Woodsmen of the West

by Martin Allerdale Grainger

  CARTER THE HAND-LOGGER

  The next glimpse into Carter’s history I owe to Dan Macdonnell.

  “The first time I ever seed Carter,” Dan said to me one day, “was in a camp on Puget Sound where I was blacksmith. Carter comed and worked in the camp – just the same Carter that he is now – a desperate man to work, surly, and wanting to do everything according to his own ideas; thinking he could handle any job whatever in the woods, and show men who had worked all their lives at that job the right way to do it, whereas he can’t do no more than butt his way through after a fashion. He used to be a nuisance to work with unless a feller let him have all his own way. I know the boss at that camp had to hold himself in all-the-time, to keep from losing his temper and firing Carter. But he felt there was no sense in losing a good worker like him. That was why Carter was able to stay so long with us.

  “Before he came to our camp Carter had put in a few weeks lying round Seattle; drunk most of the time, but still hearing a good deal of talk. He had come across some men that had been up among the islands and inlets on the B.C. coast. They told him there was a growing demand for logs on the Canadian side, and that men were able to go up north ’most anywhere and make good money hand-logging. Carter got bitten with the idea of going up there himself.

  “He was always brooding over the proposition, and whenever he’d get the chance he’d talk to us boys about it: what a fine show there was for a couple of men to go to Alert Bay and hand-log somewhere round them parts; and what big money they could make; and how they would be their own boss. You bet it was just poison for Carter to be doing work for another man.

  “Then Carter would pick on some man or other and try hard to get him to go north, in partnership. He was after me one time. Now I was sort of willing to make a trip up and give the hand-logging a trial; not that I knew the first thing about it, but from what I could hear a man would soon get used to the work. But you wouldn’t have caught me going as Carter’s partner. Being partners with him means obeying him and being his slave; a man of any independence couldn’t stay with him five minutes. Carter’s as pig-headed as they make them; and wicked. Everything’s got to be done his way; your way is wrong, and he won’t even listen to what you are going to propose; and he’ll go against your interests, and against his own, and wreck his whole business rather than admit himself in the wrong. You can’t begin to argue with him; he flies off the handle soon as you open your mouth. I’ve no use for a man that goes on like that. Well, he couldn’t persuade me to go with him, but he got hold of another feller, and soon after that Bill Allen made up his mind to join them. The three men saved up their wages for some time, and then they all quit the camp and went down to Seattle to take one of the Alaskan steamers that was used to stop at Alert Bay, going north. Carter had two hundred dollars saved up, and Bill had about five hundred. The other feller got drunk and missed the steamer, and they never saw him again….”

  And so, through Dan Macdonnell’s eyes, you see Carter and Allen reaching the little settlement of Alert Bay and making their entry into the northern logging world – about five years ago.

  One gets quaintly differing views of the past at times, out West. I can remember, for example, how our steamer going north at the time of the Klondike excitement put into that self-same Alert Bay; and how we, impatient passengers, spent an hour or so ashore, walking the new wharf, looking at the half-dozen new board-houses and the store. That common-place modern scene remains fresh in memory; it was only ten years ago that one saw it – only the other day, as it were.

  Yet, a year ago, I came to Port Browning and found a district of islands and inlets firmly occupied, in appearance, by man: camps scattered through it; steamers running directly to it; machinery at work; hotels and stores at business – everything old-established. And an old-timer told me, by an effort of memory, of a dim past before all this was; and in the remoteness of that period he mentioned Alert Bay – Alert Bay, forgotten of loggers, away over across the Straits; from where the first men came to hand-log round Broughton Island and the Inlets. And that dim past, if you please, was only seven years ago…. It seems that the Siwashes showed resentment at the coming of the first few hand-loggers; in those far-away days. I remember Johnny Hill telling us a yarn about his first camp on Coola Inlet. He was building a cabin, working all alone: his partner a week’s journey away, getting supplies. The Indians came to the cabin and actually tried to scare Johnny; a rather venturesome thing for modern Siwashes to give their thoughts to, yet one that hardly pleased a solitary man. Johnny went to the trouble of proving his title to the timber where he wished to work; a title acquired by impressive purchase, he told them, from the policeman at Alert Bay; a Government document that Johnny had steamed off a tobacco caddy, carefully; what you and I might call a revenue stamp. A trivial affair; but one that shows how fresh and free from white men the district must have been then.

