Greater Portland by Carl Abbott

Author:Carl Abbott [Abbott, Carl]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780812217797
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Published: 2001-04-19T00:00:00+00:00

St. Helens, Oregon (Oregon Historical Society Neg. 0327 A 042). The Pope and Talbot lumber mill dominates the city of St. Helens in this view from the top of the Columbia County courthouse taken before World War II. Thirty miles from the center of Portland, St. Helens is one of a half dozen wood products towns that are now incorporated into the metropolitan region.

Estacada Timber Jamboree Court, August 1949 (Oregon Historical Society Neg. 011762). The Estacada Timber Jamboree evolved from informal contests among woods workers to a moneymaker sponsored by the local business community. Declining attendance led to its suspension for the decade of the 1990s.

The most heavily exploited laborers in the regional economy were unskilled rural workers on farms, railroads, and forests, but even here the culture of the woods ran on rugged individualism. Oregon loggers and mill workers were more likely to identify with the image of self-sufficient mountain men than to join One Big Union. Washington state was the hotbed of the Industrial Workers of the World with its Timber Workers strike in 1917, its “free speech campaigns” in Spokane and Seattle, its violent confrontations in the Everett and Centralia massacres. Portland was the headquarters of the Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen, a cross between a company union and a patriotic society organized in 1917 to combat the I.W.W.

The result is the persistence of a strongly individualistic “pioneer” culture. Hugh Chance in David James Duncan’s novel The Brothers K works in the Camas, Washington paper mill but gets in trouble with his union for doing extra work on the side during a strike; family obligations trump solidarity. We’ve already met Ken Kesey’s Hank Stamper, a character who scorns unionization as much as he scorns the Wakonda Auga River. Poet Gary Snyder writes the voice of Ed McCullough, an old logger hanging onto a marginal job in the woods as a knotbumper, smoothing the logs that snorting tractors skidded to the landing:

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