A Life in the Woods: Harry Forse

I'm native-born in Vancouver. My family was living at the time at Lake Buntzen, which was one of the B.C. Electric's hydroelectric plants. Dad was an operator there. And, uh, my initial schooling was in Vancouver, and we moved around to places like Stave Falls (up the Fraser Valley), Stave Lake, and places like that. And I went to school in Queen Mary's School in Point Grey, and Lord Byng High School. And when I graduated from Lord Byng High School, I got myself a job as a section hand at the Bloedel, Stewart & Welch logging operation at Menzies Bay.

I went up there I was something like 17, or something like that. And, ah, I worked several positions as a section hand, chokerman, rigging-up crew, second loading, and eventually the engineering staff -- Harold Headly Hutchinson was head of it -- asked me if I wanted to come out as an axeman with their survey crew. So that's what got me started with the railroad-location end of this. It was a very easy job, in those days, you didn't have to have too much educational background to lay out railways -- long as you could figure your curves, and your profiles, and your cuts and fills, and your earth work, that was all you needed in those days. And a little bit of bridge building at the same time. But I, uh, I did that until 1929,1 guess. And then I decided that, well, this wasn't going to be quite enough, and I went down to Oregon State College, in the school of forestry there.

Robert Turner: At Corvalis?

Harry Forse: Corvalis, that's right. And graduated from there in 1934. Umm, it took me five years to do a four-year course, because they wouldn't allow me in because I didn't have a sufficient high-school education for a regular student enrollment there. And I had to enroll as a special student, and complete my deficiencies in the academic field through their college credits, and it took me an extra year to do that. So I graduated from there in 1934, and came back to work for the same old boss, Hutchinson ... at Franklin River -- in 1934, yeah.

Robert Turner: What was the story at Franklin River at that time?

Harry Forse: They were just starting up, at that time. And, uh, Charlie Dunham and I pioneered it down there, and we laid out the town site, and the boom grounds, and started locating the main line at Franklin River, that year. And "Hutch" Hutchinson, as we called him, had irons in other fires -- at Great Central Lake and at Menzies Bay. So he left Charlie and me on our own down there. Well, we set up a camp, with a little bit of food.

Robert Turner: In the early days, the CNR surveyed a line and did some grading ...

Harry Forse: Yeah, that's right, yeah, yes.

Robert Turner: What equipment were you using there?

Harry Forse: We had, uh, a couple of high-lead yarders, with, oh ... duplex loading system on it. You know, you hang your blocks on the buckle guys of the spar tree and put your loading lines through the blocks and tongs on the end. And there was one man per tong. That was their loading equipment. Oh, we got into some rock work, so we ... uh, this was the first use, I think, of the Caterpillar tractor, and when we got into that rock work we needed some heavy equipment to shove the rock around, [laughs] So they had the Caterpillar tractor there, and the Caterpillar people put a man [technical observer] on this tractor almost steady, almost a hundred-percent of the time, just so he could see what was going wrong with it. Caterpillar had not been into tractors for very long, and they wanted to see where it broke, why it broke down, and so on. And it certainly broke down [laughs] -- shoving that rock around.

Robert Turner: What sort of problems did it have?

Harry Forse: Oh, uh, it was mostly in the treads itself. Yeah, the, umm, the treads wouldn't stay on the idlers, and so on. But they eventually got it - before they got through there - they got it so it operated very efficiently.

Robert Turner: How many men were there when things got going?

Harry Forse: Oh, I guess, when we were operating full there would be, maybe 200 - 200 men. That's including the road construction men, the fallers and the buckers, and the rigging men, and the boom men, and so on. And, well... I didn't, I didn't stay there too long after things got operating. I went up to locate, um, some roads into a new block of timber at Menzies Bay. I left and joined the Forest Service in '36.

Robert Turner: Why did you decide to go into the Forest Service as opposed to staying on with Bloedel?

Harry Forse: Well, it gave me a little more security. In the work I was doing, I was getting moved from camp to camp. And I wanted to get married, and I couldn't see dragging a wife around this way. So I thought, okay, well if we can get with the Forest Service I'll have some security as far as headquarters is concerned. Yes. That was the only reason I left.

Robert Turner: Well, where did you start with the Forest Service, then?

Harry Forse: At that time, the Forest Service had taken over the relief camps. The men on relief at that time were being paid by the government to do certain, oh, certain improvement work, roadwork and things like that. And, uh, I guess somebody up above said 'well, okay, let's get a better program than this, see if the Forest Service can lay out a plan for road improvement, for parks and so on, into the forests'. So they put this proposition up to the Forest Service, and we set up a plan of about 20 different camps that would accommodate these men on relief.

