The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest

by Timothy Egan

  It wasn’t logging that first brought crowds to these mountains. The Siskiyous, then as now, are a chore to reach. But greed has always been a terrific trailblazer; when gold was found in 1853, roads were carved from the hills in a hurry. Prospectors, up from California over the Siskiyou Trail, and across the Plains and Rockies via the Oregon Trail, soon clogged the Rogue River basin. These were not the families of Protestant farmers who’d fled the depression of the Ohio River Valley to settle in the Willamette during the previous decade. These Rogue Valley newcomers arrived without wife or kids or a past. They needed whores and precious metal, in short order, to stay alive. By the end of 1853, the Rogue River Valley had great supplies of both. Overnight, towns such as Jacksonville and Ashland sprang up, a saloon and bordello for every two dozen prospectors.

  The Indians were randomly murdered, sometimes shot for target practice. For centuries, the natives had lived well off the abundant salmon runs of the Trinity, the Chetco, the Illinois and Rogue rivers. Like most Northwest tribes, they were superb woodworkers, building perfectly symmetrical canoes, split-cedar houses, sanded and painted pottery, and furniture—all without benefit of axe, saw or any other metal tool. The great forest god provided them with a prolific source of waterproof wood, the western red cedar, which was used for everything from clothing to housing. As pioneers of the concept of sustained yield—now the seldom-followed but constantly stated forest-industry policy of never cutting more trees at any one time than would grow back to replace them—the natives were conservationists to a fault, even setting fires to encourage new growth in decaying areas. They called themselves the Takilmas and Tututnis, but the whites who came in the 1850s lumped them into a generic category which was thought to be descriptive of their behavior: the Rogue Indians. The main river and lifeline for the tribes was given the same name.

  To protect them from further slaughter by renegade whites, the government opened up nearby Fort Lane for the tribes shortly after the waves of prospectors arrived. As the women and children were leaving the village for the safety of the fort, they were ambushed by a group of Oregon volunteers, who killed two dozen defenseless natives. In retaliation, the Indians killed twenty-seven whites. The war that followed lasted five years. Defeated, the Rogues nonetheless held out against removal to the arid wasteland of Oklahoma, which was the official Indian Territory and dumping ground for all tribes whose homelands had been pre-empted during the great western land-grab. Instead, the Rogues were sent north, to the Siletz reservation west of Portland, which was itself later taken by whites when the local timber was deemed valuable.

  Young Theodore Winthrop, looking for acid-tongued pioneer Jesse Applegate, visited southern Oregon in 1853. Six thousand people moved to Oregon that year, drawn by gold and the Donation Land Act, which gave each male white citizen the right to own 320 acres and his wife 320 acres if they stayed on the land for four years. By the time the act was repealed in 1855, more than 2.5 million acres of Oregon were in private ownership. Winthrop was uncharacteristically silent on the hordes of prospectors panning the deep canyons of the Rogue for gold, perhaps because they didn’t fit his prophecy of the Oregon Country’s becoming a New England of the West, whose people would be ennobled by the stunning landscape. Yet he had plenty to say about the deep forests and rich river country. Surely, man would never conquer the biggest trees on earth, he said.

  Wading through the tangle on the west side of the Cascades, Winthrop offered a typical reaction of the time. “These giants with their rough plate armor were masters here,” he wrote. “One of human stature was unmeaning and incapable. With an axe, a man of muscle might succeed in smiting off a flake or a chip, but his slight fibres seemed naught to battle, with any chance of victory, the time-hardened sinews of these Goliaths.”

  Forty-three years after Winthrop wrote those words, a young German immigrant was hobo-hopping his way around the country when his travels took him to the Illinois Valley, named for the river that flows north from the California border into the Rogue in the heart of the Siskiyous. The trees towered higher than anything he’d ever seen in the Black Forest or along the Rhine. Even Switzerland’s alpine valleys couldn’t compare with the jumble of mountain country in the Pacific Northwest. He wrote his brother in Germany about the free land, the opportunity for quick money, the swift-flowing rivers. When Frederick Krauss received the letter in 1896, he promptly left Germany with his wife and two kids and headed for the Siskiyous. He had a small stake, and didn’t speak the language. The rain could be a bit much, sixty inches a year on average. Summers tended to dry everything out and bring fire to the woods. But overall, this Oregon country agreed with Krauss.

