FOREST, FISH AND GAME COMMISSION. 259 



too long, forcing the manufacturers either to move their sawmills up stream or to 

 flood the logs down to some place where they could be sawed. 



In a few years log drivers were at work on every large river in the State. 

 The logs, which were cut and skidded in the fall, were hauled during the winter to 

 the banks of the streams, where they were piled in huge tiers on the "banking 

 ground," as it was called on the Susquehanna, or " rolling bank " in Northern New 

 York. With the first spring freshet, often while the ice was still running, the block- 

 ing was knocked loose, allowing the great piles of logs to roll down the sloping 

 ground, over the edge of the bank, in a swiftly moving, tumbling, splashing mass, 

 into the cold, turbid stream. In some places the logs were unloaded from the 

 sleighs directly on the ice which covered some lake, pond or stream, with the inten- 

 tion of allowing the logs to go out with the ice on the first spring flood. 



In the lake region of the Adirondacks, on the Saranacs and neighboring waters, 

 the river drivers had the additional task of moving their logs through the lakes, 

 where there was no current to assist their progress, and, too often, contrary winds 

 that drove their logs back or scattered them. In passing through these lakes the 

 lumbermen generally rafted the logs or inclosed the floating mass within strongly 

 connected booms, and then " warped " their way through the open water by using 

 an anchor, a long heavy cable and an upright windlass which stood on the forward 

 end of the raft. This work was often done at night when the lake was still and free 

 from the strong winds that are so prevalent in early spring. There are old river 

 drivers living to-day who, in their stories of early log drives on Floodwood and the 

 Upper Saranac, describe how, through the long hours and darkness, they leaned 

 wearily against the capstan bars as they tramped round and round the platform 

 while " kedging" their way down the lake. 



The work of the river drivers was a perilous one. Scarcely a season passed with- 

 out some one being drowned or killed on some stream. Men were crushed under 

 swift rolling logs at the banking grounds ; chilled to death in the icy waters ; 

 drowned while working at the rapids; or killed in breaking the great jams which 

 formed at every obstruction in the river. The most dangerous work was often done 

 by volunteers, and could all the tales of the river drivers be collected there would 

 be found stories of unrecorded heroism that would equal anything in fire and flood 

 and battlefield. They were necessarily men of stalwart build and superb physique. 

 Possessed of a surprising agility, they would leap from log to log in the rapid, swirl- 

 ing current, and with nothing but a pike pole for a paddle would ride a small log. 

 standing upright and guiding their treacherous craft as skillfully as an Indian his 

 canoe. 



