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Mountain Timber (Sono Nis $42.95)
Richard Somerset Mackie became an historian at age eleven when he started digging up old bottles from an Edwardian-era dump near his parents' North Saanich home in 1969. His tool kit consisted of a trowel, hoe, short-handled shovel and a bucket.
"Once this dump was exhausted,"; he says, "I moved to other parts of Tsehum Harbour and eventually to the shoreline and old farms of North Saanich."; While digging at Judge Matthew Baillie Begbie's former summer house at Elk Lake, he found exquisite Scotch whisky bottles as well as Chinese pottery to augment his collection of First Nations basalt arrowheads.
His parents, who were academics at the University of Victoria, encouraged him to take an extended sabbatical in Britain and Europe in 1974-75, during which he explored Corfu on a moped, hitchhiked through Provence, walked the length of Hadrian's Wall (it rained the whole way), explored the Thames at low tide and climbed Traitor's Gate into the Tower of London.
After studying mediaeval history at the University of St. Andrews, and later archaeology, history, and historical geography in Canada, Mackie obtained his Ph.D from UBC in 1993. Three books and four years later, Mackie won the BC Historical Federation's top book award for Trading Beyond the Mountains (UBC Press, 1997), a study of the fur trade.
By digging deeper into his own backyard, Mackie won that same prize again, this time for volume one of his social history of the Comox Logging Company, Island Timber (Sono Nis, 2000).
Mackie is back with its sequel, Mountain Timber (Sono Nis $42.95), opening with a quote from former Socred cabinet minister and Bible-thumper Phil Gaglardi, "Those trees weren't put on that mountain by God to be praised, they were put there to be cut down.";
Whereas Island Timber was set on the low-lying coastal flats adjacent to the Strait of Georgia, Mountain Timber covers the company's later and higher fortunes in the densely-forested valleys and lakes of Vancouver Island, mainly between 1925 and 1945.
As the company depleted its supply of coastal Douglas fir in the 1920s, it moved inland to log the Bevan sidehill, the shores of Comox Lake, and the valleys and tributaries of the Puntledge and Cruickshank Rivers. Mountain Timber also revisits Comox Logging's railway logging Camps 1, 2, and 3, around Oyster River and Black Creek.
Overall the company logged what seemed like an endless supply of timber in the Comox Valley, producing more than six billion board feet of lumber. Mackie estimates that's enough timber to "build at least a million homes-enough to house everyone in British Columbia.";
Mostly the Comox Company harvested Douglas fir. With growth rings of 50 or 60 per inch, the remarkable Douglas fir was in high demand for house construction back in 1912, and when these homes are demolished today, the wood is sometimes shipped to the U.S. to be "re-sawn and re-sold.";
Mountain Timber is also the story of the men who worked for Comox Logging, some sticking with the company for their entire working lives; people that logging poet and engineer Robert Swanson once called the "Homeguards.";
Mackie conducted interviews with employees and their descendants-skid greasers, scalers, cooks, fallers, bookkeepers, saw filers, logger sports champions (one who could bend six-inch spikes into horseshoes), teachers and wives.
With a workforce made up primarily of Swedes, Finns, Scots and English, Comox Valley Logging was also one of the first B.C. companies to hire locally; chief engineer Robert Filberg encouraged employees to buy land in the Comox Valley, put down roots and start farming.
The company sold land to one entrepreneur who built Fishermen's Lodge on the Oyster River. His grandson remarks, "Before that, the men at Camp 2 would go to Vancouver and get pissed up.... it [the hotel] was a way of keeping local employees.";
Interviewee Doris Walker recalls, "Filberg did something for logging: he instilled in his workers how nice it would be to have a little ranch or chicken farm, because they were shut down in the winter for the snow, in the summer for fires, and sometimes in between for strikes. No money was coming at these times. So they listened to Filberg and bought property, and did what he suggested.";
Comox Logging had the financial muscle to harvest, cut, ship and distribute lumber as a subsidiary of Canadian Western Lumber Company. It was an "integrated"; company long before we labelled them as such.
