The Oregon Story; Logging

Funding for production of the Oregon story was made possible through a generous grant from the United States Department of Agriculture Rural Development. [Upbeat folksy music plays] [Screeching, mechanical noise] [Narrator] It is an Oregon sound, as natural as the voice of running water. [Chainsaw noise] An instrument of life to some, [Crackle noise] of destruction to others. To the loggers, it was just another tool. To increase production. And make his life easier.

Contradicting the fact that nothing in the life of a logger has ever been easy. Yet for nearly 200 years, immigrant Americans and Native Americans centuries before them, lived among the trees and made them conform to their will. This is the story of four families that came early to the Oregon country. The Lairds of Coos and Curry Counties. The Rices of Linn County. The Evensons of Clatskanie. And the Shaws of Marion and Klamath Counties. Five to seven generations. They all answered to the name "logger". The Lewis and Clark expedition at the beginning of the 19th century exposed the rest of America to the natural beauty and bounty of Oregon. [Folk music] But commerce came first with the arrival of the Pacific Fur Company and then the Hudson's

Bay Company, managed by Dr. John McLoughlin. He not only acquired beaver pelts, the company's main business, but also built the first saw mill in the northwest at Fort Vancouver. The year was 1827. The huge westward migration would begin nearly 15 years later, as people escaped the economically depressed regions of the Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio River valleys, in search of a new life, in a new land they could only imagine. [Slow fiddle plays] Charles Rice of Tennessee and 16 members of his family began the journey in 1850. It was a dangerous trip along the Oregon trail. Three members of the family would die before reaching the Willamette Valley. The Rices settled near Brownsville and Sweet Home in a place called Holley.

Many other pioneers would head south, dreaming of California gold, but the federal government wanted Oregon populated, and did its best to encourage these immigrant farmers to stay and work the land. A husband and wife could file a donation land claim for as much as six hundred and forty acres. Charles' son, James Norville Rice, picked a site at Holley not far from his dad. His descendants still live on the land today in the same farmhouse. He was a wounded veteran of the rogue Indian wars of 1855, and later served in the Oregon legislature. James Norville Rice was a man who loved horses, and as the story goes, traded his prize spotted pony to get a band of Indians to leave his claim. [Charlie Rice] And according to my grandfather, he claimed if he hadn't given this spotted pony, they woulda stolen it anyway. Though that's what Grandfather told me.

[Narrator] The Rices, like most early pioneers, were farmers. They cleared their land of tall timber to grow wheat, not to log, and they cleared it the traditional way: by hand. Some of the pioneers like Andrew Wiley, buried here beneath the timber on his original land claim, not only farmed but sold lumber to neighbors. Wiley, whose granddaughter married a Rice, built a sawmill on Wiley Creek near Sweet Home in 1864. Probably the first saw mill in the area, since most of the earlier mills were built on the Columbia or Willamette River. [Gordon Dodds] The first Americans who made lumber in Oregon were the pioneer farmers who'd come over the Oregon Trail. They needed it for their houses and barns and fences and outbuildings and some of the more enterprising of them sold their surplus lumber to their friends and neighbors in their communities. And from this modest beginning arises Oregon's most important industry. [Narrator] Little did Andrew Wylie realize that Boise Cascade, Georgia-Pacific,

Weyerhaeuser, and the other timber giants would evolve from early Oregon mills like his. But the stakes were much higher along the Oregon Coast and Columbia River, even in the early 1850s. There was a burgeoning lumber trade with China, Hawaii, and Australia. [Upbeat folk music] Coos Bay was positioned to take advantage of an even larger market: San Francisco, and the driving force was gold. [Dodds] The people who went to California, most them were unsuccessful as miners. But the ones who really made money were those who mined the miners, by selling them food, and lumber, and other supplies. And one of these is ?Isamede? Simpson comes to Coos Bay in 1856. He takes advantage of the Morriston hinterland, of the fact that trees grow close to the water, the deep bay, and the ever expanding market in California. These things make him a very, very rich man indeed.

