Yup. My grandfather and his brother were fallers back in those days. We have pictures of them up on scaffolds and springboards chopping out the face on old growth redwoods. Grandfather could always find a falling job because he could swing an axe from either side equally well. Try chopping left handed sometime. I did and it was truly ugly.
My grandfather said that falling them was really the easiest part of the job in the redwoods. Bucking, skidding, and loading those monsters were the real challenges. That fine old tree wasn't worth a nickle 'til you got it to the mill. Some things never change, eh?
When he started logging the teams of oxen were slowly being replaced by steam power and he said that ground lead steam donkeys were what really made production possible. A lot of the machinery they used was custom built for the task at hand. That old rusty iron we see in museums and magazines was state of the art stuff then and those boys thought they were on top of the world. Look at all the old pictures of the crew posed with the machinery and look at the fierce pride on their faces.
He lived long enough to see steam replaced by diesel and the axes and misery whips giving way to chainsaws. He thought chainsaws were pure genius. His only real negative comment about the progress in logging was that the woods were a lot quieter place when they still skidded with oxen.
Just before he died I took him to the woods with me to watch a special sight. We were logging a five mile long canyon, steep on both sides but gradual grade on each end. Nice wood, big pine and fir, ten sets of fallers, quite a few three log loads. The bottom was being cat logged, the ends each had a yarder set up, and a Sikorsky Skycrane was doing the sides. You could drive around the rim or stand in one spot just above that canyon and see every kind of logging there was. He stood there for a long time, not saying anything, and watched all that logging going on. Finally he said "Its just a little busy for my tastes but those boys sure move the wood".
We lost him about a month later but he mentioned several times about that trip to the woods. And he remembered everything he saw.
Anywho, it also translated to the axe and about everything else.
