How America Hauled Giant Logs on Ten-Foot Wheels in Michigan

[00:00:00]In the great white pine forests of Michigan, in the 1870s, a blacksmith named Silas Overpack built a pair of wheels taller than a man.

[00:00:09]>> [music] >> 10 ft across, made of wood and bound in iron. So big that a grown man could walk upright between them.

[00:00:16]And with those wheels, a single team of horses could drag an enormous pine log straight up off the forest floor >> [music] >> and out through the woods in the dead heat of summer at a time of year when every other logger in America had to stop and wait for the snow. Before Silas Overpack's big wheels, the giant logs of the north could only be moved in winter, sledded out over roads made of ice.

[00:00:39]Overpack broke the forest free of the calendar and let the cutting run all year long.

[00:00:44]And in doing that, he helped Michigan take down one of the greatest forests that has ever stood on the earth faster than anyone had dreamed possible until it was simply gone. I have been reading the histories of the Michigan pine and the story of the man who built the big wheels. And this time, the record is unusual because it keeps one name >> [music] >> and almost no others. So, let me give you the two anchors of this story honestly. The first is the man whose name we have. The second is everyone whose name we do not. The first is Silas Overpack himself.

[00:01:16]Silas Chidester Overpack was born in 1841 and settled in the lumber town of Manistee, Michigan where he ran a wagon, carriage, and blacksmith shop on Pine Street. He was a maker of ordinary things, wagons and tools and the iron fittings of a working town. The kind of skilled craftsman every frontier community depended on >> [music] >> and almost none of them remembered. And in 1875, in that shop he built the oversized wheels that would carry his name across the logging country >> [music] >> of an entire continent. We know his name, his trade, his town, and his dates. He is the one man this story can point to and say, "Here. This person, he did this."

[00:01:59]The second anchor is the teamster.

[00:02:02]For every pair of big wheels that Overpack built, there was a man who drove it, who walked beside a team of straining horses with a giant log slung beneath the axle, who chained the load and balanced it, and coaxed it through the stumps and the mud and the heat.

[00:02:17]There were thousands of these men in the Michigan woods, the teamsters and the sawyers and the swampers and the rivermen, >> [music] >> and they did the actual work of cutting down the forest, and the record gives almost none of them a name. The ledger gives most of them no name, only a number, a daily wage, and a job.

[00:02:34]Silas Overpack, we can name.

[00:02:36]The men who used his invention to bring down a [music] forest, we mostly cannot.

[00:02:41]Both of them belong at the center of this story, the one craftsman we remember and the thousands of workers we forgot. If you care about the men who built this country with their hands, the workers nobody ever wrote a book about, please subscribe to Global Old History right now. Hit the button, come back. To understand why a pair of wheels could matter so much, you have to understand the forest they were built to move, because it was one of the wonders of the natural world. When the loggers reached Michigan in the middle of the 1800s, they found an ocean of white pine, a forest of trees that had been growing since before the country existed. The great white pines were giants, some of them more than 200 years old, rising up to 200 ft tall, with trunks 5 ft thick and clear of branches for the first 100 ft, straight as a ship's mast and just as valuable.

[00:03:29]This was the finest building timber in America, soft enough to work easily, strong enough to frame a house, light enough to float, and there were billions of trees of it across the Upper Midwest.

[00:03:40]To a young building nation that was throwing up cities and railroads and farms across a continent, that forest was a treasure beyond reckoning. And Michigan cut it down. For about 30 years, from roughly 1870 to 1900, Michigan was the greatest lumber producing state [music] in the entire country.

[00:03:59]And it was not close.

[00:04:01]The numbers are almost hard to believe.

[00:04:04]At the peak of the boom, around 1889 and 90, Michigan was cutting something like 5 and 1/2 billion board feet of lumber in a single year. Over the whole life of the boom, the state produced more than 160 billion board feet of pine. The wealth that came out of those forests was so enormous that it is often said the value of the timber Michigan cut was greater than all the gold that came out of California in the gold rush.

