independent spirit gives him the courage and tenacity to achieve his aims.  The union hall is often his only home and the One Big Union his best-beloved.  He is fond of reading and discussion.  He resents industrial slavery as an insult.  He resented filth, overwork and poverty, he resented being made to carry his own bundle of blankets from job to job; he gritted his teeth together and fought until he had ground these obnoxious things under his iron-caulked heel.  The lumber trust hated him just in proportion as he gained and used his industrial power; but neither curses, promises nor blows could make him budge.  He knew what he wanted and he knew how to get what he wanted.  And his boss didn’t like it very well.

The lumber-jack is secretive and not given to expressed emotion—­excepting in his union songs.  The bosses don’t like his songs either.  But the logger isn’t worried a bit.  Working away in the woods every day, or in his bunk at night, he dreams his dream of the world as he thinks it should be—­that “wild wobbly dream” that every passing day brings closer to realization—­and he wants all who work around him to share his vision and his determination to win so that all will be ready and worthy to live in the New Day that is dawning.

In a word the Northwestern lumber-jack was too human and too stubborn ever to repudiate his red-blooded manhood at the behest of his masters and become a serf.  His union meant to him all that he possessed or hoped to gain.  Is it any wonder that he endured the tortures of hell during the period of the war rather than yield his Red Card—­or that he is still determined and still undefeated?  Is it any wonder the lumber barons hated him, and sought to break his spirit with brute force and legal cunning—­or that they conspired to murder it at Centralia with mob violence—­and failed?

Why the Loggers Organized

The condition of the logger previous to the period of organization beggars description.  Modern industrial autocracy seemed with him to develop its most inhuman characteristics.  The evil plant of wage slavery appeared to bear its most noxious blossoms in the woods.

The hours of labor were unendurably long, ten hours being the general rule—­with the exception of the Grays Harbor district, where the eleven or even twelve hour day prevailed.  In addition to this men were compelled to walk considerable distances to and from their work and meals through the wet brush.

Not infrequently the noon lunch was made almost impossible because of the order to be back on the job when work commenced.  A ten hour stretch of arduous labor, in a climate where incessant rain is the rule for at least six months of the year, was enough to try the strength and patience of even the strongest.  The wages too were pitiably inadequate.