Two Whose Relatives were Lumberjacks Tell of Era
While Princeton Elim Home residents were still savoring the taste of the pancakes at breakfast last week, cousins Jim and Bernard Pearson from the Milaca area used the breakfast as a step-off into the bygone era of Minnesota logging camps.
The Pearsons were at the Elim Home to tell an audience about the days when Princeton sat at the southern edge of a renowned white pine forest, and when logging was a way of life for so many, including Jim’s uncle Nels Jonhson and Bernard’s late father Einar.
Bernard’s dad had worked in a logging camp at Isle in 1904 and at Cass Lake in 1905, and also worked at a sawmill in Milaca for several summers.
Jim’s uncle had been a logger at International Falls and had operated some lumber camps. His logging days were around the 1920’s. Jim, as a youngster, had even spent three summers staying at the International Falls logging camp where his uncle was at.
The Pearsons showed their audience old tools of the logging camps. There was the pickaroon the camp blacksmith made from a worn-out ax which was used to pull logs by hand. There was also a grub hoe for removing brush by hand, a broad as to square up logs for building log structures, a cant hook for turning logs, and a come-a-long for lifting logs by hand.
The cutting of the logs was done in the winter when sleds could be used to pull the logs from the woods to a river to float them downstream to a sawmill in the spring when the water ran fast.
Loggers didn’t rely just on the frozen ground to sled out the logs, according to the Pearsons, but constructed troughs of ice for the runners. The troughs were made by hooking a plow to the side of a sled to make troughs in the snow in which water was poured to form ice. These troughs had to be continuously built up throughout the winter, the Pearsons said.
Straw or hay also had to be placed on some sloping trails because the loaded logs would slide too fast downhill and crash into the horses pulling them.
When the ice left the rivers in the spring, crews of men called “river pigs” would help float logs downstream to lumber mills. White pine was used for thousands of homes and buildings as immigrants poured into the growing country.
The Pearsons also talked about the care of horses, which were vital to the logging. Jim told how some of the loggers would carry a ballpeen hammer to tap snow out of horseshoes.
“My uncle especially loved animals, and his horses were very big,” Jim recalled. “If any teamster (driver) mistreated his horses, they went down the road (were fired) so fast they didn’t now hat happened.”
White Pine Forest
Bernard claimed that the “best lumber in the world” came out of the Rum River valley that included Princeton and said the U.S. Army was the first to harvest it. “I understand they used a lot of lumber to build Ft. Snelling,” he said.
When the logs that were floated down the Rum River reached Anoka, they were tied together like rafts to go the rest of the way by river, as the current got swifter before finally reaching St. Anthony Falls in Minneapolis, Bernard said.
The Pearsons brought along books on logging and also literature from the Cass Lake Tourism Bureau on logging camps. A replica logging camp, in fact, is located in Cass Lake behind the bureau’s offices. The opening paragraph from the bureau’s literature described the lumberjacks as hard working and very honest individuals, who had always given their best.
But Bernard, during the interview last week, also portrayed some of the lumberjacks and logging camp operators as not so honest.
Bernard said, for example, that in the worst camps, the operator would hire someone to gather up workers for the winter season that included dropping a knock-out pill into a man’s drink in a saloon. “The next thing the man would know he was in a logging camp way up north,” said Bernard. “There were rascals on both sides.”
Sometimes as many as one-third of a camp’s workers were fugitives from the law and a signal was given at the camp whenever the sheriff was sighted coming into the camp, Bernard continued. When the signal was given the fugitives would disappear into a swamp until the sheriff was gone.
Citing books such as “The Ax and the Plow” by Herman Nelson to gather such stories, Bernard also told the story of when a sheriff managed to catch a particular fugitive at a camp. The fugitive locked himself into the bunkhouse and the sheriff then cut a hole in the door with an ax and stuck his head in to look. The fugitive buried an ax in the sheriff’s skull, said Bernard, adding that some of the life at a logging camp was “rough”.
Although the work was hard, the better camps made sure the meals were good, as the camps with the best cooking attracted the most workers, according to the Pearsons. The head cook consequently was paid well.
Some data the Pearsons gathered show the cook for a large crew at a camp in 1915 receiving $60 per month, the highest amount any worker received at the camp.
The cook was independent and he “ruled the roost,” the Pearsons said. The head cook had assistant cooks called cookees and then there was the bull cook, whose job was to clean and maintain the bunkhouses.
