Moving the Timber

After the timber is cut down and cut into logs, it must me transported to the sawmill to be cut into boards. Before mechanized lumbering, horses were used to pull, or "skid" the logs to the company's railroad tracks. Most logging camps had an entire team of horses and a stable car to house the horses in. Each company also had an entire crew of workers who only worked with the horses. These workers often had housing separate from the loggers, because they had to be up earlier in order to have the horses ready for work when the loggers needed them.

In areas of normal terrain, two horses were used to skid the logs across the ground. A two horse team could skid eight to ten sixteen-foot logs at a time, connected together with special hooks called "grabs," which were driven into the logs by workers known as "grab jacks." Each chain of logs were known as "trails." If the logs were smaller, trails of up to fifteen logs could be skidded at once. In order to make the skidding easier, paths known as "skid roads" were cleared from the log landing to the railroad tracks. The drivers of the horse teams were called "teamsters."

In the areas of steeper terrain, the horse teams were broken up and the logs were skidded one at a time by one horse. There were two ways that the logs could be skidded down a mountainside: (1) the skid road could be cleared in a zig-zag fashion, making the road less steep; or (2) a clearing could be made on the side of a steep trail so that when the log started to skid on its own momentum, the teamster could release the horse from from its grabs and move into the clearing, letting the log skid itself down the mountainside. When the logs were skidded past the steep areas, they would be put back into trails and the horse teams would be reformed.

When the logs reached the railroad, they would be loaded onto a train and taken to the sawmill for production. These trains were usually owned by the lumber company, and many of them were narrow guage, which means that the rails were placed closer together than the rails used by larger engines and railroad companies. The lumber companies often had an entire crew that worked solely with the railroad, either conducting, loading, unloading, or maintaining the engines. These employees rarely lived in the camps; rather, they lived in the towns or areas near the location of the sawmills.