[00:04:27]>> [music] >> People think of the great American fortunes of that era as coming from gold and silver and oil and steel.

[00:04:34]A staggering share of the real money came from cutting down trees. And the heart of that trade for a generation was the white pine of Michigan. That trade built whole cities almost overnight.

[00:04:44]Lumber towns like Manistee, where Overpack had his shop, >> [music] >> and Muskegon and Saginaw and Bay City boomed into being on the pine. Their waterfronts crowded with sawmills screaming day and night. Their harbors stacked with fresh cut boards waiting for the ships.

[00:04:59]And into those towns and the camps beyond them poured the men who did the work, tens of thousands of them. Young men mostly in their 20s drawn from everywhere, native-born farm boys looking for wages, and a great tide of immigrants, Scandinavians and French Canadians and Irishmen, who took to the woods because that was where the work was.

[00:05:17]They were famous for their strength and their hard living. They worked from before first light until after dark, 6 days a week, through a Michigan winter, for something like 20 to $26 a month, plus their food and a bunk. The pine made some men rich, the lumber barons whose mansions [music] still stand in those towns.

[00:05:36]It paid the men who actually cut it a dollar a day and their keep. And much of what they cut went out to build the country, the farms and the railroads and the cities of the growing nation.

[00:05:46]When the Great Chicago Fire burned that city to the ground in 1871, Chicago was rebuilt in no small part out of Great Lakes pine hauled from forests like these. It went further than the cities, too. Out on the treeless prairies of the Midwest, where settlers were breaking the first farms on land that had almost no timber of its own, nearly every board of every barn and farmhouse and fence had to be shipped in, [music] and a great deal of it was Michigan pine carried west by rail and by lake boat.

[00:06:17]The forest of the north was quite literally turned into the towns and the farms of the plains.

[00:06:22]A family on a homestead hundreds of miles from any forest might be living inside the trees of Michigan without ever knowing it.

[00:06:28]That is the scale of what came out of those woods.

[00:06:31]And the scale of what the loggers and their big wheels were feeding. But there was a problem that held the whole industry back, a stubborn natural limit that no amount of money could bypass, and it had to do with the seasons. Stay with me at the Bosque tier while I explain it for $4.99 a month. Loyalty badge, custom emoji, early access 24 hours before public, and members-only polls.

[00:06:54]Link in the description.

[00:06:57]Now, back to the woods.

[00:06:58]Here is the limit.

[00:07:01]Cutting the trees down was the easy part.

[00:07:04]A skilled crew with axes and the long crosscut saws they called misery whips could fell a giant pine and cut it into logs. That work alone was a craft and a danger. A pair of choppers would notch a great pine with axes on the side they wanted it to fall, and then two sawyers would work the long crosscut saw, the misery whip, back and forth through the trunk until the giant came down with a crash that shook the ground and could kill a careless man where he stood.

[00:07:30]Then, other men, the swampers, cleared away the limbs and cut the fallen trunk into logs, and the teamsters hauled them off.

[00:07:38]They all lived together in rough camps deep in the woods, sleeping in log bunkhouses, eating enormous meals cooked in the camp kitchen by a cook whose skill could make or break a crew's spirit.

[00:07:49]And working from the first gray light until full dark, six days a week, all winter long.

[00:07:56]It was a young man's life and a brutally hard one. Lived far from any town.

[00:08:00]And it ran entirely on the strength of the men's backs and the skill of their hands. The hard part always was moving those logs out of the deep woods to a river where they could be floated downstream to the sawmills.

[00:08:12]A single white pine log could weigh tons and dragging that kind of weight across the bare forest floor, >> [music] >> over roots and stumps and soft ground, was nearly impossible for a horse team.

