When Frank Maddox of Skagit County was not logging, he was spending his spare time hunting birds and animals. He chuckles at the memory of the biggest prize: “Boy, if you got a bear, you really got something.” Maddox guesses he killed around 40 bears altogether.1  At one point during this same period of 1910 to 1930, a massive forest fire diverted Ed Stoneberg from his work in the Oregon woods. This fire drove all inhabitants of the forest before it. Stoneberg watched as deer ran out from the flames, with “their hair burned until their hide was almost completely diluted of hair and the hoofs burned off. They stump (sic) along there on the stump of their ankles.” A fellow worker tried in vain to catch a young fawn, hoping to “medicate his feet so that it could eventually grow hoofs again and then turn it loose.”2

The experiences of individuals such as Maddox and Stoneberg illustrate the multitude of ways in which Pacific Northwest loggers, from 1910 until the 1990s, have understood forests. Loggers’ fundamental purpose has always been the harvest of trees, a fact which has received broad historical recognition and focus.3 However, alongside this commercial understanding, loggers have also held diverse attitudes towards wild animals, and these attitudes demonstrate that loggers have experienced forests in a changing variety of ways. Traditionally, loggers have envisioned wildlife as game or commodities. However as extraction of timber intensified in the mid-twentieth century and environmental discourses became more common, loggers increasingly envisioned animals as creatures to be cared for, as vulnerable casualties of forest destruction, and as nostalgic pre-development features of the landscape. Such variation and change argues forcefully against generalizing and demonizing loggers in their historical and contemporary roles. Each of these differing attitudes shall be explored in turn, followed by a discussion of their broader implications. To begin, however, some initial comments regarding the role of this research and its sources are necessary.

This study claims an important space within regional environmental history. It provides a new perspective on the historical experiences of loggers in nature, in that it focuses purely and comprehensively on the dynamics of loggers and wildlife. Whilst loggers have thus far been studied in light of their extractive role in nature, in terms of a social group and most recently in relation to environmental perspectives and forest policy, historical focus has been essentially limited to frameworks of loggers and trees. This study further demands a new recognition that loggers also had complex, changing and interactive relationships with animals; and it necessitates the revision of popular regional perceptions of loggers, and logger-forest interactions.

The personal experiences of Pacific Northwest loggers, as related in oral history interviews, provide the basis for such arguments. Washington State and Skagit County Oral History collections provide direct testimonies of loggers from approximately 1910 to 1970. Despite the authority of these sources, the interviews’ absence of chronological order and lack of references to exact dates creates difficulties in placing individual experiences in a specific time frame.  Interviewers also chose to focus upon the social, labor and technological dimensions of loggers experiences; consequently, references to nature and wildlife in particular are limited. The narratives of loggers’ wives and daughters, located almost entirely from the 1950s to the 1990s, provide further insights into logger-animal interactions, as do a number of scholarly studies of timber workers and Pacific Northwest forests.4

In order to fully comprehend the significance of loggers’ forest experiences, one must understand them within an historical framework. For this reason it is important to bear in mind the technological and cultural changes which affected loggers during this period of 1910 to the 1990s. While loggers in this region continued to use forests for a variety of purposes, forests themselves were cut with ever-increasing technological efficiency.5 The use of chainsaws and heavy machinery such as bulldozers or ‘cats’ became widespread during the 1930s, and soon after World War Two smaller logging crews were harvesting forests at an unprecedented rate. Science also played a continually escalating role in discussions of logging and forests, with the Endangered Species Act of 1973 symbolizing a heightened awareness of biodiversity and the importance of ecosystems 6. Alongside the recognized decrease in Northwest forested areas came a rise in popular concerns about wilderness management and preservation, culminating in heated debates during the 1990s about the very purposes of forests. Environmentalists’ calls for forests to be preserved for their ecological, aesthetic and cultural values were juxtaposed with timber industry demands that forests be utilized as an essential, renewable commodity and a source of employment. With these developments in mind, an analysis of loggers differing experiences of wildlife can begin.

