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

CHAPTER 2:
River of Pine (continued)

The Last Days of the Lumber Frontier

Each logging season and each fire season took its toll on the forest resources of the St. Croix valley. In Burnett County, Wisconsin, for example, by the 1880s all of the white pine and most of the Norway pine was gone. "The cry went up," a local historian wrote in 1909, "and has been a by-word with lumbermen every winter since that ‘this will be the last one for logging in the county.'" Reports of the logging industry's demise were greatly exaggerated throughout the last years of the nineteenth century. Year in and year out logging continued to dominate life along the St. Croix. While it was broadly recognized that the valley's timberlands were nearing exhaustion, there remained an immutable aura of permanence about the seasonal cycle of the industry. Life on the St. Croix was locked in a familiar, comfortable rhythm, a three-part harmony of the long winter logging season, the dramatic spring river drives, and the sawdust summers of mills humming at full capacity.

To be sure, the names and faces of the lumberjacks changed. The men from Maine and Ireland gave way to Swedes, Poles, and Finns. The name "shanty boys" also faded from the scene, replaced by the less jaunty "lumberjack." Although it is a name we associate today with colorful images of burly men in red woolen shirts, there was a more ambiguous understanding of a lumberjack at the time. On one hand, they were lauded as men of the frontier, tough enough to challenge nature in her own domain. Yet, in the minds of many valley residents a lumberjack was "a new sort of animal," crude, dirty, and potentially violent. At the turn of the century, with the frontier all but destroyed the lumberjack was often seen as the lowest form of migratory worker, a hobo without a home. There was little Paul Bunyan romance in the way woods workers were viewed. [103]

In reality, woods workers in the last days of pine logging on the St. Croix generally came from one of three broad categories, the immigrants, cutover farmers, and the hard-core, itinerant lumberjack. Immigrants were drawn to the Upper Midwest by seasonal labor opportunities as harvest hands, mill workers, or lumberjacks. Some settled into the life of a woodsman with a relish and stayed at it as long as there was work. For most, however, life in a logging camp was a way station on the road to Americanization and better paying jobs. Finnish lumberjacks expressed their distaste for life in a lumber camp with the following verse,

A wretched home, this cheerless camp;
And "finer people" sneer, make cracks:
"You ruffians, bums,
bearded lumberjacks!"
Our wages are the rags we wear,
Our scraps of food no one digests.
Our beds are bunks
And fleas our only guests.

Finnish lumberjacks sometimes brought old country experience with an axe or saw to their job; others such as Poles or Hungarians merely brought a strong back and an empty stomach. [104]

A second broad category included some of those immigrants who moved into agriculture and tried to make a living on a cutover farm. It was rare for a cutover farmer, American born or immigrant, not to resort to work as a lumberjack at some point in the process of establishing a homestead. Carl Kuhnly, who grew up on a Burnett County farm in the 1890s remembered, "The first three winters Dad worked in the logging camp. He would walk about ten miles to come home on Saturday evening, then back again on Sunday evening." His mother had to care for both the farm and six kids during the long winter. Families who lived farther from the camp had an even more difficult time. One farm wife remembered her husband worked at a camp twenty miles away. "The Camp could just as well have been a thousand miles away. There were no roads, only snow-buried trails. I never saw my husband till spring." Late in life she bitterly asked the question, "Why was I left alone to carry the whole load while my husband was away destroying the forest for a big lumber company who never knew we existed?" Another "old timer" recalled that necessity drove the men into the woods. "The family owed bills at the store for winter groceries and some of the money was used to pay these bills." [105]

A hard core of lumberjacks were men who had spent most of their lives in the woods and intended to finish their days felling trees. They had initially taken work as lumberjacks for the same reasons of necessity as the immigrants or cutover farmers but had long since given up any dream of another life. They liked the freedom of having limited responsibility. While in a camp they slept where and when they were told. When it was time to eat, the food was put down in front of him. The comradeship of a lumber crew provided pleasant association with men of similar disposition without the demands of family. A hobo lumberjack cherished the freedom to quit a camp at any time, collect his pay and go–perhaps because the cook was bad, or his bunk mate snored too loud, or he did not like the foreman, or simply because he wanted to go to town for a drunk. Similar to sailors on a ship or soldiers in a barracks, the logging camp was a predictable, structured, male world governed by well-established, easily-discernable rules of behavior. The bulk of these lumberjacks for life were highly skilled men. They often were specialists, such as sawyers. In fact, it was not uncommon for sawyers who worked well together on a crosscut saw to team-up and work together for years at a time. There was, however, a number of this class of men who were simply malcontents, dissatisfied with any situation and unlikely to lay their head to rest in any place very long. A competent foreman took the measure of his crew fairly quickly and worked to keep in camp the skilled and hard-working jacks. Often men would become regulars, year after year, with a foreman. All lumberjacks shared in common, however, the ability to put up with ill-lit bunkhouses reeking of sweat, bunks with only a "snort pole" between occupants, and dirty clothes infected with lice. [106]

