8. Other Wildlife and History

William A. Davies: the clearcuts for their food, and the timber for them to hide in. That's what the deer management people tell me. They tell me that one section of old growth timber, solid old-growth timber, has about enough food on that whole section to feed one deer if he could get around and get it; but he couldnt They find the starved-to-death deer in the late winter or early spring, when they have a late spring, starved to death with their stomachs just full of food - no protein in it. They made a study on one creek that comes from timber out into clearcut. Salmonberry was the favorite food of deer. They checked the protein content in the timber and here out in the sun in the clearcut. There's 40 times as much protein so that a deer in the timber would have to eat 40 times as much of that to get the same food value as the one in the clearcut.

8. OTHER WILDLIFE AND HISTORY

Royal G. Jackson / Jennifer Lee: Good heavens. What other wildlife did you personally see in McDonald Forest?

William A. Davies: Oh, we had some raccoon out there, and had a bear out there. Saw the bear once; I don't know how he got there. And then there was some elk that wandered through there; the loggers saw them a couple of times. We used to have a lot of coyote and fox out there, and I sort of enjoyed them, but the farmers around the area hate coyotes because, I think, they get some young lambs once in a while. Up in McDonald Forest they didn't. I don't think they went out and got any sheep any place. Too far away for sheep anyway, but they kill a lot of rabbits, and the rabbits eat up the little trees, so I was all in favor of that. They sent a federal hunter in there, the state did, without getting our permission, or with us saying they could do it, or anything else - "To heck with you. We're going to do it anyway." That was just before I became manager. After I became manager, I wouldn't allow the guy in there. But he had set out these poisons. What they do is they have a little brown thing sticking up like that, and they put female scent on it, and then when the coyote nudged that with his nose a cyanide bomb would go off in his face and kill him. One of the pathology teachers in botany caught a girl just reaching for one of those; she thought it was a fungus. They had signs up along the road, but you might come in from the other way. So he just about eliminated them; I saw one fox and one coyote only after that, I guess.

Royal G. Jackson / Jennifer Lee: I understand mountain beavers eat seedlings. Was that ever a problem in Mac Forest?

William A. Davies: That hasn't been too much of a problem here. Where that's a problem is where they have more of a flatter ground and less clay soil, where they can get around in the soil better. Usually find what they call these fern openings - the kind of openings that haven't had timber on it for a long time, and then you plant seedlings there - then they will chew the roots off. They are a problem in some places, but not on McDonald Forest. We don't have many out there anyhow. There are some regular beaver out there that dam up the creek. There was one of them there that insisted on using the culvert for his dam. That made it easy; all he had to do was plug the culvert, and he had a dam that rose up higher than the creek, and he just plugged the culvert and had his dam. We tore it out three times. Finally we had to get the state game commission to come in and trap him, and take him off, and put him somewhere else. Some places out there they don't do any damage. They dam, they kill off a few trees around the edge if the water floods, but doesn't bother

William A. Davies: much.

Royal G. Jackson / Jennifer Lee: Let's switch to the human occupation in the forest, for a minute, and talk about sawmills. Do you know of any early sawmills that were located in Paul Dunn - McDonald Forest?

William A. Davies: Yes, there were two or three, I think, that were the same mill but moved probably up Oak Creek. You know where Oak Creek is? There are some old remains there, old sawdust piles, usually got blackberries on them now. You see a big patch of blackberries there, it's probably the sawdust pile from the old mill. And then, way up at the head of the west fork of Oak Creek are some old gears and things, and some of the remains of the old flume they had. They cut that lumber up there and flumed it down in the flume to Corvallis.

Royal G. Jackson / Jennifer Lee: Did you ever see that fiwne?

William A. Davies: That flume was used back in the 1800's, I think, so I didn't see it.

Royal G. Jackson / Jennifer Lee: No remains at all of it?

William A. Davies: Well yes, I saw parts. I saw some of the stilts, some of the old boards, and stuff that had fallen down the old flume up there, yes, way up. But the flume, as it was working, I didn't see. I had the students out there one day, and there was this big blackberry patch right along the side of the road; and it was over a sawdust pile, and I told this one student, "There used to be a sawmill here in the early days." He said, "Yes, I know; my grandfather was a sawyer in that mill."

Royal G. Jackson / Jennifer Lee: Do you remember who that person was?

William A. Davies: No, I remember they have a town named for his faixuly up in northwestern Oregon some place; but I don't remember the name.

Royal G. Jackson / Jennifer Lee: The people that operated these sawmills were just private logging operators?

William A. Davies: I think so.

Royal G. Jackson / Jennifer Lee: Small operations?

William A. Davies: I think they logged, put the logs in the mill, with horses. They just took the best trees, of course; picked it over, high graded it. That's why the forest wasn't too good when we got it.

Royal G. Jackson / Jennifer Lee: I've heard the first sawmill in Benton County was there. Do you know anything about that?

William A. Davies: No, I don't.

Royal G. Jackson / Jennifer Lee: What about the Portland-Umpqua Valley Road?

William A. Davies: That was the main highway from Portland, south, in those early days.

Royal G. Jackson / Jennifer Lee: What have you heard about that route?

William A. Davies: Well, I talked to a man named Blake in the 1950's. Early 1950's we bought some land from him up there.

Royal G. Jackson / Jennifer Lee: Ed Blake?

William A. Davies: I don't know his first name.

Royal G. Jackson / Jennifer Lee: The "Blake eighty?"

William A. Davies: Yes, (chuckle) the Blake eighty we got from him. He lived there in that big house right along side of 99 West. Big, tall, two story, you know, the old 1880 type house, or 1860, or whatever it was.