The Logger’s Dilemma: Why Cheap Labor Is Killing Washington's Future

SOMETHING ABOUT THE GAY AND FESTIVE LOGGERS.

Twenty-three years ago; when we inspected the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys, were then broad, uncultivated plains into whose yielding clay the glistening plowshare had not yet cleft its restless path. Bands of elk and antelope pranced through the tall wild oats, while the sullen grizzly bear munched his acorns in the willow thickets beside the broad rivers. The vaqueros or cattle-herders were either Mexicans or Americans of a questionable type, whose antecedents generally were a robbery in Texas or a murder in Missouri. The miners, on the contrary, were a race born to danger, defiant of misfortune and full of generosity.

The logger of Puget Sound today is what the miner of California was twenty-five years ago: jovial, generous and brave. If he seems inferior to his prototype in those traits, it is because the better perfected state of our present civilization renders the exercise of those qualities less needful now than in the long-tom era of the Golden State.

That there is more danger from falling timber than from caving banks, no one will deny who has ever worked in a drift; while danger of drowning stares the logger in the face twice as often as it did the placer miner of early California. Hence, considering the absence of privations contingent upon primitive civilization, the Puget Sound logger may be regarded as a bonnier man than his prototype.

He works for hours in the water, and up to his middle in the 'salt chuck,' and sings as he couples his raft together. He stands on his springboard and swings his ax into the mighty forest giant, while Autumn gales are blowing fiercely, not knowing how soon some neighboring tree may fall and crash him to the earth. When the raft is ready for mill he is towed upon it, sometimes a hundred miles, in constant danger of being washed off and drowned. All this requires a man of courage and coolness.

Again, his camp is almost always in some lonely forest where the thick timber affords protection to wild animals. The coon sticks in his handy paw to steal the loggers' corn; the bears come sniffin' round the door whenever a babe is born. Temperance is proverbial, and welcome is the casual visitor to the rough fare and smoky cabin of the hardy logger.

'The thrifty logger, on the other hand, is the centurion of the world's army of progress. Not content with hewing down the trackless forest for a living, he converts his worked-out camp into a dairy farm and sows white clover where the tall fir fell. He buys a few cows so that his wife (a cheerful-faced white woman, not a dirty squaw) can make butter and fatten some pigs, while he goes off to drive a bull-team by the day in some neighbor's camp.

Go to Lowell, Snohomish City and a few more places of that sort, and you will see what thrifty loggers have done. The representative men of this class are Amos Brown, of this city; George Foster, of Olympia; and Ike Ellis, now a San Francisco broker. These men worked hard and spent a good deal of money; but they took care, always to get an equivalent.

For this class of labor are not extravagant, when we consider the danger of the service and keep in mind the fact that they do not average eight months of steady work in a year. The Intelligencer some weeks ago claimed that loggers' wages should be on a par with those of mill hands. This would not be in accordance with principles of equity, if the millmen work under one master all the year round, while the logger loses nearly all the winter.

In fact, a reduction of wages would only help the non-resident capitalists who own our great mills, and leave those who are building up our civilization poorer than ever. Cheap labor enriches no new country.

Frontier settlements are supposed to have no very rich men and no paupers at all. Hence we are in favor of keeping up wages of all kinds. We should like to see the day return when printer's wages were 75 cents per thousand ems. It would close out every slipshod newspaper on the coast and enable journalists who really understood the business to earn something more than a bare living. Cheap labor means famine when the harvest is over and destitution when navigable streams are closed by ice. It means working men's children growing up in ignorance, if not in crime.

Hence, we say cheap labor is antagonistic to the advancement of civilization.

Who are our leading financiers and statesmen today? The sons of bankers, lawyers, or divines? No, not at all. Charles Francis Adams and Wade Hampton are, today, the only American statesmen of illustrious ancestry. Daniel Webster's son was a gentlemanly idler; two of Henry Clay's sons were lunatics... Need we pursue this subject further? No, the proof is too plain before us. The great men of our era are men of humble parentage, whom love of toil has inspired to rise above their station.

'We cannot all sit in the battle of life; The weakest must go to the wall. So gird on your armor to face the world's strife— There's room in this wide world for all.'

Cheap labor and low wages would have reared in ignorance such men as the sons of San Francisco mechanics are growing up to be. Keep laborers on a pittance, and their sons grow up slaves like their parents. Give them liberal wages, and their children get a liberal education; for there is no parent, however poor, but wants to see his son grow up a better educated man than himself.

The day when David C. Broderick, the stone-cutter's son, took his seat in the United States Senate, the hands on the clock of the universe leaped ahead a hundred years. Cheap labor will not bring such men to the front once in a century; but pay liberal wages, and we shall find our future Brodericks in EVERY MILL AND FOUNDRY.

We glory in free labor. We exult in its strength, and bow before the majesty of its fast-increasing dominion. Coupled with the free education vouchsafed by a liberal and enlightened government, free labor shall be the palladium of a great people's liberties... The iron crown bears more imperial sway than the diadem of gold. It is not the sword that rules the world, but the pick, the plow, the loom and the anvil.