Hayward Live Cam

News of the big mills sawing lumber during the days when the virgin white pine was being harvested was often the subject matter for the newspaper writers of the day. They expounded in great detail about the "champion" daily and annual cuts of prime lumber; the size and kind of saws used in the mill, the power source, and the methods of piling for drying. They also told in heroic measures of men at the head of the corporations who owned these mills and of the ability and cleverness of the superintendents in charge of the operation. Historians, perforce, followed this lead--what was news then was later history. Few of either kind of writer chronicled the activities of the small mills producing lumber at the same time or tell of their importance in the harvest.

Often termed "scavenger" mills in later days because they picked up what the big boys had wasted and left behind, they were the opportunists of their day. Moving easily because of their small size and the simplicity of their organization, no pocket of timber was to mean for them to set up their portable machines and saw it out. They worked for the small logger or for the new settlers who had accumulated a few logs in land-clearing operations and needed lumber to errect their houses and farm buildings. Though most common after the big mills had ceased their major operations, many competed at the same time for the local market.

The first recorded instance of a sawmill in what is now Wisconsin was the one built by Daniel Shaw in 1819 at the first falls of the Black River. The Indians, still in possesion of their land, objected to this incursion by whites and Shaw was forced to leave in haste before they burned out his works. However, he returned later and eventually operated the big mills of the Daniel Shaw Lumber Company on the Chippewa. Most of the prominent lumbermen of our area in the late 1800's -- Orrinin Ingram, A. J. Hayward, Frank Drummond, and Knapp, Stout's Company's William Wilson and Andrew Tainter -- started out with small mills, later to prosper and incorporate to form the big combines.

The first lumber used in Wisconsin was probably cut in a method more rudimentary than the portable mills, the ancient "over-under" or "Armstrong" works. A log was placed on a platform or over a pit (called pit-sawing) and one or two men at each end of a long saw operated it in an almost vertical position, slicing the log into planks and boards. Obviously more portable than the smallest mill (they were not called mills because their was not turning or circular motion, only up and down strokes), this method was used mostly on emergency jobs. The late Joe Trepania once told me that in the early days of the Reservation the Indian Service sawed lumber in such a pit-saw operation located where the old Reserve-Post road crossed Blueberry Creek, using several saws and a large crew to cut lumber for houses to replace the teepees, then common habitations. Emil Radloff of Cable tells of a similar operation on the Namekagon in 1909 when four of his brothers manned a saw there to cut lumber for their house and barn and new water-powered mill.

The portable mill was essentially a circular saw on an arbor (a shaft on two bearing with the saw on one end and a drive-pulley on the other), a carriage to hold the log in position and carry it forward into the saw and return, and a source of power to apply to the arbor pulley.

Before the advent of the steam engine the motive force was water power (Hayward's little sawmill on the dam across Bradley Brook on Florida Avenue was fueled by water), or a turnstile powered by several horses. When tractor-type steam engines became available they not only powered the mill but pulled it from one setting to another. I can remember my delight as a boy of ten (in 1915) when I was allowed to stoke the fire with slabs on such an engine which was running the mill sawing our logs at the north end of Round Lake School Road. More modern engines soon took over but in memory none will replace the chuffing steamer.

The lumber sawed by the mills was generally rough and not evenly dimensioned, due mostly to the limitations of the machinery used. The large circular saw had an inherent whip when fumed at high speed and if its thickness was increased to control this vibration, the kerf it cut was so wide that it wasted up to one-fourth on the lumber. In the big permanent mills, thin bandsaws were used to alleviate this waste. Some of the portables had a planing mill and the lumber they cut could be run through this machine, producing dimensioned lumber of fair uniformity.

After the better pine was gone and the mills of the big operators closed down, the scavenging portables had their day, setting up wherever they could get logs enough for intermittent sawing. One of these relics is still being operated by Pete and Bill Peterson on the Hayward Pond off Hwy 77. There father, Charles Peterson, bought it in 1918 and they were often his crew as youths. Now at age 82 and 78, respectively, then saw out a few logs occasionally "just to keep their hands in!" Bill rolls the log onto the carriage and sets the "dogs" to hold it in place while he "feeds" it to the saw by moving the lever controlling the forward-and-back motion of the carriage on its rails. Pete sorts and loads the lumber on the truck and stacks the slabs. They have a smooth two-man operation; the usual crew would be four or five men. However, the set-up is not totally authentic--power is being furnished by a diesel tractor engine instead of a shiny black steam engine puffing smoke from its stack as it labors to keep the saw up to speed through the cut!