[00:08:23]The friction was simply too great. So, for decades, the loggers solved it with winter. In the cold months, they would haul water out and build roads of packed snow and ice through the forest. And on those slick iced roads, a team could pull a sled piled high with logs that weighed many tons, because ice is slippery and the sled glided. Making those ice roads was its own art. Crews would grade a road through the forest and then, every night, send out a strange machine called a sprinkler, a great wooden tank of water mounted on sled runners. As it was dragged along the road, men pulled pins to let the water run out in a thin sheet across the surface. And in the deep cold, it froze hard by morning into a smooth track of ice.

[00:09:05]Sometimes they even cut shallow grooves in the ice for the sled runners to ride in, like rails. On a well-iced road, a single team of horses could move a sled stacked with many thousands of board feet of logs.

[00:09:17]A load that would have been unthinkable on bare ground.

[00:09:21]Winter cold was not the enemy of the Michigan logger. It was his single greatest tool. And the loss of it every spring was the wall that stopped the work cold. That is the wall Silas Overpack set out to climb over.

[00:09:33]Winter was the logging season. The whole industry was built around it.

[00:09:38]Crews went into the woods when the snow came and worked like demons through the cold because the moment the thaw arrived and the ice roads turned to mud, the hauling stopped. For half the year or more, the great logs sat where they fell and the forest could not be moved.

[00:09:53]That was the wall that Silas Overpack knocked down in his Manistique blacksmith shop.

[00:09:58]His idea was simple, almost obvious in hindsight, the way the best ideas often are.

[00:10:04]If the problem was friction on the ground, then lift the log up off the ground.

[00:10:09]He built a pair of wagon wheels far larger than any ever used before, [music] about 10 ft in diameter, joined by a stout axle high in the air with a long tongue, often 16 ft of tough ironwood, running out front for the horses. The whole rig straddled the logs. You would back the big wheels over the front end of a log or a bundle of logs, chain the log up tight underneath the high axle so that its front end lifted clear of the ground, and then the horses would pull.

[00:10:36]With a heavy front end hoisted up under those great wheels and only the tail of the log dragging, a team could move a load that would have been hopeless on the flat.

[00:10:44]And because the wheels were so tall, they rolled right over the stumps and the [music] roots and the ruts that would have stopped an ordinary wagon, and they did not sink into the soft summer ground the way small wheels did.

[00:10:55]Overpack had built a machine that could haul giant logs over bare earth in summer, without snow, without ice.

[00:11:03]He had given the loggers back the other half of the year. It is worth lingering on how clever the rig actually was because it was more than just big wheels. [music] To load it, the teamster would back the wheels over the end of a log, drop the long tongue down toward the ground, and pass a chain under the log and up over the high axle.

[00:11:22]Then, when the horses pulled the tongue forward and up, the axle turned and the chain wound up and lifted the front end of the log clean off the ground, all by the leverage of the tongue and the turning of the axle, [music] with no separate crane or jack needed. The machine loaded itself. Going downhill, where a heavy log could overrun the horses and run them right down, the teamster [music] had ways of dragging and chaining the load to hold it back.

[00:11:47]Overpack, the wagon maker, had thought through every part of it, and he built the wheels strong, of seasoned wood and good iron, because a wheel that broke under a ton of pine a mile back in the woods was a small disaster.

[00:12:01]The big wheels lasted. That is part of why so many of them survived today, still sound a century and a half on. The big wheels could carry an astonishing load. A single rig might haul logs anywhere from 12 to 100 ft long, totaling 1,000 to 2,000 board feet of timber at a time, slung under that high axle and pulled by a team of horses with a teamster walking alongside.

[00:12:22]It took real skill to drive them.

[00:12:25]Balancing a heavy log under the axle, keeping the load from swinging or tipping on a slope, managing the horses through the stumps, all of it was an art, learned by doing and paid for, sometimes, in broken bones. A shifting log or a startled team could crush a man against a stump in a moment, and the woods were full of ways to be hurt or killed. A falling tree could twist off its stump and kick back. A log could roll on the river drive and pull a man under the water. A chain under tension could snap and cut a man down.

