TAKING DOWN A GIANT c. 1890 Poster

Around 1890, a crew of 4 lumberjacks in the process of taking down one of the largest, old-growth Sequoias in a northern California redwood grove. It must have been a loggers dream when they first saw the 300 foot coastal redwoods. It takes a lot of bravado and muscle to down a giant, but how did they do it? The first step involved setting springboards. These were placed into notches in the tree which were cut with an ax. The springboards acted as scaffolding to allow the fallers access to the base of the tree above basal swells, basal hollows or to gain access to the downhill side of a tree growing on a hillside. Once the fallers got into position they began the process of chopping the face cut with axes. The face cut would be chopped into the tree facing the intended direction that the tree was to fall. The idea is to cut 1/3 to 1/2 of the way through the tree with the bottom of the face cut being horizontal and the top being angled downward. To fall in the correct direction, the back of the face cut needed to be perpendicular to the direction of fall. Fallers used a gun stick, a scissors shaped tool, to make the final depth and angle adjustments to the undercut so that the tree fell in the desired location. After the face cut was completed a layout was constructed on the ground. Because redwoods are relatively fragile the logs will break if the tree falls onto rough ground. So workers piled up mounds of loose soil or brush in the path of the tree to be felled. When the face cut was done and the layout was completed then the fallers would begin the back cut. The back cut was made using a long crosscut saw, also called a Misery Whip, with one faller on either end and each would pull the saw through the cut in turn. The idea was to make the back cut parallel to the face cut and nearly on the same plane as the bottom of the face cut. When the back cut had sufficiently cut through enough of the wood the tree would begin to tip toward the face cut and the fallers would scramble off the spring boards to watch the tree fall into the layout. The loggers' tools were few and simple as the photograph shows, but, nevertheless, it was enough to take down a millennial giant, the largest in Nature's Kingdom.