[Narrator] Others cashed in to the lumber industry in Coos Bay would generate prosperity in the region for well over a century. [Upbeat music] James Shirley Laired drove his oxen along the Oregon Trail and then raised more on his ranch near Rosboro. In 1880, he took his bulls to work in the hills of Coos County, at a time when Coos Bay was supplying lumber for another housing boom, this time in Southern California, making this Oregon community one of the largest lumber shipping ports in the United States. [Shirley Laird] Most of the time when they logged back then, they used bulls. They called them Bullwackers. They were tough, and a lot of them stayed right out, batched some tents right out with the bulls. They were fabulous men, most of them were Swedes, Norwegians. And you could shave with their axe and nobody touched their tools.

They could really fall some timber. They didn't get much production done but a lot of the trees that they fell had fifteen, twenty thousand feet in 'em. And maybe they would fall, maybe three trees a day. They got probably 25 cents a thousand for fallin' it. And then they would get about 35 cents for buckin' it. [Folk music] [Narrator] John Shaw, born in Canada to Scotch-Irish parents, immigrated to Oregon in 1875, settling near relatives east of Salem. There, he farmed for three years before buying a saw mill upstream from Santiam City in an area which later became the City of Stayton. Nine years later in 1887, Shaw and a small group of investors started the Santiam Lumbering Company in Mill City, the first mill in the Santiam Canyon,

an area about to change forever with the introduction of the railroad. [Larry Christiansen] Well, the north Santiam Canyon was a lot like a lot of Western Oregon. It was steep, and you couldn't log it with oxen or horses, so when the railroad came it allowed us to do two things: one, use logging railroads to bring the logs to the mill sight and br- and secondly, for the railroad really will take the lumber to a marketplace where it could be shipped. Before that, most of our industry was concentrated along the Willamette and the Columbia rivers where they had water transportation. John Shaw was still managing the logging and lumber operation there when it became Curtis Lumber Company in 1899, and even later, when it was bought by the Hammond Lumber Company. In 1906, he was promoted to run the Hammond Mill in Astoria, one of the largest in the country. Here he stands proudly onboard the tug which bears his name. Back in Mill City, Shaw's sons Robert and Jay Royal Shaw would take over the Hammond operation there. By 1910, with Jay Royal running the mill,

it was turning out one hundred and twenty five thousand board feet a day. [Christiansen] They did have a Lidgerwood tower skidder operating in that area. This machine not only drug the logs through the railroad, it also lowered them on the rail cars. They'd also suspend the logs over the steep canyon so we could deal with this very steep terrain we had. The mill was using about 20 rail car loads of logs a day and this was about the output of that skidder. [Narrator] Before the Shaws would leave Mill City, they would supervise the removal of over 1 billion board feet of timber from the Santiam Canyon. [Folk music] The Evensons first emigrated from Norway to Wisconsin, where W.T. Evenson worked in the woods and began sawmilling. His son Oli, better known as O.J., came to Oregon and began a brilliant career in the lumber business in

1898. O.J. Evenson bought into and remodeled the Portland Lumber Company, which he ran successfully for six years until he became acquainted with one of Oregon's great timber industrialists, Simon Benson. Benson, another Norwegian immigrant, had become very successful with his own logging operation. [folk music] But he dreamed of rafting logs from the Columbia River all the way to San Diego, and he hired O.J. Evenson to get it done. His plan was not only to get his logs to the California market, but to sell lumber as well from his own San Diego mill. [Edvard Evenson] The first raft that they built, apparently they built it at Wallace Slough in Oregon. My grandfather made the trip in a tug to watch the action of the logs in the sea. And they made the eleven-hundred mile trip to San Diego. They had already acquired property down there to build a mill on. It was one of the bigger manufacturing

plants in San Diego. And they shipped sometimes four or five rafts per year. By 1911, O.J. Evenson, along with his business partner, was able to buy Simon Benson's Clatskanie operation. The loggers there would now work for a new owner. Though O.J. Evenson accumulated land and wealth in the Clatskanie area, he remained a private person. Nothing like his former philanthropic boss and business associate Simon Benson. [Christianson] Simon Benson, after he retired the lumber business, really became Oregon's number one citizen. He built the Benson Hotel He, being a teetotaler, he put all the brass fountains in downtown Portland that are still there, because he said a logger came to town, he should be a good drink of fresh water instead of all that alcohol. He built the Columbia Gorge Hotel in Hood River, he endowed Benson Polytechnic High School,

