(soft music) - Major funding for "Idaho Experience" provided by the J.A.

and Kathryn Albertson Family Foundation, making Idaho a place to learn, thrive and prosper.

With additional support from Anne Voilleque and Louise Nelson and Judy and Steve Meyer, the Richard K. and Shirley S. Hemingway Foundation, the Friends of Idaho Public Television, the Idaho Public Television Endowment, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

- For 40 years, the log drive along North Idaho's Clearwater River marked the pinnacle of the logging industry.

- Some of the biggest corporations that Idaho's ever had or come from the timber industry.

- The drives at the time were the fastest way to get thousands of cut timber to the Clearwater Mill in Lewiston.

It was dangerous.

- We didn't make a lot of money, but we had a good livelihood.

- The log drive was the most dangerous job that I could think of.

For 40 years, I've felled timber and that drive was much more dangerous.

It was strictly for young men.

- Potlatch was a giant in the timber industry.

Its influence not only inspired the historic log drives in Idaho, it also built communities from the ground up.

- You know, you hear a lot about company towns in the west, and there were a lot of them.

Primarily in the natural resources extraction, mining and logging, particularly.

One of the biggest was right here in Idaho, and it was Potlatch.

- What happened to the log drives in Idaho and explore how one company literally built a town from nothing.

Next, on "Idaho Experience."

(soft music) As the North fork of the Clearwater River in North Idaho begins to fill with melted snow in early spring, 1971, a big decision is about to be made.

One that will determine the start of the final historic log drive that will send thousands of freshly cut trees, down river nearly 100 miles to Lewiston.

- And when the warmer weather was going to come to melt the snow, and the river starts rising.

They want to catch it at the right time to get all the high water that they want to have the logs in the water so we can push them down.

- There was probably 45 to 50 million feet was dumped in the river.

There was so many logs in the river that you could walk across them.

They were end to end to end, just, it was jammed full of logs.

- The first Clearwater River log drive got underway in 1928.

Owners of Potlatch Lumber believed this was the easiest way to get logs cut and stacked all winter long out of Idaho's remote mountains to the mill in Lewiston.

The millions of Western white pine trees in Idaho made timber, one of Idaho's biggest industries.

The lumber produced from trees could be logged, cut, and sold across the country.

But more importantly, it provided jobs and a steady supply of building materials for a state rich with land and natural resources.

- Logging became one of the big three industries of Idaho, along with mining and agriculture.

You need to have wood, for, you know, for houses, fences, barns, whatever you're needing, so early on folks set up small sawmills, entrepreneurs of small sawmills in the timber areas on the borders of the prairies, and started supplying the folks who were moving in.

- The lumber mill in Lewiston, first constructed in the early 1920s, and expanded to become a paper mill in 1950, cut millions of board feet of lumber every year.

It was a busy mill.

It was immediately apparent that it would take a special kind of person to work in near freezing water all day long.

- The water was cold, of course, about 37 degrees, as I remember, but we wore long underwear, black wool.

And in our wool clothes, we were quite warm until the water got up above your waist, and it wasn't so warm.

- You had to be young and agile and strong and people that could get along with each other in close quarters.

- Once in a while there would be a little defugalty, but it was all settled.

And we were just kind of a little community all of our own.

- We haul logs all summer and all winter and decked them along the river, decks about 40-feet high and about a mile long.

- Employees of Potlatch Lumber Company would start preparing for the annual log drive in Headquarters, Idaho each spring.

Headquarters is an unincorporated community that was filled with Potlatch employees, storage sheds, a few bunkhouses, and some machinery to feed nearby logging camps.

- And while that was going on, they were building the wanigans downriver a few miles and hauling in supplies.

- Wanigans were the center of the drive.

Wanigan comes from an Indian word and describes a movable shelter for eating and sleeping.

On the Clearwater, it was a floating bunkhouse, kitchen, and warm gathering place.

It was home for the duration of the drive between three weeks to a few months.

- The wanigans were 115-feet long and 26-feet wide, and they were built out of 11-army surplus pontoons.

And the top was built out of wood.

And then the roof was built out of canvas.

- We had to carry two weeks supply of food, presto logs, gasoline, and we did have a portable light plant for lights.

