Luther Metke - Midlife

Midlife

Metke returned from service on the battleship Oregon in 1907, at the age of 24. He purchased a homestead in Central Oregon, on the current site of the Sun River Resort. He was a lumberjack, used the two-man saw to fall giant pines, some measuring six feet across, and floated them down the river for sale to mills in Bend, Oregon. Metke also built log cabins and bridges, a craft he remembered from his youth in Minnesota: he wrote that "a man never forgets how to use the old broad axe", the log-cabin building tool of choice for Metke. It is estimated that he built over 40 log homes in Central Oregon (including the grand lodge at Sun River Resort) and built practically every bridge across the Deschutes River. In the 1920s, Metke became a labor organizer, an advocate of labor unions and better working conditions for workers in the logging industry. Metke's years spent homesteading, as a lumberjack and woodsman, shaped another of his personal facets and would strongly influence his poetry.