Bessie Madden, who would one day marry Johnny Farley, was 12-years-old when her father Bill Madden worked at Camp I. Bessie's mother died when she was just six months old. Bill Madden never stayed very long in one place. By the time she was 12, Bessie had lived in Alberta, Canada, Oklahoma, Kansas, Montana, Washington and Oregon. I told her that it must have been a great thing to see that much of the world. Bessie's beautiful blue eyes narrowed and she said, "It was not a good thing for a little girl with no mother." Bessie went to school in John Day and lived with Mr. and Mrs. W.E. White. She was the first queen of the Grant County Fair in 1934 and married Johnny in 1935. Photos of Jack Southworth

They said it was like a park. You could be in the middle of the forest and see almost a quarter of a mile in any direction. Before there were any roads it was possible to drive a car from Bear Valley to Burns and just wind your way through the big trees.

Fred Lemcke, putting out salt in 1915 could take a team and wagon up any hill he wanted. The trees were big, well-spaced and beneath them grew a carpet of green grass.

The Forest Service advertised a timber sale of 890 million board feet in 1923 with the stipulation that the buyer build 80 miles of railroad and a mill near Burns. Idaho timberman, Fred Herrick bought the sale – much to everyone’s surprise – as it was assumed that Brooks Scanlon of Minneapolis would take it.

Herrick was undercapitalized and ran out of money before he could finish the railroad and build the mill. The Forest Service cancelled his contract, readvertised the sale, and in 1928 Edward Hines Lumber Co. of Chicago purchased the sale for $2.86 per thousand board feet.

Edward Hines Lumber Co. was a pioneer in the merchandising of lumber that gave it a leg up on its competition and they knew how to run a big show. Since the turn of the century Hines had been involved with Weyerhauser in a cooperative logging company known as Virginia and Rainy Lake Co. in northern Minnesota along the international border.

Virginia and Rainy Lake cut one million board feet per day, six days a week for a 20-year period totaling two billion board feet in 20 years. V&RL had 900 head of logging horses, used 14 large logging camps of 150 to 160 men each and two railroad camps of 25 men each. V &RL employed from 2,500-4,000 men in the woods. It operated 156 miles of railroad and 120 miles of ‘sleigh’ road across swamps and muskegs where they couldn’t build railroads and operated only in the wintertime. To feed the men required 56 head of cattle per week.

The first thing Hines did when they got to Eastern Oregon was to complete the line from Burns to Seneca. This required the construction of a tunnel at the summit. As soon as the railroad arrived at Seneca, work began on a logging spur up Shirttail Creek. Construc-tion began on a small mill on Spring Creek.

The mill at Spring Creek was known as Camp I and the word ‘camp’ is right. The first loggers lived in tents until the mill was built. The mill was powered by a Fairbanks-Morse diesel engine and could put out 25,000 board feet per day.

When the mill was up and working then they started building cookhouse and bunkhouses. There were 50 four-man bunkhouses at Camp I, each 14′ X 20′ in size. Each bunk house was electric lit and steam heated from a central power plant. There were also four bathhouses.

Rita Hankins Guernsey was a newlywed when she arrived at Camp I in the spring of 1929. I was surprised at Rita’s reaction when I took her to the site of Camp I in the summer of ’98. She was dumbfounded, almost numb. There had been so much there, and now there is almost nothing.

Lena Hanna Welch and Edith Lemcke visited their friend, Mrs. De Wolfe, at Camp I in 1929; and if we look over their shoulders we can see the camp.

Bill Madden was a teamster, and at Camp I he was seeing the end of the horse logging era. From 900 horses at Virginia and Rainy Lakein the 1920s, Hines was down to 32 horses in 1931.

Tim Hollembaek truly loved logging with horses. He was married to Fay Stratton, and they were at Camp I from the beginning. His two horses were Charlie and Sunday.

