Description
Only one copy is available of the original publication of this classic history book by esteemed author Richard Mackie. There is a small crease on the cover.
Mountain Timber: The Comox Logging Company in the Vancouver Island Mountains Mountain Timber is the long-awaited sequel to Mackie’s best-selling Island Timber: A Social History of the Comox Logging Company, Vancouver Island, which has gone through four printings and sold nearly 7,000 copies. Whereas Island Timber was set on the low-lying coastal flats along to the Strait of Georgia, Mountain Timber is concerned with Comox Logging’s later and higher fortunes in the Vancouver Island mountains. As the company depleted its supply of coastal Douglas fir in the 1920s, it moved inland to log the Bevan sidehill, the shores of Comox Lake, and the valleys and tributaries of the Puntledge and Cruickshank rivers. But wherever it moved, the company had the same purpose: to find and cut mature Douglas fir forests. The action in Mountain Timber takes place between 1925 and 1945—the two critical decades when most of the available lowland timber was cut. This absorbing book also revisits Comox Logging’s railway logging shows out of Headquarters and Camps 1, 2 and 3, around Oyster River and Black Creek. On one level the story of loggers and their machines—cold deckers, skidders, geared locies and many more—Mountain Timber is also a dense and engrossing social history of central Island in the mid-20th century. The book’s nine chapters alternate revealingly between logging and social history: between working landscapes and the communities they supported. A stunning visual feast, this richly illustrated history contains 340 photographs of the men, women, families and communities supported by logging. Mackie has gathered most of the photos, many of them hitherto unpublished, from 60 private collections. Mountain Timber also contains 18 maps and diagrams of logging camps, methods and aspects of railway and highlead logging technology.