And the camps, oh, let's see ... they would range from 20 men per camp, for small projects, up to maybe a hundred men. And we put them on such park projects as Qualicum Falls Park, Englishman River Park, Thetis Lake Park, Capilano, oh ... you can go on till you come to 20 camps like that. So we took over the organization of work for the relief men, and the Department of Public Works - it would be the Department of Highways now - they got out of it entirely, which they were very glad to do. [laughs]

Robert Turner: Were you building trails, campsites ...?

Harry Forse: Trails, park improvements, uh ... Let's see, what other work did we do? Oh. Oh, yes. We established a few marine bases for the service boats, at that time - like Thurston Bay, Echo Bay, and so on. We would have maybe 1200 men on relief, and we paid them about two bits an hour, something like that, I think. And charged them about $1.25 for board and a few things like that. [chuckles]

Robert Turner: Were they all around the Coast and on the Island, or were there some in the Interior, or?

Harry Forse: No, they were just on the Coast, and on Vancouver Island. Uh, the ones on the Coast would be ones like Capilano Park, Mount Seymour, and things like that.

Robert Turner: What were the camps like?

Harry Forse: Well, they were very temporary. They were mostly a tent, a tent put up on a wood frame. We didn't put anything permanent up at all, except maybe at Cowichan Lake. Cowichan Lake was a good permanent camp. Aw, well - we had a cook on staff, and a foreman, and maybe a couple of sub-foremen looking after keeping the men busy. They got a pretty, um, they got a pretty rough, um, cross-section of men! [chuckles] - - off the streets of Vancouver, mainly.

Robert Turner: Mm hm. And how long did that last?

Harry Forse: That lasted until the War came, yeah.

Robert Turner: Right.

Harry Forse: And soon as the War was declared, they folded up. I was superintendent of camps. And I went from there up to Prince George as Assistant District Forester, yeah. That would be in January 1940. Yeah.

Robert Turner: Well, had you had any experience in the Interior before that, or?

Harry Forse: No, no nothing at all.

Robert Turner: What were some of the differences you found, other than the weather?

Harry Forse: Uh, well... Just the way going up as Assistant District Forester you got into all phases of forestry there, ah, mostly dealing with examining the work of the loggers and lumbermen who held the timber sales. And when I first went up, one of the Rangers, old Bill Lowry, who had been a Ranger at Pouce Coupe, died - and so Doug Gregor, who was the District Forester then, said, "Okay, you go over and straighten up Bill Lowry's office out there." [chuckles] This was in January 1940. So I went up there and I don't think any Forest Service official had visited Ranger Bill Lowry since he'd been there. And so, [chuckles] he was just a little czar! - you know, in the big czardom, or whatever you call them. And he did things his way, and, uh. Forest Service regulations didn't make too much difference, so ... So it took quite a little bit of straightening around. Most of the straightening was to get the timber operators to know what the Forest Service was trying to do.

But, Bill Lowry had done a pretty good job: he had kept a fringe population, who relied on the timber for their economic income, he'd kept them going. They didn't have any necessity to holler for relief from the government - and he'd done a very good job. But I was only up there for four or five months. Back to Prince George. Then eventually, in 1942 I guess it was, I was transferred down to Kamloops, in charge of the management section in Kamloops. And there I got introduced to range problems, dealing with cattlemen and things like that.

Harry Forse: During the War years, we weren't able to get much use of aircraft. Uh, for one thing, when they started to build the Alaska Highway, the American engineers just requisitioned every aircraft there was in the country, and we didn't have any available for us at all. [chuckles] But got down to Kamloops and there's a nice District which goes all the way from the 49th parallel up north to, oh, Williams Lake. And East and West from the summit of the Coast Range to the Rocky Mountains, eliminating the Kootenay, Kettle River, and lower Columbia River drainages, which were in the Nelson District.

Robert Turner: Yeah. When you were using the aircraft, would they be government aircraft, or would they be chartered from ...?

Harry Forse: Yeah, we had a contract with, oh, let's see. Pacific Western, I guess it was, and they would supply the aircraft that we required. But they would make sure that at least one was stationed at - when we were at Kamloops - that one was at Kamloops. And, that's all. And even one aircraft, it was a very light bit of equipment for a district that size, you know. But we would use the aircraft mostly for, um, fire patrol.

Robert Turner: Mm hm. Do you recall what kind of planes they had?

Harry Forse: Well, let's see. In Kamloops, and Nelson, we had an old Junkers. A very reliable workhorse, not particularly fast. And we had de Havilland Beavers.
Robert Turner: Beavers.

Harry Forse: De Havilland Beavers, several de Havilland Beavers, yeah. They were, they were ideally suited for our work. They would get into small lakes and they were reliable.

Robert Turner: Did you fly much?

Harry Forse: Uh yes, I did quite a bit of flying-

Robert Turner: Do you recall some of the pilots you were working with?

