Woodsmen of the West

by Martin Allerdale Grainger

  Then we realised that safety lay in keeping the Sonora crosswise to the channel. When in the darkness we could hear the wave-noise on the rocks close by our bows we could back out into the channel. When noises were made close to our stern we could give the engines a few revolutions forward. We took the old chart down into the engine-room. The chart was half effaced; the light was dim. Was that mark upon the waters of Twofold Passage put there to show a rock? or was it a mere fly-blow? We strained our eyes to see; we had never been there in a steamboat before, and we had not heard of any rocks. We decided that there was no rock. Next day we learned that we were wrong. The ugly rock lay in mid-channel.

  The Sonora, however, did not hit this rock. We blew sideways down the Passage, zigzagging from the shores, in the black midnight; beaten upon by rain and the sou’-easter. We blew at length into wider waters, steamed behind an island out of the wind, and dropped anchor hurriedly in a patch of fathomable water that the chart told us of. Next day we rigged a huge rough-hewn sweep over the stern by way of rudder, and a sloop motor-boat from the hotel towed us triumphantly to Port Browning.

  “Quite an escape we had last night,” said Bill, and thought of other things. Accidents were all in the day’s work with the Sonora.

  STEAM AND THE SONORA

  “Never you get behind the donk when she’s working,” said the youthful engineer to me; “that cylinder head when it blows away like that might take a man’s legs clean off.” But I did not need the warning.

  Carter’s old donkey-engine was a mechanical chimera, and yet perhaps no worse than many others in the Western woods. The work it had to do was, of course, severe. The hauling of a blundering, lumbering log of huge size and enormous weight through all the obstacles and pitfalls of the woods; the sudden shivering shocks to the machine when the log jams behind a solid stump or rock and the hauling cable tautens with a vicious jolt; the jarring, whirring throb when the engineer hauls in the cable with a run to try to jerk the sullen log over some hindrance – all this puts a great strain upon the soundest engine. The strain of such work upon Carter’s enfeebled rattle-trap was appalling. The whole mechanism would rock and quiver upon its heavy sleigh; its different parts would seem to sway and slew, each after their own manner; steam would squirt from every joint. The struggling monster within seemed always upon the very point of bursting from his fragile metal covering. In moments of momentary rest between the signals from the woods, the engineer would sprawl over his machine with swift intensity. Spanner in hand, he would keep tightening nuts that would keep loosening; it was a never-ending task. Hauling would often be interrupted, too, for more serious repairs. But still it was wonderful what the machinery would stand. One way or another the donkey did its work, and that was all that Carter cared….

  Shovelling coal in the bunkers of a liner had been the job nearest to Steam and machinery that I had ever held before I stepped on board the Sonora. I had read newspapers, however – accounts of explosions and boiler-room fatalities – and I had in consequence all sorts of queer, limited ideas. I soon learned, aboard the Sonora, to take a wider view.

  I learned that Steam was a most mild and harmless thing. So the men, for instance, who became scared on board the Wanderer and left her in a storm in mid-channel on Coola Inlet (and never set eyes on her again) must have been as children, afraid of their own shadow. Then I saw how silly was the story that they told of the Dovecote’s engineer – the story that he dived overboard sometimes when the engine had made queer noises. And I kept an open mind about a vague yarn concerning a Dutchman near Alert Bay. It was said that he had been found scalded and the engine-room in some disorder. I learned that as long as a man did not let the water get “too low” in the boiler, and as long as he had “any savvy to him” and did not lose his head “if anything happened,” that there was “no trick at all” in handling the engines of a decrepit steamboat.

  Suppose, for example, on the Sonora, that the condensers suddenly “bucked on you,” and the cylinder head was then liable to blow off. I knew that you reached up to the second set screw on a medium-sized pipe on the left-hand side of the engines and turned it. Then the steam would go into the exhaust or some other convenient place. Anyhow the cylinder head would cease, I understand, to yearn to be a rocket, and you could fall to pondering as to what on earth might be the matter with the disobliging condensers.