While the enormous mills of the great pineries operators of the time were producing most of the prodigious volume of lumber then being sawed, and at the same time the portables were picking up the crumbs, an intermediate type of mill managed to survive, even to this day. Then powered by a stationary steam engine (or by the engine on a steam tractor) and fired by waste slab wood, they had an efficient saw and shaft system with cut-off saws to square the end of the boards at the right length. A planing mill was usually part of the setup to produce dimensioned lumber of good quality after it had been piled and dried out. Often they were operated at the same location for several years, hauling their product into a shipping point by lumber wagons and a four-horse team to market it as best they could.

The first record I have locally of this type of mill was an item in The North Wisconsin News early in 1884 that a "boiler" was being hauled out to William Wettenhall's new sawmill on Round Lake. He lived on Peninsula Road at its bend to the northward, so it would seem reasonable that his mill was here. However since later mills were located on the west side of Little Round Lake, his may have been there. The paper reported that he began sawing on April 26, 1884 (all sawing was done during moderate weather or from a "hot-pond" because frozen wood was much more difficult to cut) and that the mill was producing 23,000 board feet of lumber daily.

Two years later F. M. Steves of Rice Lake "set up a mill on Round Lake" (Little Round). In 1892 William F. Steves sold his mill there to R. D. union "who will log and mill."

On May 16, 1890, the paper mentions the "mill on Round Lake and there are many logs in the lake." Apparently much of the timber on its shores was cut and moved to the mill by water. At the north end of Big Round is a logging road leading directly into the water, indicating the hauling ws done on the ice or the logs were dumped on the ice and later floated to the "bull-chain" carrying them up to the mill.

Art White was on the corner of Peninsula and Rould Lake School Roads. He tried milling, logging, horse trading and racing and was a pioneer farmer and resorter. On May 5, 1900, The Hayward Republican reported that his "mill and a half-dozen buildings were burned." This location was probably in the field behind the house of William Wettenhall--when I was a boy there was an enormous sawdust pile there. White had a lumber camp behind his house--two bunkhouses and a cook shanty. He also had a mill set-up on Hamblin's pond beside Peninsula Road.

Mortiboy Brothers had a "mill fifteen miles west of town (Hayward)" in February of 1892 but it was destroyed by the devastating fires in August of 1898. Apparently the machinery was not damaged since the paper reported on June 2, 1900, that "Mortiboy has sawed the largest amount in years." The mill was located near the John P. Joseph farm at Saunders Lake.

The year of 1900 saw a proliferation of these moderate sized mills. Hayward Hardwood Lumber Company put in "an extensive plant with a good appearance" on the northeast end of Smith Lake, employing 75 men. The Soderburgs had a good mill at Phipps. W. A. Cooper planned a mill at Cooper (Doran's Crossing). Lee Brothers had one on the Reservation, Gaynor Brothers had a set-up on Whitefish Lake, and the Radisson Lumber Company had "the best sawmill at the railroad bridge across the Chippewa."

The next year also saw new mills: R. M. and John Lee put in a mill two miles west of Mason; Rogan Brothers, one on Big Brook near Cable; and Edes Brothers put in a mill behind O'Brien's old camp "near Round Lake."

The largest mills did not close when the bulk of the big pine had been harvested (it was mostly gone by the period 1900 to 1905), but kept on sawing on reduced schedules. They continued to saw pine by importing it from other areas by rail and by using timber of lower grade, thus competing directly with the scavenger mills. They also augmented their supply by converting more lines to the sawing of hardwood which they received over new railroads into these forests. The Hayward mill built by the North Wisconsin Lumber & Mfg. Co., an Edward Hines subsidiary, in 1902. It burned in 1922.

The smaller mills increased in number as the settlers came. Some of the later mills were Currier's near T Lake School, Preston's at Spider Lake, several at Radisson, Couderay, Seeley and Hayward, and the ones still operating locally; Radloff and Vortanz at Seeley, and Doehr at Grindstone Lake.

