Lynne Jordan has contributed to historical booklets available at the Cortes Island Museum and is currently researching the history of early logging activity in Whaletown.
In the course of an extensive 3-part interview, Lynne draws on original documents, archives, and oral histories to paint a picture of early settler loggers on Cortes — their equipment, their floating camps, the economy in which some prospered and some failed.
The logging community was always a really mixed bag… Much of the logging was done by hand. Some of it using horses.
Logging was not a good way to get rich.
Early Log boom photo – Photo courtesy Cortes Island Museum and Archives
Logging camp – Photo courtesy Cortes Island Museum and Archives
Early logging truck – Photo courtesy Cortes Island Museum and Archives
What can you tell us about the very beginning of logging on Cortes Island?
Well, in the very beginning the Natives used the forest on the island, of course, extensively — particularly cedar, but other, other trees as well. The cedar in particular was considered their Tree of Life, and besides using it for the wood itself, they also stripped roots and the inner bark to use for weaving — for baskets — all kinds of storage things.
Tree of Life — generated image by D Clarke
Their totems and their dugout canoes in particular were cedar. And cedar had an advantage in the fact that it was light, it was very workable, resistant to decay, and it had buoyancy — and the stringy fibers bark, which could be used for all kinds of things like ropes and fishing lines.
Today there are trees still on Cortes that were harvested, not the whole tree, but they’re considered “culturally modified.” They took narrow strips of bark up the tree, lengthwise. And they don’t take a very wide swath at a time in one tree, so that the tree can still have the flow of the water going up underneath the bark.
And so the tree continues to live. It doesn’t die. And when you’re hiking on our trails, you can often see strips taken off cedar trees. Today they use them for things like making canoe bailers.
So when did the settlers start logging?
The early logging from Europeans began in the late 1800’s. And they also hired Japanese and Chinese workers in the early forestry days — as well as the Klahoose, they were also hired to cut trees.
And the the late 1880s, the first logger on the island was Moses Ireland, Moses Cross Ireland, and he had considerable land in the Whaletown area that he had pre-empted or was just squatting on basically. And he logged around Cortes up towards Carrington Bay — and I believe also Green Valley — before he moved on to what was called Camp Island, but is now called the Subtle Islands.
And he lived there for a while and ran a hotel as well for loggers. And then moved to Quadra Island, where he continued with his hotel; and he had a huge piece of land there, that he used in the winter when logging couldn’t happen because of snow and winter weather… the horses and oxen that were used by the loggers, he would store them for the winter. He would have them over winter on his pastures. Back in those early days they started with oxen and then horses came in slowly and the logging was done using skid roads to move the logs.
Image courtesy of Oregon Historical Society 8045
What was the work like in those days?
Long before chainsaws were developed, the hand loggers used springboards to get up a tree — they went higher up on the tree because the tree spreads out at the bottom for the roots. So the springboards would be right where the tree narrows. so they didn’t have as much wood to cut through with a long saw.
Loggers on Springboards — CIMAS 2007-001-577
And those long hand saws, with a man on either end pulling and pushing, would be called Misery Whips — because they were nasty to work with. And very definitely had to be kept sharp !
The equipment for hand logging was very heavy to use. And in particular, the Gilchrist Jack, which was made of steel, heavy steel, and it was used when you cut a tree down, to get that tree down to the water. It wouldn’t just roll down [the slope] because there were stumps below that you had already cut; so you had to use the jack to lift the tree up and over stumps and rocks to get it down to the water where it could be boomed up.
Gilchrist Jacks — Courtesy of Oregon Historical Society
And that jack weighed 90 pounds. And these loggers, if they didn’t have a horse or a mule to carry their equipment, they had to carry it by hand up the hill, then use it coming down.
And evidently, after you jacked something up to get it over, you then had to let the jack down again so you could use it the next time. And the release mechanism. was deadly. It could slip easily and whip around and take off a finger or two. So there were a number of. Loggers that lost bits and pieces off their hands.
Early Cortes Settler-Loggers — CIMAS 2004-001-031
From that Jack Sigurd Ellingsen, who was Elmer’s father, and Bruce and Andy’s grandfather, he developed what was called the Ellingsen Jack. And it was used by a lot of loggers in this area and on Vancouver Island around Cortes. And it only weighed 60 pounds because parts of it were made with aluminium; and it also had a mechanism that made it a little easier to use.
And besides that jack, they also had to carry a falling ax, general purpose axes, a hand winch, the half inch cable that went with the hand winch, say a hundred feet of that. And a swifter line, grindstone, hand saw, bucking saw, 10 foot falling saw, hammers, sledge hammers, and wedge.
And then once logs were maneuvered down to the water, there was more equipment you needed, dog lines and a number of metal dogs to drive into the logs. A boom auger, pike poles, and a heavy chain.
Was there a lot of money in such hard work?
Logging was not a good way to get rich in the 1940s. To sell a log boom, cost a logger about $5 per thousand board feet, and that was factoring in the fuel bills and stumpage, which was about $2. Then there were royalties, for over a dollar. Towing was about a dollar. Plus the broker’s fee.
Log Boom Being Towed Past Channel Rock — CIMAS 1999-001-0290
But all they were paid was $10 a thousand board feet for number three logs, $15 for number two logs. And the ones that got the highest price, the number one peelers brought $20 per thousand. But they were hard to come by and had to be clear, straight and big. There was some big timber around Cortes and the nearby bays, but none of it had the number one rating.
So loggers in the thirties and forties lived from basically boom to boom, paying the grocery bills at the local store when a boom sold, and starting another bill for the next boom. As soon as that one had sold, if they had running tabs at Vancouver supply merchants, the loggers’ bills were sent to their log broker in Vancouver who would then pay the bills to the merchants on their behalf.
