riction in sliding along the
skidway.

_The skidway._ By the skidway in the Puget Sound region is meant a
corduroy road. This is constructed of trunks of trees ranging from a
foot to two feet in diameter. These are "rossed," that is, stripped of
their bark and laid across the road, where they are held in place by
pegs driven into the ground, and by strips spiked upon the tops of the
logs. If possible they are laid in swampy places to keep the surface
damp and slippery. At turns in the road, pulleys are hung, thru which
the hauling cables pass. The skidway runs to the railway siding or
water's edge. Over these skidways the logs are hauled out by various
means. Formerly "strings" of oxen or Percheron horses were used, but
they are now largely superseded by some form of donkey engine, Fig.
26. These are placed at the center of a "yard."

Yarding is the skidding of logs to the railway or water way by means
of these donkey engines. Attached to the donkey engine are two drums,
one for the direct cable, three-fourths to one inch in diameter and
often half a mile long, to haul in the logs, the other for the smaller
return cable, twice as long as the direct cable and used to haul back
the direct cable. At the upper end of the skidway, when the logs are
ready to be taken to the railway or boomed, they are fastened together,
end to end, in "turns" of four or more. The direct cable is attached
to the front of the "turn", and the return cable to the rear end. By
winding the direct cable on its drum, the "turn" is hauled in. The
return cable is used to haul back the end of the direct cable, and
also, in case of a jam, to pull back and straighten out the turn.
Instead of a return cable a horse is often used to haul out the direct
cable. Signaling from the upper end of the skidway to the engineer is
done by a wire connected to the donkey's whistle, by an electric bell,
or by telephone.

Sometimes these donkey engines are in relays, one engine hauling a
turn of logs to within reach of the next one, which passes it on to
the next until the siding is reached.

[Illustration: Fig. 27. Steam Skidder at Work. Grant County,
Arkansas.]

Where there are steep canons to be crossed, a wire trolley may be
stretched and the great logs carried over suspended from it.

In the South a complicated machine called a steam skidder, Fig. 27,
equipped with drums, booms, etc., is much used both for skidding in
the logs and then for loading them on th