After the marker come the sawyers with long, cross-cut saws that are pulled back and forth across the tree by two men. They saw part way through. Then choppers cut from the other side of the tree. A tree falls on the cut side with a crash. The choppers have to jump, sometimes. The trimmers follow to chop away the branches, big and little, and to cut off the slender top. At last there lies a mighty log, fifty, one hundred or more feet long. It may have taken it a century or longer to grow. It lies on the earth often as heavy as iron. Sometimes, as it lies there, it has to be sawed into two or three logs before it can be moved. The logs are lifted with derricks onto the low broad sledges and hauled to the nearest river.
But first a road has to be made for the sledges. A snowy track is cleared of stones, trees and underbrush and is packed hard by the horses and sledges. Then it is flushed with water and let freeze. If it runs down hill and ha s no turns, it is a sort of "coaster" that makes the work easier for the horses. In the northern woods from Maine to Oregon, the logs are rolled down the banks of streams onto the ice. Then, when the ice breaks up in the spring, the logs go down on the flood to the saw mills. Drivers go with them, riding on the tumbli11g logs, guiding them with long, iron rods, keeping them from piling up and jamming. This is very dangerous work, so log drivers get high wages. They bring the logs over the rapids and dams and down to the saw mills. In our Southern pine woods where there is no snow or frozen rivers, the logs are not moved at all, but the saw mills are set up in the forest, and moved when a section is cut over.
Some of the big red-wood trees of California are thirty feet thick. That’s as thick as many a two-story house is high. They have to be sawed into several logs by enormous saws and then split with dynamite so they can be handled at all. Mahogany trees of Cuba and the hot countries of America often grow on mountains sides a hundred miles in the country. They are very heavy, hardwood trees, often one hundred feet high, yet entire logs are got down to seaports, just by men and oxen, working with clumsy tools and solid-wheel trucks. Rosewood is brought out of the hot jungle along the Amazon River in South America. It is cut into ten foot logs. split, built into rafts and floated to the seaports, Teak logs are dragged out of East Indian forests by elephants. In nearly every country of the world are timber woods so valuable and beautiful that they are got to market at the greatest labor and expense.