and probably his greatest accomplishment, he was the one that pushed building the Columbia River Highway and became the first state highway commissioner. Joe Layard followed in his father's footsteps and became a second generation logger in Coos County. By now, as the 1920s approached, logging with oxen was on the wane and Joe began to use horses to drag the logs to water. But as in the Santiam Canyon, the steam donkey and railroad would change the way logs were brought to mill and market. As would splashdance used by the Layard's and others as a rough and tumble way to get logs to the mills. When Joe Laird retired, his son Wilfred came right along behind him to become one of the better known early contract loggers in Coos County. He was one of the smartest loggers, I think, that that was in the country. He could go get him a

job anywhere and especially on the cable. He understood cable logging real well. He could go into a stand of timber and he could figure out just by looking, just came natural told him, where the road should go and right where to put the landing and right where to fall all the timber to lead and he'd be right in there and get the cutters lied out and he'd done it right from the bottom. It was a time when independent contractors like Wilfred Laird, known as Jippos, could make good money but they worked hard for those dollars and it was dangerous work, very dangerous. My uncle was killed. He was killed. He was 19 years old. He was killed the same day I was born. Thousands of men have died in Oregon's woods. It's hard to say how many because there were few records kept in the early days. But since World War II nearly twenty-five hundred men have been killed in Oregon's woods

or saw mills, who knows how many before that time. I was about nine or 10 years old. I was with Dad up in the Blue Ridge Country out of Fairview and they were pulling cold day. And they were four men at the back end and well they hooked onto a log. And they weren't clear and this log came down and these guys ran this log rolled over two of 'em. Kill 'em right there. And so they just drug them off the side and put them next to a tree and kept right on loggin'. During the 1950s Oregon averaged 76 deaths a year and in the 1970s more loggers were killed in Oregon, Washington, and California than police officers in all of the United States. The work always has been and still is dangerous. Which prompted Wilfred Laird to leave his son this message in a book about his life and logging

I can say that it was not at all an easy way to go. [music] In late 1920 J. Royal Shaw left his job with Hammond Lumber Company in Mill City and began a new adventure for the Shaw family with a partner, William Bertram, Shaw moved south to Klamath Falls and joined the bidding for Indian timber on the Klamath Reservation. The first unit was 10,000 acres at Solomon View near Perth. They built the Shaw-Bertram Company saw mill at Lake Ewauna in Klamath Falls. The Shaw-Bertram saw mill handled more than 750 million board feet of timber taken from the Klamath Reservation. The plans for expansion came to a screeching halt in 1930. [music]

The Depression changed all that, it stopped everything dead. There was only one mill run for a while longer. The rest of them, all 14 of them, were down flat. The depression laid out the whole economy of the United States including that of the state of Oregon. Our principal industry, the timber industry, is flattened. Fifty percent of the loggers are unemployed. Prices go to the lowest level since 1913 and about only 19 percent of the American timber industry is running at all during the Depression years. J. Royal Shaw had a small portable mill across the border in California at Tionesta to handle small and diseased pine in the early 1930s. When the depression forced the closure of his Klamath Falls mill. He decided to run Tionesta full time. In 1935 J. Royal Shaw's son Laurence left Stanford University to enter the family business becoming the third generation Shaw to manage a logging and building operation.

Twenty, or twenty one or somewhere there. Who knows. Greenhorn, Any lumberman will agree. The key to. Your progress is your logs. To start a milling operation without knowing much much about timber is not a good... very safe. He may have been green, but Laurence Shaw would see 600,000,000 board feet of pine leave Tionesta before closing the mill in 1945. [Shaw] I think they had a yard and a half crammed in a long boom. And they drug it to a central point. Where the machine was Then after we got a pile of um, when the trucks came. I think we always had to use trucks. Very primitive trucks, they were just ordinary Fords. They broke down a lot. [Narrator] Following Tionesta and World War II, the Shaws' would move back to Klamath Falls and begin another 50 years in the Oregon sawmill business. [music]

