Category: Life in a North Woods Lumber Camp

“Mon” Lost in the Woods

Lucinda

“Mon” Lost in the Woods

An Excerpt from Life at a North Woods Lumber Camp

Around eight o’clock one October evening, before he turned in, Old Pat Moran laid down the last stick of shavings for the morning fire and went down to the stable for a final time thinking something might have been overlooked. While closing the double doors he suddenly stopped dead in his tracks when a faint sound of a rifle shot reached his ears. The old warrior suddenly sprang into action and rushed to our house, his hand trembling as he shook his cane upon finding Father.

“There’s a mon lost, George! I hear’n his gun!”

Loggers in the North Country

Photo courtesy of JohnDonahue

In the early days of logging, man power and horses were the only power used.

A gunshot at night was a sure sign that someone out in the woods needed help. The household was suddenly electrified at the news, as was the lumber shanty below the house as quickly as Father could get down with the news.

Presently the jacks gathered on our porch. Father directed the searchers to concentrate on the east and north sides, reasoning properly that men could not easily get lost in the land to the south or to the west.

Ben Watson, who this season had been taken off the list of sawyers and made a swamper, was for everybody setting off in different directions, the women folks of course excepted. He was certain that by climbing trees and yelling at the top of our voices someone would be sure to make con- tact with whoever was lost out there in the night. Father suggested that it would be best to first fire a salvo from our double-barrel shotgun. The roar hardly died away when a faint report came from afar off, easterly.

“They hear’n us!” Jut Gannon declared.

Everybody agreed except my brother Fred.“How do you know?” he asked.“Maybe he didn’t hear you at all, Pa.”

At that point Mother broke in, “What direction did it come from?”

Discussion indicated that the report came from several directions. The men decided to strike out in pairs, in various directions. Emory Lewis would carry Old Bet on his shoulder for future soundings.

Just as the rescuers began to filter out, Dave Wright dashed in asking if any- body had seen his old man, who had gone out hunting birds that morning in the region east of the O’Donnellses.

My emotions were not unmixed. I harbored certain prejudices toward Old Man Wright. He was a short, stocky man, proud of his bulging paunch. Mutton- chop whiskers without a mustache adorned his face.

All the kids called him “Pussy.” Pussy liked to tease us in a not-so-friendly way. Suddenly another report of gunfire reached us.“That’s old Bet,” Fred declared.

“It’s coming from over at the Cedar Swamp northeast.”

Then came another and another followed by an answering shot. Within min- utes, from various directions there began to be heard the calls of our men, who, from tops of trees, would be cupping their mouths with their hands and letting go with a hair-raising “Hoo-oo-oo-oo!”

Meantime Dave Wright was declaring, “Pop was never lost before.”

“Howjuh know? Ever ask him?” My brother wanted to know.

Presently another shot was heard. Evidently impatient, Pussy was going away from the rescuers.

“Now he’s getting rattled,” declared Father. “He’ll never stay in one place and let the men

come to him. No. He’s got to dash around and find them!” Ten minutes later more shots showed that he was moving farther away and veering to the south. Bert Stahl and Emory Lewis had gone across the river and struck into the timber when they caught the report of

Pussy’s firearm. The two soon closed in and at long last had their man, safe and sound, back at our camp.

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Thomas C. O’Donnell

Lucinda

Thomas C. O’Donnell’s time and study were chiefly devoted to talking with old timers such as colorful preacher-collector of Adirondack history, Rev. A.L. Byron-Curtiss.

Thomas C. O’Donnell

An Excerpt from Life at a North Woods Lumber Camp

The Adirondacks and their foothills, the neighboring towns of Forestport and Woodgate, the cities of Rome and Utica—all these furnished the themes for the books he wrote.

O’Donnell told a newspaper man who was covering the author’s latest book about Fairfield Seminary that he had a keen interest in sectional history and that he had written “eight to ten other books” before he got started on his current [north country] series. One was a gardening book, A Garden for You, “which attracted much attention among plant growers.” Prior

to his “publishing house position, he was for16 years editor of the New York Masonic Outlook,” the unnamed columnist for the Herkimer Evening Telegraph, told.

corduroy road

Courtesy of Town of Webb Historical Association

A corduroy road is made by placing logs close together to allow access over wet areas. “Between every two pines is a doorway to a new world.”—John Muir.

