HomeMy Public PortalAboutLog Brands12
Turtle 12
Idaho
Canoeman
Michigan
IDAHO BRANDS
W.W. Papish
G.A. Branson
a
Roy Lammers
C.T. Grimm
C.H. Dindinger
Lewis Olson
Cat
Washington
by
Ruby El Hult
f �Q f r' Ai/ 0 f 61acns,
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Double Bootjack
Minnesota
You know how it is when
someone invents something.
Pretty soon somebody else
comes muscling in. Thats the way it
was when Paul Bunyan invented
logging. Pretty soon he saw a bunch
of other loggers busting around, in
the tall timber acting like they'd
thought up the whole idea. Ol' Paul
had invented log drives too — he'd
already sent logs down on the Sour-
dough Drive and on the Onion
River Drive. He knew well enough
that soon these same high -binders
would be dumping their logs into
the rivers, acting like they'd in-
vented that too. "And then, by the
Holy Ol' Mackinaw, how am I going
to tell my logs from their logs?"
worried Paul.
He called to him his mighty
axman, Mark Beaucoup. "What
kind of didos can you cut with
yourax?"
"I can cut lace as fine as an
old lady's tatting. I can cut pictures
as—"
"The picture of the horn of
Babe the Blue Ox?"
"To the last curl!"
Paul gave a grunt of satisfac-
tion. "Then you will cut the horn
of the Babe on every log that goes
into the drive." And he summoned
Johnny Inkslinger and ordered,
"Put it down in our books: the
mark of Paul Bunyan is the twisted
ox horn."
So was log branding born.
But while other exploits of Paul
Bunyan have been bruited far and
wide, this one has gained him no
fame at all. His logging feats proved
Dogface
Oregon
him master of al<>< the woods, but in
branding his competition has come
from a totally different source:
Every tinhorn dude and wrangler
acts as though he had a monopoly
on branding.
The truth is that in Real A-
merica, as Bunyan called these
United States, both log branding
and cattle branding go back to Co-
lonial days. But when it comes to
riproaring history, log branding got
a head start on cattle branding. For
white pine was king of New Eng-
land and the Great Lake states.
before the longhorn was king of the
Great Plains. The lumberjack hit
the sawdust trail before the cowboy
hit the Abilene Trail. Log drives
came down the Penobscot and the
Muskegon before the first cattle
drives came out of Texas. And log
branding is as old as white pine log-
ging.
A lot of people can under-
stand why cows and calves need to
be branded, but not so with logs.
They realize that ornery, four -leg-
ged critters are apt to run off and
be stolen, but they think of logs as
staying put, as being too large for
thieves to pack off. How on earth
would a logger lose a log?
More often than not logs ride
to market down the white waters of
rushing rivers, and once a log is in
the water it is wild as any cow on
the range, and to round it up you
need some mark so you can "cut it
out" from the rest of the "herd".
And logs can be cussed things, too.
They hang up along river banks, get
swept away in floods and storms,
get lost from booms and rafts. To
reclaim such strays, you need to be
able to point with an authoritative
finger and say, "See, John Jones,
his mark!"
Without log brands the timber
industry would have been in chaos
from the beginning — even as the
cattle industry would have been
without cattle brands. Yet loggers
and cattlemen were two breeds
whose paths never crossed. They
never met to exchange ideas, never
borrowed from each other. Inde-
pendently, without knowing or
caring about the needs of the other,
each group came up with its own
answer to the problems of roving
personal property.
The idea of marks for timber
seems to have originated in — of all
places — the crowned heads of the
English monarchs. For the English
kings took a page right out of Paul
Bunyan's own book when they or-
dered their own royal brand design-
ed: the broad arrow. (In compari-
son, it is interesting to note that the
cattle brands used in our Southwest
are traced back to Spanish sources).
The broad arrow, blazed on
the tall pines of New England
meant BEWARE! PROPERTY OF
THE CROWN! DO NOT TOUCH!
And this right to warn off the Co-
lonists was stated plainly enough —
if quaintly — in the Charter of
William and Mary, granted to the
Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1691.
This document said, last clause,
that for the "better provideing and
furnishing of Masts for our Royall
Navy," all trees twenty-four inches
or more in diameter one foot from
the gound were reserved for the
Crown, and "Wee doe restraine and
forbid all persons whatsoever from
felling cutting or destroying any
such Trees.".The penalty for viola-
tion: "Forfeiting One Hundred
Pounds sterling." Real teeth in that
law! It was not until 1706, how-
ever, in Queen Anne's time, that
efforts were made to enforce this
provision of the charter. Then came
trouble. The Broad Arrow Policy,
as it was called, outraged the Colo-
nists as thoroughly as did the Tea
Tax and the'Stamp Act. It was one
more thing they refused to stand
for. They rebelled, fought a war,
and set up these United States.
