Forestry was largely a cottage industry in the Lakes District for much of the last century. Most of the forest products milled in this area came from small operations owned by families and groups of friends.
These small ‘mom-and-pop’ outfits often employed more people than machinery. In the early years of the twentieth century, rough lumber was cut by hand with crosscut saws up to fourteen feet long. While one man could do the work by himself if necessary, whipsawing was generally a two-person operation.
To accommodate the saw’s length and weight, a pit was often dug, and a frame was built over it to hold the log destined for processing (alternatively, a high trestle could be constructed above the ground and the log placed atop it). One individual called the “pitman,” positioned himself below the log, while the other, the “top man,” stood on the frame above. Each then grasped one of the saw’s handles, and together, they worked it through the length of the log. Because the saw’s teeth were angled and filed to cut only on the down stroke, the top man generally did most of the actual sawing, while the pitman was expected to help lift the saw’s weight on the upstroke.
The system worked well if the two men found their rhythm. If they did not, it was a long and frustrating process. If the pitman failed to do his part, his partner above grew fatigued and suffered back strain. The pitman, meanwhile, had to endure a downpour of sawdust—and if he wasn’t helping lift the saw to his workmate’s satisfaction, a steady stream of verbal abuse.
Old-timers will tell you that extended periods of whipsawing ended more than a few friendships. Sometimes, the participants even came to blows.
While people like Decker Lake pioneer Dick Carroll and his workmate Johnson Alexander managed to make a little cash sawing lumber in this fashion, the big money was in railway ties. The Grand Trunk Pacific Railway and its successor, the Canadian National, had an almost insatiable demand for 6”x8” and 7”x9” timbers, and this area’s abundant supply of large-diameter pine and spruce trees made it ideally suited to tie production.
While there were some large “hacking camps” in the area, most of the sleepers and other timbers produced here came from independent operators—one or two-person “shows” based out of tiny cabins far in the backcountry. Indomitable men and women took to the woods each fall and spent the long winter months cutting ties with broad axes. The most proficient of these “tie-hackers,” men like Carl Holmgren and Clark Anderson, sometimes produced as many as fifty ties a day.
The fruits of their labour were then hauled by horse and sleigh to railway sidings in Topley, Palling, and Decker Lake, where they were loaded by hand into boxcars for shipment across North America. In other areas with fewer roads, ties were floated down rivers. One winter in the early 1940s, Fred Paulig set up a solo tie-hacking operation on the Southside near Isaac Lake. When spring arrived, he floated the twelve hundred ties he had cut down a creek to Francois Lake, after which they were boomed and towed to a central landing for transportation to the CN Rail line.
Enterprising tie-hackers east of Burns Lake constructed a massive flume to float their ties down from the hills above Priestly. While the exercise usually went off without incident, it wasn’t foolproof. In 1919, a problem with the flume deposited hundreds of ties in a pile more than forty feet high. Workers spent days clearing what one man described as a “giant-sized version of pick-up sticks.”
It was exhausting but lucrative work. In a country where cash was often in short supply, the railway sometimes paid as much as fifty cents for a well-hewn tie. That might seem like a pittance today, but during the lean years of the 1930s – when bacon cost fifty-one cents a kilogram and ten pounds of potatoes sold for fourteen cents – tie-hacking was profitable.
The use of machinery became more prevalent in the local forest industry after the Second World War. Chainsaws made their first appearance here during the late 1930s, but they looked nothing like the compact little powerhouses we use today. Heavy, unreliable, and smelly, they cut wood quicker but were difficult to operate. Andreas Stihl’s first two-man saw weighed 139 pounds and required two people, one at each end of the blade. But the technology improved and by 1947, the McCulloch Motors Corporation’s Model 3-25 weighed a mere twenty-five pounds.
The availability of army-surplus trucks and bulldozers after the cessation of hostilities in 1945 also helped mechanize timber harvesting and milling. Petroleum-powered head saws enabled people to produce more lumber and ties in less time, but there were still plenty of jobs to go around. Experienced sawyers, men and women who could look at a log and instantly know how to get the most out of it, were always in demand. Not a sawyer? No problem. Lumber and ties had to be stacked by hand at most small mills, so there was always work if you had a strong back and sturdy constitution.
Things began to change in the 1950s, when larger companies began buying out smaller ones for their timber “quota” (now known as Allowable Annual Cut) and concentrating production along Northern BC’s transportation corridors. Yet as recently as the 1970s, there were dozens of independent sawmills operating in the region. Many were small portable operations that their owners towed from one location to another. While larger companies like Eurocan trucked logs to big mills outside the area, most of the smaller firms took a different approach. The mom-and-pop mills often towed their production facilities from one timber sale to the next. Wander through the bush today and you may come across piles of slabs and sawdust considered worthless by-products at a time when the Lakes District’s timber supply seemed boundless.
The forest industry remains the Lakes District's largest employer, but it has a new face. Government policies favouring the larger companies forced the small ones out of business. Today, almost none of the mom-and-pop mills remain in operation, and tie-cutting, once a has all but disappeared. While the trees keep falling, most go to giant computerized mills along Highway 16 where they become forest products destined for unknown points.
© 2023 Michael Riis-Christianson and the Lakes District Museum Society
