By Gregory Clark, March 27, 1926.

“How would forty dollars a month and board do you?”

“Good stuff,” replied the unemployed and down-and-out young man in the government employment bureau – single, in good health and unaware of the source of to-day’s supper and to-night’s bed.

“All right; there’s a man here from an Algoma pulpwood camp looking for men…”

The lively expression on the unemployed young man’s face instantly fled.

“No, I don’t want to leave town… I got the prospect of a job as soon as spring comes…”

What is it about pulpwood and lumber camps that frightens the unemployed of the cities? What false traditions and misunderstanding fill the cities’ slushy and hopeless streets with jobless men all the long winter through when the beautiful northland, where every day is Christmas, calls in vain?

Is it the cold? The thin, dank cold of Toronto at ten above zero strikes closer into the bone than forty below in Algoma.

Is it the work? Of course, it may not be work they are looking for; 7 a.m. to supper time – those are the hours!

Is it the hard life? Oh, boy! – seven kinds of pastry not including pies; bunks about a red-bellied stove; a concertina droning and all voices raised.

What is it? Why should there be a single unemployed man in the south after the first snow falls in the great north country?

When the Lake Superior Pulp and Paper Company gave us a letter to their woods boss and we went a couple of hundred miles north from Sault Ste. Marie to see the first steps in the great pulpwood industry of Canada, we expected to find hard, strong men-who-are-men living a cold, rough life just for the glory of it and pitting their brute force against the cruel elements. Ralph Connor1 and the movies had primed us for the big surprise,

Mile by mile, as we went north from the Soo, the country grew wilder, darker. The hardwood mountains gave way to the vast unbroken seas of spruce. Endless spruce, dark and motionless in the snow. The villages ceased and our stops were at little section houses. Even the section houses grew smaller, lonelier. The dark spruce was closing in.

“Mile 229 next stop,” said the conductor. “Do you know Fred Landry to see him? I’ll introduce you.”

Fred Landry is the woods superintendent for the paper company, boss of a whole township of this engulfing spruce. The train pulled up amidst little village of spotless white log houses in the snow – a Christmas card scene.

And the first thing we saw as we detrained with our packsacks and snowshoes was a young lady nine months old, wrapped in her shawl – Barbara, the little daughter of the assistant to the boss, out to see the choo-choo go by.

A Christmas Card Country

Well, here was our first shock. Something of what literature and the movies had bequeathed us was instantly and completely lost at the sight of this dainty baby. Fred Landry shook hands with us in a firm, friendly way. (“Landry,” had said a huge mackinaw figure in the smoking compartment, “drives his horse without a whip, you’ll see. He has funny dogs around him that no other man would keep for a minute. Somehow, he attracts to him the best damn cooks and foremen in the whole of Algoma. You’ll like Landry.”)

We liked Landry, a Nova Scotian, one of those dark men with about ten words an hour. His eyes have a permanent, silent smile in them. We met his wife, his assistants, in a log house the interior of which was simply the modern bungalow, even to the radio set. We went across the village square to the dining house.

“This,” said Fred Landry, “is just the headquarters, office, stores and so forth. The main camp where we are cutting is six miles back into the township.”

We visioned a long hike on foot by tote road.

“No, I’ve a horse and cutter.”

“Pretty rough going?”

“No, indeed; as fine a pavement as you will ever see; an ice road.”

“Ice?”

“Yes, we water the main road every day. The tractor hauling the pulp to the railroad needs a good pavement for its load.”

Pavements, tractors – and before us this dinner table heaped with such food as cafeteria proprietors aim at and never attain! Lumber camps must have changed since Glengarry days.

We walked through the sparkling afternoon (we get about two like it in a lucky winter down south) to where the horse and cutter were tabled near the ice road. There on the railroad siding lay a long train of empty flat cars waiting to be loaded from the ramp. We drove on to a pavement of ice, blue, hard, surely the slickest pavement man has ever invented. Standard width, it wound amidst the dark gothic spruce seeking the flattest levels. The little horse stepped out ahead of the red cutter. It was like driving straight into a Christmas card.

This road we have used now or five years,” said Fred Landry. “It takes years to cut a township. Each season we push the road back further into a fresh stand of pulpwood. We’ll be here another two years yet. Then when all the spruce is cut, we will move on to another stand, build new camps, new roads.”

“But has this been cut?” we asked, pointing to the dense thickets of evergreen on both sides of the road.

“This was cut five years ago.”

“Then you don’t clean it off?”

“No, indeed. We take only the big spruce. Plenty of young stuff is left to mature. In five years, that has taken on almost an untouched appearance. But you will see when we get back into the uncut stands that this section lacks the big spruce.”

