Woodsmen of the West

by Martin Allerdale Grainger

  If one’s work, or one’s boss, or one’s food, or one’s surroundings displease one, one can move at once elsewhere, provided times are reasonably good – as they usually are. And one has no dreary effort in the moving, nor mass of stuff to move. Just blankets rolled in one’s canvas, and a canvas bag stuffed with spare underclothes and socks and the other few things one does not throw away on the bunk-house floor.

  Then one is not conscious, like the city man, of playing a small and most unimportant part in a gigantic scheme. One does not feel the egoism-depressing thought that if one does not do one’s little piece of work there are hundreds of better qualified men of one’s profession waiting just behind one’s shoulder for the chance of grabbing it. Out in the woods there is more work than there are men to do it. If one does not do the piece of work one is asked to do, plainly there may be some hitch in getting it done. It may not get done at all. One’s work makes a difference. Oneself and one’s decisions have some obvious importance. Life plays sweet tunes to soothe and make robust one’s egoism. One is vain of being oneself, and in this happy state money can clearly be regarded as a by-product.

  Altogether there is much to make a man feel good – and he mostly does – at such healthy work. Then the dinner-gong booms from the cook-house as a pleasant surprise; he goes down and eats heartily; sits awhile and yarns; shakes off the slight distaste that comes from muscular stiffness and cold, sweat-soaked clothes, and goes back and works with visible result till supper-time draws near and he begins to feel he has done about enough. After supper, lying on his bunk with his mind in a pleasant state of rest, he can feel secure that all the worries of the day are buried and done with for ever. The day’s work is over; it has been, as it were, a complete life. The new life of to-morrow is like the life beyond death – it and its problems can, remarkably well, wait their turn.

  DAVE AND SPECULATION

  In British Columbia, you should know, a man could go anywhere on unoccupied Crown lands, put in a corner post, compose a rough description of one square mile of forest measured from that post, and thus secure from the Government exclusive right to the timber on that square mile, subject to the payment of a rent of one hundred and forty dollars a year (“No Chinese or Japanese to be employed in working the timber”). Such a square mile of forest is known as a “timber claim.”

  Years ago the mill companies and the pulp-concession speculators secured great stretches for their future use – on nominal terms that rankle now in every logger’s breast. But the woods, to ordinary men, seemed limitless. A logger might stake a claim or two over specially tempting timber if he intended, some time, to cut logs in that place; but why should he take up leases as a speculation? He felt that he might just as well lock up a coal mine, speculating on the future exhaustion of the world’s coal supplies.

  But during the last year or two, logs that in the northern country had been worth but three or three and a half dollars the thousand feet (board measure) had jumped to eight and nine and ten. The camps made “all kinds of money;” new camps sprung up like mushrooms. Donkey-engines could be got on credit, from the sawmill companies; supplies could be got on credit, from hopeful storekeepers. Hand-loggers were strung out along every fiord, along every island shore – putting in logs against Time. They could make six and seven dollars a day per man, even on slopes that had been hand-logged and re-hand-logged in days before the boom. Now a ten-dollar price for logs had stimulated the demand for good logging claims, and then suddenly it had dawned on everybody that such claims were limited in number and were being taken up rapidly. There had arisen a fierce rush to stake timber. Hundreds and hundreds of men – experienced loggers, inexperienced youths from town – blossomed as “timber-cruisers.” The woods were furrowed with their trails. Men in rowboats and sail-boats, and small, decrepit steamboats, and gasoline motor-boats had pervaded the waters of every channel and fiord. They had staked the good timber, and then the poor timber, and then places that looked as if they had timber on them, and then places that lacked that appearance. What happened, in the end, to all these claims I do not know. They were sold successfully, I believe, to vague “American interests,” and to readers of advertisements in Chicago and Philadelphia and the East generally. The catching of the English investor seems to be becoming less of a topical pleasantry in current talk; and so I suppose that “fishing for suckers” has, nowadays, to be done nearer home.

