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

CHAPTER 2:
River of Pine (continued)

Frontier Logging: The Importance of Waterpower

The scale of logging on the St. Croix increased steadily through the 1840s and 1850s. The eight million feet produced by the valley in 1843 was typical of output during the 1840s. By 1855, production had greatly increased to 160 million feet. Less than ten years latter the amount of logs floated down the St. Croix topped two hundred million feet. Logging operations became both larger and more complex. To increase the harvest double camps, with crews of twenty-five to thirty men, became the rule. To move an ever-increasing amount of logs more men were required as river drivers and more and better dams were needed to increase the flow. By 1864, more than $600,000 was invested in forest operations along the St. Croix. The number of men employed in the woods swelled to fourteen hundred loggers, more people than had ever before lived in the valley. Little wonder the Chippewa were forced to yield before the advance of this axe wielding army. [26]

While hundreds of European-Americans flocked to the St. Croix to participate in the logging boom the bulk of the land in the valley was falling into the hands of a small number of men with access to capital. Typical of these was the partnership of veteran Maine lumbermen Isaac Staples and Samuel F. Hersey. Staples was the resident partner who oversaw operations from their Stillwater, Minnesota mill site, while Hersey was the out-of-state investor who used his profits from the Maine woods and capital connections in Massachusetts to purchase extensive pine lands along the St. Croix. Between 1853 and 1864 Hersey, Staples, and Company purchased forty thousand acres of timberland. They were too experienced in the ways of the industry to make all of these purchases for the government minimum of $1.25 per acre. Rather three quarters of their empire was secured much more cheaply through the use of land warrants. These were notes redeemable in public domain land. The federal government offered these to veterans of the Mexican-American War. Of course most veterans did not want to begin life anew on the frontier. Historians have estimated that only one in five hundred veterans cashed in their warrants for land. More commonly the warrants were sold at discount, on an average seventy-five per cent of the value, to real estate speculators. During the early 1850s land sales via warrants outpaced cash sales. By a combination of warrants and cash Hersey, Staples, and Company was able to secure vast tracts of contiguous land. When Knife Lake Township, in Kanabec County was offered for sale in 1859 the firm was able to secure twenty-one of its thirty-six sections. These block purchases were important to economical logging. Access roads and dams, and sometimes even camps, could be reused season after season because of the firm's long-term involvement in the area. [27]

While Hersey, Staples, and Company became the largest single owners of timberland in the valley; there were numerous other eastern born men who established themselves in the industry. The first sawmill at Stillwater was erected in 1844 by a partnership made up of John McKusick from Maine, Elam Greeley of New Hampshire, and Elias McKean of Pennsylvania. Socrates Nelson, another early mill operator in Stillwater, came to the town from Massachusetts as a merchant but soon joined the lumber rush. Daniel Mears another Bay State native followed the same progression from merchant to lumberman, first in St. Croix Falls and later at Hudson, Wisconsin. In 1839, Illinoisan George B. Judd partnered with Walker Orange of Vermont to establish the first mill in the valley at Marine-on-the-St. Croix. William Folsom, who came from Maine to the St. Croix valley in 1845, was also a typical frontier lumberman. In less than a year he went from being a hired hand to part owner of a small mill. Typical of the opportunity that existed in the valley, Folsom was able to establish himself in business simply by filing a preemption claim on a waterpower site on the west bank of the river a few miles above Stillwater. Three other partners provided the capital, while Folsom contributed the site and his labor. After a year working to establish the mill, Folsom sold out to his partners for a cash profit. [28]

In the minds of these first lumbermen waterpower sites were of paramount importance in determining were to locate their mills. Waterpower had historically been the principal forcing driving America's early industry. United States surveyors carrying out the job of locating section lines in the American wilderness were under orders to note all potential waterpower sites. Before the Civil War sawmills on the St. Croix were largely dependent upon a steady, fast flow of water to transform logs into lumber. For this reason St. Croix Falls was considered the prime location for industry in the entire valley and it became a bitter bone of legal contention. Another obviously good mill site was Marine and it, too, became the site of conflicting claims. Unlike St. Croix Falls, however, the partners who established the first mill at Marine quickly dispatched with their rivals. When Orange Walker and his Illinois partners arrived at the site with their milling and logging equipment they found two men camped on the site, ready to contest that had staked first claim to the site. Rather than squabble over the squatters assertion the Illinois partners paid three hundred dollars to establish their clear title to the waterpower site. It was a smart investment and within a few months they had built dwellings for themselves and their workers and erected the first sawmill on the river. An overshot mill with buckets attached to the wheel was built besides a small stream entering the St. Croix. The water wheel powered a heavy, slow-moving muley saw. It produced no more that five thousand feet of lumber per day, but it was the beginning of a revolution on the river. [29]

