The Element of Danger in Stories About Log Rafting

The Element of Danger in Stories About Log Rafting by Lynwood Montell Rafting logs down river was an important economic enterprise during the first three decades of this century on the Upper Cumberland River and its tributaries in Kentucky and Tennessee. Small rafts were floated on the smaller streams to various staging areas where they were incorporated into larger ones, 75 called drifts, for the trip down the Cumberland to Nashville. Numerous stories about rafting are still recounted across the region by workers who were engaged in this exciting but dangerous occupation. John I. Cummings, the last person still alive to pilot log rafts down the Wolf River to the Obey and finally to the Cumberland at Celina, Tennessee, related a gripping episode of death on the river. Cummings told that as a young boy he wanted nothing more than to go downstream with his father on the log rafts and how, in 1917 at age 16, his opportunity came. The father, who had been monitoring the flood stage on the river all night, waiting for the precise moment to cut the raft loose from its mooring, went to his sleeping son's bed, shook him and said, "Wake up, son, it's time to go to the river." The temperature outside was near zero, and a winter wind made the job of running a raft almost unbearable. Like other raftsmen, the two wore only long underwear, a shirt, overalls, and an overall jacket. They had to be able to throw off the jacket quickly in case of a rafting mishap, as heavy clothing would make them sink into the water. A few miles downstream, and about four o'clock in the morning, they came upon another raft stranded on a sandbar in the middle of the channel. On the riverbank were a covered wagon and a small group of men silhouetted against the light of a campfire. The men on shore, unable to cross the swift, treacherous current separating them from the stricken raft, saw the Cummingses and yelled for them to go to the aid of the stranded men whom they feared dead. The father and son quickly tied up to the other raft, boarded it, and found one of the two occupants dead from exposure ; the other was near death. The men on the doomed raft had worn a path on the surface of the logs by walking in a figure eight to keep from freezing to death. Recalling the tragic scene with much emotion, Cummings said to me, "It didn't work, did it."1 Cummings' personal narrative is a gripping account of youthful admiration for raft pilots and the rafting process, of exposure to bone-chilling weather, of death at the hands of an unrelenting natural universe, and of courage demonstrated by a raft pilot and his teenage son. Yet his narrative of life and death on the Wolf River, however bound in space and time, should not be viewed merely as depicting an isolated and unique incident. It is true that the story could be used to help reconstruct the history of a time and a place, but there is a broader and deeper application to be made of this account and others like it. Viewed in their expressive cultural context, such accounts are occupational narratives that both describe and comment on the rafting process and the people involved in it. As such, the stories present, in the words of folklorist Jack Santino, "the more expressive verbal aspects of work culture."2 Like stories told in any occupational setting by workers themselves, the patterns and themes in these narratives reveal something important about the job itself, namely how the workers perceive the nature of their work and 01 themselves as participants in that specific work force. Herein lies the key to a deeper understanding of any body of oral historical texts dealing with a specific occupation . The concept of the "shaping principle" in occupational folklife has been set forth by Robert S. McCarl3 as a means of understanding the folklore that emanates from and surrounds a certain job. Each occupation, he asserts, consists of four elements: (1) the work setting, (2) the work to...