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IN 1987 THE NORTHERN SPOTTED OWL nearly did in Archie Aldis(Red)Emmerson and his forest products company, Sierra Pacific Industries. Waving the spotted owl banner, professional environmentalists were out to curtail logging on vast tracts of public forest lands, including California, where Sierra Pacific’s mills are.

Sierra Pacific was threatened with a potential shutdown. It owned little timber itself, so counted on buying it from public forests to feed its sawmills. “It was either buy [timber]land or go broke,” Emmerson recalls. “This business is the only thing I knew how to do. This was my home. Where else was I going to go?”

By one of those twists of fate that had little to do with Emmerson’s own efforts, a solution was at hand. The giant railroad Santa Fe Southern Pacific Corp. owned 522,000 acres of California timberland. The railroad wanted to concentrate on its core business. It threw the acreage on the market.

Emmerson took a mighty gamble. Putting up all ten of his mills as collateral, Emmerson convinced a syndicate of a dozen banks to lend him $460 million to buy Santa Fe’s acreage. Emmerson: “I hocked my heart and soul.”

A lot of smart people thought that at $880 an acre Emmerson was overpaying for timberland that might soon be rendered unprofitable. In October 1987 the stock market crashed. For nearly a week Emmerson waited to see if his bankers would pull out. Impressively, they didn’t.“I never worried about loaning money to Red,” says Tony Zanze, a retired executive with Bank of America, which had been Emmerson’s primary lender since the mid-1950s. “When we had our dog-and-pony shows, there would be people standing in line to give him credit.”

Not long after the Santa Fe deal closed, the U.S. Forest Service, responding to numerous court orders, began restricting timber harvests on public lands. The value of privately owned timberland virtually doubled overnight.

“We were lucky,” smiles Emmerson. “I bought that land because it was available, not because it was strategic.”