[00:12:54]The big wheels themselves, for all their cleverness, were 10 ft of heavy timber and iron carrying a ton of pine over rough ground, and on a downhill grade, >> [music] >> a load that got away could run the horses down and crush whoever stood in its path. The men who worked the Michigan pine accepted a level of daily danger that would shut a modern job site down within the hour, and they did it for a dollar a day, far from any doctor.

[00:13:17]And when one of them was killed, the work usually went on that same afternoon. That too is part of what the gleaming museum wheels do not show.

[00:13:25]The teamsters who drove the big wheels were the unsung professionals of the Michigan woods, and they are exactly the men the record does not name. We have the wheels in museums, beautifully preserved, 10 ft tall and gleaming.

[00:13:39]We do not have the names of the men who walked a thousand miles beside them with a fortune in pine swinging under the axle.

[00:13:46]And the big wheels were only one stage of an extraordinary journey. Once the logs were hauled to the bank of a river, the Manistee or the Betsy or one of a hundred others, >> [music] >> they waited for spring. When the ice broke and the snow melt sent the rivers running high, the loggers rolled the winter's cut into the water and drove it downstream. A churning flood of logs that men called river hogs rode and wrangled with long pike poles and peaveys, leaping from log to log, breaking up the jams in some of the most dangerous [music] work in the whole trade. To tell whose logs were whose when they all arrived together at the mill, >> [music] >> every company stamped the ends of its logs with a registered mark, hammered in with a branding hammer, a private alphabet of lines and shapes and initials filed by law with the county.

[00:14:32]At the mill, a man called the sorter, who carried every company's mark in his head, read those stamped ends as the logs floated past and sent each one to its rightful owner.

[00:14:43]It was a whole system running from the axe in the deep woods to the wheel to the river to the mark to the mill, and Overpack's wheels were the piece that finally let it run all year round.

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[00:15:00]One click and then come right back.

[00:15:02]Overpack's invention did not stay in Manistee. It spread across the logging country of America like wildfire because it solved a problem every logger had.

[00:15:12]He built them in three sizes, the largest a full 10 ft across in his shop on Pine Street, and he sold them as fast as he could make them, shipping them out by railroad to logging operations all over the country. By one count, at least 65 different lumber companies in Michigan alone put his big wheels to work. And they traveled far beyond Michigan, into the forests of the South and the West, up into Canada, and even overseas. During the First World War, the United States Army took several pairs of the big wheels to France to haul timber for the war effort.

[00:15:43]Overpack showed his wheels at the Great World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, the World's Fair that announced America as an industrial power. And the giant wheels from a small Michigan shop stood there among the wonders of the age. A pair cost around $350, a real sum in those days. And they were worth every penny to a company that could now cut and haul all year instead of half of it.

[00:16:06]A blacksmith in a lumber town had built one of the signature tools of the entire American logging era.

[00:16:12]I find I like Silas Overpack from the little the record gives us.

[00:16:17]He was not a tycoon or an inventor with a laboratory.

[00:16:21]He was a working blacksmith in a lumber town, a man who made wagons and shod horses and mended whatever the town brought him, and who looked at the single hardest problem the loggers around him faced and quietly solved it in his own shop. He never seems to have grown rich from it the way the lumber barons did. He kept his shop, employed his dozen or so hands, built his wheels, and sold them honestly year after year for the better part of 50 years.

[00:16:51]There is a particular kind of American genius in that, the practical man at the workbench who changes an entire industry >> [music] >> and then goes back to work the next morning. Most of the people who shaped the real working world were exactly these men, and almost none of them ever got a statue.

[00:17:06]One quick note, I turned the full story into a book, everything the records gave me.

