Alger County Logging History

In the 1860’s the Americans fought a civil war and many of the local people, in a wave of patriotic passion, signed up to fight. After the initial passions receded, others, who were unable to buy their way out, were drafted to serve in what became the most horrific war the United States was ever to enter. Many of those who went to war, died, many of those that did come back were minus an arm or a leg, but the greatest impact the war had on the Upper Peninsula was economic.

Great stands of White Pine and hardwoods were available to be sold, cut and shipped south to Chicago and to the cities of the east. The nation was building. The lumberjacks replaced the fur traders as the exploiters of Alger County.

The first trees to be felled were the ones closest to the rivers, the ones on the high plateaus and the peninsulas. In the winter the trees were cut, dragged along roads paved with ice, to the cliffs over looking the rivers and stacked to await the spring thaw. When the river opened from its ice, the logs were pushed into a chute that sent them rushing down the steep slides to send great sprays of water into the air as they sliced into the river. Men running on the backs of the giant logs with long pointed poles herded the logs into large rafts and guided them down to Lakes Michigan or Superior. On the shores the logs would be milled into lumber and placed on ships and sent on to the big cites. Some of the huge log rafts were even towed “down lake” to be milled in other noisy mills.

The lumberjacks, who felled the trees, lived in a long bunkhouse not unlike the long lodges of the Ojibwa. The men moved into the woods in the fall and stayed the entire winter in these smelly, smoke filled bunkhouses. The cooks would arise well before dawn to prepare an enormous breakfast for the men. The men were awakened every morning with the cook’s cry; “drop your c…s and grab your socks, its daylight in the swamp”. The breakfast that these men consumed has been estimated to be over 5000 calories. The men left the bunkhouse for the woods carrying their double bitted axes and their so called “misery whips” or cross cut saws. No hot lunches were served in the woods; the men simply stuffed a piece of pie and a fat back sandwich wrapped in a kerchief into their shirt pockets. When it became too dark in the woods to work the men would return to the same smoky bunkhouse, wet from snow and sweat, eat another huge meal, hang their damp woolen clothes over lines strung throughout the bunkhouse, tell each other colossal lies about women, smoke pungent tobacco and drift off to sleep. Every morning they would repeat the same process until spring turned the woods into a sea of mud. The men would then be paid off, except for the river rats that were to herd the logs to the Big Lakes. The men would then charge into towns like Seney or other small towns with their pockets full of money and their heads full of the vision of ladies. These small towns would gird themselves for the onslaught, knowing that the money the lumberjacks spent would mean survival for all.

Some of the married men took their earnings home to augment the meager earnings of their marginal farms. One man walked the miles to his home only to find another man in his bed with his unfaithful wife. He killed his wife’s lover with a “hodag”, a chopping instrument, which when swung against a man’s skull could do enormous damage. The town where the man lived became known as Hodag.

When the trees ran out in one location the men simply moved deeper into the woods. The lumber companies sent timber cruisers walking into the immense woods to find stands of the best lumber. The forest was so dense that one could not see more than a few hundred feet in front, so the cruisers would stop and listen for the wind moving through the White Pine. The famous “whispering White Pines” would give away their location so men could follow the sounds to the almost pure stands of these magnificence trees. The cruisers would then stake claims to these areas by walking back to the nearest land office, usually many miles away. Logging roads were then built into the areas; built on a series of small felled trees, later narrow gauge railroads followed the loggers and the trees flowed out of the Upper Peninsula. The “slash” from the trees and the graveyard of stumps became the evidence of their passing. In the hot, dry summer, fires would consume the slash and destroy anything left behind, some of these fires consuming entire counties and cities. The smoke from the fires so dense it turned mid day into dusk and blinding the sailors on the lakes. These men and the companies that employed them were not good stewards of the land, but the large urban centers were built as a result of their labor. When the trees were all gone in one location, the men moved on, most of the small lumber towns, their whore houses, bars and mercantile stores simply dried up. Today a grouse hunter, can walk down overgrown logging roads passing the “Swede holes” (sumps) at the side of the roads, through the second growth trees and, if he is observant, can find small bits of evidence of a bunkhouse, old foundations of houses and stores and articles that were left behind; rusted old lumbering chains, heads of “pee-vees”, “ pickeroons” and axes. An occasional old apple tree found standing alone in the woods, now incongruous in its location, is the living evidence of the life that so recently passed away.