[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 offered.  The whole story of the atrocities perpetrated during these days of the White Terror, in all probability, will never be published.  The criminals are all well known but their influence is too powerful to ever make it expedient to expose their crimes.  Besides, who would care to get a gentleman in trouble for killing a mere “Wobbly”?  The few instances noted above will, however, give the reader some slight idea of the gruesome events that were leading inevitably to that grim day in Centralia in November, 1919.