"In 1911 Comox Logging became the first Canadian company to introduce highlead logging, then known as aerial logging,"; writes Mackie, "in the form of state-of-the-art, track-mounted Lidgerwood steam skidders. Steam tugs towed booms of logs to Fraser Mills (the name of a Canadian Western subsidiary as well as the associated company town, now part of Port Coquitlam). There it was sawn for export and for shipment by rail to the Prairies, where Canadian Western's lumberyards numbered around 200 in 1912.";
The photographs in Mountain Timber really help make this book. Many are on loan from family albums, and they display skills, machinery and monster Douglas fir trees long forgotten. According to one retired forester, some of the stumps, "took three strides to get across.";
There are steam locomotives galore, men on logging shows sporting straw hats (hard hats didn't arrive until the 1950s), and crude logging camps that Arthur Mayse once described as "long, narrow and severely plain.";
High riggers balance atop head spars 140 feet above the ground (these were huge trees stripped into poles for
pulling logs off hillsides). One of them, Herman Anderson, great-grandfather of actress Pamela Anderson, was considered one of the best men at his job in B.C. before he was killed when a guy-rope jarred loose and hit him.
Mountain Timber features baseball teams, dance halls and female world bucking champions. "I could see why Jack Hodgins, whose father and uncles worked for Comox Logging, has written so prodigiously about the Comox Valley,"; writes Mackie. "Like the paintings of E.J. Hughes, the history of Vancouver Island combines equal strands of industry, agriculture, forested landscape, and working people, and a large canvas to portray it all.";
Mackie builds commendably on the work of local historians and newspaper accounts, but it's the voices of employees and descendants that give this account its lifeblood, detailing a way of life that sustained communities and families for decades-until the timber ran out.
Only 2% of that Douglas fir forest remains, and today many Vancouver Island communities are facing the harsh reality of mill closures and drastically reduced timber supply. 1-55039-171-2
-- review by Mark Forsythe
[BCBW 2009]
"Once this dump was exhausted,"; he says, "I moved to other parts of Tsehum Harbour and eventually to the shoreline and old farms of North Saanich."; While digging at Judge Matthew Baillie Begbie's former summer house at Elk Lake, he found exquisite Scotch whisky bottles as well as Chinese pottery to augment his collection of First Nations basalt arrowheads.
His parents, who were academics at the University of Victoria, encouraged him to take an extended sabbatical in Britain and Europe in 1974-75, during which he explored Corfu on a moped, hitchhiked through Provence, walked the length of Hadrian's Wall (it rained the whole way), explored the Thames at low tide and climbed Traitor's Gate into the Tower of London.
After studying mediaeval history at the University of St. Andrews, and later archaeology, history, and historical geography in Canada, Mackie obtained his Ph.D from UBC in 1993. Three books and four years later, Mackie won the BC Historical Federation's top book award for Trading Beyond the Mountains (UBC Press, 1997), a study of the fur trade.
By digging deeper into his own backyard, Mackie won that same prize again, this time for volume one of his social history of the Comox Logging Company, Island Timber (Sono Nis, 2000).
Mackie is back with its sequel, Mountain Timber (Sono Nis $42.95), opening with a quote from former Socred cabinet minister and Bible-thumper Phil Gaglardi, "Those trees weren't put on that mountain by God to be praised, they were put there to be cut down.";
Whereas Island Timber was set on the low-lying coastal flats adjacent to the Strait of Georgia, Mountain Timber covers the company's later and higher fortunes in the densely-forested valleys and lakes of Vancouver Island, mainly between 1925 and 1945.
As the company depleted its supply of coastal Douglas fir in the 1920s, it moved inland to log the Bevan sidehill, the shores of Comox Lake, and the valleys and tributaries of the Puntledge and Cruickshank Rivers. Mountain Timber also revisits Comox Logging's railway logging Camps 1, 2, and 3, around Oyster River and Black Creek.
