While researching the history of the Fruit Growers Supply Company’s Northern California logging operations I interviewed and corresponded with many former employees. The following account is from Bob Eastman who worked in the woods at the Hilt Operation. He refers that the fallers did piece work. Timber fallers were not company employees. They were contractual and were paid by the scale, i.e. board feet felled. In those days, with large trees, fallers made very good money. The buckers and limbers, however, were company employees.
“Just a bit on the makeup of the woods crews. Now, I’m speaking of the steam age, not the modern gas and diesel operations. Then it still depended on huge outlay of brute force and muscle.
“A team of two fallers, usually the most athletic and youngest, took double bladed axes sharpened to brittle edge and a cross cut saw and some wedges. This team felled the tree in an incredibly short time. After all, they were piece working and the more they cut, the more they got paid. Then two buckers with a long cross cut saw and a few wedges bucked the tree, sawing it into lengths of 16 feet, 32 feet or 40 feet to fit on the sawmill rigs. That was hard work and very dangerous because rhe log could roll—and that was it for the bucker.
”The fallers had a dangerous job too. The ‘widow maker’ could get out at anytime. A falling limb was bad enough and could just as well kill someone unlucky enough to be beneath it as it came crashing down. The main cause of damage though, ‘the widow maker’ was something else. A lot of the trees were old and were dead and the fallers didn’t know it. They were already rotten, especially at the tops. It was these huge pieces of trees that would come crashing down like a bunch of bombs and when they struck earth, zing of horizontally. You didn’t even have to be close by. Anyone even hundreds of feet distant could be struck by these flying things. The irony was that most of the loggers were unmarried and there were no widows to mourn them.”