People have used the vast Ponderosa pine and Western white pine forests of Northeast Washington for thousands of years. Tribal people split logs for shelters and used the wood and bark for canoes. The first sawmills arrived in the 1850s with the first settlers. Around 1900, industrial logging began on a vast scale. Lumbermen from the East and Midwest had depleted their own white pine stands, and they cast their eyes on the only remaining stands, centered on North Idaho and Northeast Washington. Hundreds of remote logging camps dotted the forests, and dozens of sawmills shipped pine boards throughout the entire country. Despite setbacks caused by fire, disease and labor upheavals, the region's logging boom lasted into the 1920s. By then the virgin stands were mostly gone and the logging industry went into a slow decline, exacerbated by the Great Depression. Logging continued to occupy an important niche in the region's economy, but never surpassed the boom from 1900 to 1925.
The Pine Forests of Eastern Washington
The notion of a barren Eastern Washington, devoid of forests, was thoroughly debunked in 1855 when Washington Territorial Governor Isaac Stevens (1818-1862) surveyed his far-flung territory. He reported that the eastern part of what is now Washington "is better supplied with wood than has generally been imagined" and that the Spokane River drainage was "well timbered with pine" (Durham, 217). Further, he noted that the entire region from the Spokane River north to the Canadian border was "for the most part, densely wooded" (Durham, 217). Stevens was referring to the area we know today as the counties of Pend Oreille, Stevens, Ferry and Spokane.
This was hardly news, of course, to the tribes in the region. The Pend Oreille, Kalispel, Spokane and Colville tribes – among others – had lived amongst Northeast Washington's forests for millennia. They used the trees they found there for shelter, for firewood, for smoking salmon and for innumerable other purposes. The Kalispel people famously used the wood and bark to build the sophisticated sturgeon-nose canoes they used along the Pend Oreille River. When Canadian trader and explorer David Thompson (1770-1857) arrived in the Colville River valley in 1811, he noted that one Colville village was "built of long sheds of about twenty feet in breadth … built of long boards which somehow they had contrived to split from large cedars drifted down the river" (Nisbet, 100).
These forests were of a different character than those found on the state's west side. There were a few similarities: Douglas firs were abundant in places, but they were of an intermountain subspecies and did not reach the majestic size of their counterparts near the coast. Western redcedars, as the Colvilles could attest, were also found in a many wet, sheltered groves. The high country of this mountainous region was carpeted with trees common in the Cascades, including hemlock, larch (tamarack), spruce, and subalpine fir. Yet the two most important species – at least to the loggers that would soon arrive – were the Ponderosa pine and Western white pine, both far less common on the wetter side of the state.
The Ponderosa pine (pinus ponderosa) is the iconic tree of Northeast Washington, celebrated not only for its fine qualities as lumber, but for the beauty of its bark and its forests. "Wide-spaced as if planted in a park, stately of trunk, with colorful orange or cinnamon or buff-colored bark … there is no mistaking them," wrote Donald Culross Peattie in A Natural History of Western Trees (Peattie, 80). "… Of all western pines, this one seems to the beholder most full of light. Its needles, of a rich yellow green, are burnished like metal" (Peattie, 80). Ponderosa pines even sound beautiful. Naturalist John Muir said that "of all pines, this one gives forth the finest music to the wind" (Peattie, 80). The aroma of the sun-warmed bark is also legendary, with faint notes of vanilla or butterscotch. Ponderosa, meaning "massive" in Latin, is a fitting name for this tree, although the old-timers often called it yellow pine or Western soft pine.
It was easily the most abundant tree in Northeast Washington forests, and a fine lumber tree. But no tree was as coveted as the Western white pine (pinus monticola). Some called the Western white pine "the aristocrat of the woods" (Hidy, Hill, and Nevins, 149). Others called it "the finest of the world's softwoods" (Strong and Webb, 3). With its majestic size, up to 200 feet tall, and its ideal attributes for fine lumber, it had long earned its reputation as the most sought-after tree in American forests. The center of its western habitat was mostly in North Idaho and adjoining parts of Montana, but it was also found in huge numbers in the northeast corner of Washington, along the borders with both Idaho and British Columbia.
