The real curiosity of this region is a logging camp.  The redwood country is astonishingly broken; the mountain sides are often almost precipitous; and on these steep sides the redwood grows tall and straight and big beyond the belief of an Eastern man.  The trees do not occupy the whole ground, but share it with laurels, dogwood, a worthless kind of oak, occasionally pine, and smaller wood.  It is a kind of jungle; and the loggers, when they have felled a number of trees, set fire to the brush in order to clear the ground before they attempt to draw the logs to the water.

[Illustration:  VICTORIA HARBOR, VANCOUVER’S ISLAND.]

A logging camp is an assemblage of rude redwood shanties, gathered about one larger shanty, which is the cook-house and dining-hall, and where usually two or three Chinamen are at work over the stove, and setting the table.  The loggers live well; they have excellent bread, meat, beans, butter, dried apples, cakes, pies, and pickles; in short, I have dined in worse places.

A camp is divided into “crews;” a crew is composed of from twenty to twenty-six men, who keep one team of eight or ten oxen busy hauling the logs to water.

A “crew” consists of teamsters, choppers, chain-tenders, jack-screw men (for these logs are too heavy to be moved without such machinery), swampers, who build the roads over which the logs are hauled, sawyers, and barkers.  A teamster, I was told, receives seventy dollars per month, a chopper fifty dollars, chain-tenders and jack-screw men the same, swampers forty-five dollars, sawyers forty dollars, and barkers, who are usually Indians, one dollar a day and board besides, for all.  The pay is not bad, and as the chances to spend money in a logging camp are not good, many of the men lay up money, and by-and-by go to farming or go home.  They work twelve hours a day.

A man in Humboldt County got out of one redwood tree lumber enough to make his house and barn, and to fence in two acres of ground.

A schooner was filled with shingles made from a single tree.

One tree in Mendocino, whose remains were shown to me, made a mile of railroad ties.  Trees fourteen feet in diameter have been frequently found and cut down; the saw-logs are often split apart with wedges, because the entire mass is too large to float in the narrow and shallow streams; and I have even seen them blow a log apart with gunpowder.

A tree four feet in diameter is called undersized in these woods; and so skillful are the wood-choppers that they can make the largest giant of the forest fall just where they want it, or, as they say, they “drive a stake with the tree.”