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

CHAPTER 2:
River of Pine (continued)

Industrial Logging

Jams such as the 1886 disaster were a reminder that using the St. Croix to transport their logs left lumbermen at the mercy of natural forces. The acceptance of natural cycles and adaptation to their fluctuations had been an important part of life in the valley from the days of the Dakota. First fur traders and later farmers bowed to the seasons. The first generation of lumbermen also learned to adjust to the fluctuations of snowfall, water level, and river flow. But by the 1880s the patience and resignation that was necessary to work with nature had been replaced by a restless determination to bring an industrial efficiency to the business of logging on the St. Croix. The building of sixty or more dams in the valley was only one example of an application of technology to expand the logging industry's rate of output and margin of profit.

In forest operations the increased productivity was realized by the adaptation of the crosscut saw. During the mid-1870s the axe, long the symbol of the skilled logger was replaced as the principal tool for felling trees by a new type of saw. Loggers had used crosscut saws to "buck" or saw in half felled trees, but such saws were not used to topple great pine trees because the sawdust would be packed by the weight of the trees against the teeth of the saw. During the 1870s a new type of saw blade, six to seven feet long, with "cleaning teeth" was introduced. The teeth of the blade were made of alternating size and shape, some designed to cut others to rake away the sawdust. The result was a major increase in productivity. J.C. Ryan, a veteran Minnesota logger, contended that two men with a crosscut saw could bring down one hundred white pine per day. Just as important as the fact that a team of sawyers could fell many more trees per day than a man with an axe was that they did so with less waste to the but end of the log, ensuring a small but appreciable portion of the log that had been lost could now be made into board lumber. [61]

Loggers were able to move the greater number of trees cut from the forest to the stream by the use of another improvement in forest operations, the ice road. Once the pine adjacent to rivers and streams had been cut, roads became essential to expanding into the remoter sections of the forest. Turning the harsh North Woods winters to their advantage loggers covered over the crudely grubbed and leveled rights-of-way with a coat of ice. Sleighs pulled by a four-horse team were capable of handing between 10,000 and fifteen thousand feet of logs. A full time road crew operating a water tank sleigh, for laying down a new coat of ice, and a rut-cutting sleigh, for grooming the roads, worked constantly to keep the ice roads in top condition. During the 1870s heavy draft horses, most of them Percherons weighing more than a thousand pounds, replaced oxen as the principal draft animals in the camps. After the fall harvest farmers from throughout the valley and from as far away as Illinois would ship their horses by barge and rail to the St. Croix to be leased by the logging camps. [62]

Logging camps became larger and the structures more specialized. In addition to the men actually engaged in cutting logs and crews maintaining the ice roads there were full-time filers keeping the crosscut saws sharp, teamsters, and blacksmiths. In February of 1877 the St. Croix Lumberman reported several logging camps containing as many as three hundred men. Camps such as these were a far cry from the simple one-shanty operations of the 1850s. During the later decades of the nineteenth century St. Croix logging camps were small settlements with numerous special purpose structures. One or two bunkhouses, depending on the size of the crew, were the center of the camp. A separate cookhouse was the domain of the bull cook and his chore-boys. All meals were prepared and consumed there. In keeping with the emphasis on efficiency many of the larger camps observed a rule of no talking at the dinner table. This lessened the opportunity for brawls and got the first shift of dinners out of the cookshack quicker. An office became a feature of the big camps. It was the headquarters for the foreman and the log scaler. This executive staff was sometimes expanded to include a camp clerk to take charge of all record keeping. Sometimes the clerk also operated a small store in the office, selling men tobacco, stamps, and clothing. One or two barns were necessary for the horses. These would be equipped with stalls and a storage area for hay and oats. Occasionally the barn might have a small bunkhouse attached to it for the special use of the teamsters or road crew. A blacksmith shop, maybe a filers shack, and of course the latrines, would round out the complement of camp buildings. All would be made of rough-cut timber. [63]

There are a handful of logging camp sites from that late nineteenth century within the Riverway. Big Brook Landing on the Namekagon River in Bayfield County (T43N, R8W, Sec. 26) is one such site. Here Ross-Owen Lumber Company maintained a cook house and a bunkhouse in the 1890s. A wannigan was kept moored in the river for use on the spring drive. There may have been other structures associated with this site but modern construction destroyed the historic integrity of the location. Another site, near the outlet of Pacwawong Lake (T42N, R8W, Sec. 2) shows minimal structural remains but a large number of logging artifacts have been found on the site, including logging chains, horseshoes, and files. [64]