And sometimes they sold only two log booms in a whole year. So it must have been tough on the stores, to carry so many families for such long times. But they all did it though. They must have had suppliers in Vancouver also waiting for them to pay up.
Cortes Women Cutting Firewood — CIMAS 1999-001-0648
Now, and then the Whaletown storekeeper would be forced to ask a logger how he was doing, because his wholesalers were wanting accounts to be paid. And sometimes when they sent a boom off, they had to pay to have it towed down to Vancouver or in some cases to Powell River — but those booms could sit sometimes for years. They’d sit for years and then you never knew if you were ever gonna get paid for them.
Was it only European settlers doing the logging in those early days?
Barrett hired a large crew of Mongolian Chinese laborers. They were all over six feet tall. And they were managed by a rather small Asian man who spoke both English and their Chinese dialect. So they were hired for doing heavy manual work, by Barrett. But after two years of logging, Barrett was poorer than when he began, and he eventually left the island with part of his family. And so the Chinese labour crew were then hired by Charlie Allen to log his holdings in Gorge. And they built the skid roads that were used for dragging the logs.
And when it came Chinese New Year, I guess Charlie had been a well-liked good boss — because the Allens were always invited to the Chinese New Year festivities in the bunk house.
Going back a little bit, in the late 18 hundreds and 19 hundreds, a Japanese company had a, a good sized oxen logging show at the head of Coulter Bay. And they built cedar shake huts, and a huge barn built of very heavy timbers for their oxen. Oxen don’t pick up their feet for shooing like horses do, so they had to install a hoist system from the heavy beams in the barn to raise the big animals completely off the ground for shoeing.
Lifting an Ox — generated image by De Clarke
And those oxen hauled the logs to the back corner oof Coulter Bay. And they built a log, well they called it a rollways, but it’s like a log chute with the logs vertically going down from the road to the beach. And they would send their logs down there. and they actually had freighters — early big freighters — coming all the way into Colter Bay on a high tide.
And they would lift the logs with a crane from the booms up onto their ship, and pile them on the deck and then take them to Japan. And that was a time, in the early 19 hundreds, when poles were needed for telephone and electricity lines, and they were being installed basically all over the world, but Japan was introducing electricity and telephones and they needed all these logs.
What was life like for the early logging families?
At one time in all the inlets and bays everywhere — all up and down the BC coast — you would find a floating logging camp, and all their buildings including their houses were on floats; and the houses would be sometimes pulled up all the way onto land, but often just one end of it touching land and the other end out over the water with pilings underneath to level.
Typical camp — CIMAS 1999-001-1032
But in some cases they were tied up like the Thompson’s house at their floating logging camp at Thompson’s Bay just north of the entrance to Von Donop Inlet. They were there for quite a few years and their house was not affixed to the land. It floated. Well, it floated at high tide — as the tide went out, the house settled onto the beach.
And Frances said that sometimes you had to walk uphill to get into the kitchen, and other times you went downhill into the kitchen. It just depended on what the tide was doing. But most houses were just affixed to the shore. So you could step out a door onto solid land.
The whole camp would be surrounded with a log boom that at either end would be tied to a tree or a stump on land. So it would hold the logging camp in place against the shore; and the outer ring of booms would be chained together so that it circled everything. Those scattered floating camps, there’s a few of them left, but not very many.
Typical floating camp — CIMAS 1999-001-1126
Those camps often had gardens in old rowboats or bathtubs on the floats. Sometimes there was a little bit of garden on land, and often if it was a large camp with lots of loggers and families with kids, they’d even have a school, some were big enough to have a school. I think you needed nine students before the government supplied a teacher. But most of the camps, it was one of the mothers or a number of mothers that took turns, doing correspondence with the kids for their school.
They often had light plants that would supply electricity for their and houses and things. Some of the larger camps had post offices, and a store, and a fuel station; but the ones around Cortes were all fairly small, and they were serviced by the Union steamships at nearby ports that they could come into.
Union Steamship visits a float CIMAS 2007-001-403
But the kids growing up on the floats, they didn’t have time to be bored in those days! In the twenties, thirties, forties, they had swimming in the summers, skating or sliding in the winters, booms to play on, fishing to do with rowboats, rafts to build and paddle, endless woods to play in, of course, and berries to pick, wildlife to watch.
In the course of the three-part interview Lynne also tells us about
home-made “hooch,”
the legend of a lost fortune left behind by an aging logger committed to a mental institution,
two sisters from London who arrived at their brother’s logging show with trunks full of formal dresses that they never had a chance to wear,
the amazing stink of horse manure and fish oil from the skid roads on a hot day,
the very first car on Cortes Island (a model T),
the many relocations of early hand-loggers who migrated from bay to bay with their floating camps,
using dynamite to turn a lake into a lagoon,
early sawmills and their operators, including the mill for which Sawmill Road is named,
and many other interesting details.
These podcasts make relaxing and entertaining listening for anyone interested in “the old days” on the BC coast, especially on Cortes Island.
[All images are from the Cortes Island Museum Archive, except where otherwise credited. Feature image, “The First Car on Cortes Island,” is a generated art work by De Clarke using Midjourney AI, as are “Tree of Life” and “Lifting an Ox.” This interview was originally conducted by Roy Hales; his raw audio was edited by De Clarke into a three part radio series. The theme music for De Clarke’s Currents segments is “It Ain’t Necessarily So” by George Gershwin, as played by pianist Burnett Thompson on the album ‘Uncertain Times.’]
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