  At the time when Carter and Allen came north, Alert Bay was still the nearest jumping-off place for the Broughton Island district. There was a big store there full of all necessaries, for Indians and white fishermen and prospectors and trappers and such-like men. Twenty or thirty hand-loggers, I believe, also drew supplies from that store; and hand-logging tools could be bought there, at exorbitant prices.

  So you can imagine Carter and Allen engaged in buying an outfit, and paying high for it. First they would get an eighteen-foot rowboat, with a good sail. Then tools: two heavy jack-screws, a light ratchet screw, big seven-foot saws, axes, heavy chains for chaining logs together, and many other things. Then flour and beans and bacon and the like in neat fifty-pound sacks, sewn up with oil-cloth; and tobacco in boxes; and a good-sized sheet-iron stove (with an oven up the chimney); and lots of matches (in that wet country) in tins; and maybe ammunition and a rifle. I bet Carter bought no fancy canned stuff, nor canned meats, nor any such rubbish; but he would have done himself well in cream and milk and syrup and little things a man really needs. And before the outfit was all stacked on the wharf Carter would have spent some five or six hundred dollars, cash down.

  The talk at Alert Bay decided Carter and Allen to go search for a hand-logging proposition in the channels round Broughton Island. You can, if you like, picture the boat trips: the over-laden boat; sailing winds; head winds; rough water; wetted cargoes; long, weary hours of rowing; runs for shelter behind islands; camps made in the dark by exhausted men. No men would spare themselves less than these two; no weather except the really dangerous would stop them. There was some queer anecdote about their power of endurance that I wish I could remember. But all I know is that they brought their stuff to the north end of Gilford Island, and “cached” it there, and started out with unencumbered boat to seek and choose a place where they should set to work.

  In those days good timber was plentiful – good timber, on sea-coast slopes, that could be felled and shot right down to water – hand-loggers’ timber. The country bristled with opportunities, for loggers; opportunities that were the making of men who had the spirit to venture out and seize them – men like Carter; opportunities that were then new-born of changed conditions in the lumber trade. Bitter to the Westerner are the mistakes of caution.

  Many a man I have heard lament those days. “Boys, oh boys!” one would say, “why was we all so slow in coming to this country? We’d heard talk of it, and yet we held back: pess sim-mists, that’s what we were. Men like Carter got ahead of us: had us all beaten. Why, anywhere round here all up the Inlets and round the islands there were the finest kinds of hand-logging shows. Why! the country hadn’t been touched! There’s men working to-day on places that have been hand-logged, and re-hand-logged and re-re-hand-logged since them days….”

  So Carter and Allen had no need to cruise far around the shores of Broughton Island. They saw a boom or two hung out in little bays that opened from the channels; they received welcome at the cabins of the few hand-loggers already working there; but soon they rowed their boat past untouched forest slopes and kne
w that they had pushed ahead of the advance of man and human work. Everywhere their eyes were gladdened with the sight of timber handy to the beach; fine big cedars for the most part. Many trees they noticed, pointing sudden fingers, would drop right into water from the stumps when felled; a thought that made their hearts feel light. For “stumpers” are the most profitable trees that hand-loggers can hope to get; they need so little time and work.

  So the two men looked eagerly for a small bay where wind and waves could not blow in with any violence; and this they had to choose most carefully, by observation of the signs of weather on the beach and on the trees: and by argument. What would the west wind do in summer? How would the north winds strike? Which way would the sou’-easter blow from off the mountains?