The lumber produced by the mills still was a bulky product and, therefore, expensive to move to markets located anywhere but downstream. St. Croix mill owners had their cut assembled into rafts that would then be floated to market towns along the Mississippi River. The rafts were carefully sectioned together through the use of large wooden stakes driven into holes augured into the boards. The holes damaged the wood and lessened its market value but they securely kept the raft together. Large oars, forty to fifty feet long at the bow and stern of the raft provided means to steer the makeshift craft. The completed raft might consist of a series of sections, together hundreds, sometimes thousands of feet in length. A steady river current was critical to successfully rafting boards to market. In this sense Lake St. Croix on the Lower River and Lake Pepin, a twenty-seven mile section of the Mississippi just downstream from the St. Croix, was the bane of the raftsman. Broad slack water was prone to heavy winds. When the breeze was in the raft's favor, sails could be put up and the craft could be easily advanced. Head winds could delay a raft for days, with the men helplessly hung up or struggling desperately with line along the muddy bank, trying to pull the raft to a point where the current resumed. The Mississippi's normal steady flow of a mile or two an hour was ideal for rafting, although fast places where a narrowing of the channel or obstructions in the river bed caused rapids to form could be as detrimental to rafting as slack water. The Upper Rapids on the Mississippi consisted of fourteen miles of fast rocky water ending at Rock Island, Illinois. The smaller Lower Rapids near Keokuk, Iowa were less of a challenge but still consisted of twelve miles of dangerous water, very capable of drowning a careless crew and busting up a raft worth thousands of dollars and scattering its boards on hundreds of miles of banks and sloughs. While on smooth water the rafts were kept moving twenty-four hours a day. A trip from the St. Croix to St. Louis, the largest of the downriver markets, would take about three weeks. [30]

Rafts of logs were much more difficult to control than lumber. The logs were larger irregular in shape, and harder to secure into a manageable craft. Both rapids and slack water were more difficult to manage with log rafts, yet skilled pilots could bring the logs down to St. Louis. Log rafting expanded the possibilities for milling St. Croix lumber from sites within the valley to virtually any likely location downstream from the pineries. St. Croix logs were regularly rafted to sawmills in Winona, La Crosse, Rock Island, Keokuk, Quincy, as well as St. Louis. The St. Croix valley's proximity to the unparalleled transportation opportunities offered by the Mississippi River, a virtue shared by the Chippewa River, made these areas extremely attractive to lumbermen during the pioneer phase of logging in the region. Later, in the 1870s, as railroads began to expand in the area, and offer an alternative transportation system, access to the Mississippi became somewhat less important. But during the era before the Civil War, when logging was dominated by the use of waterpower, rafting was the sole means for moving logs and lumber to market. [31]

The reliance of lumbermen on rafting logs and lumber created a strong seasonal labor market for men willing to work on the river. In the early days of the industry an unlikely relationship grew up between the little Illinois town of Albany and the lumbermen of the St. Croix. Located on the Mississippi River across from Clinton, Iowa, the town of Albany produced many of the best pilots on the upper river. Rivermen from Albany took charge of many of the early raft flotillas sent from the valley. Stephen Hanks, who piloted the very first raft of logs from the St. Croix to St. Louis, was from Albany as were all the rivermen in that flotilla. That summer of 1846 Hanks piloted three rafts down to St. Louis, each round trip taking close to thirty days. While the pilots had to be men who knew the river, the crews who manned the sweeps merely needed to be strong and willing to work long hours under the open sky. Scandinavian and Canadian immigrants often took to the rafts when the spring rafting season began. A crew of as many as ten men would be necessary to take a raft south. In rapids at least two men were needed to handle the long oars through powerful current. Between manning the St. Croix boom and downriver rafts the lumber traffic at Stillwater alone gave employment to more than twenty-five hundred men in 1860. [32]

The most vital use of water power was not sawing the logs or shipping the lumber to market, but the transportation of logs from the forests of the upper river to the mills and boom on the lower river. The pine forests of the upper St. Croix would have remained wilderness had the river not been harnessed to drive the winter's cut downstream. Nonetheless log driving was the most expensive, the most difficult, and the most vexing aspect of logging in the St. Croix valley. The main river was blessed with a strong steady current but also with numerous rocky passages that proved to be troublesome chokepoints. Save for the Namekagon, the St. Croix's numerous tributaries were small, winding forest streams with limited flow. Success at moving a winter's cut from the pineries to the mill required a mix of appropriate weather conditions, skillful planning, and exhausting, cold, wet work.

