Jim Bradshaw
In the early days of the southwest Louisiana timber industry, cutting trees from public land, or even land that belonged to somebody else, was an everyday occurrence. It got so bad that a special federal agent had to be sent in.
His name was Murray Carter, and he stirred up a hornet’s nest that the Lake Charles newspaper named The Calcasieu Log War. Historian Donald Millet detailed the brouhaha in a study of the early years of the south Louisiana lumber industry (“The Lumber Industry of ‘Imperial’ Calcasieu: 1865-1900,” Louisiana History, Winter, 1966).
The squabble apparently began when Louisiana’s surveyor general complained in 1877 that loggers were taking advantage of federal and state homestead laws to claim 160-acre tracts that were supposed to be used to establish homes and farms, and instead simply cut all the timber they could before abandoning the land.
“Hundreds of men ... make no concealment of the sales they have made and price they have received for the privilege of cutting all valuable pine from their respective lands,” he reported to Congressional investigators.
He said loggers sometimes grabbed more than one homestead site by claiming one under their real name and another one, or two, under made-up names, “certainly with no intention of retaining the land after the timber was removed.”
Based upon that report, Congressional investigators sent Carter to Calcasieu Parish in the spring of 1877 to “obtain all data necessary to enable the United States district attorney to ... seize timber or lumber ... and to prosecute (offenders).”
Lumbermen threatened to shoot him on sight after Carter seized over 100,000 logs that he said had been cut on government land. The threat caused federal officials to send a gunboat and 80 soldiers to Calcasieu.
Loggers got madder still when Carter stretched a sturdy chain across part of the Calcasieu River to keep logs from being floated downstream to mills in Lake Charles. The lumbermen said the chain also kept legal timber (which they claimed was most of it) from getting to the mills.
One of the lumbermen complained to the newspaper, “The whole business of our district is now stopped; not a wheel is turning nor mill going, and all labor is idle. The parish is stagnant, and merchants cannot pay their bills.” The lumbermen called on their congressman, J. A. Acklen, to do something about it.
The congressman did what all good federal legislators do; he called for a study of the situation. It found that the federal government had done everything properly and even praised Carter for “recovering property improperly taken from the public domain.”
That didn’t sit well with the loggers, but there was nothing they could do. The federal government sold the seized lumber at a handsome profit and then removed the chain to let the mills go back to work with what timber they could scrounge.
As historian Millet put it, “Though the people of the area were dissatisfied ... and resentment continued to smolder, the so-called log war had come to an end.”
A collection of Jim Bradshaw’s columns, Cajuns and Other Characters, is now available from Pelican Publishing. You can contact him at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.