We had a wood stove in each end, in each bunkhouse.

- The early wanigans prior to the 1940s didn't have access to pontoons.

So Potlatch employees used wooden poles instead.

- Back in the old days we used cedar poles.

They'd have cedar poles anywhere from 12 to 16-inches in diameter, 22-feet wide and 40-feet long.

- The wanigans carried a small colony of men, each had their assigned jobs.

Leading the river drivers was the foreman, along the Clearwater River that was Charles Red McCollister.

- He could be very quiet, but at the same time when he talked to you, he looked you right in the eye, and what he said was exactly, you know, what he meant.

- Well, he was a different kind of man.

He was slow-talking, he never got excited.

He was fair, and he had appreciation for each man.

He didn't discriminate, and he was just an excellent boss.

- Well, we used a system that was called leaning towards the sawmill.

The crew didn't like to walk back up or go back to the wanigan or ride back in the boat.

They always wanted to go down.

And we would try to move the wanigan so we'd be just ahead of the crew when they got through work.

And we would move whenever we needed to to stay with the crew and shorten up their travel time.

- I remember the first time Charlie McCollister said that to me, I think it was my very first log drive, I said, "Charlie you lost me right there.

What does that mean?"

And then he told me, "The wanigan was always ahead of you."

- While the river crews were busy moving logs, a small crew stayed with the wanigan, preparing meals and keeping a fire burning nearby.

- We'd have a big fire going.

We took our wet clothes off, put on dry clothes and went to the fire until suppertime.

The bull cook had water all for us to wash in.

We'd wash up and go to dinner.

- Well, we served three hot meals a day, we were working close enough to the wanigan that we could come in for dinner so there was nothing wrong with the food.

- We had the best cooks that money could buy on the wanigan, Harvey Spears.

- Harvey, he had a big stove there that he cooked on.

And the man could cook anything, anything on that stove.

- We had T-bone steaks for lunch whenever they were available.

- Some of the most wonderful coconut cream pies I've ever seen.

- If I remember right, it was around 8,000 calories we ate in one meal, because we needed a lot of calories to combat the cold water.

- If all went as planned, the logs would float, unimpeded to Lewiston.

But things rarely went as planned.

- Most of the time, the logs were flowing to the center of the river, but they'd hang up in the rocks, and they'd hang up on what we call bars, little islands.

Sometimes it took three or four days to get the logs off of one bar.

And you had to roll them, that was the only way you could do it.

- The crews used special wooden poles to hook logs and keep them moving.

The shorter pole with a spike and a free moving metal hook is called a peavey.

The longer pole with a spike and a small fixed hook was known as a pike pole used by men on a boat to drag logs away from a jam.

It took a combination of skill, power, and balance to be a log driver.

- The river was high, and there was a lot of rough water, and there was times that there was waves that was 10, 12-feet high.

And we'd hit them waves, and the rougher it got, the better I liked it.

It was just an awesome, one of the best jobs I ever had in my life, for 30 days.

- We had two rear crews and a center crew.

And the rear crews, one would go on each side of the river.

And the center crew would go down river and pick jams and make sure that the river was clean.

- Jenks was one of the younger log drivers in the 1960s, he grew up along the Clearwater River and knew the tools of the trade.

- The boots that most guys wore, they had what they called a spring heel on 'em.

They were arched right in the middle to where when you got on a log, it would fit the shape of the log, where you'd have better footing.

With a peavey in your hand and a good pair of cork shoes, it felt awesome.

- Charlie, Don and the rest all worked for Potlatch Lumber Company, a company that dominated the timber industry in Idaho.

Its roots go back to the early 1900s, when timber baron Frederick Weyerhaeuser heard there was an endless supply of white pine trees ready to be harvested in Idaho.

- So in 1900, Fredrick Weyerhaeuser himself, one of the world's wealthiest men, came to Moscow, met Charles Brown, and Brown took him on a nine-day horseback ride to wet Idaho forests.

It was the fall of the year.

- Weyerhaeuser is one of the richest men in US history.

If he were alive today, he would be worth $85 billion.

He saw massive forests of Western white pine, a tree that on February 13th, 1935 became the official state tree.

