Photo: Lincoln Lumber company is logging 186,000 acres under a modified sustained yield program in the Twin Lakes unit of Colville Indian Reservation near Inchelium. About 40 percent of its crews are Indians. Tribesmen mark trees to be cut in a 20-year program.
Fewer men in the woods turn out more lumber than ever before. Explanation for this paradox is mechanization Jobs that used to be done by horses or strong-backed men are now handled at greater speed and less cost by expensive machinery powered by gasoline, diesel oil and more recently electricity.
Take the power saw, one of the greatest labor-savers. Models are now being put out weighing 25 pounds, easily carried and operated by one man. A few years ago the smallest model weighed more than 50 pounds and took two men to run.
Most of the tree fellers now in use are modifications of a chain saw put out by Union Iron Works of Spokane in 1917, but used to cut logs, not trees in the woods.
There were attempts to produce mechanical cutters as early as 1905, when there were still oxen in the woods, and more horses than gasoline motors.
Loading cranes, tractor-pulled arches to drag felled trees, and numerous other pieces of heavy machinery are found throughout the lumber counties today. The annual bill for lumber machinery is figured at something like $40,000,000 a year in the Inland Empire.
Add thousands of miles of wire rope, leather belting and rubber hose, and throw in a few million dollars worth of gasoline and fuel oil, lubricants, for lumbering has become one of the most thoroughly mechanized occupations in America. New Machines are introduced each year, and when it seems impossible to make any better logging or milling devices somebody comes up with a new device for cleaning up the waste or making something useful out of something useless.
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