By the late 1940s Thomas C. O’Donnell’s time and study

were chiefly devoted to talking with old timers – such as the colorful preacher-collector of Adirondack history, Rev. A.L. Byron-Curtiss of North Lake — and others who remembered some of the events and figures of more than half a century back. He also spent a good deal of time going over old newspapers, books and records. His col- lection of material is stored in volumes of cartons which are anything but drab statistical summaries and are touched with keen appreciation for the days when the edges of the Adirondacks were dotted with centers of industry and trade.

O’Donnell relished the stories of early engineers, the founding of the Bisby Club and the famed Adirondack League Club, and the sawmill era with its famed lumberjacks. Tales of the old communities no longer on the map, Farrtown and Wheelertown, of Pony Bob’s, Reed’s Mill and Enos enlivened his imagination.

Clearly, judges in and around Forestport that gave the game protectors a bad time, the notorious Dirty Dozen who took vengeance on game wardens assigned to patrol the Adirondack League Club land, Forestport’s Liars Club and “The Harness Shop Senate,” which held its meetings in Sam Utley’s harness shop in Forestport, provided much hilarious material for O’Donnell’s facile pen. The guides too were colorful.

Grandfathers and grandmothers, uncles and aunts, Civil War veterans, aged farmers, loggers, merchants, local historians, and postmasters all were great storytellers and were delighted to talk of earlier times.

O’Donnell knew the modern age was on the horizon and he, the author of numerous books, knew he too straddled the generations and had absorbed much from each. While he lived in Chicago, he was involved with numerous “little” magazines, often the first venue of unknown writers. O’Donnell contributed to these magazines, and also helped to foster what might be called a truly American type of literature. He was friendly with all of the young poets who were part of the Harriet Monroe “Poetry” group, and his book shelves were lined with autographed copies of their books.

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One Man Timber Operation

Lucinda

John Whitesell ran a one man timber operation and was drawn to these frontiers in part by a desire to escape from some secret hurt.

One Man Timber Operation

An Excerpt from Life at a North Woods Lumber Camp

Then there was old John Whitesell, who as a pioneer operator belongs in this recital. John had been in the region long before we arrived, carrying on a one-man business. His work was in timber, however, albeit alone, removed from other men, and he possessed a character that would grace the pages of a book of gold.

Fred undoubtedly had heard of John, but in any case we came across him one day, north from our camp toward the Chippewa River, at the edge of a black-ash swale, a mile, two miles, from his camp. Here, sitting astride a shaving bench with a drawshave, making barrel hoops, we first saw him. As a matter of fact, we saw him but a time or two thereafter, for a year or two later he returned to his native “York State.”

Tom O'Donnell Fred O'Donnell

Courtesy of Lyons Falls History Association

Tom and Fred O’Donnell remembered fondly the early characters they met.

It is possible that John came originally to Greendale with the Gibbses, drawn to these frontiers in part by a desire to escape from some secret hurt, and in part by a nature that to start with had leanings in the direction of solitude. He had built a shanty within sight of the Chippewa, and there he lived alone, picking and selling berries in summer, making hoops, fishing a little and in winter setting traps for otter, muskrats and such other fur-bearing animals as he found a ready market for in Mount Pleasant. His wants were few and he seemed to be content with the scanty income his activities provided.

In appearance John was not unlike John Burroughs, beard and all. His manner was gentler than was the great naturalist’s. He talked little enough, but if he did not give you a great deal of his history, between the wide-spaced lines there was much that you could read. He directed his conversation to Fred, and it speaks volumes for the strength of his personality that never did my dander rise at his clear neglect of me.

“I like these swales,” he told Fred. “I’ve never seen their like anywhere else. I suppose there is some reason why they are

like that just here. But you could say the same thing about me, and about you, and I don’t ask questions about that either. I can work in the sun all day and hear the wind in the trees, and talk with the birds – for they come right up to where you are sitting and talk, kind of, and then after sizing me up awhile they will fly into a tree and sing for me.” In Fred John had a sympathetic audience, even if, as I suspect, he didn’t understand too much of what the old man was saying. Both of us listened intently, so much so that he was encouraged to go on.

