Ross Smith’s Years to Remember
Ross Smith can remember many of the stories his father told him about his life as a boy. One of the stories was about when he was a young boy in about 1894 and lived at Laycock Creek. Back then the main road came from
Many years after the sale of those apples, Ross started working for the Edward Hines Lumber Company. It was February 10th, 1951 and just a couple of months before his 25th birthday. He moved in with his sister, Joyce Hendricks and her husband, and lived there for the remainder of the winter. He and his wife, Sophie, were married on June 3, 1951. They rented one of the cabins from C.J. Wright that was near where the Catholic Church is now located on the South edge of town. Some people called them the cheese boxes. Their rent was $25.00 per month. There was no running water in the cabin but it did have a faucet outside the back door. In 1953 they bought a house at
The first job Ross had required a great deal of physical strength, as did all of his jobs for the company. He was working behind a D8 cat setting chokers in snow that was waist deep. Ross is a tall man so this was deep snow. The following summer he started operating a cat himself, skidding logs to a landing for about five years. At that time, health problems forced him to quit operating machinery, so he went to work on the landing bumping knots, not with a chain saw but with an axe. The landing was a place where the logs were loaded on the trucks headed to the sawmill. He worked on the landing for about three years bumping knots and as a hooker, top-loader. Then, he went to scaling logs and did that job for a number of years. A caliper was used to measure the logs. He could see that job was coming to an end because they were phasing it out. He held many different jobs with Hines over the years, and his last was a timber faller. He was so good at this, he won an award as faller of the year. In this time period, most fallers were paid by the day or the hour. Hines paid their fallers by the amount of work they put out which was by the number of trees they cut. Ross liked it that way. He remembers there must have been more than sixty men working in the woods out of Seneca in the 1950’s and 1960’s that were just doing the logging (not counting the shop or road crew). He stated, “I enjoyed my years working in the woods.”
A memory about work that stuck out the most in Ross’ mind happened in the spring of 1952. There was a real bad windstorm and it happened about quitting time. Riding buses on the way out of the woods, trees were falling all around them. One crew was really late getting home because trees were falling down in front of the bus. Sophie was at home with their son, Jerry, who was about two months old. She had to stand against the front door of the cabin to keep it from blowing open. Ross said, “It was real scary for all concerned!” The windstorm gave the crews plenty of work. They worked all summer and late into the fall logging all the blown down trees. The wind had probably blown down as much as twenty million board feet of timber.
Ross was bumping knots on the landing when Bud Hankins was hurt. Paul Teeman, a Paiute, found him. He heard the cat running and running and went to see why it was. A jillpoke (The cat would run over small trees and bend them down. Then the cat would turn around and come back. Sometimes the tree would catch and run up through the bottom of the cat.) came up from under the cat, went through Bud’s groin and out just under his ribs in the back. The pole was about three inches at the large end and one inch on the small end. Kenny McGhee, Vern Arment, Paul Teeman, and Ross were the men Ross remembers being there, but he thought there were a couple more. They helped keep Bud warm by the fire until the ambulance came. They met Dr. Jerry Vandervleugt (he was Swiss) about two miles beyond Parish Cabins. It was frozen hard and the snow was deep. He pulled his Cadillac off in the snow and hopped into the ambulance. They went through Seneca and on to
The first train Ross remembers seeing was sometime in the summer, probably around the 4th of July. He couldn’t have been but four or five years old. He was with his dad, who liked to fish on the
An anecdote related to fishing comes from something else Ross’ dad told him. He told stories to Ross about catching salmon in Big Creek up in
The train tunnel construction was contracted to Alec Bjorkman and a group of Swedish men. Ross thought the group consisted of Pete Holmberg, Hank Johnson, Alec and possibly Fred Holmberg. There were four men in the group and they built it in about 1927. It wasn’t nearly as hard to build as they thought it would be, because the rock was not as hard as they thought. The tunnel had a slight bend in it, and a person had to stand in the middle to see both ends.
There was a tie mill somehow connected to Hines Lumber Company. Ross said he didn’t know a lot about the mill or where it was located.
Most people remember the cold winter temperatures in Seneca, and Ross is no exception. He said he knew the temperature in the winter of 1936-37 was 57 degrees below zero. The cold lasted for several weeks. The official temperature about Christmas of 1983 was 52 below. The coldest he saw the temperature was 43 below as he was not in Seneca at the other time it was so cold. They were off visiting their daughter on that Christmas. He said the deepest he ever saw the snow in Seneca was three or so feet, right up to 40 inches.
Ross believes the main reason Seneca’s population went down is because of mechanization. In the early days the landing crew consisted of seven men including the loader operator. When Hines sold out in 1982, they were down to two members on the crew. The skid crew had been about 15 workers in days gone by and was down to about six or seven. The falling crew of sixteen to eighteen men (a guess) was down to five or six.
When he retired, Ross and his wife moved away from Seneca, but he has family roots here. They return every summer when the weather is warm and the huckleberries are waiting to be picked. The two of them visit with family and friends and talk about what has taken place over the past year. There is no doubt that the conversations are eventually directed back to those wonderful years in Seneca and what it used to be like in the good old days.