Throughout the winter logging season the wool-clad lumberjacks stacked the pine logs in large piles at a streamside landing. When the ice went out in April, that tributary stream would be used to carry the logs to the main river. Some of these streams were so small that a logger could nearly straddle them with a foot on each bank. The ideal size for a logging stream was for it to be just slightly wider than the longest log at the landing. For streams of such size to move thousands of feet of logs, and even more so for those that were smaller, "improvements" were needed. This meant straightening several ox-bow bends and sometimes removing a few boulders. It was expensive, time-consuming work and the lumbermen always tried to get away with undertaking the most minimal improvements. Their goal was to remove logs from tract of land perhaps on a single occasion, at most for only a few years. They were not interested in investing in long-term commercial improvements. One expense that could seldom be avoided was the construction of dams to raise the water level of the stream in its narrow banks and increase the rate of flow enough to move the bulky logs. Ideally the dam could be a crude, hastily constructed splash dam that could quickly backup a head of water and then be chopped open to release its flow. Frequently, however, a formal dam with a lift gate that could be opened and closed would be required. The cost of a formal dam could be substantial -- from hundreds of dollars during the 1850s and thousands of dollars by the turn of the century. The outlet of a pond or small lake was the ideal site for such a dam, as the lake could be used as a reservoir for the backed up water. A couple of days of high water would usually be enough to clear a landing of its harvest of logs and send the mass down to the St. Croix or one of its major tributaries such as the Snake or the Kettle River. Where small watercourses had to be driven long distances, it was necessary to build an additional dam halfway downstream. When all the logs reached the second impoundment that dam would be opened and the logs surged on with the crest of the flood. [33]

During the early years of logging in the St. Croix valley, the value of even the best pineland was greatly influenced by the location and character of the area's watercourses. Hersey, Staples, and Company, the Stillwater logging giant, made large purchases in Kanabec County, Minnesota with the intention of using the Groundhouse River to carry the logs down to the Snake River. Some of the firm's partners were dubious of this plan. "I trust Genl Hersey before he consents to have any more land entered on the G House [Groundhouse river]," wrote Dudley C. Hall, "will be satisfied himself, as to the capacity of that river for driving logs." During the winter of 1855-56 the company set two teams of oxen and about fifteen men to work logging about halfway up the Groundhouse. A dam was built near the camp, and when spring came, the company tried to drive the winter's cut to the Snake and from there down the St. Croix to Stillwater. But things did not go as planned. The head of water from the dam dissipated before the log drivers could get the bulk of the logs down the torturous stream. Precious weeks went by as the drivers struggled to refloat logs left stranded by the drop in the water level. Partners like Dudley Hall peppered the company's managers with requests for updates on the disastrous drive on the Groundhouse. The delayed drive, according to Hall, was "a thousand times more important than the mill. . .I trust you will. . .get them in if money can do it." Disgusted with the problems on the Groundhouse, Hall plainly stated, "I for one will never give my consent to cut any more logs on that river." [34]

The only thing that prevented the Groundhouse problems from ruining the entire season for Hersey, Staples, and Company was the fact that they had operated camps on other more manageable streams and that harvest gave the mill a modest supply of logs. That year they also operated a camp on the Beaver Brook and another on the Namekagon River. These camps successfully sent their logs down to the St. Croix. Once they reached the main river, however, their logs became mixed with the winter's cut of scores of other lumbermen operating camps on the Sunrise, Kettle, Clam, Tamarack, and Upper St. Croix Rivers. This was a problem that lumbermen in the eastern states had faced before and they transferred their solution to western waters. Every log put into the river was impressed with a distinctive mark hammered into the butt end. To sort out the logs lumbermen working along the river pooled their resources to fund a common retrieval system. Initially this was a simple association in which each lumberman reported how many logs he put into the river. When the mass of timber reached the lower river, it was assembled into rafts and counted. If a lumberman rafted more logs than he put into the river, as often happened, then he owed the others a debit to be paid in cash or logs. The system relied upon honesty and trust and could not survive the expansion of logging during the 1850s. [35]

Figure 15. A primitive water powered sawmill. During the 1850s and 1860s single sash saws were replaced by multiple cutting surfaces known as gang saws. As gang saws became more popular steam power replaced water power.