The Small-Scale Logging Era
The Western white pine would soon become the prime impetus for industrial-scale logging in what people were calling the Inland Empire (meaning Eastern Washington, the Idaho Panhandle and extreme Western Montana). The Eastern and Midwestern species of white pine had been almost entirely logged out by the end of the nineteenth century. The final remaining stands of this coveted tree now existed only in this remote region of the country, but they were hard to access. The first chief of the U.S. Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot (1865-1946), found himself in the midst of a virgin white pine stand in 1897 when he trekked deep into the Priest River Forest Reserve, one of the precursors to national forests, straddling the border of Idaho and Northeast Washington. Pinchot had heard reports that it was "the most valuable body of timber in the interior of the Continent," and he was soon immersed in a "superb old forest of Western white pine (locally called silver pine)" (Pinchot, 124). It had been damaged by fire, but untouched by loggers.
Small-scale logging had been going on since the arrival of the first white settlers in the Spokane, Colville and Pend Oreille River regions from the 1850s onward. The first sawmill near Colville was started in 1857, followed in 1858 by the Winslow Mill, four miles south of town, which at one point was considered "the largest sawmill east of the Cascades in Washington" ("Heritage Park – Sawmill"). In the fledgling town of Spokane Falls, the first commercial enterprise of any kind was a sawmill on the Spokane River. It made use of the town's two outstanding natural resources – waterpower and tall Ponderosa pines – to build what would soon become a city. Pines were the materials of choice for building new towns and farms throughout Northeast Washington. In Spokane, that first sawmill was soon joined by the Spokane Mill Company in 1887 and the Phoenix Mill in 1895. By 1900, there were dozens of sawmills in Spokane, Colville, Kettle Falls, Deer Park, Northport and other small towns in Northeast Washington. These largely served the local building market, but that was about to change.
Weyerhaeuser, McGoldrick, and a New Era of Logging
A new, explosive era in the region's logging history was about to dawn. The story can be told through the eyes of two Midwestern lumbermen who cast their eyes on the great Western white pine forests around the turn of the century. One of those lumbermen bore a last name that would soon be famous throughout Washington: Frederick Weyerhaeuser (1834-1914). He was a Midwestern lumberman, but his region's white pine forests were tapped out. He was intrigued by a map he had seen of the spectacular Western white pine forests of Idaho and adjacent Washington, so he sent out agents to file land claims.
Weyerhaeuser soon followed with associate John A. Humbird (1836-1911). They snapped up thousands of acres of timberland. In 1900 they launched the Clearwater Timber Company, organized under Washington law. Then he and Humbird headed up to Sandpoint, Idaho, and purchased land straddling the state borders in the Priest River and Pend Oreille region. They also bought a sawmill in Newport. A son, Charles A. Weyerhaeuser (1866-1930) soon "became so enamored of white pine prospects" that he purchased 30,000 acres of forests, which would become the genesis of the Potlatch Lumber Company, under the Weyerhaeuser umbrella (Hidy, Hill, and Nevins, 252).
The Potlatch Lumber Company would become "the most ambitious" of the area's enterprises (Hidy, Hill, and Nevins, 255). Most of the trees were felled across the border in the Idaho mountains and milled in the company town of Potlatch, Idaho, but many of them were processed at the Palouse River Lumber Company, a huge sawmill in Palouse. A new railroad was completed in 1907 from the big Palouse mill into the heart of the white pine forest at Bovill, Idaho. The railroad's official name was the Washington, Idaho and Montana Railway, but it became known, simply, as the White Pine Route.
The second lumberman bore a name which, while not as famous as Weyerhaeuser, would soon become well-known in Spokane: James Patrick McGoldrick (1859-1939). He was a Minnesota logging man who had graduated from what the trade publication American Lumberman called "the white pine school in the upper Mississippi valley," meaning, the forests of Minnesota ("Vim in the Inland Empire"). Around 1900, he came to believe that "the future lumber business would largely be centered west of the Rockies" ("Vim in the Inland Empire"). McGoldrick made several trips west, bought some tracts in British Columbia and "looked over the situation in Spokane" ("Vim in the Inland Empire"). In 1905, he bought the modern new sawmill of the A. M. Fox Company, on the Spokane River near downtown Spokane on land leased from Gonzaga University.