  They found a bay that seemed to them secure from wind and sea, that lay close to a fine stretch of cedar forest. The hillside, too, rose from the sea at the right sort of angle; neither too steep for men to climb, carrying their tools, nor too flat for logs to slide down easily. A little creek fell with pleasant noise over the steep rocky beach of their little bay, and the two men found just by its bank a small flat place on which to build their cabin. So they pitched a tent, near to the shore, and by that act secured (by logger’s courtesy) their title to the bay and to the neighbouring slopes. Then they made laborious rowboat trips, bringing their outfit up from where they had it hidden. That done, they set to work to make their camp. They did not build the ordinary log-house, cedar was so plentiful. Instead, they cut a cedar log into eight and twelve foot lengths, and split the straight-grained wood into planks with their axes; and made a house-frame out of poles, and sheathed the frame with their cedar planks. Then they put in a floor of rough-hewn slabs; and fixed up bunks, and made a table, and set their cook-stove and its stove-pipe in position. Outside the house they cleared a little flat; and underneath a shed they set their grindstone; and made a stand where they could sharpen their big falling saws. Their camp was soon completed. Morning and evening blue smoke ascended from it, and marked its site against the mountain slope; and the sun shining sent a home-like gleam from yellow roofs seawards through the foliage.

  Now the two men took their tools along the hillside to where tall, slender fir-trees stood. These they felled into the sea, and cut a long sixty-foot log from each. They bored holes through each end of every log and chained the logs one to the other. So they had a long chain of logs to stretch across the mouth of their little bay. Anchored firmly to the shore on either side, that floating line of logs would give them harbour for the logs they meant to cut: once placed inside, no log could wander off to sea. Their “boom” (in loggers’ speech) was “hung.” They were now ready to start hand-logging.

  “We worked right straight along when we were hand-logging; none of this here laying-off for rain or blank-blank laziness. We made big money,” was all I ever got from Carter concerning this period of his career. And yet romance lurks there. For the things men do in company are, after all, the easy things. What is so easy as to play one’s part in charges on a battle-field; to join a crowd in doing certain work; to add one’s little mite to the pile one’s fellow-workers make in sight of one? I find it impressive, I feel how much it is above the reach of average men, when men go out alone, or two or three together, against Nature in its wilderness; and there achieve noteworthy things by strain and stress of sweaty labour, hard endurance, laborious ingenuity. They work there, their own conscience driving them, with no crowd of fellow-men to notice what they do. They have no helpful standards of conduct held before them; they are free to stand or fall by their own characters, that lack the supporting stays in which the morals of the citizen of towns live laced. And yet such men as Carter will “work right straight along” in dismal wet discomfort, in far solitary work, handling with imperfect tools enormous weights and masses – at mercy of callous, disaster-dealing Nature – undismayed.

  FROM WORKING-MAN TO BOSS

  Carter made good money hand-logging. I have heard men tell of the desperate intensity with which he and Allen used to work; day in, day out; in wet and snow and shine. The first morning light would see them already at their place of work, perhaps a mile’s rowboat journey from their home. There they would slave all day; carrying their sharp, awkward tools up through the hillside underbrush; chopping and sawing, felling big timber; cutting up logs, barking them; using their heavy jack-screws to coax logs downhill to the sea. At evening, tide serving, they would tow such logs as they had floated round to where their boom was hung, and put the logs inside, in safety. Then they could go home and dry their clothes, and cook supper, and sleep like dead men. Now this waiting on the tides, this robbery of precious hours of the work-sacred day, this towing (with a rowboat) of sluggard, slow-moving logs, racked Carter’s soul and set him scheming. When he and Allen sold their first boom to a Vancouver sawmill he felt his chance had come. He bought the steamer Sea Otter for eight hundred dollars down. That ran him short of cash, and the short-sighted storekeeper at Alert Bay at once refused him credit. Even to this day that bitter, unexpected stab has left a scar on Carter’s mind; and I know, the case arising, Carter would gloat to see that storekeeper drowning before his eyes – and taunt him as he sank. Carter never forgets, or forgives.

