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

CHAPTER 2:
River of Pine (continued)

The Log Drives

Dams made possible the most colorful, dangerous, and difficult phase of logging in the St. Croix valley–the annual spring log drive. In April of every year the best of the lumberjacks were engaged to escort the winter's cut down the small winding headwaters streams to the main branch of the St. Croix and from there to the head of the boom at Stillwater. It was a job where time was of the essence. The long drive had to be completed before the water level, swelled by melted snows, splash dams, and spring rains, fell, leaving valuable logs stranded in water too shallow to float the fallen monarchs of the forest. It was cold, wet work performed by rugged men clad in two or three red woolen shirts and fitted with caulked boots. The most experienced of the rivermen were outfitted with long pikes and they rode the slippery logs in the van of the drive. They were know as "river pigs," a title in which they took perverse pride, and their job was to keep the logs from snagging on sand bars, sharp river bends, or shoals. At obviously difficult spots on the river several men would be stationed throughout the drive to prevent logjams. These men together with those who floated majestically on their logs were known as the "jam crew." The least experienced men were given the coldest and meanest work on the drive, the "sacking crew." This entailed following in the wake of the drive and wading into the shallows to wrestle stranded logs back into the current. Several wooded boats, know as bateaux, sharply pointed at the bow and stern to ward off floating logs, were part of the drive and could be used to transport men to trouble spots as they developed. Even more important was the wanigan, a covered flat-bottomed boat that served as a mobile cook shack. The wanigan provided hot food each morning and evening, although many of the men in the jam crew took their midday meals with them in little back packs they knick-named "nose bags." [48]

The rivermen had to be exceptionally hardy fellows. In what sounds today like the perfect conditions for triggering hypothermia they labored in air temperatures of thirty to forty degrees while regularly plunging into snowmelt waters that were even colder. In 1867 Nils Haugen, a young Norwegian immigrant won a place in the jam crew. He prided himself on his ability to ride a log but on the second day of the drive received a "good wetting." He remembered the "water was icy cold," although his first thought was:

Fortunately no one saw it, so I was saved from being guyed. It was always a matter of merriment to see one fall in. I had on three woolen shirts at the time; I took them off and wrung them out, put them on again, and wore them for the next three weeks, never suffered a cold or other inconvenience from the mishap.

How men coped with the sudden chill of a spill in the river was more important than finding river men who did not fall from their logs. A rookie river driver who had fallen into the Willow River came out of the water cold, badly frightened, and begragled. "I had lost my hat and hand spike and must have been a pitiable looking object." He was sent to warm up by a fire, but after his dunking "I was so scared that I was not much good on the drive." Some men felt that "whiskey helped them to stand the cold water, ice and snow of the early spring," but few foreman allowed their men regular access to strong drink for fear of the consequences to work force discipline. [49]

At night the drive crews would establish a camp on the riverbank. The evening meals generally featured better fare than camp dinners, fried fresh pork was a favorite, although like camp meals the men received as much as they wanted. Nils Haugen recalled:

We slept in tents. The blankets were sewed together so that we were practically under one blanket, the entire crew, the wet and the dry. Steam would rise when the blanket was thrown off.

The workday would begin for the rivermen about three in the morning. This allowed the lumbermen to take full advantage of the water conditions but exposed the crews to considerable danger working among the rolling, grinding logs in pitch-blackness. [50]

River men were paid substantially more than other forest workers because of the hardships and dangers they endured. Young James Johnston recalled his first day trying to ride logs on the Willow River. A branch hanging low over the stream swept him from his precarious perch and he fell "head first into the river." Before he could rise to the surface "some half dozen logs ran over me." Gasping for air he swam for a break in the mass of logs. "When I came up I grabbed the side of a log and, of course, my weight rolled the log toward me and I went down again and a few more logs rolled over me." Only the fact that the current took him to a shallow place in the river saved Johnston's life. An accident recounted in the Stillwater Lumberman in May of 1875 underscores the danger faced by the men working the drives:

Last night Ed. Hurley was brought down from the drive on Clam River in a badly mangled condition. A log rolled on him and broken [sic] his right leg in several places. Dr. Hoyt, of Hudson, was examining him this morning in consultation with city physicians, and found it necessary to amputate his right leg close to the body, which was done this forenoon. It is thought he cannot survive this day. He is a married man and his folks reside here. He is a first class lumberman and will be sadly missed by the river men.