The McGoldrick Lumber Company and its massive floating rafts of logs would become a Spokane landmark for the next 50 years. Most of McGoldrick's forests were in the Lake Coeur d'Alene and St. Joe areas across the border in Idaho. The logs were floated across Lake Coeur d'Alene, loaded on rail cars, taken to Spokane and dumped into the vast McGoldrick pond for wet storage before milling.
Other lumber firms, including F. A. Blackwell's Panhandle Lumber Company, soon arrived. It built a "large modern mill" in Ione, on the Pend Oreille River (Dyar, 364). These and other firms created an immense lumber industry on the Washington-Idaho borderland in a shockingly short time. In 1907, the American Lumberman summarized the situation:
"Seven years ago, there were practically no lumber operations in the great pine district between the Rocky Mountains on the east and the Cascade Mountains on the west, of which Spokane, Wash., is the metropolis, and which is known as the Inland Empire. Last year, its output of pine lumber exceeded 1,000,000,000 feet. The first car of Idaho white pine and western pine [Ponderosa] was shipped less than seven years ago; today more than 100 mills are sawing this fine timber" ("Vim in the Inland Empire").
The region's lumber industry was no longer local. "Western white pine lumber has but small market in the very regions where it grows," wrote Peattie (Peattie, 42). "Its great reputation with buyers is in the eastern states, where the tradition of the eastern white pine's marvelous wood still lingers ... Western white pine is usually kiln-dried near the sawmills. It is then shipped east, manufactured into all sorts of millwork … and then frequently shipped back to the West and sold to the housebuilder right in the 'Inland Empire.'" (Peattie, 42).
"Exhausting Work, Full of Peril"
Rough and remote logging camps now peppered the forests of Pend Oreille, Stevens, Spokane and Ferry counties. Washington towns such as Republic, Ione, Cusick and Metaline Falls were now catering to loggers and logging camps. In 1910, a new logging camp opened across the Pend Oreille River from the small town of Usk to "log off between 50,000,000 and 60,000,000 feet of timber" ("Will Open New Logging Camp"). A new rail spur was driven "14 miles into the timber, bringing the logs to the river and thence taking them to Ione" ("Will Open New Logging Camp").
The early camps were rough-hewn; the work was exhausting and full of peril. The newspapers of that era were littered with stories of men crushed by trees, mangled by machinery, and drowned in log drives. Even the teenaged Bing Crosby (1903-1977) – destined to be the most famous person ever to hail from Spokane – worked for a few summers in logging camps, until he cut open his knee with an axe. Just getting to and from a remote camp was difficult. In December 1909, six men in Metaline Falls tried to cross the Pend Oreille River to get to their snowbound lumber camp. They were "caught between cakes of ice and held by the heavy slush in the middle of the stream" and were swept toward the falls, struggling to shore only at the last moment ("Ice Takes Three ...").
Spokane Free Speech Fight
At the beginning of 1910, changes were in the offing, caused by three factors: gigantic fires, devastating tree diseases, and one of the wildest labor conflicts in the nation's history: the Spokane Free Speech Fight of 1909 to 1910. This was the nation's first-ever mass civil-disobedience action, and the logging industry was one of the flashpoints. A corrupt form of collusion had developed in the downtown Spokane employment agencies. The agencies charged loggers a dollar for a job, and then surreptitiously split the fee with the logging camp, which would turn around and fire the logger after only a few days. The logger would then have to go back to the agency and pay another dollar for a job. One logging company was accused of hiring 3,000 men in one winter to maintain a crew of 50.
The Industrial Workers of the World – known as Wobblies – were outraged. This radical union had been trying to unionize loggers in the region to improve working conditions and ban these kinds of employment practices. Wobbly firebrands stood on soapboxes on downtown street corners and railed against the employment agencies, blocking the sidewalks and entrances. The city responded by passing an ordinance banning public speeches downtown. Wobblies declared this a clear free-speech violation and issued a nationwide call for Wobblies to converge on Spokane to defy the law. They wanted people to stand on street corners, attempt to speak, get arrested, and "fill the jails of Spokane" ("A Fight for Free Speech").
