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Kentucky and Tennessee stock of woodsmen and squir-relhunters who fol owed the trail blazed by Lewis and Clark into the rainy giant forests of the Pacific slope. In the army Everest was a sharpshooter, won a medal for a crack shot.

(Since the days of the homesteaders the western

promoters and the politicians and lobbyists in Wash-ington had been busy with the rainy giant forests of the Pacific slope, with the result that:

ten monopoly groups aggregating only one thou-

sand eight hundred and two holders, monopolized one thousand two hundred and eight billion, eight hundred million,

[1,208,800,000,000]

square feet of standing timber, . . . enough stand- ing timber . . . to yield the planks necessary [over and above the manufacturing wastage] to make a float- ing bridge more than two feet thick and more than five miles wide from New York to Liverpool; -wood for scaffolding, wood for jerrybuilding resi-dential suburbs, bil boards, wood for shacks and ships and shantytowns, pulp for tabloids, yel ow journals, editorial pages, advertizing copy, mailorder catalogues, filingcards, army paperwork, handbil s, flimsy.) Wesley Everest was a logger like Paul Bunyan.

The lumberjacks, loggers, shingleweavers, saw-mil workers were the helots of the timber empire; the I.W.W. put the idea of industrial democracy in Paul Bunyan's

-456-Bunyan's head; wobbly organizers said the forests ought to belong to the whole people, said Paul Bunyan ought to be paid in real money instead of in company scrip, ought to have a decent place to dry his clothes, wet from the sweat of a day's work in zero weather and snow, an eight hour day, clean bunkhouses, wholesome grub; when Paul Bunyan came back from making

Europe safe for the democracy of the Big Four, he

joined the lumberjack's local to help make the Pacific slope safe for the workingstiffs. The wobblies were reds. Not a thing in this world Paul Bunyan's ascared of. (To be a red in the summer of 1919 was worse

than being a hun or a pacifist in the summer of 1917.) The timber owners, the sawmil and shinglekings

were patriots; they'd won the war (in the course of which the price of lumber had gone up from $16 a

thousand feet to $116; there are even cases where the government paid as high as

$1200 a thousand for

spruce); they set out to clean the reds out of the log-ging camps; free American institutions must be preserved at

any cost;

so they formed the Employers Association and the

Legion of Loyal Loggers, they made it worth their

while for bunches of ex-soldiers to raid I.W.W. hal s, lynch and beat up organizers, burn subversive literature. On Memorial Day 1918 the boys of the American

Legion in Centralia led by a group from the Chamber of Commerce wrecked the I.W.W. hal , beat up every-body they found in it, jailed some and piled the rest of the boys in a truck and dumped them over the county line, burned the papers and pamphlets and auctioned

-457-off the fittings for the Red Cross; the wobblies' desk stil stands in the Chamber of Commerce.

The loggers hired a new hal and the union kept

on growing. Not a thing in this world Paul Bunyan's ascared of.

Before Armistice Day, 1919, the town was ful of

rumors that on that day the hal would be raided for keeps. A young man of good family and pleasant man-ners, Warren O. Grimm, had been an officer with the American force in Siberia; that made him an authority on labor and Bolsheviks, so he was chosen by the busi-ness men to lead the 100% forces in the Citizens Pro-tective League to put the fear of God into Paul Bunyan. The first thing the brave patriots did was pick up a blind newsdealer and thrash him and drop him in a ditch across the county line. The loggers consulted counsel and decided they

had a right to defend their hal and themselves in case of a raid. Not a thing in this world Paul Bunyan's

ascared of.

Wesley Everest was a crack shot; Armistice Day

he put on his uniform and fil ed his pockets with car-tridges. Wesley Everest was not much of a talker;