Still, that didn't mean they
were blind to a good thing when
they saw it. Even before Indepen-
dence they took to their bosoms
the idea of branding their own tim-
ber, and earliest laws governing the
timber industry . included clauses
about proving ownership of logs
through brands. Such laws were put
on the books in Connecticut in
1752; in Massachusetts (which then
included the great white pine for-
ests of Maine) in 1781; in Vermont,
1786; in New Hampshire, 1792; in
New York, 1804; and in Pennsyl-
vania, 1812.
Hundreds of owners were
sending logs down the Saco, the
Androscoggin, the Kennebec, the
Penobscot, the Connecticut, the St.
John, the Machias — and what mix-
ups at the mouths with all these dif-
ferent owners searching for their
own property! In 1825 Bangor
lumbermen got together and made
their efforts a joint enterprise. A
boom (chain of logs) across the
mouth of the Penobscot caught all
floating timber; a crew from the
various owners then took over,
sorted logs according to brands,
"filed" the logs for different indi-
viduals and companies in pockets
formed by booms. After that, the
cooperative sorting boom was com-
mon in river logging.
And shortly thereafter the
branding hammer or ax was invent-
ed, also at Bangor. Since not all
axmen were as clever as Paul Bun-
yan's Mark Beaucoup, marks cut on
the sides of logs with the broadax
had to be simple; even so they were
not always uniform and were hard
to read; besides, time was lost in
rolling a log over in the water to
find the mark. The new device was
a hammer with a raised surface in
the pattern of the brand; struck in-
to the log end it stamped the brand
firmly and plainly. Common prac-
tice was to hit a log in three or four
places so at least one brand would
be visible no matter which way it
floated.
ere #; o j
New England loggers had
branding down to a system, and
when they migrated west they took
the system with them. Even before
Michigan's first log brand law was
pacsPd in 1842, the grand parade of
branded logs had started down the
rivers of the Great Lake states.
Meantime, there were a few
branded cattle in the Colonial cow -
pens, but it is not from such staid
milch cows that the main currents
of American cattle branding tradi-
tion descends. That tradition comes
from the great cattle country of the
west and southwest and is of Span-
ish and Mexican origin.
It was 1845 and 1850 before
the cows of Texas and California
came into the Union. And it was
another decade and more before
the range cattle industry really got
going. Lumberjacks who could read
log brands at forty paces were
thumping the bars at Bangor and
Saginaw hollering "Timber!" long
years before there was any Dodge
City, Wichita or Cheyenne where
cowboys with branding irons in
their saddlebags could thump bars
and holler "Yippee!"
As the cow empire spread over
the Great Plain states, log brand
laws continued to spread west in
the wake of the loggers as they let
daylight into the swamp.
Minnesota, under a law passed
in 1854, saw the registration of
20,000 log brands up to 1945. In
1872 California made it a misde-
meanor to alter or destroy a log
brand, and in 1939 passed a new
law which, like those in the New
England and Great Lake states, pro-
vides for registration of the brands
by county. In 1926, Washington
state, plagued by bold log pirates
on Puget Sound, revised its early
law to require state registration of
brands, and also to put other teeth
in. In 1891, Oregon passed an "Act
to Protect the Title of the Owners
of Floating Logs, Timber and Lum-
ber," and this law stood until 1943
when it was revised to require that
all brands be registered with a state
agency. In Idaho, registration is
with the timber inspector.
So log branding is still going
strong. Thousands of marks in cur-
rent usage are on official file in
these Western states, and some
fewer are still being used in older
logging states. But because log
brands have stayed on logs and not
strayed ,to the walls of cocktail
lounges and rumpus rooms, to mint
julep glasses and pink undies, they
are little known.
Log brands have a style and
flavor of their own. Loggers never
leaned so heavily on the devices
which became stereotypes in cattle
branding: flying letters, rocking let-
ters, lazy letters, rafter signs, run-
ning letters — all hangovers from
Mexican and Spanish brands which
use many curlecues.
Loggers exercised great inge-
nuity in thinking up new combina-
tions of old forms, creating new de-
signs. Their brands tend for the
most part to be angular, cryptic
and "all of a piece".
A cattleman's brand often
serves as his ranch name: Flying U,
the Walking T, the Star Bar, etc. —
so his brand must sound nice when
spoken aloud. The logger has no
such worry. When a sorter glances
at such an impossible brand as "YW
combined girdle cross D," he does
not have to say it; he merely knows
what owner it belongs to and so
guides the log to the right sorting
pocket. When loggers do have occa-
sion to read their brands aloud
they often use designations quite
unknown to cattlemen. In some lo-
calities theirs is not a bar but a
notch; not a slash but a girdle; not
a box but a scalp; not an O but a
blaze; not a cross hatch but a forty.
And of course picture brands get
tagged with the names they suggest
— or nicknames, mostly unprint-
able, which spice up the sorters'
work.
In this "heraldry of the tim-
ber" only a small proportion of the
brands are picturesque and amus-
ing, as is true in cattle branding.
Brands are not meant to be pictur-
esque, but merely utilitarian. And
since simple marks are just as useful
for identification purposes as com-
plicated ones, the first tendency is
to use the obvious.
