The Social Context of Forestry: The Pacific Northwest in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

n the timber-rich Pacific coast country stretching from California's Humboldt Bay north into British Columbia and the Alaskan panhandle, the forest resource has always been the centerpiece to the area's economic culture. Although other forms of activity have shaped the region-fishing, ship building, mining, and farming-the men and women who toiled in the logging camps and in the mills have been the mainstay of the economy. It was their labor that made the Pacific edge of North America the leading center of forest products manufacturing for much of the twentieth century.' The great stands of Douglas fir, redwood, spruce, and cedar provided both the principal natural resource and the primary economic base for the development of the region. The north Pacific slope was also the last frontier for a migrating logging and lumbering industry that had its beginnings in the extensive white pine and hardwood forests of northeastern North America. For more than three hundred years the timbered wealth of the continent was important to westward expansion and to the commercial and industrial development of the United States and Canada. Operating in a political environment that invited graft and corruption, lumbermen and other resource entrepreneurs