Pigeon River Country: A Michigan Forest

4. Lumbering

4 Lumbering Charles Blanchard remembered in the early lumbering days seeing ›ocks of passenger pigeons migrating north in the spring to breed. The millions of birds sounded like thunder as they approached in ›ocks that extended from east to west as far as he could see, so thick they obscured the sun. “It took as much as an hour for a ›ock to ›y over,” he said. “The men would snatch their guns and ‹re at them and get a lot of them.” He recalled lumbermen drinking, ‹ghting, and carousing after paydays in Otsego Lake Village, the original settlement. He told about the shooting of Mr. Sartamour by a woman from one of the brothels. She was sitting outside cleaning a revolver as he passed by. Mr. Sartamour stopped, bent over, and said, “See if you can hit that.” She ‹red, killed him, and received a three-year sentence. While many moved north from Otsego Lake to the Vanderbilt area during the logging days, others followed trails east and then north into the Pigeon River Country. The Salling Hanson lumber camp just east of Otsego Lake operated in 1890. By the time Clarence Cross arrived a dozen years later, the settlement known as Salling was no longer a forest. o o o We landed in Salling on an Autumn day in 1901 or 1902. Even to a nine year old it was a sorry sight after just having left the lovely town of Rochester in Oakland County. The town consisted of a row of clapboard and tarpaper shacks strung along the railroad. The town was a sea of stumps. There was a good road to Gaylord with a bicycle path skirting it. The town was peopled with the usual lumber town families with 55 English, Irish, Scots, Danish, Dutch, Polish and French Canadians. The English, Irish, Scots, and French Canadians had immigrated from Canada to Michigan and followed the lumber industry north from Saginaw as the mills moved farther north. We youngsters had to ‹nd our recreation as our parents worked ten hours per day, six days each week. . . .There was plenty of open land . . . Turtle Lake at the time had a lovely white sand bottom with an old railroad bridge or pier running far out into the lake. The railway had been abandoned . . . . They used [the pier] as a loader for white pine logs which were hauled out on the ice in the winter time and left until the ice broke up. The ›at cars would be run onto the pier and a derrick would load the logs onto them. When a train load was made up the logs would be taken to the saw mills at St. Helens and sawed into lumber. At that time the lumber mills were interested only in white pine and Norway pine. . . . [We played] Indians in the spring and fall. We built teepees and hunted small game and birds. Many were the hornet’s nest we broke up and I have many memories of being stung on all parts of my body. We found basements of old settlers cabins and usually were able to ‹nd snakes in them, which created excitement, especially when we would ‹nd a blow adder. In the summer we were mostly swimming or ‹shing with an occasional trip wild berry picking. When we would ‹nd a patch of wild raspberries we would put a guard on it until they were all picked. There was a boat house on Grubb Point (now Point Comfort) and we could earn a nickle or beg one. We headed for there as soda pop was sold there. We were never allowed there on Sundays or in the evening as Oney Grubb, the owner, operated a blind pig and sold home brew and bootleg liquor to the lumbermen . The swamp north of the island at the north end of the lake had numbers of muskrat houses and we trapped muskrat and mink with steel traps. There were large numbers of turtles in the swamp and if you were lucky and caught a real large one (any turtle a foot across the back was a large one), we would meet the ›yer, one of the two passenger trains that came through each day, and sell it to the cook in the dining car. An extra large one would give us as much as ‹fty cents, which was a lot of money in those days. Sometimes the lake froze over before the snow came and we really...