The saga of the harvest of the great stands of pine in our North Country at the end of the last century is now remembered as a period of romantic activity, almost legendary in its remoteness from our times and understanding. I know of no one alive now who actually took part in it and few who visited the old camps as children or even saw the logs go down the river.

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!

From "History of the Hayward Lakes Region (part 1)" A story of Logging by Eldon Marple Published by eco-logical marketing Phoenix, AZ. ISN #0-9637938-0-2

Reprinted with permission of the Eldon Marple estate. Photos courtesy of the Sawyer County Historical Society.