  During the time Frederick Krauss was establishing a hardscrabble home in the Northwest, another German-American, Frederick Weyerhaeuser, moved into a new mansion at 266 Summit Avenue in an exclusive neighborhood of St. Paul, Minnesota. His next-door neighbor at 244 Summit was James Hill, the Great Northern Railroad tycoon. Weyerhaeuser, by then the dominant lumberman of his day, had made his fortune stripping the trees of the Great Lakes area and the upper Mississippi Valley, and he knew that the mature white pine in that area was just about gone. Within his lifetime an area half the size of Europe—Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin and parts of bordering states—had been deforested. Paul Bunyan and his blue ox Babe sprang from mythology in the North Woods lumber camps, but by the turn of century big Paul and every other timberman was looking west at the greatest stands of softwood the world had ever known, on the west side of the Cascade Mountains. Problem was, how to get all that wood to market. Hill had an idea, and more land than he knew what to do with to back it up.

  Although the first sawmill in the Northwest was a Hudson’s Bay Company contraption built in 1827 and powered by water near the Gentlemen’s fort on the Columbia River, commercial logging never took off on a big scale, because of the distance from forest to market. Timber was scooted downslope to a river or salt water bay, and then shipped to San Francisco. Getting a boatload of heavy logs around Cape Horn to reach the East Coast was financially prohibitive. The railroads changed everything. When President Lincoln signed legislation in 1864 which chartered the Northern Pacific Railroad Company, he authorized a giveaway of vast sections of the West as incentive to complete a line from Lake Superior to Puget Sound. The company would get a checkerboard land grant of ten square miles for every mile of track completed in Oregon and Minnesota. In Washington Territory, they would get twice as much. All told, the Northern Pacific was deeded 38.5 million acres of public land. By the time Frederick Weyerhaeuser moved into the house on Summit Avenue, his neighbor James Hill controlled the Northern Pacific and all the western land which the government had given away. Hill offered this proposition: Weyerhaeuser would get 900,000 acres of Northern Pacific land grant property for $7 an acre. Weyerhaeuser, a shy man whose only hobby was beekeeping, thought this over, and then offered $5 an acre. They settled on $6. On January 3, 1900, Weyerhaeuser took title to 900,000 acres in Washington for a price of $5.4 million—the biggest private land sale in the country at the time. He paid about ten cents per thousand board feet—a dime per tree, on average—for timber that now sells for five hundred dollars per thousand board feet. The land was choice: the forested slopes around Mount Rainier and Mount St. Helens; acreage from the Cascade Crest to Puget Sound; the lowland woods near the Columbia in southwest Washington, and the temperate jungle near Naches Pass above the Yakima Valley, the spot where Winthrop had written that the forests of the Northwest were thick enough to keep man at bay.

  By 1914, when the first Krauss boys born in the Siskiyous were working odd jobs in the woods, the Weyerhaeuser Company had expanded its empire in the Northwest to just under two million acres—about twice the size of the state of Delaware—and was well on its way to the claim of world’s largest forest-products firm. There were howls of outrage from populist stump speakers and radical union leaders. Teddy Roosevelt called Weyerhaeuser a “curse.” In reaction to the land-gobbling, Roosevel
t established the national forest system in 1905, putting 150 million acres in public trust, to be managed by a corps of professional conservationists, the Forest Service.

  Of course, some still believed that the dark, brooding stands of timber on steep mountain sides were protected by their very size. The supply was inexhaustible; at times, it even seemed to rain timber. During the summer of Winthrop’s visit, a settler named Ezra Meeker built a cabin near the Columbia River town of Kalama, Washington. A spring freshet carried a load of lightning-felled logs down from the hillsides to his homestead. Meeker guided his manna down the Columbia to a mill, where he was paid six dollars per thousand board feet.