  I was meditating upon the glories of the recent boom (boom that was then fading away but that had not yet disappeared) while working one day alongside Carter on the raft. We two were taking a small winch, that stood upon a floating platform, from point to point along the raft’s edge and hauling swifter sticks across from the far side, over the mass of logs, and chaining these sticks, solid – to brace the raft for towing. The raft was about four hundred feet long.

  Suddenly Carter’s keen eye saw smoke far down the Inlet, and soon a small steamboat came into sight and made her slow way to the usual anchorage where the tide flats begin, a mile below the camp. Then there came a man rowing. He reached our raft, tied up his boat, and came hopping over the logs towards us. It was Dave Felton.

  I liked the look of Dave Felton; it gave my eyes pleasure to see him. He was a fine, tall, strapping young fellow, active in every movement as a cat; with an open, healthy face, and an outward bearing that made one imagine sound qualities within. In talk with him a breeze seemed to blow pleasantly upon one, a sort of bracing air full of Dave’s firm belief in himself. People feel it. “There’s a man who’ll make money,” they say, and nod to one another….

  Dave was a great worker, one of the best of woodsmen; and he used to be a logger and run a small camp. But the boom in timber leases had fired his explosive brain, and for a year before we saw him then he had been “timber-cruiser.” He had flown about in rowboat trips, had gone tearing through stretch after stretch of desperately encumbered forest, and had staked and staked, lease after lease, in a sort of frenzy of optimism that had proved irresistible even to purchasers in Vancouver. I expect Dave’s leases were no worse than thousands of others that were staked about this time. I dare say it may pay to take the logs off them some day when timber gets scarce and wonderfully high in value. I know, anyway, that they were good enough for the dealers in Vancouver. Dave was a straightforward, give-you-a-square-deal sort of fellow. He assumed that these people must have good reasons of their own for wanting to buy timber leases. It was not his business to question or to doubt. He only knew that he had lived hard, laborious days and explored some frantically bad country to supply this mysterious want felt by “monied men” in Vancouver and “back East” – and that his work had paid. He reckoned he had made some fifteen thousand dollars in the year. There “was a boom on” – that was all.

  And now Dave had come up to talk business with my boss – my boss who had himself leases for sale, and could not sell them. We knocked off work at once and honoured the bottle that Dave had thoughtfully brought with him. Then we had supper, and after that we set the stove going in the bunk-house and drew up documents. Mine was the pen. Then we finished the bottle and let ourselves go – in talk. We had a glorious evening.

  It was not my gamble, and I was at liberty to feel older and wiser than Dave. The feeling was depressing, because Dave reminded me of my youthful enthusiasms. As I sat warming myself at that bunk-house stove I watched him – and envied him. In comparison I felt myself worn-out; a poor relic of burnt-out energy. But as the evening passed my mood brightened. Dave just radiated heartiness. He paced restlessly up and down the creaking floor, his head among the clouds, where scheme after scheme coiled and revolved. He talked in an absorbed way, he looked at us with unseeing eyes; he was “just a-boiling” inwardly with energy and schemes. He grew breathless. We arrived at the stage of enthusiasm when all talk at the same time, our eyes opening to the marvellous opportunities that lay around us, resources of Nature that lay waiting for us to secure a monopoly upon them. We went late to bed….


  Next morning I found myself alone at work. The little steamboat’s smoke had vanished soon after dawn, taking away Dave Felton. And as for Carter, he had had an inspiration overnight, and piling his blankets and a week’s food into a boat, had gone upon a trip up-river to explore a place where he thought millions and millions of feet of timber might be awaiting the happy purchaser of timber leases.

  So for several days I worked all by myself. I sawed blocks off the damaged ends of logs and split billets of wood – three feet, four feet, six feet long – for the steamboat’s next trip. Now and then during the days I would hear the noise when the two hand-loggers across the Inlet would send a tree shooting down the mountain-side – a rumbling noise of thunder even at three miles or so. From down the coast would come at times the noise of chopping from where Mike Kendall, solitary man, worked by himself. But all these men were at bitter feud with Carter and never would approach his camp. So, except for an Indian gentleman who called in his canoe to try to trade his wife for whisky, I saw none. Winter was coming on and the market for logs was somewhat glutted. Coola Inlet for fifty miles or so was bare of men. Only deserted shacks of hand-loggers remained….