Charles O. Rice, son of James Norvell, spent much of his life logging and packing supplies to timber cruisers who spent weeks in the woods measuring the trees for big companies. His son, Charles Leonard, would become the fourth generation Rice to work in the woods, but he would have to survive the Depression first. [Charles] My dad, the first I remember of him working, would be for the WPA. He drove team up around Lost Lake or Lost Prairie and into that country. It was years later, he went to falling timber. He fell timber for Weyerhaeuser that I know of, and an outfit by the name of Skagit and Liam. He fell timber for several years, by hand, and them days. I've heard Father talk about, you had what they call lays for a tree. You went out and if it was going to hit the edge of a stump you sheared that off, or you had to

put your tree where you wanted it or you didn't have a job. That was the size of it. If you go to breaking up timber, in them days, you didn't have a job. You had to save it. [Narrator] Like earlier Rice families, Leonard's was large. As demanding as logging was, it also provided. [Charles] Well, apparently he was a pretty good father. He raised about nine of us. We didn't go hungry. Maybe we didn't have the best to eat. But we...we done fine thanks to my mother and him. [music] O.J. Evenson continued running his logging operation through the 1920s it was a time of heavy railroad logging and the camps were filled with men whose job it was to get the wood out. It was known as the days of highball and steam and they certainly got the wood out and they did it with steam equipment. In many respects their life was more dangerous than it was in the

camps. The pioneers used oxen to move the logs. The reason it was more dangerous was we now had moving lines and flying chokers the lookout for. End of the week came when they rolled down in the mulligan cars. I'm told that some of them headed to the barbershop to get a shower or bath a haircut. But on the other hand some I'm heading for the various beer halls that were here. At one time they said that there were seven churches in town but there were also about 7 - 7 beer dispensing places too. During the Depression years, O.J. Evenson went south to manage the saw mill in San Diego leaving the logging operation to his son Willard, a World War One veteran and Stanford Law School graduate, who also found time to serve as mayor of Clatskanie for seven years.

As was the case for most Americans, The winds of World War 2 brought change for the Evensons. Willard his brother Clarence and several other investors bought an existing lumber operation and renamed it the Wano lumber company, managed throughout the war by Willard Evenson and his brother. What World War 2 did was put everybody back to work. And there was such a shortage of men. That I actually started logging when I was 14 years old. Everybody that was old enough to be a logger, was off packing a gun, fighting against the Germans or Japanese. The mills were the ones who were on line during the Depression years the twenties and thirties and they are the ones that had to do double shifts, 10 hour shifts, to produce the lumber that was required for the war effort. At the end of the war the other stockholders felt that the plant was too big and it wouldn't run. My dad and uncles decided that it ought to be run. It could be run and so they

purchased the interest of the other stockholders and it became owned by the evenson's. When World War II ended Lawrence Shah returned to Klamath Falls. Purchased an old mill at Lake Ewauna, remodeled it and formed the Modoc Lumber Company. Like the Evenson's, Shaw saw a rosy future. The post-war building boom would need lumber and the federal government was opening its forest to logging something it had seldom done before. Thomas Shaw, Lawrence's son and president of Modoc Lumber. The war ended and some of the mills didn't see a future. Didn't have a vision to see a future. Had a good run so th-they quit, which left more timber for other people that were still around. That translated into profits and during the 1950s the Shaws did rather

well as did the Klamath tribe which liquidated its reservation. turning the trees into a national forest. In 1968, 67, 68 we decided to build a new sawmill and it was a real showplace. Lot of people came to see it and it worked real well for us. We hit - right after it was started - we hit some real good markets. We were buying quite a bit of timber and up to that time and into the early 70s, there was, There was a real good period in the lumber industry. The 80s, early 80s where you had high interest rates, up to 21 percent, that put a real damper on the market [laughs]. Times were really tough. Nobody was buying lumber, or building houses. [music] Following World War II and an education in San Francisco, Willards son, Edvard Evenson

return to Clatskanie to work in the mill atwana, Until it closed in 1964. He then struck out on his own. We had one truck. We had a crane we used and hooks, which were the most dangerous thing you could probably use the load logs, and I had a D8 Cat, with, I finally purchased an arch for. So we did cat logging to start with. Edvard Evenson had two sons who would eventually enter the logging business. Willard who would handle the trucking and Eric who would become a forester. [car horn] Course the place to start is chocker setting and they did their share of chocker setting. And they did timber falling in bucking for quite a while. And about 1977, I

asked the boys, I said, "Do you think you want to maybe carry on in the logging?" And they both said, "Yes." Willard drove a truck. And. Did that for quite a few years. So they, he's had experience with Log hauling. [Willard] I was fortunate enough when I was younger to have the trust of my father to drive a semi-truck and that was still my interest was the trucking industry or the trucking portion of it. [car horn] Because I run the yarder or the loader, just about everything. Of course, the one thing was that both of them had their service time out of the way. They had Experiences in the service. So they had an idea of maybe some of the other things that might go on but

