Vernacular of the Logging Camps

Here’s a little help for all of you penning logging tales set in the 1930s. It was just a teeny bit too specific to really fit in the Pulp Era Writing Tips book (or any possible future sequel,) but maybe someday somebody will find it useful. It’s an interesting little bit of history anyway.

From the November, 1938 issue of Writers Markets and Methods

By Rona Elizabeth Workman

Every type of labor has its distinctive vocabulary.

I have read logging stories which were so utterly impossible as to their conversation, their location and characters that I marveled at any editor daring to offer them to his readers, but perhaps few of the readers knew any more about it than the editor, so all was well.

A trip through an Oregon or Washington logging camp should furnish an author with sufficient local color to last him for countless stories, but Chicago is a long way from the Cascades, and it may be necessary to rely upon the trusty old imagination and a few facts. I’ll furnish the facts and let some one else do the romantic writing. Perhaps I am too close to it all to be able to do “blood and thunder stories” of the woods, for I have known the real woods. How? Oh, I married the “big boss.”

Usually the woods shut down for a couple of weeks at the Fourth of July, also during the deep snows and often during the dry season, when the humidity drops below the danger point. After a long shut-down, if there are not sufficient cut logs ready to keep the crew busy, the fallers and buckers start work a week or two in advance. The logs lie scattered about over the mountain sides amid brush and stumps and windfalls. Here, when the camp opens in earnest, donkeys are fired up, lines are strung out and the choker setters begin the dragging in of the logs by fastening the loop of cable about one end of a log and shouting to the whistlepunk, who yanks his whistle wire, at which signal the engineer of the “yarder” throws the lever and the great drums begin winding in the “line,” dragging the log through brush and mud and finally leaving it where the line from the “swing” donkey hooks on and continues the haul to the “loader.” Here they are “decked” in a huge pile from which the “head-loader” lifts them with great tongs fastened by cables to a swinging boom, hung by cables to a “spar-tree” and lays them with careful precision upon the logging trucks. Each log has to be placed in perfect relation to the others in order to insure their safe journey down the “incline” and over many miles of curving track to the big mill.

All of this outfit (yarder, swing and loader, with all the details of pumps and pipe line, drag-saws, and railroad) comprise a “Side,” and the size of a camp is gauged by the number of “sides” it runs.

The yarder is the machine which “yards” or drags the logs cut within the radius of the “setting,” usually about 800 feet, to where the “swing” donkey’s lines hook on and drag them to the “loading” donkey, where, as I said, they are loaded onto the logging trucks.

The men on a “side” are, in most camps, three loaders, a “landing chaser,” “yarder chaser,” “swing-chaser,” “hooker,” “head-rigger” and “second rigger,’ three “choker-setters,” a “swing-punk,” also engineer, fireman and woodbuck for each of the three donkeys.

“Hooker”–head man of a “side”;

“Chaser”–man who unhooks logs from yarder line and fastens on swing-line; “Choker-setter”—man who fastens the “chokers” on the logs out in the woods where the trees were “fell” (never “fallen”);

“Fallers”–men who “fell” the trees;

“Buckers”–men who “buck” the trees into log lengths;

“The old man,” “bull of the woods,” “brass nuts,” “the brains”–all these mean the woods-boss (some of the other names would, I fear, be censored);

“Head-rigger”–man next in authority to “hooker,” who keeps the “yarding crew” “lined out”;

“Punk”–man or boy (over sixteen) who pulls the whistle wire for signals ;

“Flunkey”–man or girl who waits on tables;

“Bull-cook”–man who gets wood for cook and bunk houses, makes beds and cleans;

“Gut-hammer” or “triangle”–piece of steel rung as call to meals.

Now for some of the machinery:

Donkey–huge machine which winds the “line” or steel cables on great spools and drags in the logs;

Spar-tree–tall tree, denuded of top and limbs, to which the guy lines, cables and blocks are attached;

Haul-back–line which pulls the main line back to woods;

Main-line–line used to haul in the logs, made of heavy wire cable;

Ginny–line of strawline-lighter line used to string haul-back through the woods;

Molly–strand of cable;

Donkey-setting–area logged by one machine without moving it;

Landing–place where logs are loaded onto cars;

Loading donkey–loads cars with logs;

Swing-donkey–skylines logs from yarder to landing;

Yarder–drags logs from where they were “fell.”

The above are the common terms of the Western logging world and a judicious use of them may give a bit more local color, or at least will perhaps save you from the jeers of your logger readers, for these loggers are faithful readers of the Wild Western yarns, and bitter is their scorn of the author who commits the faux pas of: having his “bull-cook” preside in the kitchen.

The old river driving days were a fertile field for writers, and while those times are definitely of the past, yet some of the terms still linger:

“Slough-pigs”–loggers who drove the logs down the flooded rivers;

“River-drive”–sending the logs out on the spring flood;

“Roll-away”–the piled logs waiting the spring drive;

“Wannigan”–large tent-roofed house built on a scow, used as cookhouse;

“Center”–a rock or other obstacle upon which logs would pile up;

“Jam”–tangled mass of logs, usually formed in bends of smaller rivers, or against a “center,” upon which the flood waters forced more and more logs until the passage of the water was almost obstructed;

“Peavey”–heavy pointed steel socket with a 4 & 1/2 foot handle of stout hickory. This socket has hinged to it a curved, sharp-pointed 14-inch steel hook to grasp and pry the logs. Don’t, I beg of you, have your “sloughpig” use a “pike-pole.” It really wasn’t done in the best logging circles.

I hope that this vocabulary may prove of assistance to some writer who plots his stuff far from the faller’s cry of “Timber.” Remember, many of your readers sit in the bunk-houses after the day’s logging is over, and read your yarns, and they are keen critics regarding your knowledge of their work. If you are writing a “river-driving” story never permit your hero to lose his peavy, even though he be swimming for his life with one hand and rescuing the lovely heroine from a log jam with the other, for that is the unpardonable sin in river-driving, and if you are doing a yarn of the present time where the golden-haired flapper from the big city wanders into the “setting,” remember to keep her away from the “haul-back” and the “main-line” or she may get “back-slapped” so far even the brawny hero can’t rescue her.

This is part of my Writing Tips from the Pulp Era Series, where I reprint articles about writing which were written a long time ago.