  I hate to tell you all about the Sonora, because she was so humorous, and you will think I am piling it on, drawing the long-bow. Sometimes when I used to look out of the pilothouse at the gaunt, gloomy cliffs and mountain slopes of the Inlet and think how it would be if anything really serious did happen to the Sonora – sometimes I used to wish she had been less of a jest, less like the curate’s egg.

  Higgs and I had met her the previous summer when we were on a sloop, cruising for timber leases. She came into sight round the head of Tooya Cove (where we were anchored) one misty morning, a blistered, dingy, disorderly junk slowly sighing her way through the water. Listening intently, one could just hear the faint throb of her engine, that was like the heart-beat of a dying man. You kept expecting it to die away and stop.

  Two months afterwards I boarded her with my blankets and bag at Port Browning, on my way up to Carter’s camp. Bill was getting up steam. The young fellow that owns the Gipsy was in the engine-room discussing with Bill ways of straightening out the rod of the pump. Someone had hit it a blow when heaving cord-wood into the fire. They fixed it somehow….

  I was a passenger that trip, and I sat on the stern writing a sentimental letter. We oozed out of the harbour, the engines going jink-jonk, jink-jonk in a wavering manner. They sounded quite loud when one was on board.

  Suddenly steam swirled in clouds out of the engine-room doors. Burning billets of wood hurtled out, into the water overboard. Then Bill shot out and ran forward. The Sonora began an immediate ominous circle back to Port Browning. I realised that something had happened. It was a mere nothing, however. After a few attempts, Bill managed to get near enough to turn some valve or other and stop the escape of steam. It then appeared that about a foot of the injector piping had blown away. We continued our voyage….

  The Sonora was the second tug built on the B.C. coast, the pride, thirty or forty years ago, of the Westminster Steamship Company. One day, in tidying up, among the pile of cartridge-boxes and empty bottles, and Bill’s town clothes and receipts, and duns from Vancouver tradesmen, and undelivered letters that rests upon the shelf over Bill’s bunk in the pilot-house – I discovered a picture frame, under the glass of which was a faded certificate, which read as follows: –

  I did not know myself what these figures about tonnage and horse-power meant; nor did Bill. He said that someone told him the Sonora was of 36 horse-power; two engines of 18 horsepower each. Anyhow we had the satisfaction of knowing that six years ago a boiler inspector had been confident that an 80 lb. pressure of steam was quite safe. We always used 80 lbs.

  Since 1901 the Sonora had lived a secluded life up various inlets. No inspectors had vented their prejudice upon her, nor meddled with the safety-valve. That class of person, I understood, was too much trodden down “by appearances.” A man ought to be free to exercise his own judgment, and if he knew that machinery and boat would do the work he required them to do, what on earth did it matter how they looked? … Bill spoke quite warmly on the subject….

  When Bill would achieve his full head of steam, his 80 lbs. of pressure, the Sonora would go full-tilt, perhaps six miles an hour. The whole boat would quake in a sort of palsy. The engines would palpitate – jiggety-jiggety – klink – konk – very quick. We would ourselves catch the cheerful infection and become lively. But this mood would never last. A new sound would begin to enter into the full chords of the engine harmony. Something would begin to hammer and bang, and soon Bill would stop the engines, and we would drift at random while he and I worked with spanners, tightening this, loosening that, shoving little bits of tin into joints, nursing the engines b
ack to sanity.