Pulp Cutters Have Special Saws

After three or four miles through this enchanted green land on the sparkling blue pavement, we at last came to the water tank on sleighs – a huge home-made square box on runners that contains 3,000 gallons of water. It was hauled by a team of giant horses. Spouts of water were gushing on to the road to freeze hard and smooth between its banked-up kerbs of snow.

Then we reached the first piles of pulp wood. The wood is cut into four-foot lengths and stacked in neat piles on both sides of the ice road to await the big tractor and its trains of sleighs.

“Pulp wood is cut on two different plans. Sometimes the company cuts it, hiring the crews direct. Or contractors cut it,” said Landry. “In either case, the principle is the same. These crews are mostly Finns and Russians. In the. fall, when the cutting begins, we open camp and the crews arrive. Each contractor or gang is allotted a certain stand of spruce to cut. The main road is extended into these stands.

“Then the crews are stationed along the main road one man to a row. Pulp wood cutting is a one-man proposition. Each man is given a stand on the main road and he starts to cut in at right angles, using his one-man buck-saw – a Finn contribution to Canada’s pulpwood industry. He starts from the road with saw and axe and cuts a lane into the solid bush big enough for a sleigh to get up. He clears the brush and stumps and falls what spruce is in the road. Then he starts in on both sides of his lane, sawing down the spruce, limbing it with his axe, sawing it into four-foot lengths with his bucksaw and carrying it out to his lane and piling it ready for the sleighs to come and haul it to the main road.

“The cutting goes on until bout January. Each man is paid by the cord – $2.25 a cord, just now, and a good smart man can cut two cords a day. There are no gangs working and wasting time. Each man is alone in his lane off the main road, but he can see his neighbors a few yards off through the spruce. Picture it? – individual men driving their little roads off the main road and stacking, their spruce as they go.

“In addition to the incentive of pay, there is the rivalry of craftsmanship. There is great rivalry for the title of best cutter in the camp. It isn’t always the biggest or strongest man who stacks up the biggest piles, either.

“When the snow comes the contractor or the company sends in the small sleighs and they haul the wood out to the main road, where it is again piled – each man his own great pile with his number chalked on – and as soon as the cold weather arrives cutting ceases, the piece-work ends, and the cutters are taken on at a straight wage-$35 to $40 a month and board, to load. The loading and hauling consumes the rest of the season. The tractor -gasoline driven – can haul ten huge sleigh loads of six to seven cords a sleigh – sixty to seventy cords at a haul. Three trains of ten sleighs are kept busy by that tractor – probably the greatest modern addition to the lumber industry. When it delivers one sleigh train to the siding, the string just unloaded is picked up and hauled back into the far end where they are loading, and when it arrives there the third sleigh train is already loaded and ready to go out. We take out two loads a day, a hundred and ten to a hundred and twenty cords.”

Seven Kinds of Pastry

When we reached the main camp – all of logs and occupying a big clearing on the edge of a lake – the shadows were beginning to creep across the snow from the encircling forests of spruce. Smoke was climbing from the cook’s fires in the mess cabin. The camp was awaiting the return of the men from the bush.

“Come and taste a cup of tea and some of the cook’s art work,” said Fred Landry.

So help us, there were seven kinds of pastry heaped on those big refectory tables before us! Jam tarts, jelly tarts, jam roll, apple turnovers, plum turnovers, chocolate cake and caramel cake!

Then there were three kinds of pie – apple, raisin and red currant. Now, this was not the sort of fine, rough fare that you could properly apologize for two hundred and more miles north of the Soo. The pies and cakes were dainty as any you would get in a Toronto hotel. The pies were rich, brown, flaky – the kind that makes mother a legend in cities.

“What else do you give them to-night?” we asked the little French chef, who was watching us with interest.

“Beans,” he replied with a grin.

Ah, beans! We knew there would be a bit of the traditional lumber camp somewhere. The cook opened a huge iron kettle almost as big as an engine boiler and lifted out a plate of beans for us. Shades of Boston and the poor mushy dark brown fodder that passes as beans down in the effete and civilized south! These beans were as light as feathers, almost white in color, every bean as complete and unsquashed as when it came out of the bean bag. And the flavor, well, Boston beans have no more meaning for us. Give us lumber camp beans for a banquet!

“Hey! Go easy,” admonished Fred Landry. “This is only tea. You’ve got a dinner waiting for you back at headquarters, and we mustn’t insult the other cook!”

We shook hands very formally with the little camp chef.

Outside, with the rose-colored evening falling upon the world of white and dark green, the great tractor was coming past the main camp on its six-mile haul to the railroad. Behind it came ten huge sleighs – one tractor hauling sixty cords of pulpwood! It reached a slight unavoidable grade on the glassy ice road. The crew broke the sleigh train in half. Up went the first five loads, down the grade came the tractor and slid the second five sleighs into place, and then on its way! In the old days, double and treble teams of horses used to heave and tug at single loads through these miles of woods. It was more picturesque, but that was all.