The Big Mill

A Mill, A Factory and a farm or resort community may be the very heart and life-blood of a small town. Such an institution was the giant lumber mill that squatted beside the dam on the Namekagon in Hayward; its apron of pine logs afloat over most of the pond above the dam and its forty acres of gleaming white lumber piles reaching back to the railroad tracks at the freight depot. For forty years its cavernous sheds offered employment to the men of the city, its timechecks cash to the many satellite enterprises clustered up Main Street, and sustenance to the thirteen hundred people who lived in the village. This successful business was established through the acumen and thoughtful vision of Anthony J. Hayward, and the lively town that developed with it -- his namesack -- could also have been in his far-ranging plans.

Some time before the summer of 1880, Hayward, a timber locator working out of Chippewa Falls, began to study the feasibility of controlling the harvest of the vast stands of white pine along the upper Namekagon Valley, one of the best in the north country. His attention settled on the falls at the present damsite and on the widening of the river banks above it, an ideal situation for a dam and millpond. This pond would also provide a handy place to store logs driven down the river. He bought the land necessary to control his choice location and also the property where a small dam was being built (probably on Bradley Brook) and as much timber as his finances would allow.

Mr. Hayward did not have the capital necessary to properly develop the enormous possibilities of the strategic situation he now controlled. Around and above him on the Namekagon were untold millions of feet of pine trees. What little that had been harvested to this date had been driven down the river to the mills far below. With the railroad pushing up the valley, a way was offered to mill the lumber near the source of the timber and ship it out by rail, thus removing the risks and costs of the drive. He wanted help, and by chance he met Robert Laird McCormick, a relative and a management employee of the Laird-Norton-Weyerhaeuser lumber interests, then a Minnesota Senator. McCormick was fascinated by Hayward's concept of what could be done on the Namekagon and took him to his employers. With their financial support the North Wisconsin Lumber Company was formed November 11, 1880.

This company began at once to gain control of the timber harvest by buying land and by the development of the site. The little mill on Bradley Brook, about wher the old brick company office now stands, was completed and commenced operation August 18, 1882, producing lumber mostly for company use. In June, 1882, the company was reorganized, introducing much more capital. A large dam and mill was planned on Hawyard's site on the Namekagon and construction was in full swing by late fall. The output of the little mill was used to build boarding houses, barns, warehouses, a store and milling sheds. Later it became the planing mill and was eventually shut down because of the inadequate water supply.

The "bigmill" began sawing pine logs on June 11, 1883, with the most modern machinery available, and it was outstandingly successful from the start. It was water-powered and had two rotary saws with the necessary edgers, cut-offs, and planers to produce top quality lumber. The original daily capacity was about 200,000 board feet but this output was increased several times as better machinery was added and the power source converted to steam. In 1893 a special run was made and the mill sawed 339,313 board feet in eleven hours, a world's record for a single day's cut at that time.

The "company" managed to control the harvest of the timber above the dam, often with dubious means, and, with their control of the water flow of the Namekagon, a right given them by the Wisconsin assembly, had a practical monopoly on it. The profits of the stockholders were enormous but Hayward -- though his vision had foreseen this -- was forced out in 1886 with little gain, and moved on to where his restless and speculative spirit moved him, having little interest in routine money making. McCormick, "The Earl of the Namekagon," took over full management fo the company until the mill was sold to the Edward Hines Lumber Company in 1902, nineteen years later. As the virgin timber ran out, Weyerhaeuser interests moved on westward to the Rockies and the West Coast. Hines cleaned up what was left of the pine and converted to hardwood sawing, later selling out others.

The colossus which A. J. Hayward and the lumber barons had formed lived on, the heart -- and often the real dictator -- of the community which had sprung up around it almost overnight, to finally come to its end in ragin holocaust on a windy spring day in 1922, long after the pinestands on which it had subsisted had been whittled away. The economic life of the community had by the changed, but the city did not die with the mill; perhaps with some of the vision of its founder, it agressively moved on toward other ways to prosper.