they seemed to be interested in coming into the business and carrying on. [music] Well, I went through eighth grade. That's all. I started to work when I was 13 and ???? right down here right down here at Crawfordsville the first job I ever had, and I got a cent a foot for tight barking and I could sometimes if I put in a long day I can make $3. When I went they was all Spark trees, there was no steel towers or nothing, where I went to work, which was "San Am Logging?". went from the Chokher setting through the landing. And just a little while I was second loading and then later years I head-loaded for a lot of years till the shovels come in and when the Grapel come in why I finally got out on the machine

and I stayed there for 30 years. You had to work hard or you weren't there them days, don't depend on someone else to do your job or Are you weren't there. That was the sign up, you had to put an honest day's work in. [music] Shirley-Laird took his first job in the woods when he was 10 filling in as a whistle punk when one of his father's crew members came to work drunk. He worked in the woods alongside his dad during World War II but when the Korean War came along he joined the Marine Corps to fight. That finished, he came home to work once again with his father but soon decided to strike out on his own, spending most of his time near Gold Beach. I got a sled yarder and so I started riggin and trees and I got some good men

So I started logging and then eventually I took the hoist off of that sled, then put it on a steel tree and then we moved up in the Agnes area, then we had to get another yarder, then we had to get more cats, and then we had to get trucks and then we had to get more men and then we had to get more of this. It was a family affair with Shirley. When they were big enough, they went to work in the woods. I think when I was probably about 14, they put me on the rigging crew with a bunch of older guys. It happened to be one particular summer when everything was kind of slow and there wasn't a lot of work to do. So I kind of put it around, set quite a few chokers. We had oh four or five boys that we put through school some are doctors, some are attorneys, some are this, and some are that and some are managers of big outfits now and now and we paid them top wage because most of the time their

dads either work for us or we knew their dads. My mom did actually drive logging truck for a while. I don't I don't know if back then you needed a CDL license. She just hopped in a truck and away she'd go and she did a lot of road hauling. I had the wife out there working and we had the girls out there working and we had every man on the job working. But one day in 1986, Shirley Laird, fourth generation logger, had enough and he quit just like that. I just told him one day, I says, "We're gonna unrigger Friday and I want everything on the landing and I'm Quitting' And it was kind of tough but I don't regret it today. But when pressed further Shirley-Laird longed for the day of the handshake deal. When a man's word was gold. He was not cut out for corporate logging. The big milles are all run from New York City and it's

cutthroat right on down the line. And if you don't show a big profit or if you can't get this done cheaper there'll be somebody in your chair the next morning. They didn't care about who you were, what you were, or the men or anybody else. Shortly after his father left the logging business, Jeff Laird did the same to run a jet boat on the Rogue River ending five generations of Laird logging. It was a good time I thought to make another career move. I don't know if I made the right one but we definitely enjoy what we do here. I do. When Champion International closed its big Gold Beach Mill in 1984 it cost hundreds of jobs. Now as father and son prepare a lot for Jeff's new home overlooking the road, Jeff has his vision for the future. Tourism right here. Between these these two companies mailboats and Jerry's Rogue Jets

We've probably run 120,000 people through this community every summer that ride on these tour boats, and with the fishing also. Rouge River has been famous for its salmon fishing since the 1880s. But will tourism save Gold Beach or any other logging community in the state where mills closed. Tourism is the third largest industry in Oregon today. But tourists have been coming here since the 19th century. One of the most famous was Roger Kipling who fished the Clackamas River for steelhead and then proclaimed, "Now I have lived!" A lot of our timber towns today would like to get into tourism. And certainly a place like the Rogue River. I'm sure we're very successful in doing that. But there are many places where the mills are dotted about the countryside that the modern tourists probably would not be interested in seeing. [music]

