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.”

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During the 1930s, between bark beetle infestation and a long term drought witnessed a large number of snag (dead) trees on Fruit Growers Lassen Operation. Then came along World War II, which created new challenges due to employee shortages. Yet, it is those kind of conditions where creativity comes to the forefront.

Even after the conclusion of World War II in 1945, there were still labor issues. Since the late 1920s, Fruit Growers, as well many lumber companies turned to machines to do the work more efficiently thus cutting down on labor at the same time.

In 1945, with Fruit Growers acquisition of Westwood from the Red River, did have some perks. The machine shop there employed some very talented people, who over years with creative talents improvised equipment best suited for the company’s needs. Their task to design and modify a caterpillar tractor that could knock down a snag tree—a snag pusher. The major advantage was it eliminated timber fallers from doing the job.

In its first year of operation Fruit Growers reported that 6,929 snags were felled by the snag pusher. How long the snag pusher was used, the record does not indicate.

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In the summer of 1920, Fruit Growers started their logging operations near McCoy Flat Reservoir, while their Susanville mill was still under construction. Since logging then, was seasonal in nature, they wanted to make sure they would have a steady supply of logs ready when the new mill would be placed into operation in the spring of 1921.

Camp A was the first of ten railroad logging camps of Fruit Growers Lassen Operation. It opened on July 1, 1920. The operation was comparatively small, only logging 720 acres that season. On April 29, 1921 the first woods crews were dispatched by rail, where they encountered three foot of snow on the ground. The first item of business was to remove the snow from the railroad spurs, so that the timber fallers could start work. Within in a weeks’ time, logs were already being shipped to Susanville. In addition, a second camp, known as Camp B, opened three miles to the north of Camp A. Between the two camps, they housed over 600 men.

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