St. Croix Riverway Time and the River: A History of the Saint Croix

CHAPTER 2:
River of Pine (continued)

From Fur Trade to Fir Trade

Fur traders, as businessmen familiar with the region and its resources, seemed to be in an excellent position to profit from the rising market for lumber in the 1830s and 1840s. But turning the opportunity into an actuality proved frustratingly difficult. Some traders like Joseph Duchene, or as he was known to all, La Prairie, who had come to the valley as a young man to work for the Northwest Company, were too old by the 1830s to take up a new line of trade. After working for many years for the American Fur Company in the St. Croix valley, Duchene lived his last days near Pokegama Lake. He suffered from poor eyesight and was known to the Chippewa as Mushkdewinini, "the old blind prairie man." Duchene was cared for in those last years by his son-in-law, Thomas Connor, another Nor'Wester who was disinclined to pursue the opportunities offered by the logging boom. Connor operated a trading post on the St. Croix River, at the mouth of Goose Creek; content to continue trading with the Chippewa, and watching the pine float past his door. The Warren and Cadotte families that had so long controlled the trade of the valley from Lake Superior struggled to make the transition to logging. Lyman Warren saw the handwriting on the wall in 1838 when he left the American Fur Company. Leaving the Lake Superior country he settled on the Chippewa River, near the falls and established a sawmill. He was, however, struck with illness in 1847 and he died before becoming deeply involved with logging. His son William W. Warren was the best educated of the new generation. He was a young man with a scholarly disposition and weak health. He died in 1853 at the age of twenty-eight, after completing his manuscript history of the Chippewa people. [5]

Those fur traders who were in a position to profit from logging were men with trade contacts with the downriver towns that comprised the market for St. Croix pine. Logs unlike furs could not be carried over the Brule portage to Lake Superior. The bulky commodity had to follow the dictates of gravity and go south with the river's flow. Fur traders tied to Mackinac like the Cadottes lacked the market and supply contacts to make the transition from furs to logs. Joseph Renville Brown, the less than scrupulous trader who had lived among both the Dakota and Chippewa of the St. Croix had the necessary downriver contacts. He was a classic frontier man on the make, anxious to make his fortune, be it by furs, land, or timber. As early as 1833 Brown had been cutting pine on the upper St. Croix, most of it seems to have been for developing his trading posts and farm, but some may have been sent down to the Mississippi. Certainly by 1836 Brown had begun to log commercially. Located at the current site of Taylor's Falls, Minnesota, Brown had a crew of loggers strip the river flat of timber. He likely had additional logs cut upstream and floated down to the falls. Brown continued to trade with the Chippewa, which may have distracted him from pursuing the logging venture with vigor. Upwards of two hundred thousand feet of pine were cut by his men, but before the bulk of it could be floated down river they were burned in a forest fire. The remainder of the logs was simply abandoned on the riverbank when Brown, with a characteristic sudden change of direction, decided to quit the St. Croix and resume fur trading on the Minnesota River. [6]

Brown's early logging on the St. Croix had been an illegal intrusion on Chippewa land. Indian Agent Lawrence Taliaferro tried to ward off European-Americans cutting pine on Dakota or Chippewa land. But with pine boards selling for sixty dollars per thousand feet in towns like Galena, Illinois, the center of the lead-mining region, the number of people willing to violate the law was great. In 1836, Brown's sometime partner in the fur trade, Joseph Bailly, complained to Congress. "A few years back the labor of a few Lumbering parties operating with whip saws was sufficient to supply the wants of that market, but now that the country is settling with a rapidity unexampled in the history of our country it requires greater supplies." Was it the government's intention, Bailly asked, to let the whole population of the Mississippi valley "suffer for want of Lumber because a few miserable Indians hold the country?" [7]

Even without government sanction fur traders and others attempted to make their own agreements with the Chippewa to secure access to the pinelands of the upper St. Croix. In March 1837, three of the American Fur Company's former lions in the region, William Aitkin, Henry Hastings Sibley, and Lyman Warren brought together a conference of St. Croix and Snake River Chippewa for the purpose of securing a ten year lease on the forests of the upper river. William Dickson tried the same tactic and like the above-mentioned traders, agent Taliaferro foiled him. Men with more modest expectations simply discretely made their way up river with a handful of laborers and after offering gifts to the local Chippewa band, began to cut pine. One Joseph Pitt led one such party to the falls in 1836. He obtained the consent of the Chippewa only to be run off by the Indian agent Lawrence Taliaferro. [8]