Tim couldn’t believe that horses would ever be replaced by Cats. And the early Caterpillar tractors did not give much reason to doubt him. On the right, it looks like the skinner is getting the starting engine going after killing his engine trying to idle across the railroad tracks. I can imagine Tim going by with Charlie and Sunday, their necks bowed, stepping high, going after another skid. “Need a pull, there fella. Boy, that railroad track sure can be tricky, being six inches tall and all. I know, why don’t we hitch your Cat to Charlie and Sunday and then the logs to your Cat and it will look like your actually getting some work.”

The Cat skinner would glare. Now his starting engine had flooded and he’d have to pull a plug and dry it.

Tim would laugh, “Hey-up Charlie, Hey Sunday, Daylight’s burning. Clk, clk,” And off Tim would go, laughing, up the skid trail.

But the horse’s days were numbered. The Cats got better and they had the benefit of a machine called an arch that they pulled behind them. The arch would hold the front end of the logs up off the ground so that without much effort the Cats could skid three, four, five times as much as the teams and twice as far.

The last two horses Hines had were used on the railroad section gang building logging spurs. These horses would pull the car loaded with rails forward as the men built the track. This was known as the “push” car because it was pushed by the locomotive to the end of the track.

Ah, the Swedes. The Swede Steel Gang was a group of fellows from Sweden who could get only the hardest jobs as they were just beginning to learn English. Bob Johnson, Oscar Johnson, Hank Johnson, Alex Bjorkman, and Peter Holmberg were among this group of men. Strong? Before the mill at Camp I was built they cut 25,000 ties with broad axes. The Swede Steel Gang contracted with Hines to lay the ties and tracks on the logging railroads and then pick them up after an area was logged. Years later, it was some of these same men that ran the section gangs on the railroad.

The Swedes were always teased about their pronounciation of English. John Saunders tells the story of Hank Johnson talking about the condiment to put on his toast. “For years you’ve been vanting me to say yam, and now you vant me to say yelly?”

After housing at Camp I was built, the little mill’s No. 1 business was railroad ties, thousands of them. The Camp One mill was supervised by Claude DeWolfe who had his own sawmill at the north end of Bear Valley before Hines came into the picture.

The last job in the woods to be mechanized was the falling. Frank Just told Mike Browning of Seneca, “You know, that falling with two-man saws was clean, quiet work. You’d knock down your 20 trees a day and go home. Once you got in shape and drank enough water, it wasn’t too bad.”

Duce McKrola said that there was quite a knack to running a two-man saw. The men had to be compatible, work at the same speed. If your partner said you were “heavy on the saw,” that meant you were pushing into the wood too hard.

Duce started falling with Frank Kellar when Frank was 50 years old and Duce was in his 20s. “No one would work with Frank because he was too old and no one would fall with me because I didn’t know how to do it.” Duce said the two-man saws made a steady hmm-swish, hmm-swish sound.

In the early days, the fallers only fell. Another crew of buckers cut the trees into logs. When the trees were too big to fit in the mill, Alex Bjorkman and Oscar Johnson cut off a slab with a two-man chain saw so it will fit on the head rig.

The first power saw was electric. It was run by a generator mounted on a D4 Cat and required three men to operate. The electric saws came out soon after World War II. Some early electric saw operators were Gerald Ripley, Vic Begg and Alex Bjorkman.

The first gas-powered saw was a Disston and Hines ran these saws for years until around 1960. Harold Clark and Leo McKrola used an 11 hp Disston to buck a log near Dry Meadows.

With the two-man saws, Hines took care of all the saw maintainence and chain sharpening. In those days you might see Fred Nelson sharpening a chain or Al Reynolds doing the repair work. On cold mornings Al said the best way to start a Disston was to pour gas over it and light it on fire. Hard on the paint, but the saw warmed right up. By the early 60s, everyone was using the one-man saw. Duce with his McCulloch by one of the biggest trees he ever knocked down, but there was a little stop right in the center of the tree. Duce couldn’t reach it with the tip of his saw. He said you’d be amazed how well that tree stood there with just that little bit in the center holding it.