The Wobblies succeeded. Ultimately, 500 people were arrested, forcing the city to house the prisoners in a squalid abandoned school. The controversy lasted for months, until the city finally backed down on the speaking ban. The loggers also won a lasting concession: The city council revoked the licenses of 19 of the 31 employment agencies.
The Big Burn
As dramatic as this was, fire proved to be 1910's true cataclysm. Forest fires were nothing new in the region. They had been occurring forever, some caused by lightning and others "intentionally set by tribal people probably as a form of range management" (Nisbet, 147). David Thompson had observed many fires, and even more smoke, in his explorations from 1807 to 1812, including "a large fire across the [Pend Oreille] river, a little below us" in March 1812 (Nisbet, 148). In 1897, when Pinchot found himself amid the Pend Oreille region's vast white pine forest, he also found to his dismay that it had mostly gone "the way of all flesh," meaning it had been badly burned (Pinchot, 124). He further noted that "there is probably not a body of one thousand acres on the whole reserve which has not been more or less seriously injured by fire" (Pinchot, 124).
Pinchot, nor anyone else, could have envisioned the scope of the biggest conflagration of all, the gargantuan fire known as the Big Burn in August 1910. It was centered in the Bitterroot Range in Montana and Idaho, but it also raged in Northeast Washington. The biggest of Washington's Big Burn fires threatened the logging town of Newport, where "a solid front six miles wide" reached the Pend Oreille River ("Newport in Grave Peril"). "Many settlers had narrow escapes, reaching town barely in advance of the flames," reported a Newport correspondent ("Newport in Grave Peril"). The Spokane Chamber of Commerce sent 40 tents, 75 mattresses, 150 blankets and tons of food to Newport for those made homeless and destitute. The more massive devastation in the Idaho white pine forests also destroyed thousands of acres of trees otherwise destined for the Washington-based sawmills.
The lumber industry was "reeling at first," but recovered surprisingly quickly and "continued to expand" (Dyar, 374). The forests were so vast that plenty of trees remained untouched, and even those that were partially blackened were still salvageable. In 1911, the McGoldrick Lumber Company bought 50 million feet of damaged, but not destroyed, white pine in the Big Burn region. Meanwhile, another wood product industry sprang up: paper. In 1911, the Inland Empire Paper Company built a large pulp mill on the Spokane River in what is now Millwood. It made newsprint, partially from trees that had previously been less marketable, such as spruce.
Persistent Labor Troubles
Labor troubles would persist over the next two decades. The Wobblies continued to organize and called an industry-wide strike in 1917, which closed most mills and camps throughout the state. By this time, companies were "attempting to meet some of labor's demands," even though "they feared the radicalism that the I.W.W. represented" ("Seeing the Forest for the Trees…"). One company proudly proclaimed it "had erected a hotel for our employees – every man has a room to himself, a bed to himself and every room is lighted with electricity" ("Install Movie Houses"). The camp even had a movie theater and a place to listen to phonograph records.
After the U.S. entered World War I, wood products, such as spruce for airplanes, were considered vital to the war effort. An organization called the Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen, 4L for short, was formed as an effective counter to the Wobblies, because it appealed to the patriotic instincts of loggers during wartime.
A New Threat
Around this time, a new threat had arrived, in the form of blister rust, a fungus that attacked the precious Western white pine. It could devastate entire stands and was difficult to eradicate. Yet neither labor troubles, nor fire, nor fungus were what ultimately caused Frederick Weyerhaeuser to regret making his big bet on Inland Empire forests. He "used to say ruefully that the name Potlatch, which signified an Indian feast marked by lavish gifts, was appropriate, for the giving of money to the [Potlatch] company never ended and little came back" (Hidy, Hill, and Nevins, 258). The "most serious mistake the company made in the long run was "'cutting the timber clean,'" that is, clear-cutting (Hidy, Hill, and Nevins, 258). In the mixed stands of the region, the company cut down not just the lucrative Western white pine, but the "much less salable" larch, spruce, grand fir and lodgepole pine (Hidy, Hill, and Nevins, 258). Selective cutting, with preservation of the more valuable seed trees, would have been more profitable and sustainable. Clear-cutting also resulted in the loss of most of the virgin Western white pine stands, leaving loggers in later decades to cut the less majestic second-growth trees.
