Online Catalogue last updated 17th of September 2023
To the people who used them, steam donkeys and other logging equipment made their livelihoods possible. From its beginnings in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to its heyday in the twenties and thirties, to its decline and extinction in the 1950s, steam logging captured the imaginations and hearts of generations of Oregonians.
In Search of Steam Donkeys traces the development of the machinery that made steam logging possible--and sometimes dangerous, sometimes lucrative. It describes the surprisingly creative methods that old-time loggers used, modified (and sometimes misused) the equipment they worked with daily; the sometimes funny, frequently poignant, tales of living and growing up in a logging camp; the reminiscences of those who still remember working as whistle punks, riggers, donkey doctors, and hooktenders.
But this book is much more than a collection of personal anecdotes. In Search of Steam Donkeys is filled with detailed photographs, diagrams, and dimensions of many types of steam logging equipment manufactured by Willamette Iron and Steel, Puget Sound Iron and Steel, Smith & Watson Iron Works, to name a few. Also included are ten plans that many will find useful for constructing their own scale models of these machines and their accessories.
The product of a lifetime of experience and of twenty years of active research in the field, In Search of Steam Donkeys tells the stories of the discovery and preservation of the last of these old-time logging machines-many found abandoned in the woods, shop yards, and backroads of Oregon; some of which are now on public display in various museums and private collections.
A feast for the eyes and the imagination, In Search of Steam Donkeys will be of interest to loggers, historians, modellers, buyers, sellers, and machinery buffs, curiosity seekers, and lovers of our Pacific Northwest heritage.
Code No. 007717, 280 pages, ISBN 0965021300, $105.00