  But such stories were rare. More typical was the logger, a missing finger or two on each hand, who drifted west as the Great Lakes timber disappeared and found he had to work six days in the woods to pay for a one-night drunk. Weyerhaeuser lumber camps were run like prison yards. No conversation was allowed at meal times, no booze, no women, and, for several bloody decades, no unions. Until the labor revolts of 1917, the average pay was no more than two dollars for a ten-hour workday. Men were fired without prior warning. Pay was deducted for use of boots, blankets and bunkhouses, most of which were not heated. Little wonder that membership in the radical Industrial Workers of the World spread like jug whiskey through the logging camps. The constitution of the Wobblies didn’t mince any words: “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.” Their black cat symbol, emblazoned with the words BEWARE! SABOTAGE! and WE NEVER FORGET, began to pop up at scenes of industrial sabotage. When Longview, the world’s biggest planned timber town, opened on the banks of the Columbia with a company band playing “Nearer My God to Thee,” the headline in the Wob newspaper was: LONG-BELL HIRES JESUS MAN TO QUIET SLAVES.

  The turbulence was not as bad in the Siskiyous, where most of the mills were small, family-run affairs. Lew Krauss, grandson of the poor farmer who left Germany in 1896, began work at his father’s mill as soon as he came of age. When he started a mill of his own—the Rough and Ready Lumber Company in Cave Junction, the principal hamlet in the Illinois Valley—there were more than twenty-five small timber operations. Krauss loved the Illinois Valley; he climbed the hills of the Kalmiopsis, fished the Rogue and the Illinois, panned for gold. As playground or income source, the natural world of the Siskiyous seemed to have no limits; as long as people used wood to build homes, the Krauss family would live well, and so Lew Krauss never gave a thought of going into anything but the timber business. He married, moved into a home not far from the house of his grandfather, and raised seven children. As the timber industry grew with the postwar construction boom, Rough and Ready prospered and expanded. By the standards of the Illinois Valley, where seasonal work was the norm, the Krauss family was rich.

  In time, the small mills were consolidated or folded and the construction boom tapered off. By the 1970s, Rough and Ready was the only mill left in the Illinois Valley and was the chief source of income for residents of Cave Junction, employing more than two hundred people. By then others had moved to the red-earth hills and deep valleys of the ancient Siskiyous. They lived in communes around the old Indian village site of Takilma, just a stone’s throw from the California border, but their lifestyle did not sit well with the loggers of Cave Junction. They ran nude in the woods, smoked prodigious amounts of dope, gathered for mystic chants and grew organic vegetables. What particularly bothered some residents of Cave Junction was the new land ethic of these mostly well-educated residents of the Takilma communes, who revered the practices of the all-but-forgotten Rogue River Indians. Some of the younger residents of the Illinois Valley, however, sons and daughters of loggers, who didn’t want to work at Rough and Ready or be married to somebody who did, were attracted to the Takilma communes.

  While the back-to-earth movement faded in other parts of America, it flourished here. Even when some of the young Cave Junction residents became disillusioned with commune life and returned to conventional society, their attitude toward the bountiful resources of the Siskiyous had changed. The vast tracts of old evergreens, they realized, were fast disappearing. “It’s the last great buffalo hunt,” said Lou Gold, a former Portland college professor who took up tree-sitting on behalf of the ancient forest.

  As the timber companies cut all the trees on their private land, the pressure on the national forest reserves increased. Forest Service logging roads into the sanctuaries set up by Teddy Roosevelt tripled in the thirty years following World War II. The thousand-year-old trees were considered dead and useless by the people who ran the national forests. “One of my major initiatives has been to speed up harvest of the slow-growing or decadent, overmature timber stands in the Pacific Northwest, the old growth,” said John Crowell, the chief of the Forest Service, in 1982. At the same time, visitors started showing up from Europe and Southern California and Florida asking to see the old trees, the ones with trunks as wide as garage doors and canopies that blocked the sky. As interest in the old forest increased, Dr. Jerry Franklin, a forester, the son of a Columbia River mill worker, was asked by the Forest Service in the early 1980s to do a study of the old growth. Contrary to the conventional view at the time, Franklin found that these forests were not biological deserts, but unique ecosystems, the jungles of America, whose rotted snags provided homes for the spotted owl and fuel for the next generation of thousand-year-old trees.

