REGIONAL— The folk hero Paul Bunyan, burly and bearded, wielding his oversized ax, stands astride the story of the Upper Midwest— a manly symbol of the labor that cleared the vast Northwoods.
The era of the lumberjack, much like the era of the cowboys, has been the subject of American myth for generations, and it’s one that a fascinating new book, “Gentlemen of the Woods: Manhood, Myth, and the American Lumberjack,” by historian Willa Hammitt Brown, helps to correct. It’s a cultural history, published by the University of Minnesota Press, which helps to place the lumberjack in a more accurate context within a society that, at the time, was both rapidly industrializing and pining for the end of the frontier.
Throughout, it paints a dramatic picture of the scale and the impact of the logging era in the Great Lakes states, which leveled tens of millions of acres of pristine, mostly white pine, forest, over the span of just several decades. Brown also explores the ways in which the timbering industry, once dominated by many small start-up companies, morphed over the decades into one led by a handful of large trusts that deployed enormous amounts of capital to industrialize the clearing of the forests. The implications of that change were dramatic as the wealth generated from the exploitation of the Northwoods increasingly went to the few lumber barons at the top.
The lowly lumberjacks, often recent immigrants, lived in unpleasant conditions as Brown describes in one particularly vivid scene from a bunkhouse, as the men took off and hung many of their sweaty clothes and socks to dry overnight. “As the clothes dried,” writes Brown, “they created a steam that one reporter claimed was ‘so heavy that our blankets were wet and you could hardly see across the room.’ The putrid stench of up to a hundred unwashed men sleeping amid a mist created by their own steaming socks belied description and perhaps belies imagination.”
It could have made the ‘jacks long for daybreak and the fresh air of the great outdoors, except for the dangerous and back-breaking nature of the their work. Felling the enormous white pines was only one of the dangers that the ‘jacks faced during the course of the day. While most didn’t die, it was a rare ‘jack who avoided serious injury.
That was even more so for the so-called “river hogs,” who were charged with keeping the logs moving during the spring river drives. The dangers were constant for these men, and escalated whenever the logs hung up, often creating vast jams that could involve tens or even hundreds of thousands of logs. Brown writes: “When a jam occurred, the work grew exponentially more arduous and difficult. With thousands (if not millions) of logs floating on the icy, rapid current, these jams could be enormous. The largest spanned miles. Toward the front, where the combined pressure of millions of logs was at its strongest, jams could tower ten or even twenty feet high over the river, multistory jumbles of wood.”
The groaning of the logs from the pressure of the slowly shifting mass could be heard for miles and would force the skilled river hogs to spend day after day, often fortified only with whiskey, to clear the jams. “Men headed out onto the jam armed only with peavies, simple tools of long wooden sticks with a metal spike on the end, to break it— testing and moving logs near the front, searching for a key log that would loosen the flood of timber,” writes Brown.
The smiling visage of Paul Bunyan bears little relationship to the reality of the era, notes Brown. Far from heroes, in their day, most ‘jacks were frowned upon in the communities near their camps, as amoral transients, many of whom couldn’t speak English and largely lived for the moment. Most, in truth, had little to look forward to, particularly in the later years when timbering was dominated by large corporations which left little opportunity for a humble, illiterate immigrant to advance.
The attitude of the newer immigrants, mostly Scandinavian, made them the target of derision and prejudice. “As Yankee-born lumberjack Horace Glenn rather more pointedly put it in a correspondence from camp: ‘There are probably fifteen white men here and sixty Swedes.’” In many camps, the Scandinavians had to be separated from the other men in cabins of their own, since most “white” ‘jacks wanted nothing to do with them.
It was much the same with the Native Americans who worked in the camps. Like the Scandinavians, the Ojibwe workers faced discrimination and were often left with the lowest-paying or most dangerous jobs.
As outsiders, many of the ‘jacks developed their own unique culture that a newcomer could find difficult to enter. That culture defined masculinity in terms of risk-taking and demonstrated skill, rather than restraint and control, which was the dominant ethos of the time among those Americans considered “white.”
Along with its more accurate portrayal of lumberjack life and its analysis of the creation of the lumberjack myth, Brown offers new insight into the intersections of race and social class in the logging enterprise.
In addition to Brown’s engaging narrative, the book includes 110 historical photographs along with other illustrations that provide context to the story.
Willa Hammitt Brown, who lives in Minneapolis, first had her picture taken with Paul Bunyan when she was four years old in Akeley and she grew up spending summers on Deer Lake in northeastern Itasca County. She holds a PhD in history from the University of Virginia, where she has taught. She is also a writer and historian specializing in American cultural, gender, and environmental history.
You can order the book in hardcover at the University of Minnesota Press for $29.95. To learn more or to order, go to www.upress.umn.edu.