Historic Hood River
Building a Log Raft
7-8-2025
Notes
Captain Dean Nichols annotated this view showing construction of an ocean going log raft. Based on Nichols relationship to George Card, this may be the H.R. Robertson operation in Stella Washington, up river from Simon Benson’s operation in Clatskanie, Oregon. Whichever operation this is, this sophisticated boom operation assembled the cigar shaped raft in a form. It was then chained together, and floated free in the spring floods so it could be towed to California.
Dale Nicol
When you see the two workmen in the center of the photo, you get an appreciation of the scale of the cigar log raft. There are several thousand logs making up the raft and I wonder what the value of the raft is?
M.A.
check out the Benson raft.
Roger Sheldrake
I’m still trying to figure out how they got all those huge chains under and around that crib of logs.
Dale Nicol
Roger, I would guess the chains were laid into the skeletal structure before the logs were placed inside it and then pulled around the logs to be secured/lashed together.
Arthur Babitz
Dale is probably correct, but I was imagining trained sea lions snaking the chain around the raft.
Kevin Burger
Yes, I was wondering about the chains also…it takes a LOT of chain to make one raft. In the lower right, it looks like they are starting to assemble the next raft and I don’t see any evidence of the chains being in place under the bottom layer of logs. Any guesses on how many board feet there are in one of those cigar rafts?
Arthur Babitz
Kevin, a previous period image of a raft had a caption claiming 8 million board feet to the raft.
L. E.
This looks like the River channel near Stella.
I also am in awe of those chains. Looking at yesterday’s photo, I thought there must have been some very tired guys at the end of the day after dragging those heavy things around all day.
Pat A
I keep looking at the ladder raft.
Probably used to string the rigging.
A daring job climbing up the ladder swaying in the wind and bobbing in the water.
Im sure the technique of stringing the chains was intriguing process
Thorn
Just astounding. The links on those chains were bigger than footballs, and just imagine the weight of the chains alone. Amazing to think Benson had mills in San Diego, LA and San Fran, and our trees and men built those towns in the beginning.