Pancakes were common for breakfast and one duty of a cookee was to fill the syrup pitchers from the syrup barrel at night in preparation for the morning breakfast.
One story the Pearsons related was about the logging camp cook who arose at 4:30 one morning to start preparing breakfast. What greeted him n the basement that morning was a layer of syrup on the floor a couple inches thick. The cookee had forgotten to close the bung valve on the syrup barrel and the syrup had all run out. The cook went after the cookee with a cleaver and it took at least two men to hold the cook down until he cooled off, the story went.
There were names for the different types of food, such as the donuts being called sinkers, the giant cookies served to loggers being called barn doors, the beans that were served with pat pork called whistle berries, and coffee called swamp water.
It was common for the logging camps to furnish chewing tobacco but cigarettes were prohibited because the loggers needed to concentrate their time and attention on the dangerous job of logging, the Pearsons noted.
The loggers worked from daybreak until dark and when it was particularly cold, the loggers had to eat fast, Jim said, or the food would freeze to the tin plate. Jim related how his uncle told him that if a logger way a white area from front on a fellow logger’s face, he would rub snow on it to get the circulation going again.
“They worked at 30 below and dad said that wasn’t’ bad.” Said Bernard, “The forest was considered a poor man’s overcoat (as it kept them out of the wind). The loggers welcomed cold weather because the work went better.”
Another element that came into the logging camps of Minnesota were the Bible evangelists who came to be known as “sky pilots.” Three notable sky pilots, according the Pearsons, were John Sornberger, Frank Higgens and All Channer. They were referred to as giants in the book called “Last of the Giants.”
Higgens was the first of the three to minister and he helped recruit Sornberger into the field at a time when Sornberger was an outlaw, said Bernard. He told how Sornberger in his early days had been a thief and had run a house of prostitution, but also was a champion boxer in Minneapolis named Jack McWilliams.
By the time Higgens arrived at a logging camp where Sornberger was before becoming an evangelist, every sheriff in northern Minnesota had a warrant out for Sornberger’s arrest.
The change in Sornberger’s life came, according to Bernard, when Sornberger was listening to Higgins’ sermon on the prodigal son. Sornberger caught the spirit and Higgins decided to ask Gov. John Johnson to pardon the man. After Sornberger dressed up and cleaned up and talked to the governor for a while, the governor decided to do it, even thought he governor fretted it would cost him some political support.
The three evangelists got the name sky pilots after someone once asked what the one man’s profession was and he said, “I pint men to the sky.”
Evangelists like Sornberger had an advantage in speaking at logging camps because they spoke the language of the camps and they were also big men physically, according to the Pearsons. If someone were to get disruptive during a service, the evangelist could just pick the offender up and throw them into the rain barrel.
The Pearsons did tell a couple things that related directly to either their experience or that of their relative at a logging camp.
Bernard told how once his father had been carrying a 12-inch diameter log about 15 feet long with a partner when the log slipped of the partner’s shoulder and the jolt broke Bernard’s father’s collarbone. Although the foreman told him to go home to recuperate, he returned the next day to carry logs using the other shoulder, Bernard said, adding that the broken shoulder always sloped abnormally the rest of his life.
Despite the toughness of the job, which also didn’t allow pay until spring when the winter logging was done, the lumberjacks “were happy,” Bernard said, noting their jobs gave them a living.
“For my dad, it was a job,” Bernard said, telling how his father and many other immigrants had been told that America was the place where money grew on trees. Maybe the trees the lumberjacks cut to make a living were those trees.
The Pearsons expressed a reverence for lumberjacks. Responding to stories of their rowdy behavior, for example, they said the generally didn’t occur in the camps but in the towns where they went to in the spring right after being paid.
“I think of lumberjacks as being the greatest athletes,” said Jim. “They worked hard all day. They were muscular. They had exercise and they ate the best of food and they slept good. During the spring drives they had to take the logs down the river. They had to be good athletes.”
Many of the lumberjacks were probably “down-and-outers” during the summer and knew that in the winter they could go north and get a job and get fed.
People make so much of the cowboys as a group, but don’t make much of the lumberjack, aid Jim, saying they were in a “class of their own. They were very intriguing, an interesting group….”
Story by Joel Stottrup
(From – Princeton Union-Eagle, May 20, 1993)