The hard life of the lumberjack, the misery of camp life, the labor day after day in below zero weather, all took place in the remote forests of the valley. Townsfolk had little direct interaction with the working woodsman, save when the logging season ended and the thirsty lumberjacks headed for town. Stillwater was a prime destination for woodsmen when spring came, and their arrival was viewed with a mixture of curiosity and dread. In 1856, the morning after a group of lumberjacks painted the town red, the editor of the St. Croix Union sought to lecture the woolen shirt brigade:

Our town is now filling up with lumbermen. They have been cooped up all winter in the woods; and when they get down here they feel like having a sort of jollification. We would have them understand that we are their friend; we know how to sympathize with them; for at one period of our life we were engaged in a humbler calling than theirs. . .It is not the dress, or the occupation, that makes a man; but the motives and principles by which he is actuated. But while we are a friend to the lumbermen, we are also a friend to law and order. Gentlemen, take your fun, but let it be innocent and harmless.

Such condescending editorials had little impact on the young men with full pockets and high spirits. Besides, as a rival newsman lamented, the business community profited handsomely from the jacks, "there is always room and welcome for a new saloon or strychnine whisky depot." A resident of Marine later recalled that Stillwater was "a good place for a rough-and-ready lumberjack to spend his money" with "about 25 licensed saloons" and plenty of "Woman of easy virtue were also available." After a few five cent shots of whisky many lumberjacks were ready for a visit to "Red Nell," the leading madam of the lower river. Together with "Perry the Pimp," Nell operated one of several well-frequented bordellos across the river at Houlton, Wisconsin. [107]

As the lumber industry spread to the upper reaches of the valley new "whoopee-towns" were developed. Barron, Wisconsin, although one would hardly know it today, was reputed to be a rough town during the 1880s when lumberjacks frequented it each spring. In 1880 the small town of Chandler, Wisconsin boasted fourteen saloons and two gambling houses "hastily nailed together of rough boards or logs. . .giving evidence that few, if any, of its citizens went there to stay." Lumberjacks in Grantsburg were known to "a make quite a racket, quarreling and fighting among themselves and with the citizens, there being no one to interfere with their pleasures," until the town invested in a hard-fisted marshal. No such threat from the law existed at Hayward. A common saying in the north woods a century ago was that "the three roughest places in the world are Hayward, Hurley, and Hell." Certainly in the 1890s Hurley, a town on the Wisconsin-Michigan border, deserved its ill fame with the wall-to-wall saloons and flophouses along Silver Street. Hayward operated on a smaller scale. It was only a village of about one thousand residents and even in its roughest days never had more than seventeen saloons. In fact, the "good people" of the town voted on at least one occasion to make the town dry, although that prohibition did not last long. Hayward's worst blind pigs and brothels were located away from the main town, easy for lumberjacks to find but not flaunted in the face of decency. "No lie about it," recalled one former lumberjack, Hayward was "one of the wildest little towns in the state." Men who had too much to drink could be found on almost every corner "bucking up." For years after the lumber trade had slackened, the proprietors of Hayward saloons delighted in pointing out to gullible tourists bullet holes and caulk marks, from loggers boots, on the floors of their rundown bars. [108]

