A Look Back In Time – My River Driver Father’s Career

“Dad was one of the old-timers,” said Bill McGee on an early winter day in 2016. I spoke with him and his wife, Emily, at their New York home about Bill’s legendary lumberjack father, Herbert McGee. Herb was among those towering men who earned the reputation of “having the bark on.” I wanted to hear tales about this river-driver and landing foreman for the Gould Paper Company, a man with a reputation for toughness and hard work in hard conditions.

As stories go, when the old drivers were paid off at the end of a season most of them took to drinking and kept it up until their money was gone. They visited saloons with crowds, and their excursions often wound up in fights. The antagonists took sides, and pitched battles ensued, which sometimes continued for two or three days or until police arrived and the most belligerent of the drivers were taken to jail. On the other hand, many drivers who were thoroughly respectable citizens, as provident as men who labored in other, less hazardous fields. Herb McGee was a colorful character and the McGee family has some interesting history, including Herbert’s rum-running days and incarceration. “Dad did time,” said Bill, handing me a long newspaper account of his father’s arrest, and his mother Anna’s moonshine-making career during the days of Prohibition.

Herb McGee knew New York’s Moose River as well as any man. The river had first been used for log drives in 1851. River drivers knew the dangerous stretch was perilous. Men were crushed under the swiftly moving logs, chilled to death in the icy waters, drowned or otherwise killed trying to break up the great jams that formed at obstructions in the river. “Dad faced death each time he got on the river,” Bill continued. “A log drive was full of danger. He faced bobbing logs and rocks, biting wind, hail, sleet, snow, and rain in the spring. “Dad never wore mittens even though the weather oftentimes dropped to 50 below zero,” remembered Bill.

Herb hailed from East Bathhurst, New Brunswick, Canada, and began working in the lumber business at the age of 15 when he drove horses for a Canadian sawmill called the Snowball Company. “Dad came to Tupper Lake, NY, in 1913; he worked in the woods around Newcomb as a logger and loader for a private contractor named Ken Hunter.” McGee Sr. spent over 50 years in the logging business and worked for the Gould Paper Company (Georgia-Pacific) for 30 of those years. Over the years, McGee had related many a fact and a yarn or two to his sons, Bill and Herb Jr., about his experiences in the logging and lumber business.

T.C. Williams’ gas Lombard at Gould Lumber Camp 7.

COURTESY FRED WORDEN

During the fall and winter months, Gould’s river drivers spent their days in the lumber camps. Bill described the typical camp as simply a long log building, usually consisting of a cook room at one end, an area in the middle called the “dingle” for unloading supplies, and the sleeping-living area, called “the men’s room.” The men’s area was one room with bunks lining the sides. Bill recalled his dad saying, “Many a yarn was cut in those days around the center heating stove before lights went out.”

Herb related that the food was great, they had plenty, and it was always homemade. His camp only had one cook, and that was his only job. Sometimes the cook chose ‘chore boys’ who helped with different jobs around the camp. Work throughout the winter involved cutting, hauling and stacking logs on the frozen half-mile-long stretch of river known as The Landing. Gould’s main landing was on the south branch of the Moose River, located a half mile below Gould’s Camp 9. The location was (and still is) on the property of the Adirondack League Club.

At the time of ice break-ups, the men gathered under various bosses to prepare for the drive. Herb knew some drive bosses who were “scarred and rheumatic from frequent exposures to wind and water.” Stout, flat-bottomed Moose River boats were prepared. Experienced men were equipped with iron-pointed pike poles which they used to free the all-too-numerous log jams that piled up on the journey to the mill. Whoops and yells, jokes and laughter were a part of the daily task. Some of the river drivers wore heavy woolen underwear, so thick they could stand a five-minute bath in the icy waters without suffering ill effects.

McGee, as the big river boss, was the key man. It was his responsibility to search out the log responsible for a jam. Sometimes it was necessary to attach a rope to it. A crew of men would then attempt to pull it free. Sometimes they needed dynamite to loosen a jam. This was the most dangerous job, since the jam might be freed by mounting water pressure while the dynamite was being placed. If the river driver was caught in the jumbled mass of moving logs, it would mean almost certain death.

Herb McGee retired from the Gould Paper Company in 1949, two years after the company’s last river drive. The days of river driving were over and McGee’s career was at its close.

When I visited Bill, he showed me some pictures. One colored snapshot was of Herb and his good friend “Huey” Dowling, dated 1964. “Dowling was known as a ‘Walking Boss,’” said Bill. Hugh was in charge over all of the camps of the Gould Paper Company. The lines in the older men’s faces tell some of their hard-bitten stories. Fortunately, filmed and taped interviews, camera-savvy photographers and personal memories have kept a permanent record of McGee and other men “with bark.”

As I looked at a 1974 photo of eighty-year-old Herb clutching a double-bitted axe and posed in front of a huge pile of firewood he was splitting, I couldn’t help but wonder: What kept a river driver on the job? Romance? The neverfailing lure of the white water? The dark bobbing logs? The crazy laugh of loons on the lakes? Perhaps the throaty song of the camp cook or the unique taste of his floury dough bread? There must have been something that kept calling the river driver back to his thrilling, exciting, dangerous life. Herb was but one of a race of hale and hearty, rough and ready men. His work is like a noted homegrown tobacco: “it will kill or cure” as an old saying goes.saying goes.

Herb McGee early 1940s on the Moose River.

COURTESY LYONS FALLS HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION