Riding the Flume (20 page)

Francie squared her shoulders, resolved not to argue no matter what the punishment was. But when she met his eyes, she saw that he was smiling. He smoothed her hair again with a hand that was still not quite steady. “Though I have no doubt that your sister would have been proud of you.” He took her arm and they all walked together up toward the pass.

At the crest of the hill, Francie turned to look back at Carrie's tree. The loggers were dismantling the scaffolding. “The oldest tree on earth,” she whispered, thinking about how many thousands of years it had stood surrounded by the quiet forest. Now it was alone. The trees in the valley were gone. Most of the other sequoias in the
whole of Connor's Basin were gone. It had been the first tree, and now it was the last.

“I'm glad you saved it,” her father said, touching her shoulder.

“You are?” She glanced up to see that he was still smiling. “Even with all the worry I caused you?”

“Even then.” He reached down and, as if she were still only nine years old, he took her hand. She held her breath, realizing that he had not done that since Carrie died. Her hand felt small in his, warm and protected. “But I want you to promise,” he added, “that you'll try to cause a little less trouble in the future.”

Francie looked up at him, and turned to include her mother in her gaze, as well. She knew what she needed—what they all needed. “I will,” she said, finally, “if you'll both promise to come here with me sometimes. I want to sit here and read to you from Carrie's diary.”

She saw the shadow pass over her father's face, and her mother bit her lip. She put her hand to her collar, and Francie knew she wanted to say no, to hide from the pain it would cause. But at last they both nodded. Her father cleared his throat. “We'll all come together. I promise.”

“Good.” She knew, then, that it would happen.

B
efore 1890 the area west of Kings Canyon National Park known as the Converse Basin was home to the finest stand of Sierra redwood trees (also known as sequoias) in the United States—some say it was the finest stand on earth. Between 1890 and 1903, the entire basin was logged. You can drive through Converse Basin. You can still see the stumps of these huge trees, and the ones that shattered when they hit the ground.

At the far north end of Converse Basin stands the Boole Tree. It was discovered when logging in the area was drawing to a close, and it was believed to be the largest and possibly also the oldest tree on earth. (More recent measurements have shown it to be third largest in bulk, though it has the largest circumference—112 feet with a base diameter of 35 feet.) Though preparations were made to log the tree, it was never cut. Some say it was simply too
big—it couldn't be brought down and moved without shattering the brittle wood. Others say that conservationists engineered a trade—the saving of the Boole Tree in exchange for easier to log timber on nearby land. The true answer will probably never be known.

At the time of its discovery, all the trees around the Boole Tree were cut. Old photos show the lone giant standing amid the rubble of downed trees. But today, one hundred years later, the Boole Tree is no longer alone. If you take the mile hike, as I have, up over a steep hill and down the other side, you will find it surrounded by new generations of pine and firs, and even a number of thin and willowy sequoias, still in their infancy, but healthy and strong.

I've been fascinated with sequoias for many years, since I read
The Biggest Living Thing
by my friend and fellow children's writer, Carolyn Arnold. From that book and from my later research I learned that the first white man to see a sequoia was a hunter named A. T. Dowd. He found the tree in what is now the Calaveras Big Trees State Park in about 1852. Only a year later, in 1853, it was cut down because people wanted to find out its age. It was, they learned, more than two thousand years old. When I learned this I was outraged at the arrogance of humankind, of people who thought it was proper to kill something that had been in the world for two thousand years simply to find out how old it was.

It was with that sense of outrage that I began the research that led, more than ten years later, to
Riding the Flume
. I learned much about logging and loggers, and now I find my outrage tempered with a kind of awe and even grudging respect for the men who had the daring and confidence to pit their tiny selves and their even tinier axes against the giants. It is amazing to me that they would even imagine that they could cut down a sequoia—more than three hundred feet tall and sometimes much more than twenty feet in diameter—with an ax. But they did imagine it. They even attempted it. And they succeeded.

It is a fact worth pondering—humans are, without a doubt, the most powerful species in the world. We can destroy a species much bigger and stronger than we are. It is only our awareness of that power, and our resolve to use it responsibly, that will stop us from destroying the earth.

axmen:
the men who began the process of cutting down a tree. With broad, swinging strokes of their double-bitted axes, they chopped a triangular-shaped notch on one side of the tree.

chute:
a dry wooden track running along the ground on which logs were slid from the woods to a landing. The logs were chained together in long lines and dragged along the chute by oxen or by the cables attached to a donkey engine.

chute rider:
The man who rode on top of the last log in the line as the logs were pulled down the chute. Sometimes logs would rear up in the track, fall off the track, or even catch on fire from friction. Then the chute rider would touch the telegraph wires near the chute with a metal-tipped pole to signal the man running the donkey engine about what was happening and whether to slow down or speed up the log train.

