Echoes of Puget Sound: Fifty Years of Logging and Steamboating

Torger Birkeland

Jul 2019 · Pickle Partners Publishing

About this eBook

In the early days of the twentieth century, the Mosquito Fleet played a colorful and important part in the life and economic development of the Puget Sound country. The fleet was composed of a myriad of steamboats of all sizes—each with a personality of its own. Many of these vessels have become legendary. Scurrying around the Sound in every sort of weather, the only links between many towns and settlements, these craft formed the largest and most picturesque fleet of its kind the world has known. They wrote an important chapter in Pacific Northwest history. This is their story, told by one who helped to bring the Mosquito Fleet to its golden age and then watched it wane.

ECHOES OF PUGET SOUND is also the story of Torger Birkeland, who came to America as a young lad with his family and started working as a whistle punk in loggings at the age of eleven. At twenty he finally turned to sea, and in this book, he gives a vivid account of his experiences of life on Puget Sound in those early 1900s.

Richly illustrated throughout with black & white photographs.

Ratings and reviews

We need more Ferry Boat books featuring the Poulsbo connection. Jim Fosse, son of Capt. A.G. Fosse and brother of Capt. A.L. Fosse.

About the author

Torger Birkeland was born on July 29, 1893 on a farm near the little town of Sauda, at the head of the Ryfylke Fjord near Stavanger, Norway. He emigrated to the United States in 1903 with his mother and siblings, where his father had built a modest home at Vinland, near Hood Canal, in preparation for his family’s arrival. At the age of eleven Torger was initiated into the rough-and-tumble life of a logger. Tom, as he was nicknamed, covered the Puget Sound country with his blanket bundle slung over his shoulder, working from logging camp to logging camp. He started as a whistle punk and learned the techniques of steam-donkey logging. Ambitious, and knowing there was little prospect for advancement as a logger, Tom felt the lure of salt water, and at the age of sixteen shipped a cook and deck hand on the cannery tender Nebraska. His seafaring career began in earnest in 1913 on the famous Sound steamer Hyak as cabin boy. He soon realised that he had found his calling and, after serving the required time on deck, he obtained his papers as male and second-class pilot, and later his unlimited master’s and pilot’s licenses for the waters. Cpt. Birkeland saw the Mosquito Fleet wane and the new fleets develop. During a career spanning almost fifty years, he slowly but steadily advanced from the bottom positions in the logging and the steamboat world to Senior Master of the M.S. Evergreen State, having been master of the state of Washington’s finest steam vessels and ferryboats. He died in Seattle, Washington on March 15, 1990, aged 96. Joshua Green (1869-1975) was an American sternwheeler captain, businessman, and banker. He rose from being a seaman to being the dominant figure of the Puget Sound Mosquito Fleet, before becoming a banker. Living to the age of 105 and active in business almost to the end of his life, he became an invaluable source of information about the history of Seattle and the Puget Sound region.