Today there is little sign left of the mill -- only a few old pictures; and the memories of its cavernous depths, the sawfiling loft above, the constant cry of its saws, and the hoot of its noontime whistle in the minds of a few of us older residents, many of whome worked in the mill, or "ran" logs on the pond in their youth. The aging dam and the quiet millpond are still there but the memories will soon be gone. What could be more appropriate than an informational marker beside the old site with a well-designed city park along the river banks to commemorte the man and the mill that put the town here?

Logging Days - It's time to go a"loggin"!

After the leaves of summer drop from the hardwood forests, the dark green racks of the pine tops stand out against scudding autumn clouds and nightly frosts warn of comming snows. In the old days these portents told the loggers of the vast virgin pine forests that once covered most of our north country that it was "time to go a'loggin'."

But it was far from that simple for the commercial loggers who cut our timber. They did not march their men into the woods with axes over their shoulders and start chopping. The planning and organization that was done before the logging commenced was comparable to that of an army moving into battle and much of it had been done months -- even years -- before this time. The staff of the big companies marshalled their forces like an army: the shock troops were those who went in and prepared the work area with roads and camps, the main brigade those who cut and hauled out the timber, and the supply division which toted into the work area what was needed to care for the men, beasts and equipment.

The logging company made their plas from the reports of the landlookers and cruisers whose job was to estimate the kind and amount of timber on land owned or controlled by them, or which they might buy or contract to cut. Also they studied and reported on the feasibility of getting the timber out to a landing.

The planners in the front office had many "rules of thumb" to go by. For instance, for each hundred thousand board feet of standing timber, they had to provide a man for the season to get it out -- this roughly gave them the size of the crew they would need. Since the practical walking distance from the camp to the cutting area was usually limited to about a mile, the estimated yield in a tract around the camp determined the number of men to hire for each one. In this 2500-acre a yield of ten million feet could reasonably be expected, thus about one hundred men would be the camp size. In some blocks of timber the yield might be much more -- perhaps doubled -- then the crew would be larger or the logging would be done in two or more seasons - a more economical way to do it by using the same set of buildings again.

The loggers did not wait for winter to start. Their operations began when the cutting and hauling was done. A lot of work had to be done in preparation before they could fill up the crew for the cutting. A "tote road" to the campsite had to be located, cleared and graded form an existing road leading to the source of supplies so that building materials could be brought in and the job supplied with its needs. This was usually only an improved trail, cut out as wide as the wagon and sleighs needed, and a minimum amount of grading was done however, the roadbed had to be firm soil or fill since they were for summer use only. Moderate grades could be tolerated and they usually followed high ground.

The logging roads over which the great sleighloads were hauled to a landing on the river or railroad line were usually constructed in the late fall after part of the camp was built so that the large crew and the teams needed to cut out and grade them could be housed. These roadways had to be wider to accommodate bunks of up to sixteen feet in width and runners spaced seven to nine feet apart under the sleigh. The uphill gradient could not be too steep or even a four-horse team could not pull the heavy load, nor could it be too sharp on the downhill side because the sleigh might over-run and "jam" the team.

Since the hauling roads in most pine operations were for winter use only, they were often routed across swamps and lakes, thus lowering the cost of the roadbuildingjob. The roadway was cut out in the fall and the grade laid before freeze-up. The last part of the job to be done was to use a rutter to set the path for the sleigh runners to follow--a sort of up-side-down railroad track which was iced to make sledding easy by filling the ruts with water from an enormous water tank on a sled after the freeze-up. The ruts were cut by pulling a dray which had adjustible blades projecteing downward to gouge out the furrows in the roadbed at the desired width.

After cold weather came, the roads were always kept clear of snow with a V-type log snowplow to allow the soil to freeze deeply, making a surface as solid as concrete. Across soft areas where a team would bog down and not be able to pull equipment, men "tramped in" the snow until it froze deep enough to support the team and plow. When this method did not suffice, corduroy (poles or cull logs laid crosswise of the road and lightly covered with earth or snow) was used to get a firmer roadbed.

Some of the hauling roads were many miles long with branches winding far back into the timberlands (the angle and curve at the junction of these branches show the researcher which way the logs were hauled) and their grades were by necessity well laid out. Some were later developed into town roads. The engineers and road crews of the CCC took over many of them to re-grade as forest roads, often with only the need our routing around swamps and lakes which the old roadbuilders had used as shortcuts. The network in the Seeley Forest was all done this way by Camp Smith Lake in the thirties. Another good example of a hauling road can be found just south of Hwy. 77 at the top of O'Brien's Hill -- the sleigh ruts can still be seen.