  That engine-room was a fine warm place in cold weather, when a man’s wet feet were numb with standing in the icy pilot-house. The sliding doors opened on a level with the outside deck. One of them was usually kept open, to let out the smoke that escaped through the cracks in the plaster, plugged upon holes in the furnace. You would put your leg through this door and go down a little ladder to the engine-room floor, about five feet below. There you would stand in warmth, warming hands and cold feet before the cracked doors of the furnace. Behind you were the jiggling engines; cylinders covered with disreputable jackets of asbestos plaster (that looked like the dusty peeling plaster of a disused cellar); mouldy-looking brass machinery; rust-eaten, discoloured pipes, tied up here and there (at joints or at holes) with rags held by clamps. Steam would be squirting out of one or two places, that Bill would be intending to fix next time he should have the chance. Chips of wood and the ground-up powder of dry fir bark would be littering the engine-room floor, but these, now and again, would be swept up with the remains of a broom and thrown into the fire with something that had been a shovel. There was nothing new to jar upon you in the Sonora. Everything was in keeping – harmonious, antique. Bill even used an axe with a split handle to break up the great slabs of bark; and he wore, with unconscious good taste, a torn shirt, engine-greasy, and trousers rent in the seat. He had a large assortment of more or less broken tools to tinker the Sonora with; and in every cranny and on every shelf of the engine-room were odds and ends of supplies, spare parts, metal things that “might be useful,” bits of pipe, old tins, and every broken fragment that had been taken out of the Sonora’s machinery for ten years past. Behind the engine-room, but on a level with the deck, there was the tiny cook-house, that held a stove (that by stifled smouldering would cook a tepid meal), a shelf to eat at, and boxes for men’s seats. Neither Bill nor I would bother much about the cooking. Syrup and ship’s biscuits and corn-meal porridge were good enough. The cook-house stove discouraged us…. Behind the cook-house was the bunk-house – the cabin, as you would say. Inside there were two bunks, two berths; and narrow lockers on which, also, men might sleep….

  Pilot-house, engine-room, cook-house, and bunk-house made, as it were, one building. Besides this building there ran, upon each side, a narrow deck, some three feet wide, fenced in by tiny bulwarks. This deck was usually piled high with firewood – with long billets, with big slabs of fir bark, each many inches thick. The deck around the stern held other piles of wood….

  A little iron ladder took one up to the house’s roof, alongside the tall, slim funnel. There lay our axes, and a big falling saw, and sledge-hammers, and steel wedges, and metal-shod spring-boards, for our use in getting fuel. And a huge frayed tow-line was coiled up there; and there was a rack of lanterns, of glasses red and green and white. The lanterns may possibly have been usable. We did not know: we travelled without lights.

  HARD TIMES COMING

  The Sonora lay anchored in Port Browning, awaiting Bill’s return. Rumour of depression had sent him hasting to Vancouver, to sell logs at whatever price hecould. For Carter was short of money, and in a logging-camp some ready money you must have. Men working for you may choose to leave at any moment. You tell them airily to “get their time” at once from Bill; you pay them cash; they go. Woe to your vanity, woe to your credit at the stores, should you lack the necessary means. For men will talk; storekeepers and saloon men, creditors, will learn about your state; the tangle of your affairs will soon be made insolvency.

  The Cassiar came to Port Browning from Vancouver trip after trip, and Bill did not return. At last he wrote: –

  THE BODEGA HOTEL

  AMERICAN PLAN

  VANCOUVER B.C.

  MR. GRAINGER DEAR SIR, – I have tried all over to sell the logs and no sawmill will look at them i never saw times as hard as they are now they lend money at 25 per cent. some are paying sixty and glad to get it at that the mills cannot get money from the banks to buy logs one mill has shut down no money to pay their men. On the American side the banks have no money at all business men here cannot tell whether times are going to get better or worse it is a panic. you may expect me soon as i can get some money I hardly know what to do i know they are short of grub up at the camp but they will get along some how. There are lots of broke men in town now all the camps are shutting down and the sawmills may do so to i could hire good men as low as 2½ dollars per day. It is hard times and no mistake

  yrs truly

  W. ALLEN

  Between the lines I could read of the tottering fortunes of Carter and Allen, tottering through no fault of theirs, shaken by some tremor of the New York money-quake; and of Bill doing his disheartened best to shore those fortunes up. Bill, all these days, would be drifting round Vancouver offices and hotels, trying and failing to get his business done, with borrowable money every day becoming scarcer. Like other master loggers, he had no accounts to show, no evidence of his solvency; Carter never minded books. Bill must try to borrow money where he had so often loaned it in more prosperous times; by aid of the mild, quiet esteem in which men held him. For every one liked Bill – open-handed, squandering Bill, who could never refuse a friend a loan. Carter counted on this popularity, having none himself to use….

