Before Paul Bunyan Was an Ad, He Was a Few Thousand Real Men

The cook got up first. In a Wisconsin pine camp in January, that meant somewhere around four in the morning, in the dark, with the cold coming through the log walls. By the time he banged the gut hammer to wake the bunkhouse, there'd be a mountain of flapjacks, a kettle of beans, salt pork, molasses and tea strong enough to strip paint.

Sixty men would eat it in near silence. Plenty of camps had a flat rule: no talking at the table. Talk slowed the meal, and talk started fights. You ate, you went out, you worked until you couldn't see.

That was the north woods logging camp, from the 1830s to about 1910. It cut the timber that framed the farmhouses and towns of the prairie. And it's been buried under a cartoon ever since.

The tree that paid for everything

The money was in eastern white pine. Tall, straight, light and easy to work, it floated well, which mattered more than anything, because the only highway out of the woods was a river.

Maine went first. By the middle of the 1800s Bangor, at the head of tide on the Penobscot, was shipping so much lumber it called itself the lumber capital of the world. Henry David Thoreau walked into those woods in 1846 and came back with notes on the men he met, later published in The Maine Woods.

Then the industry jumped west. For the last three decades of the century Michigan led the country in lumber, with mill towns like Saginaw and Muskegon stacking boards into ships bound for Chicago. Wisconsin and Minnesota followed, the Chippewa and the St. Croix carrying pine down to the Mississippi. When the pine ran out there, the whole operation packed up for the Pacific Northwest.

Every move happened in about one working lifetime. Keep that in mind.

Who was in the bunkhouse

A camp was a small, tough town with one product. The jobs had names, and the names told you where you stood.

• Sawyers felled the trees, in pairs, with a crosscut saw once those took over from the axe in the 1870s and 80s.
• Swampers cut roads and limbed the fallen trunks.
• Teamsters drove the horse and ox teams, and the good ones were paid like it.
• Top loaders stood on a sled stacked with logs and placed each new one as it came up. One mistake and the load came down on him.
• Road monkeys kept the haul roads iced, often with a sprinkler sled that sprayed water at night so the ruts froze hard.
• The chickadee was usually the youngest kid in camp, and his job was clearing horse manure off those roads. Everybody started somewhere.

The bunks were often a long double-decker shelf, loaded from the foot. The air was wet wool, wood smoke and socks drying by the stove. Pay in the 1880s ran somewhere around a dollar a day and board, held until spring. A man who walked out of the woods in April with his winter's wages in his pocket had more cash than he'd ever held. The towns that waited for him knew it, and plenty of men went back to the woods broke by May.

The cook was the most important man in camp after the boss, and sometimes before him. Bad food emptied a camp in a week. Good food kept a crew all winter. Stewart Holbrook, who wrote the classic history of the lumberjack, Holy Old Mackinaw, in 1938, makes the point over and over: men forgave cold, danger and long hours. They didn't forgive a bad cook.

The drive

All winter, sleds hauled logs to the riverbanks and stacked them in great piles called rollways. Every log end got stamped with the owner's mark, struck with a branding hammer, like cattle.

Then the ice went out, and the most dangerous work in America began.

River drivers rode the spring flood down to the mills, prying loose snags and breaking jams. They wore boots with steel calks, short spikes in the soles, so they could stand on a spinning, wet log. Their tool was the peavey, a pole with a hook and a spike, invented by a blacksmith named Joseph Peavey in Stillwater, Maine, around 1858. It's still sold today, nearly unchanged. That's about the best review a tool can get.

Jams were the killers. Logs piled up at a bend or a rapids until the river stopped, and somebody had to walk out onto the pile, find the key log and free it, then run for shore before thousands of tons let go at once. Some jams on the St. Croix at Taylors Falls got so big that people came out just to watch the crews break them.

Drivers drowned every spring. Tradition held that when the river took a man, his crew buried him on the bank and hung his calked boots on a tree over the grave. Nobody wrote much of it down. The boots were the record.

The hard part

The loggers didn't replant. Almost nobody did. Behind them they left the cutover: millions of acres of stumps and dry branch slash, piled where it fell.

On October 8, 1871, after a long drought, fires already smoldering in that slash were whipped into a firestorm around Peshtigo, Wisconsin, a company town built around a woodenware factory. It burned the town and a huge stretch of the surrounding country in a single night. Estimates of the dead run from about 1,200 to more than 2,000, which still makes it the deadliest wildfire in American history. It got little attention at the time, because Chicago burned the same night. Father Peter Pernin, the local priest, survived by standing in the Peshtigo River for hours, and his account is one of the best records we have.

The lesson didn't take. The slash kept piling up.

Hinckley, 1894

On September 1, 1894, fire came out of the cutover again and swallowed Hinckley, Minnesota, killing more than 400 people.

James Root was the engineer on a southbound passenger train out of Duluth that day. He ran straight into the smoke and saw the fire coming. He couldn't go forward. So he put the train in reverse and backed it up the line through the flames, with the cab windows breaking and his hands and face burning, to a shallow, muddy pond called Skunk Lake. Around 300 people got off that train and into the water and lived.

John Blair, the train's porter, a Black man in an era that gave him little credit for anything, moved through the cars calming passengers, wetting down blankets and keeping people from jumping into the fire. Survivors credited him by name.

That's the heroism of the north woods. It wasn't the tall tales. It was a few ordinary working men who didn't run, on a day when running would have been easy.

Where Paul Bunyan came from

Here's the part that surprises people. The giant lumberjack you learned about in grade school barely existed in the camps.

The first Bunyan story in print came from journalist James MacGillivray in the Detroit News-Tribune in 1910. A few years later an ad man named W. B. Laughead started drawing Paul for the Red River Lumber Company's promotional booklets, and Laughead is the one who gave him Babe the Blue Ox. The legend went national partly as marketing.

There's nothing wrong with a good story. But the real men were better than the cartoon, because they were real. They got up at four. They worked a crosscut saw all day. They walked logs in April water that would stop your heart. If you want company for them, read about the men who built your ordinary Tuesday. Same breed, different tools.

What they left, and who fixed it

By around 1910 the great pine was mostly gone from the Lake States. Promoters sold the cutover to settlers as farmland, and much of it was sandy, stony ground that broke the families who tried it. Some of what those homesteading wives saw ended up in diaries like the ones in the pioneer women who wrote it all down.

Then a different crew showed up. National forests were set aside across the north woods, from the Huron-Manistee in Michigan to the Chequamegon in Wisconsin and the Superior in Minnesota. In the 1930s, young men of the Civilian Conservation Corps went into the old cutover and planted trees by the billion, by hand, in rows you can still see if you know where to look.

So walk into a stand of red pine in northern Wisconsin next fall. Those straight rows didn't happen by accident. One generation took the forest. The next one put it back. Take whatever you borrow, and return it better. The woods learned that lesson the hard way, and some boy with a shovel is the reason there's shade on your trail today.