While I've found a great deal of information about the timber sale I haven't found much about Mr. Barnes (I'll get into that elsewhere). He pretty much remains a mystery, which is a shame because he made such a large contribution to the economy of eastern Oregon. But with the Bear Valley Timber Sale documents came another name: Fred Herrick. This was a most remarkable man who achieved a great deal in the timber industry—mostly outside Oregon—and would regret the day he made the winning bid on the Bear Valley Timber Sale.

Until recently, the best source of information about Barnes, Herrick and the timber sale was found in the Senate hearing transcript when the Senate investigated the Forest Service's action with respect to fraud and other illegal matters associated with the sale. Barnes was the main instigator in getting the hearing scheduled. The Senate's subcommittee determined no wrong-doing on the part of the Forest Service but did establish some rules that applied to the sale's future. This venture resulted in Herrick's bankruptcy and the entrance of the Edward Hines Lumber Co. into the Oregon timber industry.

Now I've come across another source document, quite a lot less formal—although I have to tell you, reading that hearing transcript was something akin to reading a good novel—and has some additional information.

I'm referring to a great article that appeared in the October 1924 issue of The Timberman. The article was brought to my attention by my railroad buddy, Jeff Moore (BLM fellow from Elko, Nevada). Jeff sent me a photocopy of the article but it had been photocopied from a bound set of issues and the 'inside gutter' was so large that I couldn't make out quite a lot of the words on the left side of the left-most column. But another good friend, Glen Comstock, solved that: he sent me an unbound copy of the issue.

The issue had seen its share of wear-and-tear and I was somewhat apprehensive about putting if flat on my scanner for fear of damaging the publication further. But the paper and binding were so limp that I was able to scan with no additional damage.

The scanning was something of a test of my skills. The publication's (probably more correctly called a monthly magazine) pages were too large for a single scan. So I scanned the top portion, turned the magazine around, and scanned the bottom portion. Then using Photoshop I matched the two parts together and came up with a sufficiently good quality image that my OCR (optical character recognition) software read the pages without much problem. But the OCR did misread a lot of "i" characters and made them upper case rather than lower. Spell checking in both WordPerfect and Word did not correct this error, so if you see some uppercase where lower case is correct please overlook it. I've tried to find all the errors but I may have missed some.

I've recreated the article as faithfully as HTML (hypertext markup language) formatting will allow. The article occupied three full pages and part of two other pages—and one of those partial pages did not contain much. Photographs on the web pages do not appear exactly where they did in the original because of difficult in creating column in HTML. But considering the paper quality in 1924 (it is almost newsprint that is quite thin) the photos came out rather well.

You can read that article by clicking on the following link: October 1924: The Timberman .

You may also want to check out something called (for lack of a better title) HERRICK HOME PAGE.