The typical logging camp of the old days was planned for a complement of one hundred men in a block of timber where they would cut ten million feet -- about forty-five thousand logs. The buildings were laid up from treelength pine logs of sixty to eighty feet. The log in each tier was reversed lengthwise from the one below it to get an even height with five or six logs. The spaces between the logs were blocked with split shakes and chinked with moss or mud and straw-plaster. Doors and windows were all in the ends except a skylight window for ventilation. The roof was usually framed with spruce poles for rafters, rough boards for sheathing and shakes or tarpaper to run off the water. The floor was of rough lumber laid on poles, and the cracks between the boards made the job of the bullcook who did the sweeping much lighter -- any small items just sifted through. To keep the wind from blowing up between the boards, dirt was banked up around the outside of the building and these lines of earth and the cellar hole by the cookshack are what we find today to mark the site of old camps. Usually there was no foundation under the walls -- the bottom log was laid on the ground;it was then called a "mud-sill". Some builders set the bottom log up on large stones or log butts.

The "Logging Camp" at Historyland in Hayward is typical of the small, better-quality camp of the old logging days. Its builders paterned their design from pictures taken of the old camps when they were in use and it combines the cook shanty and the bunkhouse with a "dingle" between them.

The cook shanty, bunkhouse and barns were all built the same way, either placed parallel to each other, or two might be placed end-to-end with a covered dingle several feet wide between them. At the cook shanty the dingle was used for cold storage of meat, at the bunkhouse as a "wash up" for the men, and at the bars it provided a sheltered entryway and a covered space for feed bins and hay. A smaller building provided quarters for the camp foreman, the scaler and the clerk and his "wanigan", a stock of candy, tobacco, and clothing sold to the men. An extra bunk was provided here for the "walking boss" or checker when they made camp. A blacksmith shop, often with windows in the roof were usual. Behind each building was a one-to six-holer for the convenience of the men.

The company planning a logging operation was far from done when the camp was built and the roads were ready for winter. After the cook, the first men to be hired were a blacksmith and his coworker, the woodbutcher. They had to be in the camp early so that they could get the hundreds of pieces of equipment needed on the job ready for use. Unless the logger had it from previous jobs, it was built in the shops from scrap-iron and carefully selected wood from the nearby forest.

Our hundred-man camp had a fairly constant makeup of jobs, although the variables of terrain, timber stand and length of the haul changed some of them. The needs for equipment could be figured by rule of thumb again: ten three man saw crews would cut about ninety-thousand feet per day. This required five skidding teams to bring the logs to the crosshaul at the loading area. The five-man "jammer" crew could load thirty thousand feet per day, thus requiring three jammers. This made up fifteen sleighloads but this number of sleighs could be reduced if the turn-around time to the landing was less than a full day. A go-devil had to be fashioned from a "crotchtree" from the swamp for each skidding team. All teams had to have single and double eveners, or if it was an ox camp, a yoke for each team. One or two water tanks had to be made for iceing the roads; handles for cant hooks and axes and endless fidhooks, bitch-links and monkey-links made for the many chains used. And so the list of equipment could be made beforehand, and when it was completed we could start the winter's main job -- get out the logs!

Pine Logs and White Water on the West Fork

Perhaps the part of the lumbering operation considered the most glamorous then (and is most often mentioned today) were the "drives" when millions of logs were floated down the many rivers and streams of our timbered land each spring to the mills far downriver which manufactured them into lumber. We will follow in prose one of those drives down the West Fork of the Chippewa River and tell of the work of the men and of the methods which got the job done.

We will have to depend on records and on the work of writers who told of some of their experiences at the time or in later memoirs. One of these writers was Robert Robertson who lived on the old Stocking farm (the West Fork Road just below the "Y" Pine junction) most of his life and took part in river drives in his younger years. In 1955 he wrote several articles telling of his experiences as a riverman which were published in the Sawyer County Record for the Historical Society. He stated: "I will be very happy if it can be of value to future historical writers and of interest and enjoyment to the general public-what information I can give of those bygone days." Another writer was Joe A. Moran of Glidden who visited these woods as a youth in 1895 and who wrote an article published in the Wisconsin Magazine of History dated June, 1943. Some ofour information comes from these sources. I have seen small drives of pine and "ran" logs in the Hayward millpond as a boy but, of course, saw nothing like we tell of in this book.