The prospect of earning as much as two dollars and fifty cents per day ensured that there were a steady stream of men willing to take their chances with the rolling, churning logs, and replace Ed Hurely and the other men who went down on the drive. Even the most skilled log riders fell at some point, most trusted their luck that it would not be where the logs could crush or drown them. [51]

The danger and difficulty of trying to harness the natural power of the St. Croix to move millions of feet of bulky, heavy logs encouraged lumbermen to work cooperatively on the drive. Lumbermen who sought to pursue their success at the expense of others were a menace to the industry. On headwaters streams a logger with a heavy cut could ensure the success of his drive by getting all of his logs into the river ahead of his rivals. The result, however, might be that those rival's logs would be blocked from heading downstream and were in danger of missing the high-water and being stranded in the forest, far from the lumber market. To avoid this unpleasant prospect foreman were tempted to begin their drive at the first sign of the break of the ice. Premature drives forced the men to work harder in lower, colder water conditions, with misery and risk as the reward. Cooperation was much more desirable for the men who worked on the river and for the lumbermen anxious to get their harvest safely to the Stillwater boom. One method of cooperation was for all of the lumbermen working that winter on a certain stream to agree to pay one of the firms to take charge, for a certain per log fee, of all of the cut. In 1877, for example, the lumbermen working on the Knife River all contracted with Charles F. Bean to drive all logs on the river. Bean had operated his own camp that winter and in addition to all of the other logs had 1.7 million feet of pine stacked on his own rollaway. When loggers did operate their drives independently they would establish informal, ad hoc alliances with rival crews they encountered on their downstream journey. In 1875, P. Fox and A.P. Chisley cooperated with each other and jointly drove their logs down the Snake River. Once on the St. Croix they encountered Charles Bean and his crew of rivermen driving seven million feet of pine from the upper river. It was agreed to combine their crews and proceed down river with fifty drivers managing twelve million feet of pine. [52]

The goal of the rivermen was to bring most of the log cut down to the boom by the end of May. Much more skill and cooperation were necessary to bring a large amount of logs downriver in June and July. In 1877, some twenty million logs were brought down the Snake River in late June. It was necessary to boom the logs at the junction of that river and the St. Croix due to low water on the main river. There the logs waited several weeks until heavy rain brought a rise in the water level. As more and more dams were built throughout the river system lumbermen learned how to extend the log-driving season by coordinating the opening and closing of dams throughout the valley. In July 1875, a drive of eighteen million feet of logs from the upper St. Croix was hung up near Rush Creek in Chisago County, Minnesota. There simply was not enough water in the river to carry the logs farther. The foreman in charge of the drive arranged to have dams on the Snake, Yellow, Clam, Namekagon, and upper St. Croix opened in sequence, providing a head of water sufficient to bring in the valuable drive. [53]

The numerous large lakes connected to the tributaries of the St. Croix were critical to logging in the valley. The lakes were natural reservoirs for storing large amounts of water for logging purposes. The logging dam built in 1848 by Elam Greeley at the outlet of Cross Lake was one of the first important dams in the valley. Its ten-foot head of water was critical to logging on the Snake River. But the dam was also a bottleneck through which all logs cut in the Snake Valley had to be laboriously sluiced through the works of the dam. This operation greatly slowed the process of bringing Snake River logs down to Stillwater. In 1875, thirty-eight million feet of pine were hung up in the lake. The week required to sluice through these logs occupied a full one third of the time required to complete the entire drive. Another problem posed by large interior lakes such as Yellow Lake or Clam Lake or Balsam Lake was the task of moving a large volume of logs across their slack surface. Small steamboats operated on some of the lakes to pull hastily assembled rafts to the outlet. The lumber concern of Gore & Stinson, for example, had a marine boiler and engine hauled overland by teams of horses to Clam Lake. They installed the machinery on a sixteen-foot by sixty-four foot barge. They dubbed the resulting vessel a "steam wanagan," and utilized for as many as forty trips per season. Each of those trips entailed a load of a million or more logs. [54]

Figure 18. The upstream face of a small rafter dam. This style of dam was very common within the St. Croix and Namekagon valeys, including the lift gate. From Ralph Clement Bryant, Logging (1914).