They work twelve hours a day.
A man in Humboldt County got out of one redwood tree lumber enough to make his house and barn, and to fence in two acres of ground.
A schooner was filled with shingles made from a single tree.
One tree in Mendocino, whose remains were shown to me, made a mile of railroad ties.

Trees fourteen feet in diameter have been frequently found and cut down; the saw-logs are often split apart with wedges, because the entire mass is too large to float in the narrow and shallow streams; and I have even seen them blow a log apart with gunpowder.
A tree four feet in diameter is called undersized in these woods; and so skillful are the wood-choppers that they can make the largest giant of the forest fall just where they want it, or, as they say, they "drive a stake with the tree." To chop down a redwood-tree, the chopper does not stand on the ground, but upon a stage sometimes twelve feet above the ground.

Like the sequoia, the redwood has a great bulk near the ground, but contracts somewhat a few feet above.

The chopper wants only the fair round of the tree, and his stage is composed of two stout staves, shod with a pointed iron at one end, which is driven into the tree.

The outer ends are securely supported; and on these staves he lays two narrow, tough boards, on which he stands, and which spring at every blow of his axe.