River transportation by drives was the usual way to move logs to the mills during the pine harvest. Railroads were not primarily built to haul logs until later when the hardwood timber was taken out. Because "it would not float," they had to come and get it! In areas without drivable streams such as the Seeley highlands, the pine logs were hauled on sleighs and rolled into the nearest stream, even if it was several miles away. Thus timber near good streams was the first to be cut because it could be "banked" without a long haul.

The great sleighloads of twenty to thirty logs came in to a "rollway"-two parallel lines of timbers laid down at right angles to the stream bank- where they were rolled off and "decked" on the pile. The bottom log nearest the stream was held in place with "chocks"-short blocks of wood which could be yanked out, allowing the logs to roll directly into the water when the drive was ready.

In our heavily glaciated terrain, streams often traverse lakes. When it was feasible to haul to them, loggers just unloaded onto the ice and then put a "boom" around the scattered piles to keep the logs under control when the ice melted. A boom is a series of tree-length timbers chained together at their ends and floating in the water. Booms tied to pilings were used to confme logs in an area or to slide them into spillways. A "purse boom" was one which was put all the way around a float of logs,~thus forming a "raft" or "braile" which could be pulled across a lake to the spillway with a steamboat or a horse-operated "headworks" barge. This barge inched its way across the lake like a caterpillar by putting an anchor out at the end of along rope in the direction the raft was to go and then winching it with a windlass powered by two horses hitched to turnstile on the barge. One of these anchors was found in Round Lake by a diver.

Where any reasonable "head" of water could be stored, the ingenious loggers could find a way to "drive" any stream. To look at a trout brook today, one can hardly imagine logs racing down its narrow course on fast rushing water, often several abreast, "centering" in the stream and-when "jams" formedtumbling end over end like matchsticks in a rain-flushed eaves trough. Reserve water was stored when dams were built at the lower endof flat areas traversed by the stream. The dams were usually constructed of local timbers for framing and filled with rock and earth laced with layers of brush to hold it in place. The impounded water was let out through spillways wide enough to pass the desired volume of water at driving time.

The sides and bottoms of the spillways were made of spiked-together poles and an "apron" of the same material was laid on the stream bed below it for 20 or 30 feet to keep the logs diving headlong through the "works" from digging out a pit below the dam and weakening it. These aprons below the old dams are often still in place and were not rotted out like the rest of the structure because they are free from oxygen under the water. The gates in most dams were lifted with a windlass or ginpole. The larger dams had more than one spillway-the old one at West Fork (Moose Lake) had three with a reported head of fourteen feet of water behind it.

On small streams with a low water source, several small dams were built, dropping logs down from one flowage to the next with the same water, thus avoiding wastage. On large rivers like the West Fork with an immense drainage capability and many dams for storage of water until needed, there usually was not much difficulty in passing logs down its length. All drives on the Chippewa were conducted by one Weyerhaeuser-dominated company and the water volume and flow was strictly controlled bycharts and graphs. Robertson tells of a fast hiking trip he made back up the river from its junction with the Flambeau to the West Fork dam (it was called the Goodrich dam in early days) to get the gates open and spill water much needed by the drive on the lower river.

In addition to building dams to control the amount of water flow, the operators cleared the streams of obstructions such as down trees and boulders, rolling them out of the way or blasting them out with explosives. Canals were sometimes dug to shorten towing distances (for example, the one across the peninsula in Lost Land Lake) or along streams to bypass tortuous courses.