  Then Carter came back, and we two went to work upon the hillside near the camp. We sawed and split up cord-wood, future fuel for the donkey-engine. And for several days our brains were seething with the prospectus of the Coola Inlet Pastoral Colony Syndicate, that was to embank and reclaim the wide stretches of grass-lands on the river delta. Carter could not keep away from me. He had to talk or burst. He had returned from his trip dazed with possibilities. Every ten minutes he would come across to where I worked and discuss a fresh extension of our schemes; much to the hindering of my work. But in the evenings, more soberly, he put me to work upon “the books.” You know the little thin pocket account-books dear to landladies and laundries. Imagine three or four of these chock-full with the store bills, the wage accounts, the gambling debts (one to another) of the dozens of men who had stopped at that camp, as it were a hotel, during the months of that year. Imagine all these accounts jotted down in smudgy pencil, by inapt fingers, at odd moments, from memory, in the desperate hurry of a work-weary, sleepy man. Imagine, entangled with these, the long sequence of accounts with hand-loggers who, from time to time, had drawn outfits and supplies from the camp on credit…. Imagine me wrestling in this illegible jungle of words and figures with the awful complications of the accounts with P. François and Co.; P. François personal; François and Fisher; Fisher and Simpson (a change of partnership due to a quarrel); Fisher personal; Fisher guarantor for Simpson!!! …

  In the late evening when, weary of accounts, I would lie blissfully upon my bunk, Carter would sit and smoke, warming himself at the bunk-house stove and watching his clothes hung aloft to dry in the rising heat. Under these genial influences his stern mood would thaw and he would discourse about various things “a man might do to make money” – schemes that would bring to mind experiences of his past and suggest reveries and chains of thought. He would tell me of his life and give his views. I made a good listener. I used to wish to goodness that I could remember it all afterwards.

  CARTER’S EARLIER CAREER

  The plank houses of Carter’s camp were built upon separate rafts – platforms of huge great logs that floated high upon the water, and that could be towed conveniently from one place to another. There was the bunk-house – the house in which men slept; the cook-house – that was kitchen and store-room and eating-room combined (with a compartment for the cook to sleep in); and the office house where Carter slept when many men were in the bunk-house, and where his business papers lay scattered on the floor. On the same raft as the office was the blacksmith’s shop. The three rafts were moored together at a convenient place within the protection of the boom, making a little hamlet on the sea – primitive lake-dwellings, as it were….

  One evening I came into the bunk-house feeling very sleepy, and I took my boots off and put on dry clothing for the morrow (oh, luxury!), and rolled into my blankets in my bunk without delay. But Carter, it seemed, was feeling talkative; and talk he would, and have me listen. So I would doze awhile, and then his voice would rouse me into wakefulness; to feel the gentle heaving of the bunk-house on the swell; to see the lamplight flickering on clothes hung up to dry, on rows of empty bunks, on Carter’s pensive figure by the glowing stove, on socks and old boots and torn playing-cards that lay littered upon the floor. I would listen awhile to what the man said, and then I would doze again. Sorry I was afterwards that I did not keep awake. For Carter was telling me the history of his life.

  I can remember, half-way through the yarn, the droning voice saying: “… and when I got to Seattle it was early morning. I walked round the streets looking for a bank, and pretty soon I found one – ‘Miner’s Exchange’ it had written up over it, and a card hung in the window with ‘highest prices paid for gold dust’ on it. Not that I had any dust. My eighteen hundred dollars was all in bills in my pocket-book. Them bills made a nice little wad, I can tell you. I kept them in my hip-pocket. There was a feller standing on the edge of the pavement, and while I was waiting for the Bank to open I got into conversation with him. There was a saloon a few doors down the street, and pretty soon I asked the fellow to come and have a drink. We had one, and I pulled out my pocket-book and got a bill out to pay for the drinks. Most of the change I put back in the pocket-book.