A discussion of loggers and animals must begin with one of the earliest and most common perceptions: the understanding of forests as hunting grounds. As most loggers from approximately 1910 to 1950 continued to see trees in terms of timber, so too did many see wild animals as game. Loggers’ frequent references to wildlife as “game” in oral history interviews, such as that of George Hunsby, illustrate this point.7 Hunting as a sport was not unique to loggers, nor was this loggers’ only form of recreation, yet it remained an important part of many loggers’ lifestyles. There is plentiful evidence of this within oral histories of loggers in Washington State. Charles Henry Mooers, who ran a logging camp in Skamokawa during the 1920s and 1930s, remembers loggers spending their Sundays hunting and fishing, “just for pleasure”. Mooers recalls that these men often used dogs to hunt bear or wildcat: “They’d have these dogs and take them out and run the beat (sic), and tree them, and have fun shooting them, once in a while a cougar on that order (sic).”8 Ralph Theodore Strand of Whatcom County remembers using times of heavy snowfall, when the logging camps shut down, to hunt in the woods.9 Marcellus Gilmore, also of Whatcom County, mentions hunting and fishing frequently between 1920 and 1950.10

Such accounts demonstrate the popularity of hunting for loggers from approximately 1910 to 1950, although this trend by no means began during this period. Hunting continued as a pastime into the second half of the century also, as evidenced in Margaret Elley Felt’s memoir of gyppo logging during the late 1940s and early 1950s.11 However, what differentiates the experiences of Hunsby, Mooers, Strand and Gilmore is that they appear to exist largely in isolation. These men mention their interactions with animals during the first half of the century almost solely in terms of sport, reflecting a preoccupation with wildlife as game only. Stories of animals that do not involve deliberate killing become more common later in the century, as shall be addressed in due course.        Scholars of more recent logging history have often mentioned, but insufficiently questioned, the tendency of many loggers to hunt. Forest sociologist Robert G. Lee has noted that hunting is but one of the many uses loggers have for forests12, and Beverley A. Brown has used the stories of embattled timber community members to illustrate that loggers depend on woods for hunting, fishing, and other recreation purposes.13 Charles Pezeshki’s exploration of timber workers’ forest policy perspectives also provides evidence of loggers’ hunting during the 1990s.14

Although most such studies of loggers do not analyze their recreation practices, there is one significant exception. In a 1992 study of forest workers and their environment in Ontario, Canada, Thomas Dunk remarks on the amount of outdoor equipment and number of hunting trophies found in the homes of loggers. Dunk takes this as evidence of an active involvement with nature, and also concludes that much of this involvement entails “appropriating it rather violently, thereby reflecting the relationship with nature reflected in logging.”15 Dunk’s study not only demonstrates the geographic pervasiveness of hunting as a popular pastime for loggers, but the author makes an important point about the aggressive and masculine nature of this pastime. Environmental historian Richard White suggests that such masculine desires were also behind hunting in the early American West; maintaining that wild animals died simply “so that American males could maintain their virility and virtue. . .”16

While the arguments of Dunk and White do not focus upon the Pacific Northwest and are not deserving of disproportionate attention, their points about hunting as masculine violence are significant to this analysis. Firstly it must be noted that the worlds of logging, fishing and hunting, although dominated by men, were not exclusive to them. Margaret Elley Felt, logging operation partner, fished often and did attempt to hunt deer once, but in the midst of shooting “suddenly realizing what I was doing, and aghast at my temerity” put down the gun and permanently abandoned all thoughts of hunting.17 Lois Engleton recalls working on the Olympic Peninsula in the 1950s, during which time she hid her long hair under a hat in order to keep her job in a logging outfit.18 Engleton fished with driftnets on the Hoh River, and later ran a successful commercial fishing operation.19

