Forest for the Trees: How Humans Shaped the North Woods

4 Lumberjack Life

4 Lumberjack Life I had a job in the great north woods, working as a cook for a spell. But I never did like it all that much and one day the ax just fell. bob dylan, “Tangled Up in Blue” a product of the american frontier, boomtowns rose with the raucous, rowdy, and lawless splendor of new settlements beyond the ken of civilization. Blooming suddenly and with great flourish, they disappeared just as quickly, collapsing beneath the weighty veneer of civilization as the frontier became settled. Winton was one of the last Minnesota boomtowns to prosper and then atrophy. In 1893, the year Knox Mill opened, Winton had a population of one hundred and boasted one company store, one stable, one boarding house, and twenty-four frame houses. The next year a teacher arrived and the company built a school for the town’s eighteen children. By 1900 Winton’s population was six hundred. The following year the Swallow and Hopkins company alone employed 450 mill hands. By 1911, twelve hundred lumberjacks worked in the woods and two thousand people lived in Winton. The sweet, resinous smell of freshly sawn lumber permeated Winton , not to mention copious dust from the mills, a torment to Winton’s housekeepers. The high-pitched, metallic scream of the saws provided 67 a constant backdrop, the shrill metronome of the sawmill whistle the town’s heartbeat, signaling shift changes, weddings, funerals, rounds in a boxing match, even baseball victories. In winter, with the jacks out in the woods and the sawmill supplied only by rail, the pulse was slow. In spring, however, as the jacks rode logs downriver into town, the pulse quickened considerably. After the long, dark, cold winters, spring came suddenly. With the ice out of the lakes and rivers, the jacks were ready to “burn out the grease.” Townsfolk kept children indoors and respectable women avoided the “business districts,” where raucous laughter boomed out of saloon and bagnio windows. Woods workers crowded the boardwalks as bunkos solicited them from saloon doorways or bordello balconies. The prone forms of lumberjacks sleeping off benders littered haylofts, horse stalls, alleys, sheds, and even the foul, muddy gutters. After nine months in a logging camp, a lumberjack’s thirst for women and drink was nearly unquenchable. Logging was hard work, dangerous and demanding. But the rules established to maintain control of hundreds of men living in close quarters were perhaps more tormenting than the labor. Life in camp was so restricted that the jacks tended to overcompensate when they first got to town in the spring. No skirts or smilo, that is, women, were allowed in camp: maternal or medicinal, it made no difference. The companies forbid thermometers so jacks could not complain that it was too cold to work. New recruits quickly learned never to sit on another man’s bunk or on the deacon seat in front of it, never to change bunks or touch another man’s clothing, tobacco, “stags,” or slippers. Lumber camps were like loose confederations of fiefdoms, and as the jacks passed from one realm to the next they had to serve different masters and abide different rules. In the bunkhouse, the bull cook’s domain, jacks could talk only in low tones. The bull cook regulated the heat, too, and jacks were forbidden to adjust the skylights and stoves. Similarly, cookees ruled the mess halls, which were usually finer structures, and warmer, than the bunkhouses. Without electricity, gas, or plumbing the cooks fed hundreds of hungry and demanding men every day. Since nothing shut down an operation faster than food poisoning , the cook’s rules were strict, carrying harsh penalties if broken. lumberjack life 68 The one person in camp a jack could absolutely not afford to offend was the cook, and new men quickly learned the established routine. Platters of food steamed on the tables as the jacks filed into the cookhouse. Without a word, everyone went directly to his assigned seat at roughhewn benches worn smooth and dark and shiny by canvas duck and wool stag pants. New men or guests hung by the door until a cookee set a place at the foot of one of the plank-topped, oilcloth-covered tables. Huge wood-burning stoves separated the kitchen from the dining hall. Screened buildings abounded with hams, bacon, and grouse, fish, deer, or moose supplied by the Ojibwe or skid row spikers...