Harry Forse: Oh, yes, um ... Don Thompson. He was our pilot for a good many years at Nelson. And, uh, Russ Baker. There are several others. Oh, um ... Yes, Chuck Wilson. He's now a test pilot with CP.

Robert Turner: Well, what were the main jobs of the Forest Service, then, in the early '40s?

Harry Forse: Well, it was ... the essential job was the administration of the Forest Act insofar as it applied to the sale of Crown Timber, Crown Lands. On privately held lands, we didn't have to do with that, except to make sure that royalties were payable from any timbers removed from Crown land, that was all.
Robert Turner: Fire protection?

Harry Forse: One of the important functions, of the Forest Service was, um, protection and suppression.

Robert Turner: What about timber inventory and that sort of thing, was there much going on at that stage, or?

Harry Forse: The actual inventory work was being handled out of Victoria, by the Inventory Division in Victoria.

Robert Turner: The District offices didn't have that much to do with it.

Harry Forse: Not that much, except for the cruising of the Crown timber, which was applied for as timber sales. Okay, we'll inventory that. But the broad inventory figure, as to how much timber one district had, that was a function of Victoria.

Robert Turner: Did you ever have to chase after people who were logging to see that they were paying the right stumpage, and that sort of thing?

Harry Forse: Well, yes, not paying the right stumpage so much, but to make sure they were they were making the proper scale returns, so that we could bill the stumpage and royalty.

Robert Turner: What about dealing with the range aspects you were mentioning, what was involved with that?

Harry Forse: Yeah. Well, I really didn't have too much to do with it, it just, uh, it was just a sort of a side issue. But, um, we had a range-management man in each Forest District, and he would make sure that the, um, grazing leases and grazing permits were issued properly for the proper number of head of cattle, and make sure that they weren't being overgrazed, and that was about all.

Robert Turner: I see. How big an area were you responsible for? Oh, just roughly.

Harry Forse: Yeah, to give it in terms of acres, that would have been a great deal. But for instance, the Prince George District, uh, went east and west everywhere from the Alberta border to, oh, Burns Lake. North and South, from the Northwest Territories to, um, Williams Lake. So that's quite a territory.

Robert Turner: Huge chunk of land.

Harry Forse: Yeah, we didn't try to cover it by foot. [chuckles]


Robert Turner: No. [chuckles]

Robert Turner: Well, when did you move on from Kamloops, then?

Harry Forse: In 1946 we went to Nelson. The District Forester, Sam Marling in Nelson, got TB and he had to go to the sanatorium] ...

Robert Turner: Marling?

Harry Forse: Marling, yeah. He contracted TB and had to go to the 'sank' and, so, I went over to replace him, and stayed there for 11, 12 years, I guess.

Robert Turner: I see [obscure]. And, what were things like in Nelson when you got there?

Harry Forse: Oh, just about the same as they are now. [both laugh] Nelson had been set up as a sort of a mining boom town -- silver-lead-zinc mines started to flourish and Nelson sprang up, and reached a peak, and then flattened off and maybe even deteriorated a little bit from there.

Robert Turner: How many people would be working in the district then - you would be the District Forest officer, Forester?

Harry Forse: How many people? Oh, I guess I would have ... On a permanent basis, maybe a hundred and fifty.

Robert Turner: What sort of jobs would they have to do? What positions would they

Harry Forse: Well, the District would have been divided into about 20 Ranger Districts. And there would be a Ranger in charge of each District. He would be the only permanent ... when I went there, he would be the only permanent employee there, and then he would have summer temporary help, maybe five or six ... it'd be divided into Assistant Rangers, patrolmen, and lookout men.

Robert Turner: The main thing then was watching for fires and ...?

Harry Forse: Yeah, the lookout men were our first line of defense, as far as fire's concerned, and mainly responsible for detection - report the fire in and report it back to the Ranger, and the Ranger would tell his Assistant Ranger or patrolmen to get a crew of men together, and away they go. Out to the fire, whether it was a two-day walk or [chuckles] whether it was a ten-minute walk, they'd get out there all right. Uh, this was before we had any great aircraft organization. And later when we had both the aircraft and the money to run them, uh, we would send the crew out light and possibly parachute their supplies and their tools to them. That would happen in a good percentage of the cases. Otherwise, if the fire wasn't too far away, they would pack the supplies up themselves. They'd hire packhorses or whatever was need to get them up there.

Robert Turner: You had boats operating on the Lake, too, didn't you?

Harry Forse: Uh, yes, on both the Arrow Lakes and Kootenay Lake. We had boats. Not the same fleet of boats that they would have had in the Vancouver Forest District, but... Let's see, in the Arrow Lakes, we went might have had three boats. Kootenay Lake, maybe one ...

Robert Turner: How did you use them? What sort of jobs would you put them to?

