Appendix B.. Bucking Timber On The Siletz In 1943

Appendix B. Bucking Timber On The Siletz In 1943

Neil Vanderburg: Neil Vanderburg wrote the following recollection of his timber falling career along the Siletz River in Lincoln County, Oregon.

Neil Vanderburg: The reason that our saw was called a "swede fiddlet' was because the work was very hard and a lot of Swedes came out to the northwest to work in the woods. The men came from M.innesota and other states that were logged out. In the early days of logging they wanted to get the trees off of the ground so they could farm it. I have been back in Minnesota and seen where the logging barons have logged and not reseeded, or left the ground with seed trees to replant it. When you see the way they did it back east you can see why people from back there are so concerned with the clear cutting out here. They don't realize that we are replanting with hybrid trees that are going to make lumber much faster than the trees that were native to this country. Even so, with seed trees there is a lot of timber that has regrown that I helped cut that is a lot bigger than it was when we cut it originally.

Neil Vanderburg: Well, I got off in another direction than I originally intended to go. Back to the big Swedes. I worked in the woods in 1943 before I went into the Marines. I worked for Werner Timber Co. out of Cutler City, which is part of Lincoln City now. We had to leave the office at 4:00 in the morning to go up the Siletz River until we got on the west side of Valsetz. We would get up to the landing, which was as far as the crummie (an old six- cylinder Dodge bus) went. We would get to the landing at about 8 o'clock in the morning.

Neil Vanderburg: We figured that we carried about 120 pounds of tools on our backs. We carried our lunches and a one-gallon canteen on long straps that would go over our shoulder and hang at or a little above the waist. We carried a seven-foot bucking saw with a handle on it. We carried two bucking wedges. Everything was steel then, they hadn't invented plastic yet. They were carried on a rope with a six-pound maul on the other side to balance them. We carried a double bit ax. One side of the ax was sharp enough to shave with. If you were doing any falling, all of the under cuts were cut with the ax. You asked Donald how we cut the limbs off. We used the duller side of the ax for that as well as for cutting brush around the cut to make a place to stand. After we ate lunch each day we would talk and sharpen our ax.

Neil Vanderburg: We carried an oil bottle with us to lubricate our saw, and if we got into a pitchy tree, to wash the pitch off; it had diesel in it. It was made out of an old ketchup or wine bottle. It had a hook wired to it with fine wire wrapped around it several times to hold the hook solid. The hook was used to hook the bottle on the tree close to the cut. We had to be careful that we didn't run out of oil before quitting time or it really slowed you down.

Neil Vanderburg: Then we carried an under cutter. That was a piece of flat metal with a roller with grooves in it so we could put the saw on it upside down so we could cut up from under the bottom of the log. We used the under cutter if a log was laying with one end up in the air to keep from splitting it. We also had to build a stand for it to come down on to keep from splitting the log.

Neil Vanderburg: This was beautiful old growth timber about three foot in diameter on the stump. I cut one tree up there that had 14,000 feet in it. I almost got fired one time when my legging slipped out and I split a log that was about 30 inches across and 16 feet long. The boss said that log was worth almost $200.

Neil Vanderburg: A man ran the saw all by himself. For several reasons: one being that as often as not one side of the Cut would roll down the hill and the log would roll over you, if you were on the bottom side. On the bigger trees the end of the saw would go into the tree so you couldn't have a handle out there. Also, when we got down close to the bottom of the cut we would saw with the end of the saw, so if we got into the dirt we just dulled the end few teeth. You can't do that with a chain saw. We only got two sharp saws a week, so when the time was about half up you put the handle on the other end and had a sharp saw again.

Neil Vanderburg: We got paid by the thousand so this job separated the men from the boys. When I went into the Marines I had a 46-inch chest and a 30-inch waist and weighed 205 pounds. The Marines sure liked to get the loggers from the northwest.

Neil Vanderburg: As to where the big Swedes went, that is three generations back and they are all mixed up with other nationalities.

- Neil Vanderburg Independence, Oregon December, 1990