A large camp of three hundred men operated on a grand scale. The camp would be situated to exploit a large area all around its central location. The Stillwater Lumberman noted that "three hundred men will cover and cut a section of about three miles square, taking off over 60,000 logs, which would measure about 10,000,000 feet, each season." Large camps with a considerable investment in buildings would be operated at the same location for several seasons before being disassembled and the logs shipped to the mill or reassembled at a new campsite. As the scale of logging increased so too did the emphasis upon efficiency. As efficiency became a virtue of management logging was increasingly mechanized. During the late 1880s and into the early twentieth century some logging operations augmented their use of horses on the ice roads with specially designed steam haulers. Essentially they were traction engines equipped with treads and used to haul a virtual train of sleighs over ice roads, from the cuttings to the river landing. Many of the early steam haulers were manufactured in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, although it has been speculated that the first ones were merely converted threshing machines. Around the same time steam power was also harnessed to operate jammers whose job it was to load or unload logs from sleighs to riverbank or railway car. [65]

Lumberman William Hanson employed one of the first steam haulers used in the valley. In 1888, he brought one to his camp near Lake Namekagon. A lumberjack with the colorful name of "Wild Bill" Metcalf was one of the men trained to operate the hauler. Metcalf was more than willing to take on the new technology because the responsibility carried with it a salary of twenty-five cents an hour, a big improvement over the dollar a day he had been making driving horse teams on the ice roads. The hauler would handle an average of eight sleighs per run and because the iron horse never became tired it was on the go during the peak period twenty-four hours a day. Metcalf counted his pay and tried to keep himself awake during the long days, taking naps while the hauler was being loaded or unloaded. As the season wore-on, however, he found it harder to keep up with the machines relentless schedule, particularly in the spring when the afternoon sun made him warm and drowsy. "I'd go to sleep steering the hauler," recalled Metcalf. "The engineer'd toot his whistle and I'd jump a foot." [66]

In numerous and often inventive ways lumbermen experimented with the "high tech" possibilities of mechanized transportation. Even river transportation was improved by the application of steam power. The large lakes of the valley had always been a challenge to river drivers. Steam donkey engines made it much easier to warp large booms of logs across the open surface of lakes. The puffing of the little stationary engines on the deck of a barge replaced a cumbersome string of ponies operating the windlass that pulled the boom across the lake. Small steamboats also became a common sight on headwater lakes. The Katie R's shrill whistle was first heard on Cross Lake during the 1880s and it became a fixture of the Snake River drive through the end of the century. During the 1890s lumbermen used a small steamboat on the Upper St. Croix, speeding the movement of logs as far up river as Upper Lake St. Croix, more than one hundred and twenty-five miles above the pervious head of navigation on the river at St. Croix Falls. As early as 1876 Martin Mower, the iron-fisted power behind the St. Croix Boom Company, tried to develop a steam powered ice boat that he hoped to operate on the frozen river. Mower eventually built and operated a prototype, but its lack of success ensured no further experiments along those lines. [67]

The railroad was the most obvious application of steam technology to impact the St. Croix. In many parts of Michigan and Wisconsin railroads replaced rivers as the principle means of transporting logs to mill and market. This did not happen within the St. Croix valley. A few logging railroads were established in the valley. The Wisconsin Lumber & Manufacturing Company operated a network out of Cable, Wisconsin while the Drummond Southwestern operated an extensive network of standard gauge track along the headwaters of the Namekagon River. [68] Still, for all the problems with dams and jams the river was still the cheapest means of moving the great sixteen-foot white pine logs that were stacked at forest landings throughout the logging season. Yet, the iron horse was integrated into the forest operations of the St. Croix logging district in a variety of ways that fulfilled the lumbermen's growing passion for efficiency.

The first railroads completed in the St. Croix valley were the Lake Superior and Mississippi Railroad (1871), which linked Stillwater with Duluth, and on the Wisconsin side of the valley, the Northern Wisconsin Railroad (completed 1883), that ran from Hudson to the Lake Superior town of Bayfield. The right-of-way of each line was laid out well away from the river, creating rival transportation corridors and a string of new towns. The villages of Pine City and Hinkley soon boasted new steam powered sawmills, although their production did not come close to rivaling the volume produced by the Stillwater mills. As a class, nineteenth century lumbermen were not particularly distinguished for their foresight so it is not surprising to find that the majority of them opposed the expansion of railroads into the remote region of the upper valley. This was particularly true for men who owned extensive tracts of Wisconsin forestland and who feared the cost of county bond initiatives to encourage railroad construction. On the other hand, lumbermen were pragmatists and they began to make use of the Northern Wisconsin Railroad long before it was ever completed. During the long construction phase of the line lumbermen provided cordwood, poles, lock-downs, and thousands of railroad ties. Even with the line only partially completed it gave the lumbermen an inexpensive and timely means to supply their logging camps operating on remote headwaters and the upper Namekagon River. The Northern Pacific Railroad whose main terminus was at Duluth, ran a spur line to Grantsburg, Wisconsin. This now abandoned line crosses the St. Croix River in Burnett County (T37N, R20W, Sec. 8) the grade is clearly visible within the Riverway and the old pilings from the bridge can be seen by passing canoeists. [69]

