The Catskinner

If you’d asked my husband George what it was he did, without a doubt he’d have answered, “I’m a Catskinner.”

He was that and more.

His love was CATS, Caterpillar tractors.

First he worked for the U.S. Forest Service building roads and fighting fire.

When the fire season ended in 1943, he was laid off until the next fire season. He went to work in the woods falling, bucking and loading timber on trucks.

What a difference from today, with two-man crosscut saws, skidding the logs with a Cat or even a team of horses. John Watson had a wonderful team of horses, Tom and Jerry, who were savvy about logging and were a real pleasure to watch — much easier on the forest, too.

Trucks weren’t huge behemoths. They were Fords, Chevys, Diamond Ts or others built up with heavy dual-speed rear-ends and other parts to extend their load-hauling capacity After World War II, improvements appeared, especially made for easing and speeding up the tough job of logging.

A big Titan chainsaw had two-fisted handles and a stinger for a second man.

Manufacturers created equipment of all sorts to make timber and lumbering jobs faster, easier and safer.

Over the years, with the many ups and downs of the lumber industry, George worked wherever a job was open. If a gypo logger went under or shut down, he hunted another job. He was at the mercy of weather, bosses going broke, the mill shut down or whatever. He took the first job found each time with many different jobs, some of them the pits. During those years, he did almost every lumber job from falling timber to pulling green chain in mills and planer.

It was wonderful when he finally found a steady job working for Fairview Placers gold dredge on the Trinity River — until the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation seized the property and shut the dredge down.