The logging wasn't the easiest work in the world. [car horn] And I told my kids I kind of wanted them to stay out of stuff like that. [car horn] I graduated on a Friday night and I started work for my uncle Monday morning, in the logging. When I started we was still logging a lot of the old growth timber, government timber which is nice big old growth stuff. And you know they've shut most of that down of the logging of the federal government timber. [logging noises] And so now we're going through the second growth, the smaller fir and hemlock [logging noises] And they utilize everything now, down to five, four inch log,

which, like before you just left that, that was just brush, push it off the side and leave it. Now we take, we take everything, right down to a tooth pick it almost seems like. [Worker] We get the big one over there. [Operator] We'll get a couple more and then we'll be done. When the weather is wet and I can't run the skidder or cat they have me out pulling and rigging yarders. Or setting chokers and pulling and rigging. When the dry weather comes I get on my skidder. It's got a set of grapples on the on the back. I just go out and grapple my own logs that don't need a choker setter behind it, just wrap up my logs, and throw them out there by myself. It's been a good living. It's a hard living, we work hard. I enjoy that. I'm an outdoors person and

I enjoy being out there. The uncle that John went to work for was Charles' younger brother Robert Rice who works with his own two sons in their contract logging business. [Worker]On this side of it, [car horn] it looks like it might have a sucker [inaudible] there's another star. You were up on the rolling side. [horn beeping] They owned their own equipment, hire their own man, and harvest trees for large timber owners like Weyerhaeuser. It's a cutthroat business. in the 1990s and Robert's son Chris has a fallback position. I graduated high-school and went to Oregon State. I worked summers and then logging to pay for school. Took a couple years off. I just worked straight logging, but I finally finished up and got my degree in 1980 and passed the boards, so I'm a licensed pharmacist. Robert Rice has spent his lifetime working in the woods living job to job

hoping to make ends meet and still have something left for his sons. It's been really tough for us the last year. To stay in business and with the crew situation. there's not that much money in it. You're not able to pay the amount of wages that you should to get good people. I think right now there's lots of logger's and there's also lots of opportunities for our crew. We've lost several people to industry in town in Albany and Rare Metals. and stuff like that. Contract loggers will invest over a million dollars per site. But if they go under, there's no way to get the money back. That tower is about a half a million. The de-limber. Is around three, forty, fifty thousand dollars. The shovel - same.

About three, three fifty. But what it's worth today is next to nothing. I enjoy logging, The future I guess you could say it's cloudy. You know I guess the 80s were lots of work around and there's not as much nowadays. So it's real competitive industry. Real competitive. And we've got to pay our bills and if it gets to the point we can't. Well then we won't be able to stay in the business. Charlie Rice, fifth generation logger has retired. It's been good to me. I had raised a family and we never had nothing. that you're nothing that, we always we always owned our own home and we had what we needed all the time. We didn't really go without. Just today we were still you know I guess,

I can't complain, I should put it that way. I did a lot. Years past done a lot of it. Really it's been pretty good to me. As his grandfather retired Nathan Rice, seventh generation Oregonian and two time state high school wrestling champion from Sweet Home, began his career in the woods. It lasted just 30 days before the accident. I just step back and fell and hit my head and hit my back some on the way and bruised my spinal cord and lost feeling in my legs for a while. It's coming back, I'm walking on stuff now so feeling should be back in time hopefully. [Nathan] The feeling's slowly coming back for him So, we're hoping for a full recovery. He's hoping maybe to get to go to school now and

see what his options are. One of his options, provided his health comes back, is to keep working in the woods. I can do it for the rest of my life. My dad really don't want me to. He wants me to go and maybe, he wanted me to play sports and stuff, which I'd like to do and stuff, but it's something I enjoy doing if I couldn't go to school or couldn't get another job, I could do it for the rest of my life. I don't tell him what he can do but if he wants to do it he can do it. I'm not going to tell him no anyways. I would like to see him try other things, things that I didn't try. [logging noises] Rice logging is steeped in tradition. [chainsaw sound] Old second growth probably around during the time of Charlie Rice's great grandfather's mill just two miles from here is coming down. And as they fall, spring board holes in the stumps are reminders of where their

forefathers had cut a century before. At a time when environmentalism was a word never heard nor a concept considered. Today, It generates a larger family discussion. I guess maybe you could say the logs on the path give us that bad reputation of going out there and just, raping the hills but Nowadays we would take everything, we would clean up real good, take care of it. [Nathan's sister] We need wood so I'm not totally against it. It's just that I feel it's important that we make sure that we just don't go, all the way logging and everything and not. Taking care of the earth. [Nathan] My sister she's kind of like an environmentalist and she has her values and stuff. I mean she don't like clear cutting. And when I hear the word clear cut, I think of ugliness. As soon as we move out, they're in their clearing it and getting it replanted in the streams, they're very,