“Maybe you’ve noticed these swales, when the leaves have gone – how blue they are with the sunlight on them. In winter with the snow they are even more wonderful. I come here to this one, which is the finest of them all, a good deal in the winter.”

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The School Lunch Pail

Lucinda

This business of taking your lunch to school had advantages that we had never dreamed of. You started in on your lunch at the morning recess.

The School lunch pail

An Excerpt from Life at a North Woods Lumber Camp

This business of taking your lunch to school had advantages that we had never dreamed of. Each pupil had a nail, driven into the wall, for holding his hat and coat, in such months as he wore them, and on it he managed to hang his dinner pail as well. You started in on your lunch at the morning recess. The early class in reading had taken a lot out of you, and your waning strength would have to be reinforced by one of the two hard-boiled eggs, and maybe a slice of bread and butter.

At noon you and Nora would sit at the end of the stoop and compare notes on the viands your respective mothers had fixed up. And maybe you traded half of your pie for a go at her cake.

In spring, at the right time, should spring ever show up, you would get Mother to put a cup in the pail, with sugar in the bottom. You started for school a half hour early and planned a descent upon a patch of wild strawberries you had stumbled into the day before.

A lunch pail filled so lavishly with sweet things as yours would have the disadvantage of being a great drawer of ants. You would mention the menace of ants to Mother, and she would take it up with the folks in Shepherd who sold pails. Relief never came from any source, a fact that mattered not at all. The berries, to my taste, were just as nice when you had picked off the ants as they would have been before becoming anted.

school lunch pail

Courtesy of Dorothy Payton

Author Tom O’Donnell, who in his early life in the 1880s, acquired considerable lumbering and river-driving understanding in Michigan’s northern woods.

After lunch, and before school was called for the afternoon session, you would have with the others a whirl at pom-pom-pull-away, or hide-and-seek, and maybe Miss Sweeting would let you wash the blackboard and slates. And if somebody had beaten you to that you might be permitted to pull the long bell rope that came from the belfry through an augur hole bored through the ceiling, thus bringing the rest of the kids tearing in for the afternoon exercises.

All this, what with staying nights after school, made me practically a denizen of the schoolroom. Completely overwhelmed by the glamour of the new furnishings, I determined never to leave, and Mother declared that the way I was headed I would make it. Nights after school I flatly refused to go home. I was aided in my determinations by the vigilance of Miss Sweeting, who, the first afternoon, caught me in the act of clipping True Hodgins on the ear with my ruler. For this I was penalized by being kept after school for a full half hour. What with washing the blackboard and sweeping the floor, the time passed so quickly that I asked Miss Sweeting if I might not stay on for another half hour. With a remark that the punishment was hurting her more than it did me, she said yes, but be sure to come home in time for supper.

“Fred will bring it to me, I betcha!” I declared.

Immediately I set out upon a series of investigations during which I practically wore out the wall maps, first pulling down the one dealing with North America and, after admiring ecstatically the beautiful colors, I turned to wondering where Michigan was. I finally located it in the general region of Athabasca.

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Poling a raft down the river

Lucinda

Poling a raft down the river could be achieved by standing at the back end, jabbing the pike into the bottom, leaning against it and pushing.

Poling a raft down the river

An Excerpt from Life at a North Woods Lumber Camp

Poling a raft could be achieved by standing at the back end, jabbing the pike into the bottom of the river, leaning against it and pushing, or standing in the front end and pushing, as the craft moved, shoving for all one was worth and walking along the side to the stern. And so on all over again, and again, until the outfit had reached the objective of the expedition, if by some miracle the poler lasted that long.

The presence of the flare, just beneath which the suckers were supposed to congregate in expectant mood, complicated the business, and so tonight the navigator stood in one spot at the front and just pushed. Father’s was an extraordinary performance, and we made

better than fair progress. After a half hour or so, Fred spied a long, black form following just back of the raft and in the outer circles of the light. In his excitement, he turned to mention it to Father, only to catch the navigator in the shin with the spear. Father, caught completely off guard, cried, “By the jumping Jeeeehoshaphat and all the little Jeeeehoshaphats,” an expression of his usually reserved for ceremonial occasions. Turning aside to avoid another

flourish of the spear, he slipped and fell overboard in three feet of water.