Harry Forse: All right. We'll say on the Kootenay Lake, um, the boat would operate out of Kaslo, and it would transport the fire crews and supplies across the Lake where there was no road access, or up to the end of the Lake, into the Lardeau area ... at that time there was no road between Kaslo and Lardeau at all, so we had to rely on the boat for transportation and, uh ... Trout Lake, I don't think we had a boat on Trout Lake, I can't recall it. What we used to do there, maybe, was hire a little boat. Um. We had one or two riverboats on the Columbia River. They were strictly an outboard affair, it was all you could rely on there.

Robert Turner: This was in the late '40s and early '50s?

Harry Forse: Yeah.

Robert Turner: And fire protection and still the dealing with stumpage and all of that.

Harry Forse: Yes, yes.

Robert Turner: Were you getting much, then, into planting and that sort of thing?

Harry Forse: No, no, not at all. We ... In those years we ... Gosh, I can't remember doing any reforestation at all in those areas. Things, things grew so well by themselves, there, I mean, the logged areas got seeded down naturally very quickly. And the burned-over areas they got seeded down just as quickly, because the fires in that jack-pine country, uh, - while they may have seemed to do a lot of damage - it took a fire to open up the lodgepole pine cones, so the seeds would fall out. And so, [chuckles] the lodgepole pine grew up like hair on a dog's back, after a fire. But, uh, in those '40s and '50s there wasn't that large an area logged, you know, in the Kootenays at all.

Harry Forse: Those were really good days in the Nelson area. Nelson was a very, a very stable type of town - although it had been built up rapidly with the mine, yet it reached that level and just stayed right there. And, uh, I learned to play golf there, and we had a tennis club too.

Robert Turner: It's still a very lovely place.

Harry Forse: Oh, yeah, it's one of the nicest - for summer - it's one of the nicest places in the province I think. But the wintertime, you know, it's set right down in that West Arm Valley and in the wintertime the sun would come up over the hills in the east at about 10:30 in the morning, and set over the hills in the west about, oh, 2:00 in the afternoon, so [chuckles] you didn't get very much bright sunlight there.

Robert Turner: Um hm.

Harry Forse: I certainly enjoyed the 11 or 12 years I spent there.

Robert Turner: Where did you go from Nelson, then?

Harry Forse: Oh, I went, I went back to Victoria, in charge of forest protection. They figured I'd had enough experience with the fires around Nelson that I could handle forest protection in Victoria.

Robert Turner: What did that job involve, was that covering the whole province?

Harry Forse: Yeah, covered the whole province. That... just to organize the, um, protection facilities for the whole of the province.

Robert Turner: What were the changes that were coming in for that, and that would be in the mid '50s, late '50s?

Harry Forse: Yeah. The changes were mostly in the use of aircraft, and at that time we were, um, well we were toying around with developing quick-action crews that could be supplied or got there very quickly, with aircraft - if not by floatplane to an adjacent lake, then by helicopter. Those were the main improvements they made in the protection.

Robert Turner: What about the water- bombing and the use of both aircraft and helicopters?

Harry Forse: Yeah, yeah. That was coming in at the same time and, oh, let's see, water-bombing ... I guess in Nelson, they likely pioneered the water-bombing practice, um ... The aircraft that we had for it weren't entirely suited. We had these old PBYs.

Robert Turner: Canso's.

Harry Forse: Yeah, Canso's. They were inclined to break down more than a little bit. And, uh, we lost a few, mostly through the inexperience of the pilots - trying to get in as low as they could. A couple of them clipped snags, and as soon as they clipped snags with their wings, they were down.

Robert Turner: Um hmm. What about using the monsoon buckets, and things like that?

Harry Forse: Yeah, well we used those with the helicopters.

Robert Turner: I think that was developed in Nelson.

Harry Forse: Yes, yes. Really, it was ... they were developed there after I left. Uh, I think Ollie Kettleson, you may have come across the name, he was our protection officer up there then - he had a lot to do with that.

Robert Turner: How long were you in charge of forest protection in Victoria?

Harry Forse: Uh, six years. Six years. I went to Vancouver as District Forester.

Robert Turner: I see. Uh, what would be your title in charge of forest protection?

Harry Forse: Just O.C. Protection, that's all.

Robert Turner: I see. And you were District Forest Officer in Vancouver after that?

Harry Forse: After that. Yup, yup. And I retired there in 1971. Came back here to live. Yuh.

Robert Turner: Things have changed a lot from the '30s to 1971.

Harry Forse: Oh, yes. Yes, yes. Well, they changed a lot, but not as much as they've changed from the time I retired to now [chuckles] It's a different kettle of fish right now.


Robert Turner: So hard to keep up with.

Harry Forse: Oh, yes, yes, yes.