  “Then two other fellers came in, and we got talking, and pretty soon we lined up to the bar for a drink or two. Them other fellers paid. By this time I saw that the Bank would be opening, so I went out of the saloon and down the street and into the Bank. I sez to the cashier, ‘Make me out the forms, I want to deposit seventeen hundred dollars with you.’ He sez, ‘All right, hand her over;’ and I put my hand to my hip-pocket to get the money. Holy Mackinaw! but you oughter have seen me jump: the pocket-book and the wad of bills was clean plumb gone!”

  I must have dozed off: the slam of the stove door woke me. Carter had been putting in some wood. He was still talking.

  “… and soon I got into a ranching country. Sometimes I was refused, for there was too many hobos begging their way round them parts: sometimes I got a meal. Once I remember I’d had a meal, and as I went away, feeling cheerful, I picked up a stone and threw it – and hit an old duck and killed it. I picked up the duck and walked away. The old lady was watching me from the door, but she never said nothing. That duck tasted pretty good to me next time I made camp, too. You bet I kept a good look out for chickens after that.

  “I’d been having a run of bad luck when I struck a little town where there was a branch railway line forking off in the direction I wanted to go. I started out from the depot, meaning to walk along the track as long as that railway kept going my way: but when I’d gone a hundred yards or so a new idea came into my head. There was big Swede foreman working by the side of the track, and just beyond him was his gang – all Swedes.

  “‘When’s the next train going this way?’ sez I.

  “That foreman never showed he heard.

  “‘Say, mister!’ sez I, ‘when does the next train start?’

  “He went on working.

  “‘D’you hear me?’ sez I, soft-like.

  “He went on working.

  “I’d had no food for two days, and I tell you I was a desperate man. I noticed the Swede had the side of his head towards me, and I pulled back and let him have one – just back o’ the ear. I thought for sure that gang of Swedes would have piled in on me with their picks and shovels: but they only stood and stared. The big fellow got up off the ground after a while and stared at me.

  “‘When’s that train go?’ sez I. He told me.

  “‘Gimme something t’eat,’ sez I. He pointed to the depot, where his dinner pail was laying on a pile of ties.

  “‘Not much,’ sez I; ‘they’ll say I’m stealing it. You come along and watch me eat.’ He done that. There was cold beef and potatoes and pickles and good bread in that di
nner pail. I ate hearty….

  “… and I got footsore and threw away my blankets. Then I came to a town in the mountains where the houses was built on a side hill. The doors of the houses was on a level with the street; on the downhill side there were cellars built under the houses. The women useter keep their pies and kitchen truck in the cellars.

  “I useter walk right into a cellar, collar a pie, and take it out, and any one seeing me would think I was living in that house. A man wants to look right and have confidence and no one will bother him…. And then I struck a job. You bet I froze on to that job. My nerve was all shaken, and I reckoned I would stick to that job for the rest of my life, never take no more chances of being broke in that blank-blank Chinaman’s country. I held that rotten job for five or six weeks. Then I went out on the mountain making square timber by contract….”

  I wish I had the materials for a life of Carter from the time when, as a boy of sixteen, he revolted against the grinding monotony of the little farm in Nova Scotia, to the present day, when, as Carter of Carter & Allen, loggers, Coola Inlet, his wanderings have (for the moment) ceased.

  I’ve heard him tell of the long hours of work in eastern logging-camps. “Men was plentiful and wages was terrible poor in them days. The bosses knew they had power over us; and they was hard, bitter hard. Being but a boy, I had trouble to stand up to the work. I useter fall into my bunk after supper, and the men would let me sleep there to the very last minute in the morning….”

  He knocked around the camps in the Ottawa, and drifted over the border and worked on rivers in Michigan. Later in life he appeared as a trapper up in the Cariboo. It was on his return from there that his savings were stolen from him in Seattle. Hard times were on just then, and Carter, penniless, tramped for hundreds of miles before he found a job. I should judge that those were the hard times of 1893.