They Tried to Cut it All: Grays Harbor—Turbulent Years of Greed and Greatness

they tried to cut it all They chopped. They whacked. They sawed. They gnawed at the greatest Douglas fir timber stand on earth from daylight ‘til dark for six decades. But they couldn’t quite cut it all. Ed Van Syckle heard the mill owners, the loggers, the shipbuilders and the commercial leaders of Aberdeen and Hoquiam boom out the slogan, “Billion or Bust.” He was born in the din of mill whistles in the sawdust town of Cosmopolis in 1902. His father, who had come to Grays Harbor in ’88, ran tugs for the timber-squandering Grays Harbor Commercial Company. His grandmother was a sister of Jason and John Fry, among the Harbor’s first sawmill builders. A 1920 graduate of Aberdeen’s Weatherwax High School, Van Syckle studied journalism at the University of Oklahoma and returned to Cosmopolis to publish a weekly for two years. Famed editor Werner Rupp lured Van Syckle to the Aberdeen Daily World in 1927, and there he covered the Grays Harbor story from stump to wharf until he retired as editor in 1969. As a 14-year-old, he earned 75 cents each 10-hour day in a Harbor planing mill. Later he earned his way through college working summers felling trees, chasing rigging, whistlepunking and setting chokers. He covered the Harbor waterfront for a decade and once made a Pacific voyage with Capt. Matt Peasley aboard the five-mast “Vigilant.” “THEY TRIED TO CUT IT ALL” comes from Van Syckle’s own experience and a half century of interviews with the crusty men who goaded the bull teams, fired the satanic steam donkeys, built monster splash dams, fought and caroused along Heron Street. He saw the grand schemes of industry captains unfold and he saw the scampy side, peopled by saloon keepers, madams and gamblers. This story is built on happenings from the days of rampage and waste to the modern era of tree farming and sustained yield. If Alaska was Gold Rush, then Grays Harbor was Timber Rush. Fortunes geysered from the cutting of the greatest stand of Douglas Fir, Hemlock, Spruce and Cedar ever touched by axe and sawtooth. Van Syckle knew them, the barons, the boss loggers and the bullwhackers. Grays Harbor has had a lurid and lavish past. It also has a future: supported by timber forever. They tried to cut it all. But they couldn’t. —Dave James