Great Falls tribune. [volume] (Great Falls, Mont.) 1921-current, 1922-06-11

ward Missoula a benevolent sun warmly
welcomed the pioneer sprouts of a
timid spring. The atmosphere was
balmy even at ~Frenchtown, an odd
village just twenty miles away, where
English is spoken with an accent and
idiom heard only among the Canadian
voyageurs and the descendants of
Evangeline's exiled compatriots along
the Bayou Teche in Louisiana. The men
of that place already had discarded
rubber-armored boots. ribbed stockings
and mackinaws for lighter footgear and
garments, and the driver of the stage.
a valiant motor vehicle that had done
100000 miles on mountain roads and
proclaimed the fact with a variety of
alarming noises, scOrned a coat.
But up at the Nine Mile, only n
thousand feet or SO above the valley,
on the heavily wooded slope of the
Bitter Roots, a colony of thoroughly
weathered lumberjacks getting out tim
Der by tens of million feet for the
Anaconda mines at Butte, was still
subject to the o~nslaughts of IN ag-
gressive, long-lived winter. Only the
calendar could testify that the season
was rapidly advancing toward summer.
An icy wind leaped the snowcapped
brows of Squaw Peak and her giant
tribe, forced protesting shrieks from
sWaying evergreens, and whipped the
sides of wooden barracks grouped at
intervals along fourteen miles of tenn
porary railroad. Glacial icefields still
chung to the flanks of the mountains,
and while the snub nosed little Shay
locomotive showed a steam crane, with
a long string of flat cars, up hill to-
ward the timber chute at the end of
the line, a snow storm kept diligently
at the job of thickening the coverlet
of gooscfeathers it had spread over the
landscape the night before.
Mallory, the logging BOSS who had
been a captain of engineers overseas,
stood at the forward end of the fore
most car, his mackinaw open, exposing
a flannel shirt to the gale. Having just
passed through a winter Of invariably
minus Temperature, clouds of snow flakes
too heavy with moisture to ride the
storm were to him merely pleasant
evidences Of milder weather to come.
His voice sounded q faint obligato in
the combined chorus of the wind and
the heavy car trucks gathering on
unlevelled rails.
Democracy of the Woods
but there is a difference" he was
saying, between the romantic and the
fascinating There are men among us
who have forsaken women for the
woods, and a few women have aban-
doned homes in the city to be with
husbands who could find no content
ment in town. They have been happy
or they would be back where they
came from. So the forest must exert
some potent attraction. But there is no
romance about the business of getting
out logs; no more than there was about
the business of driving the Germans
out of the watersoaked dugouts of
northern France.
"All the romance of numbering is in
the north woods melodramas Of the
movie screens. There are no villains
among us, not at least of the stage
type, though undoubtedly a thirty
minute egg may be found occasionally !
among the crews. In the five camps
operated here during the winter there
were $50 to $50 men, but no more
order and decorum ever was obtained
in an army cantonment or at a church
camp meeting. And if there were, |
or are, any heroes in the bunch the
fact is yet to be revealed.
"We have ON hand simply a big
job, one of the many activities of a
great mining company which operates
on two continents. Mining requires
timber, and when the copper produc-
ers of the Butte district are operat-
ing as they are now they need IS to
100 million feet of timber a year.
This makes the Anaconda Copper
Mining company numbering operations
the biggest in Montana. 1t is our
business to cut this timber, get it
down the chutes and lift it on the cars
to be taken to the mills at Bonner,
on the Blackfoot river just beyond
M~issoula, or to the mill at Rocker,
Butte, where it is turned into !,
stulls and other forms for use under
ground. The surplus is prepared for
market, and the milling part of pro-
ducing m~erchantable lumber has be-
come SO standardized that it puts up
to us the problem of avoiding red ink
balances, which for the bosses at
superintendent and the
foremen-adds much to the RESPONSE
as well as the interest of life.
"For the chief Of us all, Kenneth
Ross, there is the further responsible
lily also of Keeping forest f~ire2iossesla
ut a minimum, promoting conservation