Making Matchsticks
The region proved a disappointment financially to Weyerhaeuser, but the logging camps and mills of Northeast Washington continued to ship out vast amounts of Ponderosa and white pine lumber in the 1920s. Spokane was now home to, among others, the White Pine Sash Company, the McGoldrick Lumber Company, the Western Pine Manufacturing Company, and significantly, the Ohio Match Company. The Western white pine had proven to be ideal for wooden matches, used every day to light kitchen stoves in practically every household in America. The Ohio Match Company's plant and Cusick's Diamond Match Company plant, both opened in 1920 and shipped millions of matchsticks. Demand was even higher because of a new fad, the cigarette. Peattie estimated that 300,000 mature white pines were needed to create a year's supply of the nation's matches.
Slow Decline
The Northeast Washington logging industry began its slow decline around 1925 when most of the virgin forests had been cut. This was followed by a more rapid decline during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The Winslow Mill near Colville closed in 1934, after almost eight decades of operation. Jim McGoldrick summarized the situation that he faced as a young man in the late 1930s as he contemplated his future in the family lumber firm. "By this time, the Great Depression had hit the timber industry pretty hard," he recalled (McGoldrick, 144). "Future timber supply was a matter of great concern, and the company was already having to go out almost 100 miles for logs. Small parcels of timber, scattered around the area, logged by 'gyppo' loggers, were now replacing much of the huge stands of timber of the 'good old days'" (McGoldrick, 144).
Log trucks remained a common sight in the region's forests, but the number one lumber tree was the Ponderosa pine, supplanting the ever more scarce Western white pine, according to a 1939 pamphlet titled The Lumber Industry of Washington. Blister rust and root diseases had taken a toll. The future of the industry in general was precarious. In 1940, a federal regional forester predicted that much of the timber acreage in Northeast Washington and North Idaho "would be gone in 20 years" ("Lumber Industry to Get Vacation").
The era of big lumber camps and mills drew to a close, symbolized by the fate of the McGoldrick Lumber Company. The mill suffered a knockout blow on August 9, 1945, when catastrophic fire raged through the plant. The McGoldrick Lumber Company called it quits in May 1946, citing the increasingly uncertain source of new logs, the high cost of rebuilding the plant, and "difficult times" in the region's industry as a whole ("Firm Will Not Rebuild"). The McGoldrick millpond reverted to Gonzaga University and is now a scenic lake on campus.
Logging dwindled as an industry throughout the region. Yet the prediction that the forests would vanish by 1960 did not come true. The "more progressive lumbermen" had heeded the warnings and converted to selective logging, allowing the forests to be reseeded and rejuvenated (Dyar, 376). Sustainable forestry practices were more widely adopted. New blister rust-resistant strains of Western white pine were developed, although the vast stands remained a memory.
The logging industry's role was never again as robust as it was in the 1910s. As of 2025, logging retained an important niche in the local economy. The Inland Empire Paper Company still churns out newsprint and other paper products, joined by the even larger Clearwater Paper, which evolved from Potlatch Forests, Inc., and is headquartered in Spokane with a mill in Lewiston, Idaho. The Confederate Tribes of the Colville Reservation conducts timber sales to harvest 78 million board feet annually, in accordance with a management plan designed to protect its forests.
Spokane has not had a giant downtown sawmill for 80 years, but sawmills still dot some of the towns to the north. Vaagen Bros. operates a huge, thriving sawmill in Colville and another in Usk. The Vaagen Bros. operation perhaps epitomizes a new philosophy of logging in the region. Its motto is "waste not, want not," and it aims to "make the best use of much of the harvested log as possible," including the bark, chipped logs, and wood fiber ("The Vaagen Approach"). It also sponsors a stewardship project to fund restoration work on the Colville National Forest.
Meanwhile, the vast carpets of Ponderosa pine noted by Isaac Stevens 170 years ago still stretch from Spokane northward, creating Northeast Washington's signature look, and even its aroma, with just a touch of vanilla.