[00:17:11]If you want it, the link is [music] in the description. And now I have to tell you the other half of this story, the part that the gleaming museum wheels do not show, because it is the part that gives the whole thing its weight.

[00:17:22]The big wheels worked.

[00:17:24]They worked so well that they helped the loggers do the one thing that, in the end, brought the whole boom [music] crashing down.

[00:17:33]They helped them cut the forest faster.

[00:17:35]Before the wheels, the seasons themselves had put a limit on how quickly Michigan could be logged because the hauling stopped every spring.

[00:17:43]Overpack's wheels removed that limit.

[00:17:45]Now the cutting could run nearly year-round, and it did. And the great pine forest, which everyone had treated as if it were endless, turned out to be nothing of the kind.

[00:17:55]Within roughly a single human lifetime, the seemingly inexhaustible white pine of Michigan was almost entirely cut out.

[00:18:03]By the end of the 1800s, the giants were nearly gone.

[00:18:07]And what was left behind in their place [music] was a haunting thing the loggers called the stump prairie.

[00:18:12]Mile after mile of cleared, sandy ground studded with the stumps of trees that had taken two centuries to grow and a few decades to fell.

[00:18:22]And the cutover land did not simply rest. The dry slash and the bare ground left behind [music] burned again and again in some of the worst forest fires in American history.

[00:18:33]In the autumn of 1871, on the very same days that the famous Great Chicago Fire was burning, a series of enormous fires swept across the cutover forests of Michigan fed by the dry brush and slash the loggers had left behind and driven by the same fierce winds. 10 years later, in 1881, it happened again. And worse. In the part of the state they called the thumb, a firestorm raced across whole counties in a matter of hours and killed nearly 300 people, burned thousands of homes and barns, and left some 14,000 people destitute. That fire holds one more small place in history.

[00:19:09]The newly founded American Red Cross, started that very year by Clara Barton, carried out its first disaster relief operation in answer to the Michigan fire of 1881.

[00:19:19]The forest had not only been cut, the ruin that was left behind burned, and people died in the burning.

[00:19:25]These fires are part of the true cost of how fast and how carelessly the great pinery was taken down.

[00:19:33]The land that had held one of the greatest forests on Earth became, in places, a scarred and smoking waste. I want to be careful and fair here because it would be easy this into a simple story of greed and ruin, [music] and it was not simple. The men who cut that forest were not villains. They were workers and businessmen doing what their whole society asked of them.

[00:19:52]Supplying the lumber that built the farms and the cities and the railroads of a growing nation, and almost no one at the time understood that a forest could actually run out. The white pine of Michigan built a great deal of America. The tragedy is that it was treated as though it could never end, and the tools that made the cutting so efficient, Overpack's wonderful wheels of lumber, helped prove, the hard way, that it could. By the early 1900s, the big wheels themselves were passing into history for two reasons at once.

[00:20:21]The forest that had needed them was mostly cut, and new machines were arriving that did the job differently.

[00:20:26]Steam-powered skidders and, a little later, gasoline tractors and the railroad reaching deeper into the woods took over the hauling that horses and big wheels had done.

[00:20:36]It is one of the patterns of these stories that a tool can be very nearly perfect and still be temporary. The big wheels were the ideal answer to a particular world, a world of vast pine forests, cheap horses, plentiful labor, and no machine power in the deep woods.

[00:20:52]When that world changed, when the easy pine was gone and steam and gasoline finally reached into the forest, the wheels had no place left.

[00:21:00]The logging railroads pushed spur lines right up to the cutting, so the logs no longer had to be hauled overland to a river at all. The steam skidder, a stationary engine that dragged logs in on a cable, did the yarding that the wheels and horses had done faster and without feed or rest. The wheels were not beaten because they were bad. They were retired because the forest that had needed them was nearly gone and the machine age had at last arrived in the woods.