After the trees were bucked into logs the Cats and arches took over and took them to the landing at the railroad.

Wood it up! Wood it up! How long has it been since a skid of logs like this has been pulled into the landing?

Three things ended the use of the arches: Bigger cats that didn’t need them, the advent of trucks to get the logs to the railroad and dozers and patrols to build the roads.

The early loaders were McGifferts.They had six-cylinder engines: Four of the cylinders provided the power and the other two compressed air to provide the quarter-swing to the loader.

Some of the regular Seneca loggers knocking the chokers included Noah Mosley, Bob Lowe, Louis Farmer, Butter Shields, Gus Cummins, Morris Gullett, Roscoe Terry, Bob Johnson and Jack Gray.

I asked Duce what the little platform on the roof of the truck was for: “Why, that’s where Butter stood,” he replied. Before he was logging superintendent, Butter was a top loader in charge of placing the logs on the truck.

The first trucks were gas powered, single-axle whites with folding tongues and short side stakes. You don’t need much when the logs are 3 feet in diameter and the average load is three logs.

The biggest trucks ever used were the huge off-road Kenworths that could haul 10,000 board feetto the load. The McGiffert loaders were later replaced by Lorain loaders that would actually sit on the railroad cars instead of straddling them like the McGifferts. The loggers referred to them as ‘Slide-ass’ loaders becaused the loader would winch itself from car to car, dragging itself across the deck of the car.

The workhorse of the woods was the Shay gear-driven locomotives. These locomotives were not fast – top speed was 15 mph – but it was said they could climb a tree as every wheel on the locomotive was a driving wheel. This made the Shay excellent for use on the temporary logging spurs that seemed to have gone up every draw in Bear Valley.

The main line was from Seneca to Burns. The logging operation had its own engines and was responsible for getting the loaded log cars, usually 44 per day, to the yards at Seneca. From there, the Oregon and Northwestern and their big Baldwin locomotives took over. Besides the 44 log cars, it wasn’t unusual to have 15 or 20 freight cars as well to pull to Burns.

There was only one wreck on the Oregon and Northwestern and that occurred on Jan. 29, 1947. They had stopped at the Jap Camp at the lower end of Silvies Valley to take on water and added a second engine for the climb to the summit between Trout Creek and Poison Creek.

After they got to the summit, they sent the second engine back to the Jap Camp and rejoined the cars. The Conductor gave the ‘all OK’ signal and they started off the hill. Brakeman Chuck Clark knew something was wrong from the get-go. He was on the ground swithching retainers on the brakes and when he went to hop on the cabboose, it was going to fast for him to catch.

Benny Cottrell and Ray McComb were in the caboose and they knew they were on the tail end of a runaway and unhooked the caboose and tightened down the breaks by hand.

E.J. Dick, famous for his extra long nose, was the engineer and Charlie Pierce and Archie Miller were firemen riding with him. They didn’t have as attractive an option as the fellows in the caboose. They bailed off the train when it was going about 40 miles an hour.

Charlie decided to jump into some willows only to find that is where the section crew had thrown some old ties. He broke a couple of ribs. E.J. Dick skinned his nose, how could he not, and Archie was relatively unscathed.

The train left the track in the canyon three or four miles south of the tunnel at the summit. Chuck Clark was standing at the phone booth at the top and said he could hear the wreck. The wreck took out the phone line so Chuck had to walk to the highway and hitchhike to Burns to get help.

The railroad crew was glad to be alive but they said that losing that locomotive was like experiencing a loss in the family.

When the logs arrived at the mill in Hines they arrived at the largest covered mill in the world. 200,000 board feet per shift, 100 million board feet per year.

Jack Southworth of Seneca gave a slide presentation with this information in Seneca and John Day.