Paul Bunyan had a better method of doing this, the story is told. When he operated on the Snake River, a very contorted stream, he tied Babe, the Great Blue Ox, to its head and he held the tail and when Babe pulled real hard, all the kinks were straightened out and he had a good driving stream! The West Fork rises in Chippewa Lake near the southeast corner of Bayfield County. It is shallow and surrounded by swamps and was probably the "End Lake" shown on the explorers' maps. The ancient portage from the Chippewa River system to the Marengo River and the Lake Superior watershed probably began here. All of the timber cut in this area had to go down the West Fork or be hauled west to Namekagon Lake. Moran stated that in 1895 Fred Leonard cut 40 million feet nearby and that he had a headquarters camp in Section 30 (probably beside Day Lake, once a swampy flat through which the river ran) and Robertson wrote that he had a dam near this camp.

The water below Leonard's camp was controlled by the dam above Upper Clam Lake and by the high dam at the outlet of Lower Clam (as it still is). Since driving was good down to the West Fork dam at the Moose, there were no dams between the latter two. Some of the flats caused trouble and the one below Meadow Lake had to be "boomed" for about two miles. This was done by laying two lines of timbers parallel to each other. They were then staked and braced to form a "chute" across wide areas, the water being confined between them rather than spreading out across the flats, thus raising the effective depth.

"Jamming" sometimes caused trouble at Brown's and Beel's rapids above the West Fork dam, according to Robertson. Two kinds of logjams caused trouble; the "wing jam" where logs lodged along the shore and caught others, forming a wedge of interlocked logs out into the stream, and the "center jam," a situation where the middle of the river was blocked with logs. Both had to be constantly cleared because they might soon accumulate enough logs to cause serious obstruction and hold up the drive.

The men who escorted the logs down the rivers were the highest paid and most daring of those who followed lumbering for a living. They also had the most dangerous jobs and had to work long and irregular hours at extremes of physical labor while living in uncomfortable quarters, often only a tent or a canvas on the ground. They were called "river hogs (or pigs)" and were volunteers for this work which usually lasted only five to eight weeks in the spring. They were men from many sources: farmers, immigrants, Maineites, Indians and transients; united without discrimination in the camaraderie of this unique occupation.

The rivermen wore the usual lumberjack clothing except that it all had to be woolen cloth which felt warmer when wet-as it so often was. Boots had to have high laced tops and calk-studded soles (for good footing on wet logs) and were invariably custom-made "Chippewas," the best that money could buy. The mackinaw pants were "stagged-off" above the ankle to keep them out of the water.

The men who worked the logs on the drive carried either a peavey or a pike pole to do their work. The peavey had a handle 5-112 feet long and was used to roll or pull a log into the stream by using the curved hook on its side or to push it with the spike in the end of the handle. The pike pole was 12 to 16 feet long and was used to "pole" (push) logs in midstream or, by ramming the twisted point into the log, it could also be used for pulling them.

Other men on the drive were the two-man crews of the several bateaux used to move the men from one work area to another, and the cooks on the wannigan, a large scow used as a floating cookshanty and supply depot. A separate unit often was used to carry the bedding for large crews and was called a "blanket wannigan." Its two-man crew usually went ahead to set up camp for the night.

The job of the driving crew was to get the logs down the river-all of them-as fast as the current could carry them. Each river and each drive required different methods and sizes of crew. On a small stream with a steady flow of water and few obstructions, the drive was stretched out and men had to patrol the stream on foot to find jams. On the rivers with plenty of water, the logs and the crews were bunched. A typical drive starting at West Fork might have eight bateaux and a crew often or more men in each. Their job was to prevent jams by keeping logs in the center of the stream and moving. They spent much time on the logs in midstream and had to be agile and quick on their feet. The "sackers," the cleanup men, followed the main body of logs to get stranded ones back into the current. They spent most of their time along the shore or in the shallows, often up to their hips in the icy waters.

After the drivers had struggled with rapids, slack water, jams and headwinds, one more hazard faced them on the trip downriver. This was the whirlpool-like eddy found in some bays to the side of the main current. It captured logs and spun them around until the boatmen could pull them out into the current again. Robertson states that there were eddies at Venison Creek, Chippewa Narrows and at the head of Puckway-Wong, all now in the Flowage.

Paul Bunyan's men had an experience like this on a drive. Their wannigan was pulled up to the shore at a likely place at dusk for several successive days and tied to a stump. At daylight they shoved off, but finally they noticed that the scenery became more familiar each day. That night, sure enough, the same stump showed up again-they realized that they had been making a circuit each day on Round River!