Having established that logging is an arena which has included both men and women, one must still address the question of why so many men in this region killed animals as well as trees, particularly in the earlier half of the twentieth century. As Dunk implies, and oral histories confirm, many loggers held a violent attitude towards nature in general. This is confirmed by the unsympathetic manner in which several men recall the capture and deaths of animals. Adolph Elsner, logger, hunter and trapper of Kittitas County from approximately 1920 until 1960, vividly remembers following the tracks of dying wolves:  “You could tell as soon as you had one poisoned, why he would start going in circles . . . head for water. They were just as thick as rabbit tracks.”20 Many loggers’ accounts of hunting, such as Maddox’s tale of killing 40 bears, do suggest if not a callousness, at least a commodification of animals in terms of prizes (“Boy . . . you really got something”,21) or in terms of economic value22. For example, Elsner recalls exactly how he valued each animal he trapped: “Well, martin brought you all the way from fifteen to forty-five dollars, lynx is always about fifty dollars, fisher was about seventy-five.”23 Thus many loggers not only killed animals, but these actions were rewarded. They were something to be proud of, just as many loggers were proud of felling giant old-growth trees.24 

However, to limit all loggers’ views of animals to this commodity-oriented dimension is too exclusionary. While these types of attitudes have been important, particularly earlier in the twentieth century, they did not preclude other types of engagements. For example, there is much to suggest the existence of an alternative, even contradictory, attitude towards forest creatures: that of appreciation of nature, and a sense of care and responsibility towards those that were vulnerable. Such latter attitudes have become increasingly frequent- or have been told increasingly frequently, in the past several decades.  In an interview conducted in the early 1990s Dorothy Harris remembers her father, an Oregon logger, as having “a respect for nature and animals in the woods. He would relate to me if he had seen a bear in the woods, or a deer, or whatever.” He didn’t hunt, she recalls, except for one winter when the family was short of money and food, and he helped to poach a deer near their home. “But”, she asserts, “My dad just never liked to kill anything”.25 In his 1992 chronicle of positions and issues in national forest debates, William Dietrich retells the efforts of Olympic Peninsula loggers to protect those creatures whose habitat they were harvesting.26 Here, cutter Russ Poppe of Forks remembers once deliberately cutting around a stand of trees sheltering baby elk. Upon discovering an intact nest of baby squirrels in a fallen tree, Poppe watched as the mother quickly took them up another nearby cedar, and then left that tree alone for a month.

While these narratives provide valuable insight into loggers’ experiences of wildlife, the political context in which they are related is highly important. Poppe tells these stories of protection in part to defend himself against “the image of callousness as if loggers didn’t care about the forest they were cutting”27; an image for which Poppe, and Dietrich, implies urban environmentalists are largely responsible.28  A similar sentiment is reflected in Mystee Vanderpool’s defense of her husband, who has logged in various areas around the Columbia River basin: “. . . he enjoys the beauty of nature as much as anybody else does. I mean they've picked up bird's nests and put 'em back in trees, and things like that--they're not just going out to kill and rape and maim, like everybody thinks they do.”29 Against a background of cultural conflict in which loggers have often been demonized for their role in the obliteration of wilderness habitats, loggers’ tales of taking care of animals in jeopardy are often presented as evidence of their own environmental ethics.30  These have been told chiefly during the 1990s, in a context of heightened habitat awareness (for example, this decade witnessed intense debate over northern spotted owl protections).

However, loggers did not all necessarily need to take part in a broad environmental consciousness in order to demonstrate empathy towards animals; for some these actions were simply instinctive. When Ed Stoneberg told the story of his fellow logger attempting to save a fawn burnt in a forest fire, ideas of environmental conflicts, ethics, and popular conceptions of loggers were absent. These notions also have no place in Margaret Elley Felt’s sentimental description of her gyppo logger husband, who was “a little on the tenderhearted side”.31 Sonny Felt, whom Margaret makes clear saw trees purely from an economic perspective, stalled burning part of an abandoned logging camp after discovering it sheltered a family of baby woods mice. Instead, Sonny “gently replaced the board and tiptoed softly away. After all, he admitted, he couldn’t disturb a family like that.”32 Whilst this story may have been chiefly presented as evidence of Sonny’s “tenderhearted side”, it also exemplifies the range of experiences loggers have had with animals, be they large or small.

