The Tenderfoot Lumbermen and the 340-Foot Giant
When two skeptical Wisconsin mill men visited the Pacific coast, they tried to school the locals on timber estimating—only to be humbled by the sheer scale of Washington's old-growth forest.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
A story is related about certain Wisconsin lumbermen who lately visited the Pacific coast in the capacity of tenderfoot, as showing how readily anyone will be deceived regarding the height or contents of the big trees that grow there, although standing alongside them—no matter whether experience may have been had in estimating timber in other parts of the country. A Puget Sound lumberman took a brace of Wisconsin mill men into the woods and successfully showed them a little of what they did not know about red and yellow fir. They found it was not white pine, by a jugful. The Puget Sounder was asked to estimate how the timber on a certain tract ran to the acre and did so to the best of his ability, but his big figures were hilariously scoffed at. Then the Wisconsin skeptics were asked to make a guess, and they about cut the native’s estimate in two. The coast lumberman proposed to show those tenderfeet how badly they were astray, and he bossed the job in a business-like manner. An acre was surveyed, and an average tree selected, by mutual agreement, as the basis of calculations. The Oshkosh man guessed that the tree would run 4,000 feet to 16 feet in length, and the New London man acquiesced. They thought also that there were about eight 16-foot cuts in the tree. Then the natives laughed at the tenderfeet. Two axemen at once put their foot boards into notches and felled the tree. The Wisconsin men laid off 17 16-foot lengths, and looked sheepish, but they turned pale when they found that the tree was 340 feet long from butt to top, that a 16-foot log contained 7,500 feet, and that the tree contained 81,500 feet instead of their estimate of 32,000 feet. When the tenderfeet recovered from the severe guying to which they were subjected, they went into a mill and saw 16-foot logs that contained 16,000 feet, and into the forest where there were trees that grew 250 feet without a knot or branch. After seeing all this, it is said they wanted a finger in the pie, and had soon bought some of the big timber.
“They found it was not white pine, by a jugful.”
This account captures the sheer awe—and greed—that drove the rapid industrialization of Washington’s forests. The discrepancy between eastern timber knowledge and the reality of the Pacific Northwest’s massive old-growth trees mirrors the clash between outsider perspectives and local ecological realities that persists in regional development debates today.
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