The water tank is filled from holes cut in the lakes by a horse-windlass and a barrel. The road is repaved every day with polished glass.

Then out of the evening woods trooped the loading gang, its day done. These were all Finns. Broad-cheeked, blond northerners – splendid, monosyllabic fellows with only two faults recorded against them in all the north country: they don’t observe the game laws and they are slightly tinged with Red – that is, they are easily swayed by agitators, and strike without much difficulty. Another fault also heard against them from Canadian lips – they don’t mind work! But a feeling of envy filled our hearts when we saw these great, weary dumb giants sit down to the meals fit for demi-gods: a great envy – for we pictured the employment bureau in a far distant city, a grey, terrible scene, damp and smelly-a pitiful mob of shabby, hungry, ill-looking men leaning against soiled counters, waiting for something to turn up. These tousle-headed, wool-clad huskies of Finns, tucking into such a meal, with warm bunk houses to soothe their work-happy muscles. Already, a concertina was tuning up somewhere out in the Christmas scene. But the songs that were sung were unknown songs.

Lumber Camp Turkish Baths

Have we petered out? What these Finns are doing, the great grandfathers of the present Old Ontario were doing seventy-five years ago. The cities are betraying many a man out of his rightful inheritance. The Finns are taking the north country as they find it. The cities are filled with men wearing callouses on the soles of their feet.

“We sent a man down, to the cities,” said Fred Landry, as though reading our thoughts. “He couldn’t get any men.”

Despite the big tractor and its note of modernity, there are still no end of picturesque things in the great camp. One of the quaintest was the steam bath house. This, like the one-man bucksaw, is a gift of the Finns to Canada. No Finn will work in a camp without a steam bath house. This house is a low windowless log shanty, closely chinked. One whole corner is filled by a huge pile of stones, neatly piled over a hole or fireplace. The rest of the shanty is filled with benches. Early Saturday morning a fire is started in the fire-hole beneath the stones. It is kept afire all day long, until he stones are piping hot. Then the gang comes in from the bush and disrobes. They carry pails of water int the awfully hot shanty. The pails of water are thrown on the stones and the shanty fills with live steam. There the Finns – and all the rest of the camp to the boss himself – sit and stew for half an hour. The dirt is fairly gushed out of them by sweat. It is simply a Turkish bath. But it is a mighty sanitary one.

The blacksmith shop of a lumber camp makes everything from the huge runners for the wood sleighs to the sleighs themselves. Latches, windless beams, horseshoe nails, ten-ton water tanks – nothing is beyond the old-fashioned blacksmith whom the motor car has driven to his final halt in the lumber camp. He is a great man. He has a pile of iron bars and ingots. From them he will make you anything. We found him throwing together one of the gargantuan sleighs that follow the tractor over the ice highway. A little job like building a ship.

The bunk houses are like army huts, except that they are roomier and the bunks are bigger and more comfortable. Gas lanterns light the scene for the boys to read and write before “lights-out” at nine o’clock. The Daily Star arrives every day – just seven hundred miles!

“Well, it’s wonderful,” we said to Fred Landry, the boss of all these wonders. “Christmas every day.”

“It is a great life, he said quietly. “They grouse.”

“Just like the troops.”

“But we are all happy and healthy and it puts a spell on you.”

We drove away in the twilight down the road paved with palest green, between aisles of cathedral spruce and large silver stars snapping in the remote Algoma sky. We passed a little clearing where a Finn lived with his wife and sons. There was warm light in the windows and the bucksaws were hung by the door.

“They’re beginning to settle. He works with the gang and is doing a little clearing, too. His wife helps pile the pulpwood.”

We could now detect, in the dark woods, the tell-tale ghostly paths cut right and left, that showed the cutting done five years before. But the young spruce forest had already forgotten time and was busy restoring the great dark blanket of evergreen which, save for fire, lies over all that great lone land. At the railroad, a sleigh train was just being hauled on to the ramp. A loading crew stood ready to hand-heave the little logs from sleighs to flat cars to go down to the Soo where the company’s big paper mills are.

One year there were four hundred men in this camp – this township. The number changes with the season’s demand for pulpwood. But there are always Finns enough to supply the need for men – he-men, strong, willing men with a taste for producing wealth out of the raw.

Back at headquarters, with the radio bringing in comic cities and their inadequate compensation of sounds hundreds of miles to the south, Fred Landry showed us a map.

“After we’re through here, we’ll move up to one of these other townships.”

It is a great, romantic harvest – the beginning of the strange business that ends with this paper resting in your hands with this story and these pictures printed on it.

Editor’s Note:

  1. Ralph Connor was an author of romanticized versions of the Canadian West. ↩︎