  Bill Allen had to go to town and use his popularity to get an introduction to a storekeeper; a thing that Carter knew he could not do himself. So the crisis was tided over. They got supplies on credit, and settled down again to work, in the enjoyment of the Sea Otter. Of that steamer I can tell you little; for though she still pants her aged way among the inlets of the coast, my eyes have never chanced to see her. I could never get much more from Bill concerning her than that she was “a good little boat.” But Jimmy Collins once told me a little more. “She was about thirty feet long,” he said, “and her hull was fairly strong. The engines and boiler were middling good too; they were a bit too strong for the hull. Leastways Bill never dared give her a full head of steam, for fear of shaking her to pieces. It used to be a great sight to watch him in the engine-room. At the start he didn’t know the first blamed thing about steam, and when the engines used to buck on him, him and Carter would spend hours crawling round with spanners and arguing about what was the matter. But after a while they got the combination all figured out, and they made the Sea Otter work good for them, towing logs to their boom and fetching freight from Alert Bay.”

  So Carter and Allen prospered in their hand-logging, and soon had money in the Bank. The next thing I knew of them was told me also by Jimmy Collins, and I think it is worth giving in his own words. “Just about then,” said Jimmy, “old Cap Cohoon lost the Midge. Cap was a dandy. He’d had the Midge running two years after she had a piece blown out of her boiler. Cap just put a pad over the hole, and pressed a sheet of metal over that, and kept the lot braced tight against the side of the boat with a jack-screw. When the Midge got lost, Carter sold him the Sea Otter for five hundred dollars, and bought the Ima Hogg. That was just before Carter started business as a boss logger.” Carter, in fact, had made enough money, by this time, to enable him to make a deal with one of the big sawmill companies. For so much cash down, and so much in half-yearly instalments, he bought a donkey-engine and its “rigging.” Then he staked some timber leases, and set to work to put up buildings for a logging-camp.

  Mike Kendall’s boom.

  “Then Carter bought the Ima Hogg.”

  Now the country round about where Carter worked was becoming well known to logging men. A population of hand-loggers was stringing itself out along the shores; donkey-engine camps were starting up here and there; and the coasting steamers from Vancouver had extended their former course to take in the new business centre, Port Browning, where a store and a hotel had been established. So Carter went down to Port Browning and hired half-a-dozen men to work for him. Oh, the proud moment!

  Now let me tell you that a logging-camp is not an easy thing to run, successfully. A man may understand the practical side of logging – the in
s and outs of the actual process by which the logs may be removed from a forest area and sent to market; or he may understand the business side of logging – the keeping of accounts, the knowledge of profit or loss, expenses, debts, assets, balance at the Bank, and all that sort of thing. It very rarely happens that logging bosses understand both these sides, and the one they usually know nothing about is the business side. That is why so many of them come to grief, financially; for they engage in a business that is somewhat of a gamble, where money comes in quick and goes out quick in large sums, where a firm grip on business principles is very necessary, and often they are men with less power of grasping matters of simple finance and arithmetic than the reckless undergraduate, absorbed in “going the pace, blue.” Carter’s ideas of “figuring” were those of a child; he took wild risks in starting business as a boss; he knew he did. Yet a fine consciousness of his great power of blind, persistent effort made him careless of his own defects; and already, by some luck of judgment, he had schemed the policy that brought him to Success.

  His capital was small, his means of doing work were limited. He had the sense not to attempt formal logging. He did not build logging roads and try to take, on any system, all the good timber that stood upon his leases, after the fashion of a high-class logging company. He worked, instead, close to the beach, cutting timber along the frontage of his leases, taking those logs only that he could haul out easily. One thousand feet, the length of his wire cable, was the farthest inland he ever went; and that not often. Much he cared that he was spoiling leases for future working, like a mine manager who should hurriedly exhaust the rich patches of his mine. Leases, he said, were going up in value. Some one would find it worth while, some day, to buy from him the stretches of forest whose sea-fronts he had shattered and left in tangled wreckage. As for him, he was going to butcher his woods as he pleased. It paid! …