caught cutting timber on Congress land their rafts are seized and sold.
At present prices, it pays to haul logs in the redwood country only about
half a mile to water; all trees more distant than this from a river are
not cut; but the rivers are in many places near each other, and the belt
of timber left standing, though considerable, is not so great as one would
think.

Redwood lumber has one singular property--it shrinks endwise, so that
where it is used for weather-boarding a house, one is apt to see the
butts shrunk apart. I am told that across the grain it does not shrink
perceptibly.

Accidents are frequent in a logging camp, and good surgeons are in demand
in all the saw-mill ports, for there is much more occasion for surgery
than for physic. Men are cut with axes, jammed by logs, and otherwise
hurt, one of the most serious dangers arising from the fall of limbs torn
from standing trees by a falling one. Often such a limb lodges or sticks
in the high top of a tree until the wind blows it down, or the concussion
of the wood-cutter's axe, cutting down the tree, loosens it. Falling from
such a height as two hundred or two hundred and fifty feet, even a light
branch is dangerous, and men sometimes have their brains dashed out by
such a falling limb.

When you leave the coast for the interior, you ride through mile after
mile of redwood forest. Unlike the firs of Oregon and Puget Sound, this
tree does not occupy the whole land. It rears its tall head from a jungle
of laurel, madrone, oak, and other trees; and I doubt if so many as fifty
large redwoods often stand upon a single acre. I was told that an average
tree would turn out about fifteen thousand feet of lumber, and thus even
thirty such trees to the acre would yield nearly half a million feet.