While there may be considerable local color in tales of wild "timberbeasts" cavorting in saloons, modern readers need to remember that hundreds of lumberjacks, perhaps the majority, departed for home strait from the logging camps, or after having only a single drink with their winter's comrades. For men waiting for a train, a saloon was one of the few places in most towns a dirty lumberjack would be welcome. Most saloons put out "free lunches' for men who would buy a drink. Saloons were also a good place for a laborer to find out about new jobs. Certainly there were plenty of lumberjacks who lost their entire paycheck on one wild spring spree, but these tended to be the hobo lumberjacks -- men who lacked, or chose to neglect, family responsibilities and had few ambitions in life other than doing what they pleased, as long as the money lasted. These men took pride in their physical prowess in the woods and their capacity for alcohol in town. Their life followed a pattern of long periods of hard work and short periods of riotous living. Sherman Johnson, who grew up in the valley recalled a friend who went to work as a lumberjack at the age of fourteen. "He then made the logging and harvest field circuit for 14 successive seasons, each year spending his money for liquor and women." Only when he gave up logging was he able to turn his back on the bottle. More than a few who stayed on that path ended up as old men shaking through delirium tremens. [109]

Logging never really ended in the St. Croix valley. Just as white pine yielded to Norway pine, so to did jack pine and cedar forests become the focus of the lumberjacks. Hemlock, which was regarded by Isaac Staples as scrap, became a very important forest product during the 1890s. The editor of the Bayfield Press proved an accurate prognosticator when he wrote in 1883, "While laying no claim to being a possessor of the gift of prophesy the writer would, nevertheless, hazard the opinion that ten years or less hence will see this once despised timber take high rank in the markets of the land." Unlike the buoyant white pine, hemlock and hardwood would not long float and it could not be driven via the St. Croix to market. Logging railroads and steam haulers were the only way to transport the logs and bark from the forest. [110]

The harvesting of hardwoods and hemlocks in the region climaxed in the 1920s, after which time the few remaining sections of virgin forest were nothing but a handful of wood lots. The Edward Hines Lumber Company of Chicago was one of the few big lumber companies to operate in the valley in those later years. In 1902, they purchased remaining forestlands of the North Wisconsin Lumber Company, including the big mill at Hayward. The Hines Company operated a logging railroad that ran spurs all through the upper Namekagon valley. Fred Etcherson, who worked as a lumberjack for the company, described the way they built their spur tracks:

Didn't take them long to build a railroad anyway. Had their own crew and made their own ties right there; they had a tie maker with them and I made ties for them one summer. The timber stood right in the right of way, see, fall the timber and make the ties, down they lay, then they put the rails on.

Railroad logging operations generally harvested all trees within hauling distance of the track. By increasing the volume of timber cutting the company could compensate for the lower quality of timber available and the increased cost of logging that stemmed from building logging spurs. Pine, hemlocks, other hardwoods would be gathered for lumber. Poplar or scrub oak, that was useless for dimension lumber would be harvested for pulpwood. Hines operated out of Hayward until 1922 when a fire burned their mill. [111]

The final phase of logging in the St. Croix valley featured the rise of the rubber tire lumberjacks. It began in the 1930s and continues to this day and features small-scale logging on selected private wood lots or public forests. During the bleak depression years the backwoods townships of the valley were very hard hit. Many a cutover farmer kept food on the table only by harvesting cordwood from personal wood lots or by working for a logger cutting a tract of "weed trees"--second growth stands of poplar and balsam. Only after several decades of professional management of public forestlands did logging begin again in earnest through government timber sales. By this time logging camps were a thing of the past, as lumberjacks commuted to work in their automobiles. Heavy equipment operators replaced the physically demanding work of a sawyer or swamper. The term "rubber tire lumberjack" refers to the diesel powered skidders used to harvest wood as well as the impact of such equipment on the lumberjack's physique.

Through the long twilight of the logging industry in the St. Croix valley, from the days of river driving to railroads to truck trails, the one consistent feature was the lumberjack. As long as there was work to be done in the woods, there were men willing to take up what has always been one of the riskiest jobs, in terms of personal injury, in America. In 1970, Fred Etcherson, who cut pine at the turn-of the-century and scraped by through the depression hauling pulpwood, tried to explain what drew men to work in the forests. Although most lumberjacks just barely made enough to live on, he was confident that they were happy with their lives because they, "didn't care to get rich." When he tried to explain his personal motivation eighty years later, he said:

I just love to be in the woods. I'd just love to go down there in these woods right now. Lay down and go to sleep, I love to be in the woods. Wonderful place to be.

Etcherson had spent his life trying to destroy that which he loved. Ironically, cutting trees gave him a chance to develop a love of the forest. [112]

Figure 24. A profile of the Bear-trap sluice gate used on the Nevers Dam. This type of gate was developed in Pennsylvania although Nevers Dams was the largest dam structure for which it was ever used. From Ralph Bryant Clement, Logging (1914).