- And up here he established the Humbird Lumber Company, the Bonners Ferry Lumber Company, Rutledge in Coeur d'Alene, Potlatch in the town of Potlatch, and Clearwater in the town of Lewiston.

And eventually those merged, not all five of them but the three bigger ones merged to form Potlatch Forests, and then it became Potlatch Corporation.

- Weyerhaeuser would buy parcels of land 160-acres at a time.

Buying the land was just the beginning of the process.

- They need to cut that land within 20 years.

So in order to do that, you had to have these huge crews, you know, these thousands of guys out in the woods.

There was nothing in the area.

We talked about small mills, and there were small mills in this area.

The biggest ones were actually just across the state line in Washington in the town of Palouse and Colfax.

And Weyerhaeuser bought both of those, and he did what sawing he could do there.

But they knew they were going to have to build a massive, a massive mill.

- In 1903, Weyerhaeuser planned to build a mill somewhere in Idaho.

The first Lewiston mill wouldn't be built until the early 1920s.

- The people in Moscow wanted him to build here; they did everything they could, but one of the things that the Weyerhaeusers wanted to do, one of the real banes of existence of timber barons was a transient workforce and alcohol.

So they decided they're just going to buy up this land about 20 miles north of here and build their own town, and build what was then, perhaps, I've never been able to quite verify, but they advertised it as the world's largest sawmill.

- Potlatch, Idaho began to take shape in 1904 when crews started construction of the mill.

- Well, if you were here in, say, 1903 there would have been nothing here.

- The mill began operating in September of 1906.

The company soon built 143 houses on a nearby hill and a boarding house that served unmarried workers.

- This company town was not like the vision that we often have of company towns, you know, of debilitating places to live.

It was and still is a very beautiful small town.

And they built the houses very well, the rents were very low.

They wanted to attract people and keep them there because they didn't want to have to constantly retrain people in the mill.

- The owners of the newly incorporated town of Potlatch decided if they owned everything, they could control everything.

Alcohol and prostitution was prohibited.

What they wanted was a better class of working men to support a massive lumber operation.

- This whole area was the mill site.

And it was a gigantic mill.

The sawmill itself was a football field long.

The planning mill was even larger.

Beyond that for acres and acres were the lumber storage area.

After they'd mill it, they'd take it out and stack it and sticker it, and put stickers in between so you could air-dry the lumber before it was shipped out.

And they had 37 miles of small gauge rail line out there in the lumber storage area, to give you an indication of how big the operation was.

And surrounded that with the company town, that they owned everything in the town, the houses, the buildings, the school, the church.

Basically your life was with the company.

- For the most part, company life worked for Potlatch.

But in 1917, as remote logging camps were built high in the mountains, all the comforts of a town were missing.

Workers fed up with long hours and less than desirable food and housing decided enough was enough.

They went on strike.

- And in Idaho, most famously, the Industrial Workers of the World which came into Idaho in a very big way and actually struck a Potlatch camp out in Bovill in 1916 and set off one of the biggest labor strikes ever in Western history, basically shut down the woods in Idaho, Oregon, and Washington.

But it all started from an Idaho camp and grew from there.

- The Industrial Workers of the World based in Chicago were often referred to as wobblies.

The strike involved only the logging crews cutting trees.

Not the mill workers.

And while Weyerhaeuser mills continued to operate, the wobblies successfully convinced Governor Moses Alexander, Idaho's 11th Governor, to improve working conditions.

- There were some changes that came in the woods that were beneficial to working people.

And I attribute that to the strike; although, as I say, the folks at the head of the lumber companies would dispute that.

- As retaliation, the Weyerhaeuser mills made it known that if you were a member of the wobblies, you weren't welcome in their town.

- The Weyerhaeusers for all their mills said, "If you have any IWW ties, you're not getting hired."

And other lumber companies throughout the Northwest did that, so it pretty much killed that.

- Back in Potlatch, the Weyerhaeusers had another problem.

They needed to ship the lumber out to market.

Existing rail companies weren't ready to expand to Idaho.

So the Weyerhaeusers created their own, starting with a beautiful train station in Potlatch.

- And this area right here, where we are right now, was the Washington, Idaho and Montana Railroad.

