The choppers grind their axes once a week--usually, I was told, on Sunday--and all hands in a logging camp work twelve hours a day.
The Government has lately become very strict in preserving the timber on Congress land, which was formerly cut at random, and by any body who chose.

Government agents watch the loggers, and if these are anywhere caught cutting timber on Congress land their rafts are seized and sold.
At present prices, it pays to haul logs in the redwood country only about half a mile to water; all trees more distant than this from a river are not cut; but the rivers are in many places near each other, and the belt of timber left standing, though considerable, is not so great as one would think.
Redwood lumber has one singular property--it shrinks endwise, so that where it is used for weather-boarding a house, one is apt to see the butts shrunk apart.

I am told that across the grain it does not shrink perceptibly.
Accidents are frequent in a logging camp, and good surgeons are in demand in all the saw-mill ports, for there is much more occasion for surgery than for physic.

Men are cut with axes, jammed by logs, and otherwise hurt, one of the most serious dangers arising from the fall of limbs torn from standing trees by a falling one.

Often such a limb lodges or sticks in the high top of a tree until the wind blows it down, or the concussion of the wood-cutter's axe, cutting down the tree, loosens it.