Hard Times in Paradise by William G. Robbins

Author:William G. Robbins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Washington Press

The immediate postwar years in southwestern Oregon were the heyday of the storied gyppo logger and sawmill operator, the hardy individual who worked on marginal capital, usually through subcontracts with a major company or a broker, and whose equipment was invariably pieced together with baling wire. In his great novel Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey features the gyppo logger in classic form through his account of the fictional Stamper family. “Never Give A Inch”—the family motto—is the symbol for the Stampers’ struggle to survive in a world progressively dominated by outside capital and large labor organizations.

Reckless and daring gamblers, always ready to move on to the next stand of timber, the multitudes of gyppos were unique to the postwar era in the Douglas fir country. Opposed to labor unions and government regulations, they were a throwback to an earlier day of independent entrepreneurship. The voracious California construction industry, the availability of easy-to-reach small tracts of second-and third-growth timber, and access to modest credit marked the emergence of gyppo logging and sawmill operations. Varying in size from three to fifteen or twenty employees, those small units were important contributors to the Coos economy between 1946 and 1960.

George Youst, who came to the bay area from southwestern Washington, where he milled railroad ties and bridge planks, was one of the earliest of the modern-day gyppos in the Coos country. He set up a sawmill in Coos County in the late depression years with a $900 loan on a half section of timber he owned in the state of Washington. His son, Lionel, explains that gyppos commonly set up their mills on a hillside and from there they would “shoot the slabs down into the canyon.” Once the canyon had filled with waste wood, the operator would “set fire to the slab pile and burn it and then start over again.”11 Sometimes the mill burned too, as happened to the Yousts on one occasion. With a donkey engine salvaged from the fire, George Youst simply moved his family and equipment to another stand of timber.

Operations of that kind made a profound impression on Jerry Phillips when the state forestry department hired him as a logging inspector in Coos County in 1952. At that time, he recalls, there were about 500 small mills in Coos and Curry counties, most of them cutting cross ties for the nation's deteriorating railroad system: “From a high point you could see dozens and dozens of columns of smoke coming up all the time, because everywhere you looked there was a small mill employing between five and fifteen men that was cutting timber from some ranch. They had built these small mills, and they had a slab and sawdust pile that was constantly on fire.” Although “few of those fires got away and caused damage,” when they did, Phillips said, they usually spread from the slab and sawdust pile into the mill. Those grease-soaked planks and wooden structures usually burned easily.12

When the state began requiring sawmills to install

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