crosscut saw:
a saw with a long thin blade with teeth on one side. The kind used in the California logging operations usually had a handle on each end. Two men were needed to draw the saw back and forth and cut into the tree trunk.

donkey steam engine:
a portable steam engine with cables attached. It was used to pull logs through the woods to a central location where they were loaded onto railroad cars and taken to the mill. It replaced the teams of oxen used to perform the same task.

double-bitted ax:
an ax with a sharpened edge on either side of the metal head.

fallers:
the men who did the work of cutting down or “felling” the trees.

featherbed:
also called a “felling bed”—a pile of small trees and branches arranged beside the tree to cushion it when it fell and hopefully keep it from shattering.

flume herders:
the men who lived in small houses built at regular intervals along the flume route. They monitored the lumber floating down the flume, broke up log jams, and repaired leaks.

logging show:
the logging operation in the woods . . . cutting the trees and transporting them to the mill.

lumber flume:
a U-shaped or V-shaped trough built above the ground on a framework or scaffolding. The flume looked a bit like a roller coaster and the trough had several feet of water flowing through it. It was, in essence, a man-made stream or river built above the ground and used to move lumber from mills high in the mountains to other locations at lower elevations.

picaroon:
(also spelled pickaroon) a long pole with a hook on one end. The flume herders used picaroons to help maneuver the lumber down the flume.

sawmill:
where logs were sawed into boards by machinery.

sawyers:
the men who wielded the crosscut saw. Standing one on either side of the tree, they drew the saw back and forth, making a cut that was parallel to the ground. They always began the cut on the side of the tree that was opposite to the undercut. The men who worked in the mill sawing the logs into boards and planks were also called sawyers.

skidroad:
a path through the woods used for dragging logs. The skidroad was also that part of a lumber town where most of the saloons were built—loggers went there to drink during their free time. The expression “on Skid Row” which means “poor and out of work,” later developed from this logging term.

undercut:
a triangular notch cut by the axmen in one side of the tree. The undercuts in sequoia trees were often big enough for a man on horseback to stand up inside the notch.

wedges:
large pieces of triangular-shaped steel hammered into the slice cut by the crosscut saw. This kept the weight of the tree from resting on the saw and trapping it in the trunk.

Here are a few of the books I used in researching the discovery and logging of the redwood trees in California.

Andrews, Ralph.
Redwood Classic.
New York: Bonanza Books, 1958. This book talks about the early days of logging in California.

Dilsaver, Larry M., and William C. Tweed.
Challenge of the Big Trees: A Resource History of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks.
Three Rivers, Calif.: Sequoia Natural History Association, Inc., 1990. This book focuses on the human story around the creation of these national parks.

Johnston, Hank.
They Felled the Redwoods: A Saga of Flumes and Rails in the High Sierra.
Fish Camp, Calif.: Stauffer Publishing, 1996. Go to this book for fabulous photos of the sequoias and learn how they were cut down.

Peattie, Donald Culross.
A Natural History of Western Trees.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1953. Biological
information on the trees. His description of sequoias captures their quiet majesty.

Sargent, Shirley.
Pioneers in Petticoats: Yosemite's Early Women 1856-1900.
Yosemite, Calif.: Flying Spur Press, 1966. This book will give you a good idea of the unconquerable spirit of the women who helped settle California.

Seagraves, Anne.
Women of the Sierra.
Hayden, Idaho: WESANNE Publications, 1990. Short biographies of the women who lived in the Sierra Nevada mountains between 1840 and 1890.

Zauner, Phyllis.
Those Spirited Women of the Early West: A Mini-History.
Sonoma, Calif.: Zanel Publications, 1994. More biographies of the strong women of California and the West.

Also by Patricia Curtis Pfitsch

Keeper of the Light

The Deeper Song

SIMON & SCHUSTER BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author's imagination and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2002 by Patricia Curtis Pfitsch

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pfitsch, Patricia Curtis

Riding the flume / by Patricia Curtis Pfitsch.

p. cm.

Summary: In 1894, fifteen-year-old Francie determines to fight the lumbermen and protect the largest sequoia tree ever seen which had been given to her sister just before her death six years earlier.

ISBN 0-689-83823-9

ISBN 978-1-4814-6111-5 (ebook)

[1. Giant sequoia—Fiction. 2. Logging—Fiction. 3. Conservation of natural resources—Fiction. 4. Frontier and pioneer life-California—Fiction. 5. Depressions—1893—Fiction. 6. Sequoia National Park (Calif.)—I. Tide.

PZ7.P4485585 Ri 2002

[Fic]—dc21              2001042948