Custom
Logging
Deasy
Logging
&Truc-King
Ph: 347-2590
New Meadows,
q'k,M
S LM N
IdaRDVIER
EVERGREEN FOREST LUMBER
PROdUCTS, INC.
lX
EVERGREEN
LoGGiNG Co.
SERVING
TIDE
COMMUNITY
Tamarack, Idaho
�4
A company supporting
the community.
RIGGINS
IDAHO
Working.plan
of an early
gang saw.
Ivich
Logy i n , Inc.
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NEW MEADOWS
DAHO
JONN RON
347-2266 347 -2541
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Ohio Match Company
Stine Shingle
Atlas Tie Co.
St. Joe Boom Co.
Cameron
Lumber Co.
Rose Lake Lumber Co.
OH 10
Ohio Match Co.
Kellogg Logging Co.
CDA Log Owners Assn.
•
•
Hoo Hoo Lumber Co.
� 6-D
Rutledge Timber Company
ATCO
Atlas Tie Company
W.J. Quinn
W.B. Ahlston
0
Carscellan Brothers
FOX 2
FB
F6ox Lumber Co.
A
Shoshone Lumber Co.
Clarence Marshall
COCK
Fulton Cook
W. J. Ross
Export Lumber Co.
TJssf1
T.J. Stonestreet
Bunker Hill & Sullivan
Pearl Bailey
Post Falls Lumber Co.
7
UP
Milwaukee Land Company
W
voL
Winton Lumber Co.
Milwaukee Lumber Company
U
j^C
James Crocker
Sprinuston Lumber Company
Bradford Kennedy Co.
RM
Russell & Pugh
LTRI
O'Neil & Irvine
tT. 30
L 39
Coeur d'Alene Lumber Co.
PA
Peter Lamb
lk I D
Kid Island Lumber Co.
Mike Flynn
A.C. Morbeck
Blackwell Lumber Co.
_12-I —0-20
`6( )16( 20
Blackwell Lumber Co.
F.A. Blackwell
w
Grant Lumber Co.
12
(Turtle 12)
McGoldrick Lumber Co.
1K
St. Maries Lumber Co.
IMI IX I
IN I W
B.R. Lewis
Covrr+ry - pi-d /gip
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Deasy Logging
V
V
2
Question
Plus Minus
Zig Zag
% Circle V Dot
Boise Cascade
•
Pi
Double Diamond
•
Divide
1
NS
Beartrack or Sunrise
J.I. Morgan
Clifford
/°S
Flying
Johnson
O
• •
• •
• •
6 Dot
(..../
J
Glen Stuut
n
• •
Smiley
Turkey
Track
Harrison
I
Line -dot
•
-Line
---
Backwards
Swastika
Boise Cascade
0-0
Dumbbell
(kola
Logging
<
K
c?
Heart
)°'
% Broken Arrow
Malvich Logging
• •
` •
• •
5 Dot
// \
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Chevron
H
Wagon
Wheel
0
Circle
Lorne Rice
Dollar
B & G Logging
A
J.I. Morgan
J Cross
A
The practice of log branding was discontinued in Valley and Adams Counties in 1975.
The brands si,own here were all registered by the Boise Cascade Corporation and last used
in 1974. Each year, Boise Cascade assigned a brand, or several brands, to loggers working in
the region. In addition to branding, a color -coding system was used to denote which timber
sale or region logs were coming from. Colors were painted over the brands. Some of the
loggers are listed with the brand they used in 1974.
1�fP
"Pig Head"
Muskegon Shingle
Lumber Co.
/.;;\
"Privy"
F.C. Falkert
Alpena, Mich.
"Hanging Man"
Davis & Whitney
Muskegon, Mich.
"Bottle O'Rye"
Wells, Stone & Co.
Saginaw, Mich.
'Bedbug'
Storrs & McDougall
Muskegon, Mich.
"Crosscut Saw"
Glue & Smith
Muskegon, Mich.
MASTERPIECES: In the really creative class are the picture brands. They employ pictorial references,
sly and otherwise, to everything the logger does, thinks, eats, drinks and works with. This type of brand
saw its finest flowering in the heyday of Michigan logging when lumberjacks were real hellroarers. Many
of these Michigan masterpieces deserve to be enshrined beside Paul Bunyan's immortal oxhorn.
WASHINGTON BRANDS
OREGON BRANDS
J.A. Feazle
O ""
Saxton Bros.
Logging Co.
Russell Nelson
Agh
Marshfield
Tie Co.
Wittick
& Sjogren
Al Pierce
Co.
m
Valentin Logging
Co.
Hirchenhein
& Pratt
Simonson Bros.
Logging Co.
MINNESOTA BRANDS
Eastside Lumber Co.
Otis Staples
L�
Douglas Lumber Co. David To e!
MICHIGAN BRANDS
T.B. Wilcox
Tl
S.C. Hall Augustus Paddock
James Foley John H. Simons
Schafer Bros.
Monroe Logging Co.
Hellyer Logging Co.
/ 1
1
Mountain Tree
Alvin Anderson
Milwaukee Land Co.
Schafer Bros.