Photo Courtesy Lawton

L. Williams “Cleanup crews” worked in boats and from shore as a sort of “rear guard” to make sure that every last log reached its destination at the mill. These men combed the banks, freed minor log jams, and got all of the timber that might have been delayed in its downstream journey moving again.

Meantime I had been up and about and in the general excitement caught Old Pat in the midriff with my own spear. The old soldier, erstwhile toast of generals and colonels, who was standing on the outside log, swung out neatly and clipped Fred on the ear, a performance that was rewarded with howls.

When Father had been brought aboard, Fred murmured that he was sorry, a sentiment received by Father with a smile, and presently we were underway again. We had gone two or three bends and as many straight-aways when Pat shouted “Fish!” with the same nonchalance as in the war he had received the General’s encomiums. Fred had seen them at the same time – three huge lunks lying along the bottom tandem fashion. Fred heaved the spear and hauled in one of the trio, a squirming creature that tested Fred’s strength and sang-froid before it was landed in the bushel basket that in supreme optimism we had brought along.

Father told Fred that it was a fancy job and started poling again. Up around where Spring Brook entered the river, Fred caught sight of a group of fish that followed the raft, only to be blacked out one minute and then being again in what they seemed to consider their favorite spot. Something eerie seemed to be afoot when suddenly they remained in sight long enough for Fred to hurl his spear. This gave him his second trophy.

While Father was bestowing encomiums upon Fred’s prowess, we drifted onto a sandbar and here we remained for a few minutes for the excitement to disappear. We made use of it to discuss the disappearing and reappearing fish that had caught Fred off balance. Father worked it out that trees momentarily threw shadows across the stream, which shows that a little worry about trees is sufficient.

Pat, no doubt, was thinking of the battle at Cold Spring when, startled as our prizes began lunging right and left in the basket, I slid off the raft into water almost to my chin, noiselessly and unmissed by the rest of the crew. Father at last looked around.

“Where’s the kid?”

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The Gibbs

Lucinda

The Gibbs

An Excerpt from Life at a North Woods Lumber Camp

Religion and religious observances in our operation had pretty much to shift for themselves. In the Gibbs schoolhouse, four miles away, Sunday- school sessions were held. Shepherd, eight miles to the south and west, had the usual small-village quota of religious denominations holding religious services.

In the Gibbs neighborhood, the problems of Sunday services were simple. The community was made up entirely of small farmers who had an attitude toward their immediate religious

needs as clear as was their feeling toward civic obligations.

Except for our immediate family, the population was never a settled one. Our lumberjacks came from varied religious backgrounds and were in camp but a few months each year. None of our jacks had ever married or were interested in fraternal groups: It is clear that no institution pertaining to these interests could have claimed the interest of our men.

People of the Gibbs settlement, hailing to a man from “York State,” remained New Yorkers in manner, speech and customs. Solid, upright folks who showed little interest in timber and timber operations, they viewed with a good deal of amused tolerance the rather roisterous ways of our lumberjacks.

Just why the Gibbs families moved into this particular spot in the first place on the Black River, provided they were determined upon settlement in Greendale, was clear enough: They

hit upon the largest area of arable land in the town- ship. Land on the river bottoms

produced good yields of oats and other grains, and back from the river were areas that could produce decent yields. Otherwise, the land around them was like the rest of Greendale: white sand that had no bottom until hardpan was reached, and hard might lie eight, ten feet and even more below the surface.

The Gibbs families formed the heart of the settlement, but in one way or another the other families were related to them. The head of the family was Truman, known far and wide as Old Man Gibbs — in the woods all men over say sixty years of age were Old Man This or Old Man That.

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Rondeau philosophizes on Thoreau

Lucinda

Rondeau and Thoreau

An Excerpt from “The Hermit and Us”, page 209

He [Noah John Rondeau] also valued the philosophy of Henry David Thoreau.

“From my middle teenage years, I had self-Thoreauized myself – so now I needed a little real-life Rondeauizing to give balance to the bookish ideas as to what a hermit is really like in the wilds. Rondeau was a primitive Thoreau, a Thoreau gone to the wilderness instead of Walden Pond.”

