Vancouver Island logging history: camp words, steam donkeys and mills

On June 6, 1967, BC Forest Products retired the last working skidder in British Columbia. It was a Washington steam skidder, and it had a long history on the coast: the Abernathy & Lougheed Logging Company of Haney bought it new, and Industrial Timber Mills took it over in 1935 and ran it out of its Camp 6. The Cowichan Leader printed a crew photograph the next day, 18 men in two rows, and the BC Forest Discovery Centre in Duncan keeps the clipping.

Vancouver Island logging left two kinds of record. One is the machinery, the company names and the mills, which museums and newspapers have tracked closely. The other is the talk of the camps, and that is harder to pin down. What follows keeps to the words a dictionary, museum or encyclopedia actually records, and leaves out the many more that circulate in memory.

Chinook Jargon under the camp talk

Several of the words loggers used on the island are older than the industry. The Canadian Encyclopedia describes Chinook Jargon, or Chinook Wawa, as a trade pidgin of British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest, built from Lower Chinook, Nuu-chah-nulth, French and English with contributions from Salishan and other Indigenous languages. Around 100,000 people could speak it in 1875, the encyclopedia estimates, and for many years it served as the working language of canneries and mills, often learned by early Chinese immigrants as well. In Nanaimo, many Chinese workers dug coal and lived in the city's Chinatowns, which stood on three sites before the last ended in a 1960 fire. The vocabulary was small, about 700 words, and today, the encyclopedia says, it survives in place names and "in the vocabulary of some long-time British Columbia residents."

Four of those survivals turn up in standard dictionaries.

Skookum is the best known. Dictionary.com labels it Pacific Northwest and Canadian and defines it as large, powerful, impressive or first-rate, from a Chinook Jargon word for strong. Saltchuck, in the Collins English Dictionary, is simply any body of salt water; the Canadian Encyclopedia explains that chuck is the Jargon word for water, taken from Nuu-chah-nulth. A cheechako, in Dictionary.com, is a tenderfoot or newcomer in Alaska and northern Canada, first recorded between 1895 and 1900 and built from chee, new, and chako, come. Tyee, from a Nuu-chah-nulth word for elder brother, meant chief or boss in the Jargon and is now also the name for a large chinook salmon.

Steam, skid roads and the jobs in the woods

The camp vocabulary proper grew out of the work. The steam donkey, which Wikipedia describes as a steam-powered winch, was often attached to a yarder to drag logs from where they fell to a landing; its operator was the donkeyman. Before steam, logs moved over skid roads, and the dictionaries keep both senses of that phrase. The table collects the job and camp words that the dictionaries define, with the source each comes from.

The second meaning of skid road travelled furthest. Wikipedia notes that the phrase first meant the path along which timber was skidded, and that the sense of a poor district appears to have begun in the Pacific Northwest, with Vancouver's Downtown Eastside among the places given the name.

Machines changed the words again in the 1940s. The BC Forest Discovery Centre's history of coastal chainsaws says the first imported German Stihl saws on the BC coast were used at the Bloedel, Stewart and Welch camp at Franklin River, and that when the Second World War cut off parts, Vancouver entrepreneur D.J. Smith began building a two-person saw of his own, the Timberhog. A 1943 photograph in the museum's collection shows a falling crew and a scaler at Camp 3, near Kissinger Lake west of Lake Cowichan, with what is most likely a Timberhog fitted with a 60-inch bar. The museum quotes a logger, Roy Byers, on starting one: if the operator got the timing wrong, "the saw would likely run right up the starting rope like a 130-pound yoyo. Many of us have scars to prove it!"

MacMillan, Chemainus and the big companies

The company history is better documented than the slang. According to the Canadian Encyclopedia, H.R. MacMillan came to the BC coast as a timber cruiser in 1907, became the province's chief forester in 1912, and during the First World War served as assistant manager of the Victoria Lumber and Manufacturing Company's plant at Chemainus. In 1919 he launched the H.R. MacMillan Export Company, built a plywood plant in 1935, built the Harmac pulp mill in 1947 and merged with Bloedel, Stewart and Welch in 1951. The company took the name MacMillan Bloedel in 1966 and, by the encyclopedia's figures, had sales of $5.25 billion and more than 12,800 employees in 1995.

