890 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[June 4, 1910. 
We found that our new acquaintances were 
Moses Wadleigh, of Oldtown, a head lumber¬ 
man, and one of his men. He had a crew of 
men down stream and it had frozen so that they 
could not boat up supplies and he had started 
to go through the woods to Moosehead Lake, 
which he said was not frozen as we supposed. 
He was going to get his horses across, build a 
jumper and haul back a load of provisions. 
They had no blankets and only an axe and an 
auger, a few slices of raw pork, which was tied 
to one of their belts, and a dipper for making 
tea. As it was near noon and we were not far 
from an old camp, we boiled the kettle and ate, 
we giving them some of our food, as it was bet¬ 
ter than theirs. 
It was much nearer to go to Moosehead than 
to Chesuncook where I had planned to go, and 
as they wished me to go with them because 
neither of them had a compass or knew any¬ 
thing about the way, we “joined drives” and 
started for Loon Lake. We had not gone a 
mile when we struck a fresh man’s track, and 
although it led us out of our course we fol¬ 
lowed, hoping to be conducted to some camp 
where we could get directions to some tote 
road. 
Pretty soon we heard axes and saw red shirts 
high up from the ground. On getting nearer we 
found a crew camp building and a dozen men 
were placing one of the great rib poles. Learn¬ 
ing that their home camp was miles out of our 
way and that Henderson’s crew were camping 
across a cove of Loon Lake, we again started 
for the lake, but as we had to go several miles 
out of our way to get around Big Scott Bog, it 
was nearly sundown when we c^pie to a ridge 
which looked natural to me. I said to Rufus: 
“This is the ridge our Loon Lake sable line is 
on,” and in a few minutes we came to it and 
followed it down to the lake, taking out a sable 
on the way. 
We were just down to the lake and were 
going to camp in an old hunter’s camp, when 
across the cove we heard a noise like pounding 
with an axe on a barrel. When we were here 
in the canoe, I had paddled around the cove 
while Rufus cooked, and I remembered seeing 
three old batteaux on a log landing just across 
the cove. So I told them that the noise was 
made by some crew breaking up those batteaux. 
We went to the shore and through the gather¬ 
ing darkness we could just see some men as 
they disappeared into the woods. It was about 
a quarter of a mile across the cove and we were 
not very sure of the ice, but we strung out and 
tried it. On getting across we found a newly 
swamped road leading back, but could get no 
answer to our calling and pushed on. It grew 
very dark and we stumbled over roots and slip¬ 
pery skids for over a mile before we saw the 
sparks flying out from the smoke hole of a large 
camp. To see us four come in was quite a sur¬ 
prise, though it could hardly have been a wel¬ 
come one to the six men we found there, but 
they greeted us as if we had been brothers. 
The head man, Henry Averill, and five men 
had got the camp nearly finished, but their wan- 
gan boat was frozen in thirteen miles from there 
on Russell Stream and everything they had to 
eat must be carried that distance on men’s 
shoulders. This word wangan is a Penobscot 
Indian word and is used by our lumber crews 
to designate several different things. A wangan 
boat is a boat in which provisions and cooking 
tools are carried. A wangan chest is a chest 
in camp in which are tobacco, clothes, mittens, 
socks, etc., to be sold to the crew and is equiva¬ 
lent to a slop chest aboard a vessel. Our Penob¬ 
scot men carried the word to Michigan and Min¬ 
nesota and there they have changed it to zvan- 
nigan, but wangan is the correct word. 
These men wefe just as free with their pro¬ 
visions as if they had a carload at the door. As 
Rufus and I had our own supplies we did not 
taste their food, for it seemed too bad to eat 
what had cost them so dear, but it was not for 
lack of urging. They had only a berth boughed 
for six, but the head man gave up his chance 
to Wadleigh, and another did the same to Wad- 
leigh’s man and they lay near the fire on the 
yellow clay floor which later would be covered 
with the floor poles. I lay in my blanket on a 
slab of green spruce which was soon to serve 
as a deacon seat and Rufus stowed himself away 
on the floor somewhere. 
