Logging was a tough life in the 1800s and early 20th century.
I found the following essay in the files of the Hibbing Historical Society describing life in the logging camps. It was a tough life, but at least you ate well.
The storyteller tells how the logger would work hard all winter, then blow his pay partying in town until he was hung over and broke, and then go back to camp to start the cycle again. The story is much like what you would hear in a visit to the Forest History Center in Grand Rapids.
"Living in the Woods:" A Logger's Story" follows: The article says it is liberally adapted from Roots, published by the Minnesota Historical Society, Fall 1975.
••• Maybe someday I'll get a piece of land, work on a farm of my own. But, sometimes I think I've got logging in my blood. Much as I want to be my own boss, every fall I find myself signing up at a logging camp.
I was born in 1840 in eastern Canada. I came to the United States when I was 15. I've follow the woods and drives for the last 25 years. I first went to upper Michigan and worked, then followed the woods to Minnesota where I've been ever since.
All the camps are pretty much the same. They're isolated. There aren't many settlers around. The land that caused the huge pines to flourish is not good soil for farming. Lots of people make the mistake of homesteading in the woods. They usually give up after a few years. There's little topsoil up here.
We need two bunkhouses and a cook shack, all about 40 to 80 feet. We eat in the cook shack and the cook and his helpers sleep there. In the winter there might be 60 or 70 men in the camp, and the cook and his helpers — we call them cookees — work day and night. It takes quite a bit of food to keep a logger working for 16 or 18 hours a day. One cook never leaves the bread board. He mixes flour for bread steadily, hour after hour. The food is usually pretty good, too. A lumber company won't keep a bad cook. If loggers don't like the camp food, they go to work for a company that cooks better.
We take food pretty seriously — everyone in camp does. The work is so long and hard that meals are the highlight of the day. The cook is the highest paid man in camp and is the absolute boss in the cook shack. Most cooks forbid talking at meals. It's probably a good idea — it avoids arguments and fist fights. The cook also assigns each man a place at the table and no one would dare sit anywhere else. We usually eat three big meals of beans, pork, bread and tea or coffee. During drives we eat four times a day. You could eat six meals a day if you wanted to, though. We always get as much food as we need to keep working.
We live in bunkhouses. It isn't a very fancy place. There's hardly any furniture. The walls are lined with bunks where we sleep. We go out to the barn, grab an armful of hay, and throw it on the bunk. Then we get two blankets — one to lay on and one to lay over — and our bed is made for the rest of the year.
Most bunks here are made out of cedar wood because it drives away the bedbugs. We sleep in our work clothes so bugs are always a big problem. Every now and then we do a thorough housecleaning, but the bedbugs always survive it. It
doesn't bother us too much. We wouldn't feel at home in the camps if there weren't a few bugs around.
One day is very much like the next in the woods. The cook wakes us up at about 4:00 with a blast from his long tin horn. "Daylight in the swamp!" he yells, "Roll Out!" And we head for the cook shack for a breakfast of pancakes, pork and beans. We are at work by 5:00 no matter how cold it is. We never had thermometers at the camp. If we knew for sure how cold it was we'd probably decide we were crazy to go out.
We work steadily until lunch, chopping, sawing, hauling. Then the cook comes out to the woods, his sled loaded with more pork and beans. You'd think we'd get tired of the menu, but we don't, Those cooks know how to make those beans taste like the best thing you've ever eaten. We eat lunch in the cold, sitting on logs around the fire. We eat fast, before the beans can freeze on our plates.
We work 'till nightfall, go to the cook shack to eat, take off our clothes to dry, put them back on, and go to bed. I seldom stay up past 9:00 p.m. except on Saturday nights when we have "stag" dances. Someone in the camp usually knows how to play a musical instrument — a fiddle or a mouth organ. No women are allowed in a lumber camp so half the men tie grain sacks around their waists and play the role of female partners. It sounds corny, but we always have a good time. Saturday night is also the time for playing penny ante poker, singing, and storytelling. I've heard some pretty tall tales, all told in the most sober, solemn way. Every logger claims to have felled the biggest tree, hauled the largest load, broken the biggest jam.
We work on Sundays, too, but not at logging. Sunday is "boil up" day in camp. A huge fire is lit outdoors and a big lard can full of water set on it to boil. We wash our socks, shirts, and underwear, trying to kill the lice that would find their way back to our clothes in another day or two. Sunday is the day for shaves, haircuts, letter-writing and mending. It goes too fast. Four o'clock Monday morning comes way too soon.
In the spring, when the camps break, nearby towns like Bemidji and Walker fill up with loggers. At one time Bemidji had 48 saloons, and I'd bet there were 5,000 loggers in town. And all drunk. Everywhere you looked, you'd see a fight. The police used to go and hide, it would get so rough. A logger would come into town with $100 or $150 from the winter. The next morning he'd be found leaning against a lamppost asking for a quarter for breakfast. When the loggers were broke, there were taxis from the lumber companies to take them back to the woods. Once back in the woods some men would stay for a year. I once stayed in the woods for two years and never came out.
Sometimes the boss will come by the cook shack during mealtimes to talk to us — and the cook always allows him to. He says, pridefully, that our timber has built every home in the state and maybe even the Midwest. But to us it's just a job. We are proud of our work — logging is a tough business. But I wonder, and other men do too, when these logs will provide timber for our homes and our businesses. Or I wonder whether we will all follow the woods for the rest of our lives, making just enough to live, but never enough to get our own piece of land.
•••
Jack Lynch can be reached at: jlynch@hibbingdailytribune.net To read this story and comment on it online go to www.hibbingmn.com.
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