| hauled a good many million feet of logs up it. We operated three
camps for several years, in the wintertime, hauling logs up this hill.
We had a small camp up stream from the hill and I went there one day with
Henderson Bateman, who was then our logging superintendent, to see how
they were getting along. After dinner at the camp Bateman asked the cook
if he had all of the supplies he needed. The cook was an old Finn who did
not talk very good English and was not much of a cook but was the best
that was available at that time. Bateman was very much amused when the
cook said he had everything that was needed except canned tomatoes and
a pitchfork for cleaning out the barn; so Bateman felt that they ought
to get along without much trouble.
It was very difficult sawing and skidding the timber on the steep
hillsides, both for the sawyers and for the horses. The logs were not large
so they were usually skidded with a single horse, but we had to use one
horse for a while and then let him rest while another horse took his place.
At one time we tried skidding the logs with a steam skidder but we had
to haul the logs down hill, which we found was impractical and we soon
gave it up. At one point we built a log chute from the top of the bank
to the river, and skidded all of the logs which were within skidding distance
of that point, and slid them down the chute instead of trying to skid them
down the bank with horses.
This method of "chuting" logs down hill to the river is often used in the far west, but we never knew of it being done in this part of the country except on the Ontonagoti River. We had trouble getting men and we had one or more men on the road most of the time, bringing in men from Chicago, Milwaukee, and Duluth, or wherever they could find them. Most of these men picked up in that way did not stay long. One summer we got a bunch of men out of Duluth who came from Austria and Montenegro. They could not talk English, and it was very expensive boarding them because they were such great meat eaters. They had never had much meat in the old country, and were delighted to find a place where they could have all of the meat they could eat. They had no knowledge of logging, but we had them cutting and grading railroad right-of-way and they worked pretty well at that. We used to get a good many Finns who had come over from the old country to work in the mines. These men generally came from a timber country and were used to logging but they were not used to our tools, and when we gave them a canthook they would throw it into the brush and cut a wooden hand spike, which they preferred to use to a canthook. Most of them know nothing about horses and we found some of them putting collars on the horses upside down. They were reported to be bad fighters when they got drunk, and each man carried a knife in his belt, which he used freely in case of a fight. Forty-four
|
One fall we hired a foreman who had been a Diamond Match Company
foreman, because we thought he could pick up a good many of the old Diamond
Match Company men who lived around there, and who would not ordinarily
care to work under our Oconto foreman. He understood his business and he
was quite a pusher, but he picked up a bunch of men who were great drinkers
and every Saturday night they had a free fight in the camp, and the foreman
would fight them all until he had them knocked out, but by Monday they
would be ready to go to work again.
There was a man working in the camp who lived in a little shack on the Baltimore, about half a mile from the camp. He had a wife and three children. During the winter the baby died and the man drew what was coming
to him and started for Ontonagon to get a coffin in which to bury the baby.
When he did not come back for several days the men in the camp made a rough
wooden coffin and buried the baby, and then carried food to the shack to
feed the mother and the other children. When the man finally returned he
was in bad shape as he had spent all of his time in the saloons at Ontonagon,
and when his money was all gone the saloon keepers turned him out and made
him go back to camp.
Our Oconto foremen tried to keep the men from bringing whiskey
into the camps and in many cases were quite successful, but the camps which
were operated by others near us made no effort to keep out whiskey and
many of the men were drunk most of the time; it was always a wonder to
me how they got any work done at all.
Baltimore was a flag station on the South Shore road where our
railroad connected with it, and when I was there and wanted to catch the
afternoon train for home I used to telephone to the Station agent at Bruce's
Crossings, over a line which we built and maintained to facilitate the
operation of trains, and he would wire the station agent at Ewen to have
the train stop for me. One Saturday we did this, and Ed Herald drove me
out to Baltimore with a team and sleigh. There was a howling snow storm
and the snow was drifting badly but we got to Baltimore all right and I
insisted on Ed going back so that he and the horses would not have to stay
out in the snowstorm any longer than necessary. The train was somewhat
late and when it came along it went by in a cloud of snow, and I suppose
the engineer did not see me at all, and we never did find out why they
did not follow instnictions from the agent at Ewen. I buried my bag in
the snow and started to walk back three miles to camp. It took me three
hours and it was long after suppertime when I got there, but I was thankful
to get there alive. The snow was very deep and I had to lie down frequently
to rest, and I had a notion to crawl into a culvert and spend the night,
but I would probably have frozen to death if I had. The men were astonished
to see me turn up in the snow at the camp; as they supposed I had caught
the train no one would have been looking for me and there is no knowing
what would have happened if I had not been able to get through to the camp
that night. However, after supper and taking a nap by the fire I was all
right and Ed took the team and drove me out to Ewen to catch the midnight
train. The snowstorm had stopped by that time but it was heavy going for
the horses. I got into Marquette about 4:30 in the morning and had to wait
there until evening to catch a train to Oconto.
Most of the land in that vicinity was entered under the homestead
law, and each homesteader took up four forties and built a shack on it,
where he was supposed to stay a certain part of the time and cultivate
the land. However, there never was any land cultivated that I saw, but
when the time for proving up came each homesteader swore that the other
one had lived on the land for the required length of time and complied
with the law, and then he got his patent. Very few of them stayed on the
land after they got their patents. The shacks were very small and flimsy
affairs.
I stayed one night in an old shack with Paul McDonald, John Crawford,
and John Ingram. It was an extremely cold night. The men let me have a
bunk in the end of the shack where the kitchen stove was, and they slept
in one bed in the other end. The bed had a wire spring on it and McDonald
got in the
Forty-five |
