Sawmill work is machine work—­rapid, tedious and often dangerous.  There is the uninteresting repetition of the same act of motions day in and day out.  The sights, sounds and smells of the mill are never varied.  The fact that the mill is permanently located tends to keep mill workers grouped about the place of their employment.  Many of them, especially in the shingle mills, have lost fingers or hands in feeding the lumber to the screaming saws.  It has been estimated that fully a half of these men are married and remain settled in the mill communities.  The other half, however, are not nearly so migratory as the lumberjack.  Sawmill workers are not the “rough-necks” of the industry.  They are of the more conservative “home-guard” element and characterized by the psychology of all factory workers.

The logger, on the other hand, (and it is with him our narrative is chiefly concerned), is accustomed to hard and hazardous work in the open woods.  His occupation makes him of necessity migratory.  The camp, following the uncut timber from place to place, makes it impossible for him to acquire a family and settle down.  Scarcely one out of ten has ever dared assume the responsibility of matrimony.  The necessity of shipping from a central point in going from one job to another usually forces a migratory existence upon the lumberjack in spite of his best intentions to live otherwise.

What Is a Casual Laborer?

The problem of the logger is that of the casual laborer in general.  Broadly speaking, there are three distinct classes of casual laborers:  First, the “harvest stiff” of the middle West who follows the ripening crops from Kansas to the Dakotas, finding winter employment in the North, Middle Western woods, in construction camps or on the ice fields.  Then there is the harvest worker of “the Coast” who garners the fruit, hops and grain, and does the canning of California, Washington and Oregon, finding out-of-season employment wherever possible.  Finally there is the Northwestern logger, whose work, unlike that of the Middle Western “jack” is not seasonal, but who is compelled nevertheless to remain migratory.  As a rule, however, his habitat is confined, according to preference or force of circumstances, to either the “long log” country of Western Washington and Oregon as well as California, or to the “short log” country of Eastern Washington and Oregon, Northern Idaho and Western Montana.  Minnesota, Michigan, and Wisconsin are in what is called the “short log” region.

[Illustration:  A Logger of the Pacific Northwest

This is a type of the men who work in the “long log” region of the West coast.  His is a man’s sized job, and his efforts to organize and better the working conditions in the lumber industry have been manly efforts—­and bitterly opposed.]

As a rule the logger of the Northwest follows the woods to the exclusion of all other employment.  He is militantly a lumberjack and is inclined to be a trifle “patriotic” and disputatious as to the relative importance of his own particular branch of the industry.  “Long loggers,” for instance, view with a suspicion of disdain the work of “short loggers” and vice versa.