And they built their own railroad to bring logs in from the woods, and then to ship lumber out to market.

- The WI&M Railway Company would bring people to Potlatch and help transport the millions of board feet of lumber out of town and into the hands of builders across the US.

- And on the WI&M they could get to a transcontinental line either by going to Spokane or to Bovill.

So then their product was mostly shipped east from here.

- Today, the mill in Potlatch is gone, it closed in 1981 due to declining lumber prices.

The company sold off most of its assets including homes and buildings.

But if you look hard enough, you can still find remains of the former Potlatch company presence.

By the 1950s, the Clearwater River's ability to move freshly cut white pine to the mill in Lewiston was overshadowed by its apparent threat of flooding and a desire for hydroelectric power.

That meant a dam at the mouth of the North fork of the Clearwater River.

- Some people were adamant they didn't want it to happen, other people did.

And it was a controversial thing.

People talked about it all the time.

- The reservoir behind the dam would flood wildlife habitat and homes along the river.

And there were no plans for fish ladders for migrating steelhead and salmon.

Many residents of Ahsahka, Orofino, and Potlatch argued against the plan.

But despite their best efforts, construction of the Dworshak Dam, named for Idaho Senator Henry Dworshak, began in 1966.

It remains the third-tallest dam in the United States.

- Before they ever put the dam in there when we were kids, it was one of the most beautiful streams that existed.

And when they put the dam in, as far as I'm concerned, you know, they destroyed it.

They destroyed everything.

My dad was born and raised there, he lived there 56 years.

And it really broke his heart having to leave.

- Our place in there, the log house here with the old Ridgerunner standing in the porch is under about 60 feet of water now.

- Potlatch Corporation had decided the last log drive on the North fork of the Clearwater River would happen the spring of 1971.

- The dam was already a barrier.

But they wanted to have an open house at the end of the last log drive and have the public be able to come on board the wanigan.

- Logs were sent through a large tunnel diverting water away from the construction site.

- There was all kinds of chatter about taking the wanigan through the diversion tunnel.

And I was kind of wanting to see that.

- But it was decided that it was too dangerous for the wanigan.

- So they had to logistically figure out how to take the wanigan apart, take it around the dam and reassemble it and float it the rest of the way.

- The final year drew thousands of people, media, cameras and dignitaries from across the west and beyond.

- Because there were a lot of cameras, there was a lot of press.

And yet people had to pay attention to what they were doing.

Plus there were guests.

I mean, there was a lot of hoopla there to the end.

- The last of the big log drives had ended.

Charles Red McCollister had been a supervisor for Potlatch Corporation the rest of his career.

Even after the log drives came to an end, he progressed up the ranks within the company.

- He made advancements, and he ended up logging superintendent right at the close of his career, out of Headquarters.

- Well, I always enjoyed moving logs, and... That was a place you could move a lot of them.

- The history of the Clearwater River log drive could have been lost.

Forgotten over the years.

But some of the former log drivers are working to keep it alive.

The Clearwater Museum in Orofino is still a work in progress in 2021, 50 years after the last log drive.

- It preserves something that would be completely lost.

And it's excellent, like all the pictures and paraphernalia and stuff that would have been lost if it hadn't been established here.

- So we've had a lot of support.

And that's the main thing, that there's a lot of stuff and a lot of good people out there that wanted to help and this sort of thing, and that's one thing that we can really use is some expertise on getting this stuff set up.

- The Clearwater Historical Museum in Orofino and the J. Howard Bradbury Logging Museum in Pierce preserves a historically significant part of Idaho history.

- (laughs) I'm getting pretty old now, so it won't be long until there won't be any of us.

I hope they come here and look at what there is to gain some knowledge.

Because it's a shame that it's gonna be lost if people don't take care of it.

(light music) - Major funding for "Idaho Experience" provided by the J.A.

and Kathryn Albertson Family Foundation, making Idaho a place to learn, thrive and prosper.

With additional support from Anne Voilleque and Louise Nelson and Judy and Steve Meyer, the Richard K. and Shirley S. Hemingway Foundation, the Friends of Idaho Public Television, the Idaho Public Television Endowment, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

(dramatic music)