Very critical on how we log across the stream so we don't damage them. leave lots of trees for the fish, the habitat there. So I think we're doing a real good job of working with what the environmentalist want us and to protect the environment. I mean we're not out there to destroy the environment. We want to protect it. I live out there. I mean I love it out there in the outdoors. You know, I don't want to see it destroyed. I think that everybody uses wood, the products they produce and I think that you know, That we need to do that to live in most cases. But I think that we need to be careful what we do concerning the earth because it's not going to be here forever. It takes a long time to replant and stuff like that so... She has her beliefs and she sticks to them. I'm proud of her actually. She, really good at school. She gots her priorities set. And where are Nathan's priorities? Will he fully recover from his spinal injury? Will he

continue to log or will he break the chain of seven Oregon generations and leave the woods forever. In 1987, John Shaw's great great grandson joined the family business. Tom M. Shaw, Tommy to his grandfather, would enter about the same time as the symbol of this new era of environmentalism. The Great Northern spotted owl. It wasn't long before Tom and his father would have to face the realities of the 1990s. The federal government under political and legal pressure was beginning to severely restrict the selling of trees from national forests. And we were dependent on public timber. For a few years we went on the outside and ran on mostly private timber. In about '94, we realized that that wasn't going to last forever and we didn't see

a future of running out what we'd spent a lifetime building up. So in 1995, one hundred and seventeen years of Shaw Mills came to an end. MODOC lumber closed its last saw mill. Running a saw mill's a lot of fun. Laying off 185 people isn't a lot of fun at all. Especially when you've had the community ties that we've had for the last 50 or so years in Klamath Falls. Made it really difficult. There are many reasons why Oregon saw mills close. Competition. Changes in technology and changes in public policy. During the 1960s and 70s, Congress passed several laws designed to preserve our national forests and wildlife, and in the 1980s and 90s, the courts enforced these laws, effectively shutting down much of the logging on federal land, reversing a policy of harvesting the National Forest which began following World War II and putting the Shaw's

and many other Oregonians out of the sawmill business and out of work. The federal timber harvest was reduced by about 75 percent the state of Oregon. This in effect caused the loss of about 30 percent of all saw mills and plywoods in this state. What has happened to the Shaws is not unusual. It's happened all over the region of Western Oregon and Western Washington. Though the Shaws are out of the sawmill business, They still own ten thousand acres of timber and have made the decision to stay in logging. That decision ultimately puts the future of Modoc lumber and the Shaw legacy in the hands of 31 year old Tom Shaw, Jr. I'd like to have a stand of trees like you see around us now for my children. And I'd like to have them have the same opportunities that I've had and to manage this and to make a living at it, and to get out and enjoy it. [chainsaw sound] The trees we fell this morning were Ponderosa pine trees, somewhere around

120 years of age. They were here. They were probably saplings maybe some five six seven inches in diameter when my great grandfather, Jay Royal, was up here logging in the 20s. We feel that there's times where we need to go in and take some of those trees out to open up the stand and to allow regeneration in younger trees to release and begin growing to their potential. There have been good times and bad times and during the Shaw family and the lumber and timber business and I think the good times outweigh the bad times and we've had a good good ride in it. I think about my children and their future in this industry and and I think that's one of my main focuses now is to ensure that there's some preservation there for for them to continue, and their grandchildren. Yeah I'd like to see another five generations in this industry. I don't know if that's a possibility or not for that. That's something I'd like to see happen.

Oh I think it's possible but it will be conditioned by several things. One, where each year we seem to find more regulation of what is done, Even private forest properties. Was certainly a fire insect, infestation would change our whole attitude what we're going to do. There's some tax liabilities downstream as we passed properties from one generation to the other that can be oppressive And make it more viable to do something else and then maybe some generations will get tired of doing it and sell out to somebody that is willing to offer big dollars for it. It's very difficult for us to determine now what our grandchildren might want to do with those timber holdings. [banjo music] 18-year-old Scott Evenson is learning the business of his great great grandfather OJ. He's learning it the way of all loggers, from the ground up setting chokers. I'm just learning as I go.

