Hard Times in Paradise

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 875 dent (despite weak disclaimers) discredits the authors’ arguments as much as it denies other cultures’ capacity for learning from Native Americans or adapting European cultural and technological forms to New World survival. Surely frontierwide experience with Indians, various experiments with new forms of cultivation, military conflicts, and resource market evolutions had as much to do with adaptive and dispersal patterns as the arrival of a few hundred Finns on America’s shores. The authors do make a good case, although overstated, for assigning America’s Finns an important place in frontier history. Their exhaus­ tive transatlantic research has broadened the debate on the origins of this unique adaptive strategy immeasurably, and subsequent scholar­ ship cannot ignore their efforts. The book is, in sum, a significant reinterpretation of the early American frontier, rich in example and pregnant with new insight. Richard W. Judd Dr. Judd is on the University of Maine faculty. He has served as associate editor of the Journal ofForest History and is the author ot Aroostook: A Century ofLogging in Northern Maine and articles on conservation and forest history in Maine. His current research explores the relations between class interest, economic change, and conservation in Maine. Hard Times in Paradise: Coos Bay, Oregon, 1850—1986. By William G. Robbins. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988. Pp. xiv+ 194; illustrations, notes, index. $30.00 (cloth); $14.95 (paper). Coos Bay, the only major deepwater harbor along Oregon’s densely forested Pacific coast, has remained a “timber town” from the lumberhungry California gold rush days of the 1850s through the raw-log exporting frenzy of the present time. However, the city that once billed itself as the “Eumber Capital of the World,” with a self­ proclaimed limitless supply of Douglas-Hr and cedar timber, is now faced with closed mills, a dwindling supply of raw material (mature trees), and a severely depressed economy. Although the cycle of boom and bust has long characterized the natural resource extractive communities of the American West, the deep structural changes now under way in the wood products industry—changes fueled by global market demands and rapid technological advances—are altering life in the region’s lumber towns forever. In the Pacific Northwest, with its once vast forests of large-diameter, old-growth trees, these changes will have long-lasting social and economic effects, particularly in places like Coos Bay. How did this situation develop over the past 140 years? What part has technological innovation—from ox teams and steam power to gaso­ 876 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE line engines and computers—played in this drama? Hard Times in Paradise answers these and other historical questions in a scholarly yet very readable fashion. Although the book’s geographic focus is southwestern Oregon, a similar story could be told for many other places in the Pacific Northwest and northern California. William G. Robbins traces the initial development of Coos Bay as a resource colony (coal, fisheries, but, most important, lumber) run by California capitalists during the last half of the 19th century. This external economic control would continue to typify the region throughout its subsequent history. During the second big logging boom (in the early 20th century), jobs were so easy to come by that Coos Bay became known as “a poor man’s paradise.” Hundreds of workers (including a sizable contingent of Scandinavian immigrants) flocked to Minnesota lumberman C. A. Smith’s ‘‘Big Mill,” the huge, ultramodern sawmill built on the bay in 1907. During the next quarter-century, the Smith-Powers Lumber Company’s railroads ex­ tended ever further into the remote canyons of the Coast Range, bringing billions of board feet of timber to the mill. Phe story of railroad logging in the Pacific Northwest has been told elsewhere, but too often it has been couched in epic, almost romantic, terms. Robbins portrays it as the labor-intensive, physically exploit­ ative, and dangerous work that it actually was. Steam power— “donkey” engines for dragging the logs to the railroad, specially manufactured geared locomotives to pull the loads to town, the turbines that drove the headrig and other saws—was augmented by large crews of men in

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