Myrtle Bergren, Tough Timber: The Loggers of British Columbia: Their Story
I didn’t mean to love Tough Timber, but somehow it just wasn’t at all the book I expected, even though in retrospect of course it was precisely this book.
But it’s also a love story for the Cowichan and its people, and more broadly a love story for the working classes in general, with capitalist owners as its villains, and as I say in the subtitle to this post, I am HERE FOR IT.
Will you appreciate it? Well, that’s hard to say.
Logging history is a complicated thing to write about these days, even to think about, especially in BC given events like the Fairy Creek protests and the inconsistency with how the province is protecting (“protecting”) old-growth forests. But if we don’t know the history, we’re at risk of building a future that we don’t want. Books like Tough Timber seem to me essential at this point.
Anyway, here are some reasons it worked for me (apart from the accidents of biography, since my family was in the Cowichan at the time Bergren’s writing about, and since I spend an awful lot of time thinking about BC and its environmental culture)
Tales I enjoyed
BC is a newer place than its dominant culture would like to pretend.
In the early days of BC logging, a letter was sent from Sweden addressed simply “Ole Hanson, Canada.” As Bergren puts it, the letter must’ve just been forwarded repeatedly across Canada until it reached the Vancouver post office. Someone there must’ve decided a Swedish man in BC must be a logger, so off it went to the West Hotel, the biggest hotel catering to loggers at that time. The West immediately sent it to Jarvis Inlet, where the intended Ole Hanson was working, thus proving that only a century ago, the world’s second-largest country was basically a single neighbourhood.
To this day, many places in this province remain far from a highway, but Tough Timber reminds readers that in the 1940s, it could be challenging just to get to hospital from a mid-sized town (like Lake Cowichan). The loggers and forestry workers in Lake Cowichan had to run successful petition campaigns about the terrible 28-mile road not once but twice during the 20 years covered by this book, the first time to build something substantial and the second to make it easily drivable again.
Logging has always been dangerous, but between the 1920s and 1940s, more than a hundred men a year died in BC’s woods, thousands more being seriously injured. In the 1930s, the ladies of the Women’s Auxiliary in Lake Cowichan would regularly visit the hospital at Duncan, to check on everyone who was there in order to report back to the community and to the logging camps:
“On one typical visit they reported on the condition of Blondie Koski, high rigger, injured in a fall at Camp 3, Youbou; Mr. Hakely, who had injured his hand in the crane at Youbou mill; Eric Nelson, L. Hill, three Japanese from Hillcrest, two east Indians and one Chinese from Youbou mill, who were all in hospital. The sight of crippled men or men in casts walking around on crutches was a common one throughout the area.” (p.113)
One knows this in the abstract, and novels like Haig-Brown's Timber do their best to make it material, but Bergren does a great job of casually bringing this genuinely to life.
And the walking!
The union organizers were trying to coordinate among multiple camps, access to many of which was entirely controlled by the companies. As a result, the organizers (usually one man working alone, sometimes two men) would trek for hours, 30 or 40 miles a day, sometimes to find a camp inaccessible, sometimes to sign up only a single person. Hjalmar Bergren told of exhaustedly lashing two logs together and using a salvaged board, to cross Cowichan Lake and save himself a few hours of walking in the rain (p.106). The camps near Port Renfrew, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, had to be accessed from the Cowichan side, which meant 47 miles each way unless (as sometimes happened) you could find a way onto the rails via speeder or train.
Truly, this was heroic work, the kinds of efforts and commitment it took to improve the lives of working men, and in uncounted ways to save their lives.
Things I learned
How could I not have known that on Vancouver Island, many of the the Women’s Auxiliary organizations were in fact auxiliary to the union, or in the absence of a union, auxiliary to the workers trying doggedly to unionize?!?!?!? I’m appalled by my ignorance about this. Yes, there’s a Women’s Auxiliary attached to the Royal Canadian Legion (ie, veterans), and hospitals have them as well, but this seems like something I should’ve known.
Race and racism in the logging industry: it has long been a thing, and I’m familiar with historic issues with differential hiring practices and differential salary. (For example, none of the men hired to fall trees would ever be from India; if a Chinese man and a Swedish man had the same job in the same camp, the Chinese man would be paid less, e.g. page 7 of this fascinating old mimeograph.) What I didn’t know was that the union had accomplished racial pay equality in 1942, when the huge Chemainus mill was first unionized.
More than that, throughout the 1940s the union took on numerous issues of racism outside the workplace. In Duncan, for example, Bergren recalls that “the East Indians could not get into a barbershop for a haircut,”and around the same time, “a young East Indian was forbidden to swim in Victoria’s Crystal Pool”: in both cases, a union boycott and protest meant that both bans were lifted.
In summary
I grew up in a complicatedly non-union household, my father working at a non-unionized lumber mill whose wages were tied to the gains at unionized mills (and at least for a time, with the company’s books open to the workers, I think as a condition of their remaining non-union). My grandparents on my dad’s side were ardent members of the Co-Op and supporters of the NDP, and before that the CCF, so community-mindedness was part of the furniture, so to speak.
But I didn’t know very much of the historic minutiae presented in this book, and I really regret that.
A crucial element of this regret, simply, is that I didn’t know how seriously the union’s early organizers took global concerns. They pledged not to strike during WW2, for example, except that they did go out briefly when it became clear that the companies on Haida Gwaii (then the Queen Charlotte Islands) were profiteering from the war through prices for the Sitka spruce that made Britain’s airplanes.
Writing in the 1960s, Bergren sees unionization as having a key role in the global future, especially in terms of the unequal “wars” perpretrated by militarized industrial countries, often at the behest (direct or indirect) of the companies involved. As Bergren puts it, near the book’s close:
“The capitalists corrupt and degrade their own populations in building war machines, in the shameful occupation of loading trains and trucks and ships with machines to kill off destitute populations, who are trying to raise their standard of life.” (p.247)
Her book, and the union movement as she understood it, speaks instead on behalf of “the people who work by hand and brain, who make everything, invent everything, discover everything in the world for the progress of mankind” (p.247).
For all this book’s humour, and indeed there are all manner of very funny stories, and for all its historical detail, which is legion, it’s animated finally by Myrtle Bergren’s principles. It’s a remarkable book, and one that should be known by everyone with an interest in BC culture and BC history, as well as environmental history more broadly.
(Cross-posted from my Substack: beautiful platform, but not many readers, and I don't really want to do the necessary hustling for more)
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