The workforce behind those numbers was more varied than the old photographs suggest. The museum's account of Darshan Singh Sangha describes Asian workers filling the lower rungs of the sawmills, and Sangha himself starting on a sawmill's green chain, in an era when British Columbia had stripped them of the vote in 1907; Sangha rose through the International Woodworkers of America. At Port Alberni, MacMillan's wartime plywood plant, nicknamed ALPLY, employed about 350 people during the Second World War, 80 per cent of them women paid 26 per cent less than men, according to the museum, drawing on historian Susanne Klausen. The plant closed in 1991 and was demolished in 1997.

The yarder on the legislature lawn

Small operators did not always lose to the licence holders quietly. In 1956, as the museum tells it from Joe Garner's book Never Under the Table, Jim Gillespie was a 26-year-old market logger at Cowichan Lake. British Columbia Forest Products wanted local support for its Tree Farm Licence application, and Gillespie said its district manager promised him "timber forever" if he signed. A year later the promised timber had not appeared.

So one rainy June night he trucked his sled-mounted yarder to Victoria, arrived at the legislature around 3 a.m., talked a crane operator into lifting a load that had supposedly "shifted," and parked the donkey engine in a public stall in front of the building with two banners on it. Premier W.A.C. Bennett drove past and looked without stopping. Fourteen officers came to move it and could not, because it sat inside the white lines of a legal parking spot. Gillespie left after more than five hours, once the photographs had been taken.

The yarder is the kind of artifact Gerry Wellburn spent his life saving. The museum says he began collecting forestry equipment from around the island in the early 1950s, built a narrow-gauge line on his Deerholme property between 1954 and 1958 to run his restored locomotives, and the museum names him as its founder. If you drive down from Nanaimo, the centre is at 2892 Drinkwater Road in Duncan, about 35 minutes south, and its Halloween train runs on set evenings through October 30, 2026.

Clayoquot and the end of quiet logging

The argument over how the island's forests are cut came to a head on the west coast. The Canadian Encyclopedia records that the province's 1993 land use plan for Clayoquot Sound opened 62 per cent of the Crown land to logging. A protest blocked the only bridge to a logging site near Kennedy Lake for five months; MacMillan Bloedel won an injunction, and 859 people were arrested, tried and convicted in BC Supreme Court, "the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history." Later that year the Nuu-chah-nulth and the province signed an interim agreement giving local Indigenous review of logging plans.

The pulp mills

Pulp turned the island's waste wood into an export. The Canadian Encyclopedia notes that the province helped bring more than a dozen new kraft pulp mills into being in the 1950s and 1960s, many of them in the interior. Vancouver Island had mills of its own. On Vancouver Island, Elk Falls opened at Duncan Bay near Campbell River in 1952, and Premier Bennett called it "free enterprise at its best." The Museum at Campbell River described it in 2013 as the region's main economic engine for nearly 60 years, after it had closed. Port Alice's mill, run last by Neucel Specialty Cellulose, has been dormant since 2015, and by 2021 its court-appointed receiver had sought approval to borrow up to $39.7 million to decommission it.

Crofton was the most recent loss. Domtar announced on December 2, 2025, that the mill, operating since 1957, would close, citing poor pulp prices and "lack of access to affordable fibre in B.C." The final shutdown slipped to the week of January 4, 2026. Counts of the jobs lost differ: the Bulletin reported about 350 in December 2025 and "almost 400" in August 2026, and the Cowichan Valley Citizen gave about 450. The closure also took out the 'Namgis-majority-owned Atli Chip mill near Port McNeill, whose market was Crofton.

Harmac, south of Nanaimo, is the survivor. When its owner, Pope & Talbot, went bankrupt in 2008, more than 200 employees put in $25,000 each for a 25 per cent stake, and with three investors formed Nanaimo Forest Products, which bought the mill for $13.2 million and restarted it that October. It employs about 350 people and received $5.5 million in federal tariff-response funding in August 2026, though the Bulletin notes it still struggles to find enough chips. Harmac Pacific bought more than 1,250 acres around the Duke Point cargo terminal in 2008, and its land plans have drawn objections of their own. The harbour beside the mill belongs to the Nanaimo Port Authority, whose retiring chief executive said in 2017 that he had found the port "in a tough position as a forest distributions centre."

What comes next is disputed by people who know the business. After the chip mill closed, North Island MP Aaron Gunn blamed government restrictions: "It's not like we've run out of trees on the North Island." Mike Morris, in a column in the Mirror on January 4, 2026, had written that he first became aware of the crisis in 2014 and that the province "was over-harvesting at an unsustainable rate."