  Some of the younger residents of Cave Junction saw in the forests of the Siskiyous and the torrents of the Rogue and Illinois rivers another future: tourism. Sons and daughters of third-generation logging families, they set up whitewater rafting outfits or took the family homesteads and converted them to bed-and-breakfast guest houses. Their livelihood became dependent on the very scenery which their neighbors and brothers were tearing up. Battle lines were drawn, as clear as the physical difference between one side of the Illinois River and the other. East of the river is a patchwork of logging roads and clearcuts, and the red earth is warm to the touch on large sections of denuded land. West of the river is the only big wilderness area in the Siskiyous, the 200,000 acres of the Kalmiopsis, where no roads penetrate a crowd of madronas, conifers, wild rhododendrons and the rare, pink-flowered Kalmiopsis plant, a cousin of the azalea which was thought to be extinct before it was discovered here.

  For the last decade, the fight here has been over a roadless 400,000 acres just north of the formal wilderness. Conservationists want that section of land and the wilderness lumped into a 700,000-acre Siskiyou National Park—all of it off limits to the chain saw. Timber companies, including Medco of Butte Falls, and Rough and Ready of Cave Junction, asked the Forest Service to build 214 miles of roads into the area and allow them to cut nearly six thousand acres annually. When the Forest Service announced plans to do just that, some Oregonians said that punching a road through the sacred heart of the Siskiyous and stripping all the trees on either side of it in order to save a few hundred jobs would be no different than trashing a cathedral to get at the candle wax. A lawsuit, filed on behalf of the endangered spotted owl, blocked the immediate cutting. Some of those who filed the suit received death threats.

  “You may not like living with us now,” said Andy Kerr, a leader of the conservationists. “But we make great ancestors.”

  Between court injunctions, when bits and pieces of the wilderness area were nibbled up by the loggers, acts of sabotage increased. Near Holcomb Peak, for example, a zigzag pattern of spikes was nailed through dozens of ancient trees. Few noticed the ironic reappearance of a symbol not seen in these woods for half a century. Sheriff’s deputies found posters of a screeching black cat with the words: BEWARE! SABOTAGE! And in smaller type, “We never sleep.… We never forget.…”

  At the Rough and Ready mill in Cave Junction, Lew Krauss can barely control himself when he tries to talk about the conflict raging outside his office window. In his late fifties, Krauss is a tall, angular man dressed in plaid shirt and workboots. Nothing corporate or stuffy about
him. Jimmy Stewart would fit in those clothes. He is likable, as Stewart is when he holds his finger up and says, “Now, wait just a minute.…” His grandfather would not understand this fight, Krauss says. In fact, as he talks, the land of his grandfather is enmeshed in a struggle brought by the Green Movement, whose members in Germany speak much the same language as the young residents of the communes outside Cave Junction. The planet is exhausted, they say; nothing short of direct action will save it. Krauss blames those who live in the communes and shacks down the river for holding up a timber sale in the national forest which he needs to keep the 220 workers at the Rough and Ready mill employed. Working with lawyers from the city, conservationists have held up numerous timber sales on the Siskiyous, claiming the spotted owl is being killed off by the loss of its old-growth-forest habitat. The owls, which nest in pairs, need up to five thousand acres per pair to live. The species is a barometer of the ancient forest; when spotted owls disappear from an area, it’s a sign that the world of the forest is in deep trouble. Citing government studies that showed clearcutting the old trees has caused a steep decline in the population of the spotted owl, environmentalists in the 1980s found their best legal tool yet to slow logging in the national forests. In the parking lot at the Rough and Ready mill, some of the pickup trucks have bumper stickers which read, “Save a Logger. Kill a Spotted Owl.” Inflatable owls are hung by their necks with ropes attached to the trucks. And when a convoy of logging trucks blocked the roads to protest Forest Service consideration for the spotted owl, a sign appeared in a local cafe which read: “Today’s Special: Spotted Owl Stew.”

  The smell of fresh-sliced pine fills the air at the Rough and Ready mill. Two-by-fours and two-by-sixes are stacked thirty feet high for a quarter-mile in the lot outside the mill. After a long recession, times are good again. Never before have so many trees been cut at one time from the national forests of the Northwest. Lumber prices are approaching an all-time high. But Krauss can see the future.