Everybody I work with teaches me new stuff every day and it's pretty exciting. I've been learning a lot lately. Scott's father Eric is the chief forester for Evenson Logging, supervising the thousands of acres the family has acquired over the past 65 years. On our tree farm. We have approximately 22,000 acres of timber land and we log anywhere between 300 and 350 acres a year. At the rate that we're cutting and the way that we're managing it right now it should go on forever, so that the next generations can continue on and do the same as what we're doing. [chainsaw sound] We have to harvest it all at the same time to get it to grow properly. Pine, you can have in an uneven aged stand and it works fine. But, in Wester- North Western Oregon, to manage Douglas Fir, it works out the best to clear cut and start from scratch.

It's just like a farmer when he harvests his corn you know he harvests all of it. [machinery noise] I've seen some big changes on how timber's harvested. They got stroke de-limbers and processors. [machinery noise] That machine can grab the log and measure it cut the limbs off, then buck it in the log lengths, to within in an inch or two of being right on the button. [tractor sound] Right now, they're doing a lot of work with these little processors and forwarders and stands that are about 25 years old and they're taking small sawlogs and pulp logs out of the stands and then receiving some revenue for it.

Eric Evenson's other son David is studying forest engineering at Oregon State University, at a place in time much different from where his grandfather and father were schooled. I'm learning And a lot of newer things down there. I think it's given some focus a little bit more towards the environment maybe then that's a bigger issue, trying to make sure that future generations have some wood and trees and we're not being selfish. That's where we're thinking about the next generations. But I'm benefiting from the generations before me. So if that thought process continues then it'll keep going. My family background that's something it's pretty important to me. They knew that at the time, my great grandfather that he wasn't ever going to see a crop come off of the land that he had purchased. But he knew that the future generations were going to benefit

from his actions and we're being successful now because of what he did in the past. I think that's something that's pretty neat and impresses me a lot. I think that I'll continue in the business and do what the past generations have done for me. I'll do that for the future generations hopefully, try and expand a little bit with purchasing more land when the opportunity arises. So that my kids and their kids have a little something to look forward to like was given to me. [tractor noise] Whether they Evensons or the Shaws will be able to continue their logging legacy is questionable. Clearly it will be difficult. We'll never go back to the days of hundreds of small operators making up the forest products

industry in Oregon. The future belongs to a few large multinational corporations who have the resources to control this industry. It is possible that a few small operators may keep on going but they'll have to be very well educated, very astute to market demands, very up to date in technology in order to survive in this terribly competitive world market of today. [sound of tree falling] Certainly Oregon's timber industry is declining. High tech has become the state's number one employer and forest products no longer lead Oregon exports. It's also clear that Oregon has the best tree growing land in the world. How or if those trees are harvested will depend largely on Oregonians. [sound of tree falling] An economy is like a three legged stool. In the past Oregon's economy has

been based on agriculture and forestry. A third leg of high tech has been good for our economy. I would hope that we can continue to manage our force in such a manner that we will address the environmental concerns and continue to produce wood fiber for the world. We can do that better than anybody else. Now whether we are able to continue doing this over the- depend totally on public perception. The modern forest products industry is a lot different than it was a hundred or 50 years ago [inaudible] can think of-technology, markets, working conditions-and nobody in the business today would do things like they did in the old days. And it is true that there were a lot of problems along the way-environment has degraded in part, a lot of people are killed or injured in the industry- but I think it would be a mistake for for us today to apply to the people of 1900 or 1920 or 1930 our standards. And we must remember those were their times and their practices and their customs.

But all in all it's really a kind of glorious story because modern Oregon, which is the envy of many people in the States, wouldn't have been the Oregon it is today without the contributions of this major industry in our development. [country music] [singing] I stood on a hill overlookin' a valley at a new stand of timber overtakin' the land. And I thought of the young man replacing the old man. I guess that's the way nature had it all planned. [spoken] This giant timber industry has past through a time that is over forever and it's now just history. And now new men are standing where the old men once stood and

using brand new methods to harvest a tree. Where once you could hear the ring of an axe, the swish of a crosscut saw, that these men pulled by hand. The canyons are filled with the sputtering of chainsaws and and giant monstrous machines are roaring over the land. Watch the old time high climber as he stands by and looks at a giant steel tower rear her head into the sky. [singing] I stood on a hill overlookin' a valley at a new stand of timber overtakin' overtakin' the land.

And I thought of the young man replacing the old man. I guess that's the way nature had it all planned. Funding for production of the Oregon Story was made possible through a generous grant from the United States Department of Agriculture, Rural development