Weyerhaeuser Frederick - Frederick Weyerhaeuser and the American West

JUDITH KOLL HEALEY

The publication of this book was supported through a generous grant from the Atherton and Winifred (Wollaeger) Bean Fund for Business History.

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International Standard Book Number

ISBN: 978-0-87351-891-8 (paper)

ISBN: 978-0-87351-898-7 (e-book)

William Stafford, The Way It Is from The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems.

Copyright 1998 by the Estate of William Stafford. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Healey, Judith Koll.

Frederick Weyerhaeuser and the American West / Judith Koll Healey, Char Miller.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-87351-891-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-87351-898-7 (ebk.) (print)

1. Weyerhaeuser, Frederick, 18341914. 2. IndustrialistsUnited StatesBiography. 3. Lumber tradeUnited StatesHistory. I. Title.

HD9750.5.H43 2013

338.763498092dc23 [B]

2012048185

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The Way It Is

Theres a thread you follow. It goes among

things that change. But it doesnt change.

People wonder about what you are pursuing.

You have to explain about the thread.

But it is hard for others to see.

While you hold it you cant get lost.

Tragedies happen; people get hurt

or die; and you suffer and get old.

Nothing you do can stop times unfolding.

You dont ever let go of the thread.

WILLIAM STAFFORD (191493)

Frederick Weyerhaeuser was something of a marked man. His reputation as a shrewd investor in high-value timberlands across the country, his extraordinary success in identifying, purchasing, and managing these wooded properties, meant that wherever he traveled local journalists and business interests avidly tracked his movements. His 1894 inspection of the southern pineries, for example, sparked nonstop speculation about his potential purchase of large tracts of land there. As newspaper editorials pleaded with Weyerhaeuser to invest heavily, one of his private correspondents concurred, arguing that any such purchases would redound to the legendary lumbermans profit and be a boon to regional development. All would be good if only we had a Weyerhaeuser here.

This importuning could get old, and no doubt was a reason why Weyerhaeuser preferred to negotiate out of the public eye. One of these deals produced a staggering result. In 1900, Weyerhaeuser negotiated with his down-the-street neighbor in St. Paul, Minnesota, James Hill, head of the Northern Pacific Railroad, to purchase nine hundred thousand acres of the railroads holdings in the state of Washington for what in retrospect seems a paltry $5.4 million. The saleits massive scale and relatively cheap price tagproduced considerable debate. So much so that when Weyerhaeuser headed west in June 1902 to look over his acquisition he cautioned George Long, manager of the companys sprawling forested estate, Do not advertise our coming any more than you possibly have to. I do not want callers after the style of Black Dan[,] and the less fellows I have calling on me who have axes to grind the more I will enjoy my visit.

Weyerhaeusers preference for anonymity came conjoined with a desire to hold himself apart. For all his manifold ability to work with others, to develop complex, collaborative arrangements within the usually brutally competitive wood products industry, he liked to keep his own counsel. This personal quality is captured in an evocative photograph snapped while he and his partners in the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company toured the region. One stop along the way was at a major sawmill in Everett, where a photographer caught their image: six men are in the frame, all standing solidly on huge logs floating in Puget Sound, ready for milling. Five of them face one another in a semicircle, seemingly in conversation, most with their backs to the camera. The indisputable head of the eponymous corporation, by contrast, stands several feet to their right: hands clasped behind his back, head bowed as if in reflection; even in close proximity, the self-contained Frederick Weyerhaeuser seems a study in solitude.

These definitive traits are smartly revealed in Judith Koll Healeys new biography of Weyerhaeuser, one of the great industrialists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He has been the subject of study beforebusiness historians have probed his corporate dealings; muckraking reporters have exposed what they believed to be his monopolistic ambitions; and in rebuttal his children have written paeans to his virtue. Yet Healeys is the first attempt to integrate his personal and public life: to see the man in his work, to trace how his professional aspirations furthered his familys internal life, and to set him in the larger social context.

Along the way she discovered, as good biographers do, that her subject had something to teach her. Reading Weyerhaeusers extensive correspondence and journal entries and leafing through letters and diaries of family members, friends, and business associates, Healey received the unexpected gift of getting to know a complex, gifted, and interesting character. A self-made man who, not incidentally, helped make America.

That indeed is one of the central themes of this new biographical study. Like so many other German immigrants who came to the United States in the decade before the Civil War, Weyerhaeuser spent several years working a variety of jobs to make ends meet and, in the process, to sort out what field seemed most consistent with his abilities. It is too easy to suggest that his new countrys gargantuan appetite for wood in the initial stages of the industrial revolution made Weyerhaeusers choice straightforward. But it is fair to say that he correctly perceived how significant timber was to the nations development. In moving to Rock Island, Illinois, a bustling port on the Mississippi Riverdown whose many tributaries millions of board feet annually flowedWeyerhaeuser was positioning himself to take advantage of this remarkable opportunity.