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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, > < 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. g NEW MEADOWS DAHO JONN RON 347-2266 347 -2541 ( jp t 7�GG'P '4i 1 a�—' li }'4.7 vs ±THF1 iA8(2 LOB JXP BC0 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 a‘,P t` ,i— of f ^ ‘ T�qnf AL 1 )A1210 _JAN 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 // \ /\ 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.