The United States may today be the world’s largest producer and consumer of officially accounted wood but it has been a long and tough journey for the American lumber industry, from the precolonial period of British timber speculation, subsequent British colonization, and American development into the twenty-first century.
This amazing scene was captured in 1917 and shows a group of loggers and their 10 mule team preparing to fell a giant Sequoia tree in California. The life of these lumberjacks was not only a hard one but a migratory one, moving from timber harvest to timber harvest, with the earliest American lumberjacks centered in northeastern states.
