A FORESTER’S LOG: FIFTY YEARS IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST An Interview with George L. Drake Conducted by Elwood R. Maunder in Four Sessions in 1958, 1961, 1967, and 1968 Forest History Society Durham, North Carolina ã 2004 Copyrighted © 1975, 2004* by the Forest History Society, Inc. 701 William Vickers Avenue, Durham, NC 27701 All rights reserved. * Notes re the 2004 revised edition: In 2001 Martin G. Morisette keyed into electronic format the 1975 typed first edition of this interview using a photocopy of the original transcript provided by the Forest History Society. Morisette, who was not a Forest History Society employee, produced the electronic transcript for the purpose of providing himself a means of searching the text for specific information. He maintained original square [ ] and round ( ) bracket formatting included in the original transcript and added curly { } brackets around a few insertions he added into the text during his transcription. Morisette modified text only where obvious typographical errors appeared in the original or where different spellings of words more adequately reflected modern spelling standards. Michele A. Justice, Assistant Archivist/Librarian for the Forest History Society, edited and reformatted Morisette’s electronic transcription to produce the final 2004 revised edition of this interview. Due to reformatting pagination and footnote numbering in the 2004 revised edition differ from those in the original first edition. Table Of Contents INTRODUCTION.....................................................................................................................iv INTERVIEW I (NOVEMBER 10, 1958) Founding of Pacific Logging Congress and Drake's involvement beginning in 1919; George Cornwall's influence on the Congress; other early leaders; Drake's forestry education at Pennsylvania State University; trail building and timber cruising in Oregon and New Hampshire summers of 1910, 1911; development of tractor logging; lumber camps; labor and unions; forest fire protection; trade associations. ..................................................................... 1 INTERVIEW II, SESSION 1 (SEPTEMBER 9, 1961) Charles S. Cowan and George L. Drake National Industrial Recovery Act, 1933; lumber industry trade associations committee writes up Article X of Lumber Code; William B. Greeley's role; growth in consciousness of industry toward proper forest management and fire protection.................................................................................................... 22 INTERVIEW II, SESSION 2 (SEPTEMBER 10, 1961) Major accomplishments in field of forestry; fire protection; multiple use; forest management. ................................................................................................. 32 INTERVIEW III, SESSION 1 (FEBRUARY 22, 1967) George Cornwall and development of logging engineering in forestry schools of Washington and Oregon; trade journals; Drake's summer employment in New Hampshire, 1911; Edgar C. Hirst; travel between East and West Coast, 1910; timber cruise with U.S. Forest Service in Oregon, summer 1910; college professors who influenced Drake; permanent employment as timber cruiser with U.S. Forest Service, 1912, Oregon and Washington; forest examiner in Alaska, 1914-18; forest examiner in Oregon, 1918-30; flu epidemic; development of safety practices in the lumber industry; Pacific Logging Congress; Bush Osborne and Julius Hofmann fire study, 1921; aircraft lumber for World War I; railroads to Oregon timber areas; sale of government timber...................................... 37 INTERVIEW III, SESSION 2 (FEBRUARY 23, 1967) Forest Service timber sales, Oregon; contributions of leaders in forestry; technological developments in logging equipment; multiple-use concept on national forests. ....................................................................................................... 70 INTERVIEW IV (JANUARY 19, 1968) Drake's employment with Simpson Logging Company beginning in 1930; labor and unions; C.H. Kreienbaum; Depression years; U.S. Forest Service employment in Alaska, 1915-18; National Industrial Recovery Act, 1933; Simpson acquires timber land; forest surveys; Mark Reed, president, Simpson Logging Company; David T. Mason sustained-yield advocate; Shelton Sustained-Yield Unit; safety in logging; tractor logging; industry leaders. ................................................................................................................... 86 APPENDICES.......................................................................................................................110 INDEX ................................................................................................................................115 iii Introduction Few men who have labored as professional foresters in the richly timbered Pacific Northwest are remembered by their peers more fondly than are George Lincoln Drake and the late Charles S. Cowan. Drake, born and raised in New Hampshire, has not lost a distinctive Northeasterner's brogue or the great talent of the Yankee to tell a story with wit and sly transfer of wisdom. This is primarily his memoir, with Cowan entering as a party to the second interview. Like Drake, Cowan enjoyed a great reputation as a raconteur. Cowan came to a long and distinguished career in the Pacific Northwest via an education in forestry at Oxford, a tour of duty as a young forester in India, and as one of H. R. MacMillan's corps of forestry pioneers in the first British Columbia Forest Service. He was responsible for the earliest survey and inventory of the forest resources of that province and in a separate memoir made with me in 1957 recounted some of the details of that work. He served first as a Canadian infantryman in World War I and was transferred to the Royal Canadian Air Force where he rose to the rank of Major, a title he greatly cherished and one most frequently used by those who knew him up until his death in 1969 at the age of eighty-two. Major Cowan's most important contributions to forest history are recorded in a book The Enemy is Fire which he wrote and published in 1961 through the Superior Publishing Company of Seattle, Washington. In this work he recounts the long struggle carried on against forest fire in the state of Washington. Public and private landowners joined forces in that struggle under the leadership of the Washington Forest Protection Association headed by Cowan. Cowan was first hired by the Association as its Chief Fire Warden in 1927. He performed thirty-one years of service as head of the organization and retired in 1958. My first efforts to tape-record his memoirs came in October and November 1957 and portions of these have been published in article form in early issues of the Journal of Forest History.1 The full text of the Cowan interviews remains to be published in hardcover by the Forest History Society when funding is made available. George L. Drake was born in 1889 in central New Hampshire. His father was a knitting machinery expert and conducted a manufacturing business. The young Drake went to school firmly resolved to fit himself for work in some phase of mechanical engineering. He began his college training at New Hampshire State University but soon transferred to Pennsylvania State where he was graduated in 1912 as a forester. During the summer vacation periods between years of his college training he worked for the United States Forest Service (1910) building trails; in 1911 he was put to work by Edgar C. Hirst, first state forester of New Hampshire. In the summer months following his sophomore and junior years Drake went back to school in a summer camp conducted by the Penn State Forestry School and worked in a lumber camp in northern New Hampshire. Following his graduation, Drake entered the Forest Service at the bottom rung of the ladder and was assigned to southern Oregon near Klamath Lake. He cruised timber there and later in the year 1912 was transferred to the Okanogan National Forest in northeastern Washington where he took part in pioneer aerial surveying and mapmaking. There, at a Halloween dance in Okanogan, he met and began to court a young schoolteacher named Dora Polly whom he married two years later in September 1915. He recounts in this memoir some recollections of his early career which will be of particular interest to scholars of early twentieth-century forest history and to veterans of the Forest Service. Drake's career in the Forest Service took him to Alaska in 1914. There he served in various capacities until the end of World War I. Drake recalls that it was a time of exciting new development for 1 Charles S. Cowan and Elwood R. Maunder, "Forest Protection Comes Under the Microscope," Forest History 2, Nos. 3 and 4 (Winter 1959), 1-14. iv the territory. War brought a steadily increasing demand upon the forests and a fast-growing fishing industry. He became acquainted there with men such as Roy Barto, William Weigle and Frank Heintzleman, all prominent figures in the development of Alaskan natural resources. When America entered the war Drake attempted to enlist in the Tenth Engineers but was rejected for a physical defect. He was soon thereafter transferred from Alaska back to Oregon and put in charge of Forest Service timber sales on the Whitman National Forest, later to the Regional Office in Portland. In 1930 Drake came to the attention of the late Mark E. Reed of the Simpson Logging Company and was hired to become the company's logging engineer. Deeply interested