These images of loggers protecting baby elk, birds and woods mice lead to the question of how such compassion coexisted with the logger’s ultimate purpose of converting the forest into timber for the mill. Some loggers and their families have suggested that loggers saved young animals whenever possible, yet this did not deter them from the occupational necessity of cutting all valuable trees. Even though Russ Poppe let the family of baby squirrels shelter in their new home as long as possible, finally that tree too had to be brought to the ground. “It was thousands of dollars, just standing there.”  “But. . .” Dietrich reminds us, “. . .he had tried to give the tiny creatures every chance.”33 Thus, alongside ideas of forest animals as objects of sport, and as valuable furs, there has been an awareness of some animals as vulnerable entities deserving of protection. As suggested earlier, this awareness has been increasingly vocalized by loggers over the past three decades, possibly in line with a growing recognition of forest as habitat. It has also been frequently articulated as a defense against accusations of ruthless destruction of this habitat. 

In fact, there is evidence that at certain times, loggers have afforded animals an even deeper level of respect. Maxwell Wilson, a Pacific County logger from 1920 to 1950, recalls seeing a fellow worker leaving the logging grounds early one day. Charlie Wittala was walking in along the railroad in the early afternoon, carrying his axe. He had stopped work immediately upon seeing an owl in the forest. This owl, present in full daylight, was to Wittala an omen of bad luck.34 Although Wilson asserts that he did not believe in such things, his account does suggest that forest birds could be seen in a superstitious light, much as the fisherman has at times viewed sea birds such as the albatross.  Oiva Carl Wirkkala, who also logged the Pacific coast between 1910 and 1950, provides an even clearer depiction of how birds were treated at his logging camp. Camp robbers – or gray jays – would come out at dinnertime and eat out of the workers’ hands. “No one was allowed to throw a bark or anything at ‘em or chase ‘em . . . boy they frowned on it, right there. They used to figure they’re the spirits of the past loggers. . . . They were respected.”35  Wirkkala’s memory is highly significant, in that it shows that animals could have another meaning for loggers; a meaning imbued with reverence, even spirituality. Just how many loggers envisioned the camp robbers in the way Wirkkala did is unclear, as questions about forest wildlife were not a priority of interviewers of the Washington State and Skagit County oral history programs, as mentioned earlier. The possible spiritual and folkloric dimensions of loggers’ relationships with animals – and with nature in general in this region – still await further exploration. 

Although most loggers’ narratives used in this study do not themselves delve into the meaning or importance of forest animals, they do suggest that many loggers envisioned animals as an inherent part of a broader natural environment. That is, they were part of a pre-existing wilderness into which the loggers and their machinery were steadily encroaching.  George Hunsby, Whatcom County logger, best articulates this sentiment: “There was very little wildlife around the camps because there was so much racket going on. All these steam locomotives, you know . . . . There was so much doggone racket, you know, that if there was any wildlife around, that they all took off for the tall timber.”36 Hunsby reflects that this had not always been the case, however: “. . . I can remember when it was more serene and there was wildlife . . . before they started logging way back in the mountains.”37 In the days when the timber still stood “two or three hundred feet tall”, the road between Bellingham and Glacier was always crossed by bears.38  In contrast to these nostalgic recollections of more wild times, one logger from Metford, Oregon, has argued that wildlife remains an important part of daily life in the forest. During a 1989 hearing on spotted owl protection, Jim Standard stated that animals were often observed on logging sites after machinery was shut down for the day. Standard uses this wildlife presence, as others have, as solid proof that loggers and animals can coexist: “Ask any logger who daily shares his lunch with a raccoon, a chipmunk, a raven, or even a doe and her fawn if he is destroying habitat or enhancing it.”39 

Standard’s argument, and the atmosphere in which it was voiced, is evidence of a cultural shift. Loggers, particularly from the 1990s onwards, acknowledge the accusation that their work does have a destructive impact on the habitat of wild creatures. While some, like Standard, argue that they can share the forests with other creatures, others have developed a more realistic view of the need to better protect habitats. Brett, a logger of the Nez Perce forests admitted, in 1998, that the soil washed from logged-off areas was threatening the survival of salmon in nearby rivers.40 Russ Poppe of Forks echoed this awareness, telling Dietrich that leaving a strip of trees alongside stream banks was “good forest practice.”41 While these men represent the logic that some animals’ habitats deserve shielding, it must still be remembered that animals could also be classified as legitimate game for the logger when he or she hunted or fished. Hence the motivations for protection may have varied according to the animal’s perceived purpose.