Failure to come to terms with the Indians could be quite costly, as John Boyce of St. Louis discovered in 1837. He led eleven men past the falls in the autumn of that year. With logging equipment, six oxen, and a mackinaw boat he pushed up the St. Croix to the vicinity of the Snake River, where he established a logging camp. The Snake River band, which well understood the great value the white man placed on pine lumber, protested Boyce's activities. "Go back where you came from," ordered Little Six, a bandleader backed by more than one hundred of his people. Boyce sought the mediation of the Presbyterian missionaries at Lake Pokegama. They advised him to leave and the Chippewa threatened to prevent Boyce from removing any of the pine. "We have no money for logs; we have no money for land. Logs cannot go," was their firm policy. Boyce persisted in spite of all threats and harassments, although his efforts came to naught in any event. In May, after a winter of logging, Boyce tried to raft his harvest downstream. The Chippewa, in a manner Boyce regarded as menacing, followed the drive. High water and hungry, unpaid, thoroughly dispirited men led to the loss of most of the logs. With the Chippewa looking on Boyce also lost most of his logging equipment when the mackinac boat upset while being lined down the falls. The boat itself was saved when the shrill whistle of the steamboat Palmyra "broke the silence of the Dalles." Aboard were other lumbermen who rendered Boyce assistance saving his boat and recovering some of the logs. Perhaps most important, the steamboat bore the news that the United States Senate had radified the 1837 treaty of session, appeasing the Snake River Chippewa. It was too late, however, for Boyce. The few logs that were recovered and sold did not come close to meeting the expenses of the venture. Pioneer chronicler William Folsom recorded that "Boyce was disgusted and left the country." [9]

The Treaty of 1837 opened the St. Croix valley to European-American occupation and loggers surged into the valley to exploit the new frontier. John Boyce had paid a high penalty for beginning operations prematurely. As did a number of the other lumbermen who were on the river immediately in the wake of the treaty. In September 1837, Franklin Steele and several partners ascended the river in a bark canoe and a scow loaded with supplies and men. They built several cabins at the falls, filed land claims on the best mill sites, and scouted good timberlands up river. Four other groups of lumbermen arrived that fall. Steele's group organized themselves as the St. Croix Falls Lumber Company and construction was begun on a twenty thousand dollar sawmill. They controlled an important waterpower site, but retained inexperienced millwrights and lumbermen. Their mill was not completed until 1842, in part because the site posed considerable construction challenges. Franklin Steele soon sold his share of the company, and the firm fell under the control of absentee owners and men more interested in land speculation than logging. The most important of the former was Caleb Cushing, a prominent Democratic politician in Massachusetts and a veteran United States diplomat. As logging expanded on the St. Croix it became clear that the head of the Dalles was not the best place to locate a mill and subsequent lumbermen elected to drive their logs farther downstream to lower Lake St. Croix. This did not deter Cushing from continuing to make sizable investments in the site and in timberlands upriver, as well as wrangling with his partners in costly lawsuits. The latter worked their way up to the United States Supreme Court. Cushing was not able to establish his control over the company until 1857. By that time the bloom had long since left the bright promise of the falls site. Other towns had been platted and emerged as logging centers. The Polk County Press mocked St. Croix Falls's hopes of being the industrial center of the river. "The ruthless hand of time has made sad ravages, and though the industrious relic hunters might find there a dam by a mill site, they would not find a mill by a dam site." [10]

The ill-fated St. Croix Falls Lumber Company did succeed in making history in its career of failure and misfortune. Quite unintentionally the company caused the first rafts of lumber to be sent down river to St. Louis. In 1843, the company's boom below the falls gave way before high water. The entire corporate stock of logs was borne away on the flood. While this meant the newly completed mill could not cut the lumber, the company could still salvage something if the logs could be caught downstream. John McKusick a young logger just arrived from New England collected about two million feet of logs. These were assembled into rafts of five hundred thousand feet each and floated down the Mississippi to St. Louis. In the years that followed literally thousands of rafts of logs would follow in their wake. John McKusick used the proceeds from his share of that log sale to purchase the machinery for a water-powered mill. That mill was established at Stillwater where it played a major role in making that site, as opposed to St. Croix Falls, the lumber center of the river. [11]

The surest way to making money in this early stage of the logging boom was to keep things simple -- get a crew of men to the upper St. Croix, cut several hundred thousand board feet of trees, drive them over the falls, assemble them into a raft and float them to growing river towns, preferably one not too far south. In May of 1838 Lawrence Taliaferro reported that two hundred men were at work in the pineries of the St. Croix and the Chippewa, by October the number had grown to five hundred. These small-scale operators benefited from what amounted to a free resource. The patchy pine lands of the lower river were not surveyed by the General Land Office until 1847 while the tall timber of the upper river was not mapped until the 1850s, so even if an individual wanted to purchase the land he was logging it would have been impossible. Even preemption claims were not possible on unsurveyed lands in Minnesota until Congress extended that privilege in 1854. With federal land policy making legal purchase impossible and the market clamoring for more lumber, the pioneers of the pineries responded in the best, unscrupulous tradition of the frontier – they took what they needed and damned the consequences. The era of free timber on the lower St. Croix lasted at least a decade, from 1838 to 1848, and on the upper river private fortunes were made off public lands well into the 1850s. [12]

Figure 13. Oxen haul a big pine log to the river landing. From Harper's Magazine, March, 1860.