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“With this in mind, I could not help but bring up the subject of Walden and its author, Henry David Thoreau. Rondeau said he had read Thoreau but did not think much of him as a hermit. Then, in a short diatribe, he blasted the sage of Walden Pond. To a young disciple of Thoreau, this was embarrassing and unnerving. Though his acid criticisms seemed un- just, I listened. ‘You call Thoreau a hermit,’ barked Noah, ‘when he spent less than two years at Walden Pond and walked into town almost every day to see his folks. He may be the most talked-about hermit, but to me he was a phony.’”

Noah admitted to reading quite a bit. “Back here I would take a kind of course, like something—astronomy, religion, philosophy or something like that just on my own authority. I’d get a few good books and when I’d get through with it, I’d know more than when I started.”

Seeking seclusion from the rest of the world changed him. He developed an increasing distaste for civilization in general. “I got so I hated the most of the government, and a lot of it I didn’t get over and I don’t want to. I see it that way. There’s too much pressure and too much put on. You know what the taxes are now, and they keep taxing it so that now it’s no better than it was fifty or sixty years ago when I was a boy when people worked for ten to fifteen cents per hour.”

Noah drew a “line of demarcation” between the government and people. He didn’t try to offend people “for nothing maybe in error [he did] as much as anyone else. But the way it is, there’s so many of them. There’s a hundred that could be picked out that they all see that the other fellow is wrong and themselves generally right.”

The men’s conversation shifted, and turned, and returned to a familiar subject throughout their confab.

Ed said, “I considered Noah’s words but did not know if they had anything to do with Thoreau. If people considered him a worthy hermit, that was one thing, but the fact is Walden was a part of Thoreau’s deliberate experiment to put transcendental theories into a life form and he did it. Noah had a firm and narrow concept as to what made a hermit authentic. Evidently, it was not what he [Thoreau] accomplished, but how long he stayed. So, Thoreau was verbally excluded from his fraternity of hermits.

Nor would he give him any credit for sublimating the solitary life. His fiery criticism of the 19th century sage assured me, however, that Noah was probably one of Thoreau’s most unusual and most avid readers.

“In my mind, I began comparing the two hermits. Both were of French descent. Both were ‘of short stature, firmly built, of light complexion with strong, serious…eyes and a grave aspect,’ and each had a ‘face covered in late years with a becoming beard.’ Such was Merson’s description of Thoreau. How well it fit Rondeau—except that his eyes were brown and Thoreau’s blue. Maybe Noah had a less ‘grave aspect’ than Henry and he was probably a more jovial fellow.

“Neither of the hermits ever married. It is said…Thoreau gave it some thought but then turned his back on it.”

Noah said, more than once, he had no room for marriage. I’m “too busy living alone in the woods all alone. So I never got married.”

If truth be told, when pressed about any thoughts of finding someone to share his solitary life, he owned that when some female mountain climbers did begin to come along the trail he was in his fifties and figured there was “no hope.”

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Life in a North Woods Lumber Camp – In Appreciation

Lucinda

In Appreciation

New York State regional author Thomas C. O’Donnell, formerly of Boonville, tapped upstate history for his four books published in the late 1940s and 1950s. His works are a gold mine of local lore, characters and funny stories – the kinds of books that you can read straight through without stopping, which is about the highest praise I can offer any writer.

During his retirement he began to develop a sixth book. It was to be his personal recollection of

growing up in a family-owned logging camp. Mr. O’Donnell recorded stories of his father’s lumber business and the hardships his mother faced living in the woods, and he wrote with nostalgia about his adventurous youth and how his brother and he mastered their ABC’s in a backwoods log-cabin school house and lived as children did before the dawn of television. The tug of his boyhood years was strong, as evidenced by the reflective narratives left in O’Donnell’s unpublished memoir.

Life In a North Woods Lumber Camp

I would like to acknowledge, posthumously, Thomas C. O’Donnell. Special recognition goes to grandson Thomas A. O’Donnell, who gave permission to reshape his grandfather’s unfinished manuscript where needed, always with an eye to capturing Tom’s distinctive voice, which is clearly evident in his uncompleted work.

“Life in a North Woods Lumber Camp” is much more than the history of the O’Donnell family business. Although the logging industry was a huge part of American history, to see it from such an up-close-and-personal perspective is both a privilege and a delight.

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