Henry Johnson, by the way, was a very good man and held some kind of an office for forty years, ranging from Town Treasurer, Town Chairman, and Member of the Legislature, to State Treasurer, to which latter office he was elected several times, and was said to be one of the best vote getters in the State.
 
 

Usually the loggers on the river got along with each other, using the same logging roads and landings, but occasionally there was a serious scrap. One fall Rodney Gillett had a contract to haul logs and land them in the North Branch, near what was afterwards known as McAllen's. Holt & Balcom leased the land along the river where Gillett expected to land logs. The Eldred Company started a camp to haul on the same road and land on the same landing, so when they started to haul Holt & Balcom got an injunction to restrain Eldred from using Gillett's landing, and they had the sheriff tie up the camp and keep a watchman to prevent them from hauling any logs. Eldred carried it into court and, as I recall it, was tied up about two weeks with his whole crew idle, and in the end the court held that Gillett had the right to use the landing, and Eldred had to cut another road and make another landing farther up the river. He could have done this in the first place but he was too stubborn to give in without a battle.
 

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John Crawford worked for us as a cruiser for many years, looking over land and estimating timber. He had a very keen mind and often got off some pretty good things. One time he was called as a witness in a trespass suit, some one had cut timber which did not belong to him, and the question was how much timber had been cut and removed. As Crawford had estimated the timber a short time before it was cut, he testified to the quantity of timber he found there. In cross-examination the attorney on the other side said, "Mr. Crawford, estimating timber is nothing but a guess, isn't it?" And Crawford replied, "No, Sir. It is a mental calculation based on practical experience." This always seemed to me to be a very good answer to the question. And it was remarkable how closely some cruisers could estimate the amount of standing timber. Our cruisers usually made two beats across a forty, that is to say they went through the forty twice. In cruising with Crawford he used to tell me after we had made the two beats across the forty, "Now, I saw so many feet of timber. How much will you give me for what I did not see?" And then he would add a certain amount to his estimate to cover trees which he had not seen. Where the timber was very thick he sometimes paced off an acre and counted the number of trees, but his estimates were generally based on what he knew of the scale of timber cut on various forties, and he compared the size of the trees, and the number of them, with that he had seen cut and scaled in other places. 

At one time a Bdnk in Chicago, upon the recommendation of Mr. Uri Balcom, hired Mr. Crawford to estimate Some timber in Lower Michigan near Manistee. When he got there he was completely overwhelmed to see how much timber there was on a forty, as there was no place around here where the timber grew as tall and thick and large as it did around Manistee. He said he spent some days visiting logging camps and finding out how much timber they had cut off from certain forties, before he undertook to make an estimate, and he said that he estimated that many of the forties would cut more than a million feet each. In this part of the country a forty which would, cut over five hundred thousand feet was unusual, and only a very few would cut as much as a million feet. In fact, I never saw a forty that I thought would cut as much as a million feet. 

I asked Crawford once who owned a tree which stood on the line between two forties, and perhaps the line was spotted on that particular tree; and he said that in the early days it was understood that any tree which you could reach with your ax while standing on the line you could take, and there were some very long handled axes in those days, so long, in fact, that sometimes timber was cut all over a forty. In later times he said that a tree which was on the line was always taken by the party who cut there first, and thit in running lines the cruisers often "beam drifted" a little so as to bring the tree onto the forty where they wanted it. 
 

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