Essentially, loggers’ attitudes towards animals demonstrate that loggers could experience forests in a variety of ways; as an arena for sport, as a fundamental home to creatures which they were necessarily disrupting, even as a place of spirits and bad omens (and therefore possible danger). The narratives listed here could be, and have been, interpreted in a number of ways. Accounts of a logger trying to preserve birds’ and squirrels’ nests can be taken as proof of loggers’ environmental spirit; as a demonstration of an inherent love for nature.  Alternatively, the fact that some loggers killed and sold animals for profit as they did trees could be seen as evidence that loggers viewed all forest resources in terms of their potential commodity value. Loggers are a diverse group, and such interpretations could certainly be true for some individuals. As yet there has been insufficient analysis of logger-animal relationships to draw any specific conclusions about forest ideologies for loggers as a group.

Nevertheless, in that these narratives demonstrate a variety of logger-forest interactions, they demand that we redefine our historical understanding of loggers in forests. Although this study has focused on the accounts of loggers within the Northwest, the ideas and experiences of these men are not necessarily unique to this area. As far away as northern Ontario, loggers have utilized nature in the same ways as Adolph Elsner and Frank Maddox of western Washington; thus the conclusions reached here have potential implications for many forested regions. Hunting narratives dating from around 1910, such as Maddox’s, are echoed continuously through to the 1990s, telling us that not only do loggers kill, eat and sell forest animals, but that that they have had at least a century-long tradition of doing so. How technological and cultural shifts have affected these relationships remains to be fully explored, yet it is obvious that loggers have been more eager to espouse a sense of wildlife stewardship when confronted with recent accusations of destruction.

However, what has not changed is the fact that, as political analyst Debra Salazar has proposed, loggers have values and interests in forests beyond trees alone 42. They have an historical tradition of affecting and being affected by forest creatures in a multitude of ways. This fact further enfeebles the dichotomization of loggers and environmentalists that has arisen from regional environmental debates.43 Loggers, whether rescuing, hunting, or simply eating alongside animals, can no longer be seen as simplistic constructions in relation to trees only. Such constructions, usually negative and often exaggerated, have forced loggers to voice their own environmental ethics in defense, as mentioned previously.44  That loggers have had historical and multiple connections with wildlife means that they share goals and values with the nature lover; these two groups can not and should not be polarized. As Standard implied, many loggers have had an intimate and experiential knowledge of nature and wildlife which surpasses that of the urban environmentalist.45 Their understandings of animals are but one aspect of this broader professional knowledge of forests. As one western Washington logger expressed in 1990, “How can anyone who knows less than I do about the woods say that I am not an environmentalist?”46  In light of their wide-ranging experiences of nature, loggers need to be recognized as active participants and stakeholders, both historical and future, in the protection and destruction of forest habit. Many of these conclusions could also be applied to workers in other resource extraction industry, such as fishing. Indeed the twentieth century saw similar developments in these interrelated professions, and an intimate understanding of nature is an occupational necessity of both groups.47

The ways in which loggers have known animals have been multiple, flexible and in no way exclusive. In the first half of the twentieth century, some loggers saw jays as spirits or owls as bad omens; during the 1990s one particular type of owl came to represent restrictions upon the timber industry itself.48 Men logging between the 1910s and 1950s were more likely to boast of killing or trapping animals, whereas over the past two decades many expressed concerns about habitat destruction; pointing to the existence of a broad and complex range of forest values. Such variations argue strongly against generalization and demonization of loggers. But ultimately, it must be remembered that although the evidence points to loggers understanding forest animals in a variety of important ways, one must be careful not to overly romanticize these experiences. The final, fundamental and foremost intention of loggers is and has always been to convert living forests into lumber.49 After all, Russ Poppe did eventually bring that cedar with its relocated nest of baby squirrels crashing to the ground.