While railroads did not supplant the river for log transportation, the train did augment the network of natural and improved waterways. The railroad could be pressed into service when there were problems with driving logs by water. In 1877 low water made driving on the Willow River problematic for large logs. The solution was to have 350,000 of the best logs pulled out of the river where it passed under the tracks of the North Wisconsin Railroad and shipped by rail to the mill. In a similar fashion Snake River loggers occasionally made use of the railroad when faced with difficult driving conditions. Lumbermen also used the railroad to provide a steel extension from the farthest reach of the waters to the untapped reserves of white pine in the interior. During the 1890s the Empire Lumber Company operated in Douglas County, Wisconsin, beyond the headwaters of the St. Croix. They built a short haul railroad between their camps and the river. Logs would be loaded on to this railroad and hauled to the river where they would be dumped into the stream and driven down to Stillwater. At the boom the logs would be formed into rafts and then floated down river to Winona, Minnesota, where the company built a new steam powered mill. While the railroad was used to bring logs to the St. Croix, it was also used to send them from the valley. The movement from rails to river by the Empire Lumber Company reflected the economic advantage of moving logs by water. The cost of shipping logs by rail was sixty percent greater than conducting a river drive. [70]

Yet, if railroads could be used to bring logs to the river, they could also be used to take them away from the St. Croix valley. As the value of St. Croix pine increased and mills in other parts of Wisconsin and Minnesota began to suffer from a shortage of logs, the economics of the lumber industry began to dictate new applications of the rail network. The rapid destruction of the vast forest of Pine County, Minnesota was greatly hastened by the opening of the Lake Superior and Mississippi Railroad. Only two years after the line was completed twenty-one million board feet were shipped out the valley to St. Paul. By the late 1880s several railroads bisected the St. Croix, including the Minneapolis, St. Paul & Sault Ste. Marie and the Chicago, St. Paul, Minneapolis & Omaha railroads. These and other lines created numerous small sawmill centers that could tap the flow of pine that previously had flowed uninterrupted to Stillwater. Forest products firms were established at Turtle Lake, Comstock, Shell Lake, and Hayward. Railroads spread the impact of the St. Croix pinery outward, like ripples on calm water. By 1895, those ripples had reached as far east as the northern Wisconsin town of Rhinelander, where St. Croix logs kept the local mill humming through the use of Minneapolis, St. Paul & Sault Ste. Marie Railroad. Diversions such as this became increasingly common and eroded the link between the logging camps of the upper river and the mill towns downstream. [71]

By the end of the nineteenth century the towns along the lower St. Croix, from Prescott up river to Taylors Falls had made a substantial investment in large modern steam powered sawmills. The old reliance upon waterpower ended in the 1860s, a causality of the need for a more powerful and consistent energy source. With this change came a substantial increase in the scale of investment needed to compete in the lumber industry. In 1825, James Purinton built a sawmill and waterpower dam at Hudson, Wisconsin for $25,000. By the 1890s the cost of a new mill might exceed $300,000. For that price tag the lumberman bought a sophisticated industrial complex including mammoth steam engines and boilers, a network of specialized mill buildings, including facilities for making dimension lumber, shingles, and posts, kilns for drying lumber, and extensive yards for storing the finished product. The heart of such a complex was the giant band saws -- the last word in fast and efficient lumber production after 1880. Scores of mills such as these, from Stillwater, Winona, and Red Wing all the way down the Mississippi to Muscatine and St. Louis were dependent on St. Croix logs. The biggest mill complex were those along the river itself. Between 1860 and 1900 sixteen steam-powered mills were built on the St. Croix River. In addition to these large mills were scores of smaller ones built in interior sections of the county, some merely to provide lumber for settlers, others positioned to use the railroad to ship their product. Between the Civil War and the turn-of-the-century at least fifty-five such mills were established. [72]

Figure 20. An imaginative depiction of the dangerous job of the river driver, from Outing Magazine, April, 1907.