Redwood logging in California in the early 20th century

In its 22 January 1905 issue, the Swedish weekly Hvar 8 Dag published an article on redwood logging in Humboldt County, California. The correspondent was somewhat ambivalent about what he saw in the redwood forests close to Eureka:

"Still there are vast forests left, but they are beginning to look severely damaged. Wherever the white man arrives, everything will soon be plundered. Now there are in many areas only half burned tree-stumps left, like graves in an enormous graveyard. It feels sad that the plundering to such a great degree has been done by Scandinavians. Most of the axes and saws are namely handled by Swedes and Finns."

"But the there is also a bright side. Yes, before the white man arrived, the trees were untouched, and you felt like entering a cathedral, pillars beside pillars, with organ music at the tops. The Indians were roaming, and the bears were padding without fear. But it was also wilderness everywhere. Now the land is cultivated, and the grain is standing high in the fields, and big herds of cattle are grazing. Thousands have got new homes; small towns have been built; railways have been been constructed; and then the primeval forest has again began to grow around the stumps."

"Pillars beside pillars - One felt like entering a cathedral".

"A beautiful specimen".

"The stumps are big enough to be used as a dance floor"

"How the trees are felled . This one was 23 feet in diameter."

"In cases of emergency you can use trunks as a stable."

A loading station.

A train carrying the  felled trees. 

"Planks 80 inches wide, without a crack, can be sawed."

PS

The Swedish correspondent was right about the redwood trees beginning to grow again:

Humboldt County is a densely forested, mountainous, and rural county situated along the Pacific coast in Northern California'srugged Coast (Mountain) Ranges. With nearly 1,500,000 acres (6,100 km²) of combined public and private forest in production, Humboldt County accounts for twenty percent of the total forest production for all of California.^[4] The county contains over forty percent of all remaining old growth Coast Redwood forests,^[5] the vast majority of which is protected or strictly conserved within dozens of national, state, and local forests and parks, totaling approximately 680,000 acres (over 1,000 square miles).^[6]

Read more about Humboldt County here