  Waiting in Port Browning, I heard other news of bad times approaching. Men arriving from Vancouver talked of a strange difficulty in finding work after a happy holiday in town. They brought newspapers with them that told of a poor crop in Manitoba, of a shortage of money there, and of the currency crisis in the States that was rolling dense vapour clouds of depression over Canada. British Columbia lumber, it was said, had ceased to sell in the North-West; the sawmills could not even get their pay for lumber sold. The outlook became most gloomy to men in Port Browning; loggers and hand-loggers with half-completed booms in the water. They brooded as they worked….

  Over at the hotel the talk of lounging men was gloomy. Camps all around the district were shutting down. Going to Vancouver, the Cassiar was packed with men. And yet what use to go to town?

  Of the shortage of money queer yarns were told. For instance, a man spending a few days on the American side had put his wad of money safe in a Seattle bank. His visit ended, he went to draw his money out. “No cash paid out from here,” the bank had said. “Here, however, is our acknowledgment; payment, we hope, will not be many months delayed.” In Seattle things were so bad, we heard, that men paying for their drinks in dollar bills would get the change in writing – bartender’s script! …

  Money, as yet, was plentiful enough at Port Browning Hotel; men were still spending their recent wages. Of an evening, when darkness had driven me from my work of cutting steamer fuel, I used to row across to the hotel, or to the store, watching and talking to the boys. I never had a cent myself to spend; yet visiting the hotel meant accepting drinks every few minutes. I would figure in introductions, “Captain of the Sonora;” and my new friend would say, “Pleased to make your acquaintance, boy; come-andavadrink!” I would watch the card game; Bob Doherty perhaps on the win. Bob would be setting up the drinks, paying for meals for any one around who was short of money, supplying one or two special friends with counters for the game. “Had your dinner in the restaurant?” he would ask hospitably.

  I saw some thrilling fights. French Pete and Noble had a great set-to one evening, both being sober, in settlement of some deep grudge. Fifteen minutes it lasted in the bar-room; none of your “scraps” – hit, grapple, go-to-the-floor-and-bite affairs – but a proper stand-up fist fight, an unusual thing.

  There were games too. Players would arm themselves with slats of boxwood, half a dollar would be placed upon the bar-room floor, and the game begin.

  A man, confidently swift, would rush to pick the money up. To reach the floor he must bend; bending, he would present a curved behind; terrific smacks of boxwood slats would be delivered there. The man would spring upright, reeling, with a yelp. The rest of us would roar. So the game would go on, in bus
tling style, with wonderful good temper – until boxwood would run short.

  It was strange to take a last look at the lively, rowdy scene – the fiddler, the groups of men, the red-hot stove, the coloured whisky-dealers’ pictures, the brilliant lamplight shining through strong wire masks, the dazzling altar of the bar – and then to step outside and seek one’s boat. Gee-wiz! but the weather would be cold and fierce some times. I would get my boat baled, wait a moment for a bad gust of wind to pass, and then row, at full strength perhaps, towards the lantern light aboard the Sonora. Squalls, lashing, tearing; rain, sleeting, dashing in one’s face; snow maybe; utter darkness; utter winter weather….

  But empty pockets and distaste for drink made me prefer the quiet store to that disorderly hotel for an evening visit. There we were sedate, sitting on the counter or on boxes round the stove, engaged for the most part as listeners to conversations. The latest news from Vancouver would be heard and debated. Some man fresh from cruising timber on Queen Charlotte Islands might tell about his trip. Are there two metals, aluminium and aluminum? – a high debate.

  Dave Felton might tell the boys of his approaching trip back home to Wisconsin, on money made by selling timber claims last summer; dandy Dave Felton, passing round a tailor’s receipted bill for a hundred-dollar suit of clothes! Or the stormy weather and disasters caused might bring us back to our staple subject – logs. Two million feet of logs had broken loose at the mouth of the Nimpkish river. “Now I’ll just show you the mistake that company made,” says some one, and draws with a piece of chalk upon the floor. “They had their boom hung across from here to here. What they oughter have done was to …” Amey, a master logger working some miles up-coast in Johnstone’s Straits (that rough water), came in one evening fresh from a catastrophe. We heard the simply told story: Amey’s anxiety at the weather; the tug that came to his aid, too late; the breaking of his boom; the four hundred logs that floated away to sea; near two thousand dollars lost – a sore blow to a small contractor.