In the winter of 1900, Jeff heard of good jobs in the sawmills of Alamogordo, New Mexico. He packed the wagon and family again in late February and made the cold trek to Alamogordo before spring, when he knew the rest of the itinerant laborers would get there. By mid-March he had a job unloading the log wagons as they came in from the mountains to the east. It was hard work, and though it paid much better than cowboying and was steadier, he worked harder than the pay he was getting seemed to deserve. He couldn't help notice that while he was unloading the wagons, the drivers disappeared and then returned when the wagon was empty and drove it off.

There were no openings for wagon drivers, and a foreman had told him that the company was tired of investing in wagons that broke down, in mules and oxen that broke their legs or collapsed from the weight they pulled, so they weren't likely to be hiring drivers. More and more, the company wanted to buy logs from independent loggers who would absorb the losses in stock and equipment themselves.

Jeff began buying raw lumber, especially hog lumber from the outside of the tree, usually barked and flat on only one side. He rebuilt and reinforced the wagon they had taken across country, the one they had lived in, and turned it into a log wagon. He bought two teams of oxen and talked four men from the mill into joining him in cutting and hauling lumber from the mountains to the mill.

Jeff's good eye for livestock served him well, and the teams of oxen, rotated between hauling and resting, held up and began making money soon after they started. His frugality proved valuable as well. By the end of the summer they had made a profit, socked some money away to expand the business, and split the rest. Jeff put Granny Jane and the children into a small house in Alamogordo, where the boys could go to school. Jeff and his new partners spent the late fall and winter building a base of operations at the four-thousand-foot level of the mountain, not too far from the tree line, where the pines grew, but not far enough up to be into the heavy snow, either. When weather permitted, they cut and hauled the lumber down, and when it didn't, they worked on the camp as best they could. By early spring, they had a good line cabin, corrals, and stables for the oxen and their horses. They began cutting and hauling full time again.