[00:21:25]They had ruled the summer haul for about 50 years, which is a long reign for any tool. By the 1920s, the great wheels were going still. The horses retired, the teamsters moved on or grown old.

[00:21:38]Silas Overpack lived until 1927, long enough to see the forest that had made his invention famous very nearly vanish and to see the machines that would replace it arrive. His son carried on the family business for a while and then ended the making of big wheels and turned the old shop to other work.

[00:21:55]The age of the horse in the woods was over, but the wheels did not entirely disappear.

[00:22:00]And that is a small grace. Because they were so large and so striking and because Michigan came to understand, too late, what it had lost, pairs of Overpack's big wheels were saved.

[00:22:12]You can see them today standing in logging museums across the state, 10 ft tall, restored and gleaming, often with a single great pine log slung beneath the axle to show how they worked. They have become, in a way, the symbol of the whole Michigan pine era, the one machine everyone recognizes.

[00:22:29]A pair of them even became a roadside monument. The tool that helped cut the forest down is now the thing that helps people remember the forest was ever there. And in one place, the forest itself was saved, just barely. In 1927, the same year Silas Overpack died, a woman named Karen Hartwick bought a large tract of land in northern Michigan that still held something almost nobody had left, a stand of old-growth white pine >> [music] >> that the loggers had somehow never reached.

[00:22:56]She gave it to the state of Michigan on the condition that the virgin pines be preserved, in her own words, forever and for all time.

[00:23:04]Today, that stand at Hartwick Pines is one of the last patches of the great original forest still standing. A few dozen acres of giant white pines more than 300 years old, the kind of trees that once covered the whole north and now survive in this one small remnant.

[00:23:18]And right beside the living giants, the state built a logging museum, recreating an 1890s camp, the bunkhouse and the cook's shack and the blacksmith shop.

[00:23:27]And there, of course, stand a pair of Silas Overpack's big wheels. You can walk from the great living pines straight [music] to the machine that helped take the rest of them down in the space of a few minutes.

[00:23:38]There is no better place to feel the whole story at once, the wonder and the loss together.

[00:23:43]Here is the thought I will leave you with, and you can tell me in the comments whether you think I have it right. We like our history to have heroes and villains, and the story of the big wheels refuses to give us either. Silas Overpack was not a villain.

[00:23:57]He was a brilliant, practical craftsman who saw a problem every logger faced and solved it with a pair of wheels so simple and so effective that they spread across a continent and crossed an ocean.

[00:24:09]And the teamsters who drove them were not villains, either.

[00:24:12]They were working men doing the hardest kind of labor for a daily wage, and most of them died as anonymous as they had lived.

[00:24:19]The forest they cut was real, the lumber built a real nation, and the loss of that forest was real, too.

[00:24:25]All of it is true at once. The big wheels are a triumph of homemade American engineering, and they are a monument to one of the great vanishings, the day the endless forest turned out to have an end.

[00:24:37]I think the honest thing is to hold both, to admire the wheels and to mourn the pines, and to remember the one man we can name and the thousands we [music] cannot, all of them caught up together in the cutting of a forest that no one believed could ever run out.

[00:24:52]The wheels stand in the museums now, taller than the people who who to look at them. And the giant pines they were built to move are gone from almost everywhere except that one saved grove.

[00:25:02]Stand between a pair of those wheels and you are standing inside the exact machine that a blacksmith dreamed up in a Michigan shop to beat the summer mud and you are also standing at the edge of one of the great vanishings in American history. Both of those things are true and the wheels hold them both.

[00:25:18]I think that is why they stay with me.

[00:25:20]They are beautiful and they are a warning and they were built by good men who could not see as almost no one then could that the endless thing they were harvesting had a bottom after all and that the bottom would arrive within their own lifetimes. One more thing, if you want to be part of the inner circle on this channel, join final boss for $9.99 a month. Public shout out in upcoming videos, members only investigations, plus everything from boss tier. Link in description. See you in the next one.