View of logging camp, probably Schafer Bros. — 6/27/1940 — #17362_2
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Photograph Copyright Anderson & Middleton Company
United States — Washington (State)
Schafer Bros. Logging Co.
A train pulled by steam locomotive enters a logging camp. Note on envelope reads "Hildebrant".
This is one of a series of three photographs commissioned by the Schafer Bros. Logging Co. The pictures were not fully identified by the Jones Photo Co.
These photographs inspired the sharing of a story from Clarence (Tud) Orville Kinnaman. In October 1995, his son Gerald (Jerry) recorded this story of his father’s work for the Schafer Bros. Logging Co. in the 1930's.
Tud begins: “I started work in 1935 for Schafer Bros on its railroad. Worked all over, including Bunker Creek, Lincoln Creek, then they shipped us up to the Olympic Mountains in 1939, where Schafer was logging. Had to set up camp. When the logging camps shut down during the depression, then I got on the WPA in 1935-36. Tail end ’36, I went back to work for Schafer. All the companies opened up logging again. Everybody went back to work.
In 1939, I worked on the Peninsula, at the headwaters of the Satsop River, for Schafer, I was working on the railroad, not in the woods. In 1939, Mom and son Jerry, who was 5 and a half, spent one summer with five families at a tent camp. What a time we had! Wood floors with a wood wall up about 3’, then framework with a tent over it. The tent we had, when it started raining, more water came in the house than outside on the ground. So that weekend when we went home I had to get a tarp to put over the top and then we were fine and dandy. The wood mice were terrible, in the house thicker than flies. Had traps set all over the place…”
[Jerry remembers the other tents, the garbage area and the bear cub that hung around the garbage camp].
Tud continues, “People couldn’t leave the camp for the weekend because the cub would have the whole camp torn up. The cub was alone because a tree had fallen and killed the mother. When we moved to the camp we had a bulldozer come in and dig a big ditch for all of our garbage. That little guy would get down in there and beat cans around having a good time getting to all of the garbage. What a time we had!
I even had a rope on that bear one night. He was up the tree and so I took a long rope with a loop on one end and put it at the foot of the tree with an apple and got way back. Pretty soon I could hear him coming down the tree. Then I heard him chomping on the apple, gave that rope a big jerk and had him by the hind foot. I wish I had never thought about the idea. Delbert Crabb, who lived in the next tent to us, was up the hill just above us a little bit and the bear took out right after him. Crabb shouted “hold that SOB, hold that SOB”! I said I can’t! That bear was just a drag’n me. The rope was siwashed around huckleberry bushes but he was still dragging me. He rolled down the hill, the rope came off and I thought, Oh! Boy! I was glad of that. That sure was a stupid thing to do. He wasn’t very big but he sure was powerful.
So I went out that Friday night and shot him with Delbert Crabb. We hung the cub up, skinned him out and dressed him, and holy cow, he looked just like a human being hanging there. We quartered him up, each one took a quarter and put them in our suit cases, wrapped up in paper and took them home. I had a hindquarter, cut it up and made a roast out it. Mom roasted it, which tasted just like veal. The more we chewed it, the bigger it got. I said that was enough of that and threw it all in the garbage. If I hadn’t killed and dressed it, then it would have been all right.
[Jerry remembers riding to the camp on a caboose, and that the camp was in a big gully, a river bottom, with quite a hike down to it. Also, he recalls the need to evacuate the camp to high ground when they were felling trees on a steep hill across from the camp]
Tud adds: “I would go in on a Sunday night, getting there after dark. When it rained in that country, it really rained! My God, those cat tracks [Caterpillar tractor] you would have mud clear up to your knees. Had to pack all those groceries through the woods into the camp!”
