From the Montana Collection

From Forests to Factories

The historical seeds of the Kootenai timber industry were planted over a hundred years ago, as a growing country looked westward for new reserves of raw materials. This budding industry benefited from improvements in technology that made the area more accessible and the logging activities themselves more productive. In Waters of Wealth : The Story of the Kootenai River and the Libby Dam, Don Spritzer describes the evolution of logging in northwest Montana :

"Nearly every explorer and trader who traveled up and down the Kootenai River commented on the thick forests covering the countryside and the potential wealth they represented. But, as David Thompson recorded, the region's remoteness left its timber "without a possibility of being brought to market." The first pioneers to enter the area sought other riches, and, except where a homesteader cleared his land or a prospector felled trees to build a cabin, they left the forests virtually untouched.

The coming of the railroads brought a sudden rise in the demand for timber. When railway construction began, many independent operators known as tie hacks cut the wood for the road beds. Skilled Scandinavians, using only axes, could turn out forty to sixty ties per day. Later, lumbermen brought in two-man whipsaws and began cutting boards.

The first sawmill on the American side of the boundary came in 1899 when Tom Flowers and Charles Therriault brought a large turbine, piece by piece, into Tobacco Plains on pack horses. They sent some of the lumber from their mill down the Kootenai on rafts to Jennings. The Libby town site company erected that town's first sawmill after bringing in the machinery by wagon. This mill ran successfully for several years until one day when workmen overheated the boiler. It exploded, leaving everyone stunned but uninjured.

By the turn of the century, the crosscut saw had replaced the ax as the tool for felling trees. Methods of hauling logs had also become more sophisticated. At first, horses skidded the logs and pulled the drays, sledges, and sleighs which hauled timber from the woods. Thus, most logging took place in the winter when snow slick for runners packed the forest floor. In some places, horses pulled flanged wheel trucks along wooden pole roads. Then, around 1900, the first logging railroads appeared. Shay locomotives equipped with special devices to keep wheels on the rough tracks hauled up to twenty-four carloads of lumber at once.

With the arrival of the railroads, donkey engines came into wide use. Loggers set these steam-powered drum winches near the railroad tracks where their cables pulled in full-length trees. Horses then returned the cables to gather more felled trees. An eleven-man donkey crew could skid five carloads of logs or 80,000 board feet of timber each day. Later the more efficient Clyde skidder replaced the donkey engine.

Early logging camps were of two kinds - a string of railroad cars in which families lived with the men, and wooden shanties built near a donkey engine. Conditions in these camps were often deplorable. Ticks, lice, and bedbugs were common. Eating and sleeping facilities were filthy. Not until a 1917 strike did American lumberjacks even obtain real beds in their bunkhouses. Loggers worked as much as fifteen hours a day for very low wages. Most were transients, rough and hard on the outside but full of compassion, especially when injury struck a fellow worker. Since most of the Scandinavian timber workers could not read English, they spent what little spare time they had gambling.

Each spring many of these men participated in the huge log drives down the Kootenai river. For many years, beginning in 1899, most logs cut in the upper Kootenai drainage and along the Montana loop floated to mills downstream. The earliest drives went all the way to Kootenay Lake where boats towed the logs to mills at Kaslo and Nelson. Then in 1900, a group of men determined to keep American timber out of Canada built the Stein Lumber Company mill at Bonners Ferry and bought huge stands of timber from the homesteaders up the Kootenai. This firm soon became the Bonners Ferry Lumber Company run by Wisconsin merchant Frederick Weyerhaeuser.

Settlers clearing their land hauled the logs to landings near the river where they waited the spring drives. The logs which could not be rolled into the river went down specially built chutes. Some of these were five miles long and consisted of logs fastened together to form a trough. Many logs reached the Kootenai via tributary streams from Gold Creek and Elk River in British Columbia to Pipe Creek and Yaak River in Montana. The flood waters of the Kootenai were deep enough to avert any serious jams. On the smaller tributary streams, jams often took days to break free as drivers leaped from log to log in the icy water using dynamite and poles to release the logs.

Each drive involved millions of feet of larch, Douglas fir, and Ponderosa pine and stretched for miles along the Kootenai. The men of the driving crew wore spiked shoes and carried peavies and poles. When not prodding logs, they traveled in long, slender bateaux. They ate meals in a cook's wanegan boat which followed the drives and carried the supplies. They portaged these boats around Kootenai Falls on railroad push cars while the logs shot over the falls. Despite the obvious dangers, relatively few men lost their lives during the drives. Probably more injuries occurred after the drives when the lumbermen went into town to do their drinking, gambling and fighting.

The annual log drives continued for only about ten years. Once the Montana legislature ruled that Montana cut timber had to be milled in the state and Canadian authorities prohibited transportation of logs across the border, the great Kootenai timber drives came to a halt.

In Montana, once timber no longer floated down the Kootenai to Idaho, local mills grew and prospered. At Tobacco Plains, the Eureka Lumber Company employed up to 300 men by 1915. In Libby, the Dawsons of Wisconsin built a large mill in 1906. Following the 1910 fire, another Wisconsin lumberman, Julius Neils, purchased the mill, and the J. Neils Lumber Company eventually became the largest single operation in all of Montana. In smaller Kootenai towns, such as Troy, Warland, and Jennings, lumber mills supported many families and kept the woods alive with activity. By 1912, the editor of Libby's Western News conceded that "without question, lumbering is Lincoln County's greatest industry and will continue to be so."

Spritzer, Donald. Waters of Wealth : The Story of the Kootenai River and Libby Dam. Boulder, CO. Pruett Pub. Co. 1979. pp. 103-113