[Illustration: Loren Roberts

American. Logger. 19 years old. Loren's mother said of him at the trial:
"Loren was a good boy, he brought his money home regularly for three
years. After his father took sick he was the only support for his father
and me and the three younger ones." The father was a sawyer in a mill and
died of tuberculosis after an accident had broken his strength. This boy,
the weakest of the men on trial, was driven insane by the unspeakable
"third degree" administered in the city jail. One of the lumber trust
lawyers was in the jail at the time Roberts signed his so-called
"confession." "Tell him to quit stalling," said a prosecutor to
Vanderveer, when Roberts left the witness stand. "You cur!" replied the
defense attorney in a low voice, "you know who is responsible for this
boy's condition." Roberts was one of the loggers on Seminary Hill.]

In Centralia, Aberdeen and Montesano, in Grays Harbor County, the struggle
was more local but not less intense. No fewer than twenty-five loggers on
different occasions were taken from their beds at night and treated to tar
and feathers. A great number were jailed for indefinite periods on
indefinite charges. As an additional punishment these were frequently
locked in their cells and the fire hose played on their drenched and
shivering bodies. "Breech of jail discipline" was the reason given for
this "cruel and unusual" form of lumber trust punishment.

In Aberdeen and Montesano there were several raids and many deportations
of the tar and feather variety. In Aberdeen in the fall of 1917 during a
"patriotic" parade, the battered hall of the union loggers was again
forcibly entered in the absence of its owners. Furniture, office fixtures,
Victrola and books were dumped into the street and destroyed. In the town
of Centralia, about a year before the tragedy, the Union Secretary was
kidnapped and taken into the woods by a mob of well dressed business men.
He was made to "run the gauntlet" and severely beaten. There was a strong
sentiment in favor of lynching him on the spot, but one of the mob
objected saying it would be "too raw." The victim was then escorted to the
outskirts of the city and warned not to return under pain of usual
penalty. On more than one occasion loggers who had expressed themselves in
favor of the Industrial Workers of the World, were found in the morning
dangling from trees in the neighborhood. No explanation but that of
"suicide" was ever o