Overall the company logged what seemed like an endless supply of timber in the Comox Valley, producing more than six billion board feet of lumber. Mackie estimates that's enough timber to "build at least a million homes-enough to house everyone in British Columbia.";
Mostly the Comox Company harvested Douglas fir. With growth rings of 50 or 60 per inch, the remarkable Douglas fir was in high demand for house construction back in 1912, and when these homes are demolished today, the wood is sometimes shipped to the U.S. to be "re-sawn and re-sold.";
Mountain Timber is also the story of the men who worked for Comox Logging, some sticking with the company for their entire working lives; people that logging poet and engineer Robert Swanson once called the "Homeguards.";
Mackie conducted interviews with employees and their descendants-skid greasers, scalers, cooks, fallers, bookkeepers, saw filers, logger sports champions (one who could bend six-inch spikes into horseshoes), teachers and wives.
With a workforce made up primarily of Swedes, Finns, Scots and English, Comox Valley Logging was also one of the first B.C. companies to hire locally; chief engineer Robert Filberg encouraged employees to buy land in the Comox Valley, put down roots and start farming.
The company sold land to one entrepreneur who built Fishermen's Lodge on the Oyster River. His grandson remarks, "Before that, the men at Camp 2 would go to Vancouver and get pissed up.... it [the hotel] was a way of keeping local employees.";
Interviewee Doris Walker recalls, "Filberg did something for logging: he instilled in his workers how nice it would be to have a little ranch or chicken farm, because they were shut down in the winter for the snow, in the summer for fires, and sometimes in between for strikes. No money was coming at these times. So they listened to Filberg and bought property, and did what he suggested.";
Comox Logging had the financial muscle to harvest, cut, ship and distribute lumber as a subsidiary of Canadian Western Lumber Company. It was an "integrated"; company long before we labelled them as such.
"In 1911 Comox Logging became the first Canadian company to introduce highlead logging, then known as aerial logging,"; writes Mackie, "in the form of state-of-the-art, track-mounted Lidgerwood steam skidders. Steam tugs towed booms of logs to Fraser Mills (the name of a Canadian Western subsidiary as well as the associated company town, now part of Port Coquitlam). There it was sawn for export and for shipment by rail to the Prairies, where Canadian Western's lumberyards numbered around 200 in 1912.";
The photographs in Mountain Timber really help make this book. Many are on loan from family albums, and they display skills, machinery and monster Douglas fir trees long forgotten. According to one retired forester, some of the stumps, "took three strides to get across.";
There are steam locomotives galore, men on logging shows sporting straw hats (hard hats didn't arrive until the 1950s), and crude logging camps that Arthur Mayse once described as "long, narrow and severely plain.";
High riggers balance atop head spars 140 feet above the ground (these were huge trees stripped into poles for
pulling logs off hillsides). One of them, Herman Anderson, great-grandfather of actress Pamela Anderson, was considered one of the best men at his job in B.C. before he was killed when a guy-rope jarred loose and hit him.
Mountain Timber features baseball teams, dance halls and female world bucking champions. "I could see why Jack Hodgins, whose father and uncles worked for Comox Logging, has written so prodigiously about the Comox Valley,"; writes Mackie. "Like the paintings of E.J. Hughes, the history of Vancouver Island combines equal strands of industry, agriculture, forested landscape, and working people, and a large canvas to portray it all.";
Mackie builds commendably on the work of local historians and newspaper accounts, but it's the voices of employees and descendants that give this account its lifeblood, detailing a way of life that sustained communities and families for decades-until the timber ran out.
Only 2% of that Douglas fir forest remains, and today many Vancouver Island communities are facing the harsh reality of mill closures and drastically reduced timber supply. 1-55039-171-2
-- review by Mark Forsythe
[BCBW 2009]
Submitted on November 16, 2009 in By David.
