Logjammin'

It's a little known fact that back in the late 1800s the people of the Pacific Northwest were at war with the federal government. Back in 1870, the government, backlogged by debt from the Civil War and looking for novel ways of making money, came across what to them seemed like a brilliant idea. They decided to start taxing all water traffic. Little did they know that this would not go over so well. Americans at the time were accustomed to traveling on the nation's waterways for free. President Grant tried several methods of bringing the debt to heel, but the only remotely successful attempt was a gold fixing scheme that came to be known as Black Friday. Then, in 1872 he hit upon a brilliant idea. If the king could make money on land with turnpikes, he reasoned, then a President could do so on water with what he called "toll berms:" artificial sand bars that would impede the passage of a boat until a toll was paid, at which point laborers would lower the level of the sand bar enough to allow passage, then re-fill the gap. This would have the added benefit of providing gainful employment to the many freed slaves who were knocking about with nothing better to do. The old Union states immediately began protesting. They refused to pay anything more for the war, which was already a terrible burden. When the Crédit Mobilier Scandal hit, they threatened impeachment and Grant withdrew the idea, knowing he would lose. Still, the idea was implemented in the South. Since it was held down by military governors and mired in Reconstruction, there was nothing that the erstwhile battlefield enemies of Grant could do. However, since Jefferson Davis had loaded all of the Confederate gold on an ironclad warship and sent it to Africa at the tail-end of the war (as recorded in the documentary film Sahara), the South had nothing to pay the tolls with except for old rags and useless Confederate scrip. After much thought and deliberation, the President turned his eyes on the lush Pacific Northwest. They were mostly still territories up there, and the Constitution was specifically set up so that people who live in a territory that is not yet a state have no rights and are considered little better than animals. And not the cool animals. They're specifically put in the same category as the ugly and smelly ones that generally aren't good for anything other than dissection in a high school science class where most of the girls scream and try to get one of the nerdy kids to do the work for them by acting like the sad, lonely weirdo actually has a chance to engage in some heavy petting. Maybe even shirtless heavy petting. Grant knew the settlers of the Pacific Northwest wouldn't take the plan lying down. So he commissioned the building of a pair of monitor-class warships in San Francisco named the Samuel Adams and the Patrick Henry. The soon-to-be taxed territories got the news about a month before the Samuel Adams was to be launched and sent to patrol the mouth of the Columbia River. A militia was formed, but quickly disbanded when word came that any armed resistance would result in reprisals from the nearby 10th Army under William Tecumseh Sherman. The people knew they had to come up with some other idea. They looked around and realized the only resource they had in abundance were the trees that covered every inch of the territory. It was then that they hatched a plan. It was daring, reckless, and brilliant. The Samuel Adams entered the mouth of the Columbia River right on schedule to begin operations. In its first week it collected $14 in tolls. When news reached Washington, D.C. at the same time as a bill for $12,000 for the construction of the two monitors and $100 for its first month of operations, Grant decided to shut down the project. News didn't reach the hapless Adams in time, however. At dawn of the first day of the second week the officer of the watch raised the ship alarm. Hundreds, if not thousands of multi-ton tree trunks were bearing down the river. Its steam engine had been shut off for the night and there was no time to turn it on. The Adams was trapped. The first tree trunk hit the ship and worked its way under the skirt of deck armor designed to protect the fragile hull. Five massive logs flowed in right next to that first one and put massive holes in the ship below the water line. Within ten minutes the only part of the Adams that was above the water was the gazebo-like roof above the turret. The crew tried to escape, but most didn't actually know how to swim. The few that did were immediately hit by logs and shared the fate of their ship. The rest tried to jump across to shore, but couldn't find any footing on the slick, wet trees and fell off. Most were fortunate enough to be eaten by carnivorous Puget salmon before dying a slow death of hypothermia in the cold water. News of the "Battle of the Puget" quickly reached the loggers, but news of the decision to rescind to waterway tax didn't make it to them for nearly a year. Trees continued to flow down the Columbia River long after they were needed. On April 15th, 1875 a man found several people trying to pull a huge log off of the river bank with a team of horses. When he asked why, they said they were from Boston and that they could sell the log back home for almost a thousand dollars, since everyone knew old-growth Pacific Northwest trees make the best homes. Three days later the trees were once again floating down the Columbia River. The logging industry was born. Today those early anti-taxation pioneers are finally getting their due. We owe Glen Beck, Michelle Malkin, and a whole host of others on Fox News a debt of gratitude for setting up and publicizing memorials to the Battle of the Puget. I don't know why they're throwing tea bags in the water, though. Maybe someone can explain that to me...