The desperate engineering of a Snohomish log drive
With a drought halting logging operations, crews in Snohomish turned to a clever, labor-intensive dam-sluicing method to force logs to tide water.
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.
In consequence of the continued dry weather the logging camps are suffering for room at the rollways and some are obliged to suspend operations for a time. One of the camps of Elwell & Jackson was shut down last week, and the crew moved to the other camp to engage in a novel traffic for floating the logs to tide water as follows: Dams are built across the creek every quarter of a mile or such matter, raising the water and banking it up to the next above. These dams have a sluice gate in the middle, which can be removed to allow the passage of the single logs, one at a time. This however is slow and tedious work, as the water soon runs out of the dam and leaves most of the logs on dry land or in the creek where they can't float. But you see the persevering logger goes on to the next dam above and takes out that gate, crowds down as many logs as possible and poles them through the canal, and so on it goes till his energy is rewarded, and he has a splendid raft ready for the mill.
“In consequence of the continued dry weather the logging camps are suffering for room at the rollways.”
The precarious nature of Northwest logging is immortalized here in the struggle against a summer drought. This method of 'splash damming' was a hallmark of 19th-century timber extraction before modern machinery.
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