The Dam at Number Three 
By BILLY ALECK 
ES, ’tis the f oiliest cut of pine that’s lift 
in the bush,” said Martin O’Leary, the 
fire-ranger, as we sat and puffed at our 
pipes on the stoop of the boss’ office at Burnt 
Lake station. It was after a twelve-mile tour 
through the bush, personally conducted by Mar¬ 
tin, made in order to feast our eyes on a real bit 
of virgin pine bush that fully repaid us for the 
five days’ struggle with paddle and pack ere we 
reached our destination. 
On the tramp that afternoon we passed through 
a section which bore traces of the operations of 
the previous winter’s cut, with all the wreck and 
ruin left behind after the shanty boys had taken 
out the timber. Dead brush, fallen trunks and 
stumps left a scene of desolation not unlike a 
fire's ravages in a city’s industrial center. These 
wastes of brush are the bane of the fire-ranger. 
After a long drouth, it is just so much tinder, 
ready for the lightning stroke. 
Not far off we passed a typical log shanty of 
the woods differing from the larger camps in 
that the one building served as clerk’s office, 
bunk house and cookery. The rude furnishings 
and remnants of broken chains, cant hooks, 
peavies and discarded axe heads, with the huge 
Cylindrical heating stove and businesslike shanty 
range, bore ample testimony that there had been 
doin’s here the previous winter. Camp Number 
Three was at a point where Alder Creek sud¬ 
denly became ambitious to spread itself and the 
sluggish stream, which up to this point had 
meandered lazily through swamp and muskeg, 
took a sudden drop and changed to a miniature 
rapid, thus requiring a dam to hold back the 
logs with a sufficient body of water to float them 
safely over the numerous rocky shallows in the 
spring. 
“I was always a’feared of the reserve dam,” 
said Gidoux, the boss. “The frost wasn't out o’ 
the ground when Pat Green put down that 
frame, and I know’d she’d go when the ice 
broke.” 
“’Twas lucky the gang was there when she 
broke. Gaw-da-mighty couldn’t have stopped it 
if Pat hadn't been watchin’ it like a cat,’’ said 
Martin. 
“The lads were at supper when Pat rushed in: 
‘Ske’s goin’, boys! Out, all of yez!’ 
“Everyone jumped, some seizing peavies as 
they ran. Some were told off to bring bales of 
hay from the keep-over, others to cut brush, 
while the rest got busy with shovels, filling bags 
with sand. The water had risen fully two feet 
after the last two days of steady March drizzle, 
and the brown flood was churned into foam as 
it swept down the rocky bed below. The upper 
works, well braced with timbers and weighted 
with boulders, would withstand the water that 
rushed over it; ’twas the hole below that had 
to be plugged.” 
Fourteen bales of hay were rammed down, 
only to be swept through the gap and tossed 
like corks down the swiftly rising stream. It 
was neither comforting nor tactful of MacNeish, 
the handy-man, to speak of what had happened 
on the drive two years back, when the dam at 
the head of the Cedar rapids had collapsed, and 
the logs run wild down that three-mile stretch 
of angry white water. It tied up a drive of 
50,000 logs for a year and three brave lads there 
met a watery grave. A foreman’s reputation is 
not enhanced by such mishaps as these, and no 
wonder Pat, the young boss, was in desperation. 
The anxiety of the previous hours of watching 
had strung him up to concert pitch, and he 
showed the gang he was no highbanker. He saw 
the only hope was to get two bales down at * 
once and jam them into the breach together, so 
with his peavey he dashed across through the 
curving water on top of the dam, and big Louis 
Le Fleur followed. Crossing their peavies they 
forced them into the bed of the stream, the next 
two bales fell fair across their peavies and these 
two giants stood waist deep, every muscle 
tense, holding back the tide of destruction. Then 
came more hay, then the brush. 
“All night long we worked,” said Martin. 
“Twenty men holdin’ lanterns an’ twenty cuttin’ 
brush, and we put down 400 bags of sand be¬ 
fore the boss would let up, and if the wind 
hadn’t changed in the mornin’, we'd be workin’ 
on it yet. No one thought of grub till we’d 
been workin’ twenty-four hours, but then the 
shanty boys are like camels and can eat four 
meals in one, and you can bet the cook didn’t 
stint the chuck. Nothin’ was said either when 
the boys didn’t turn out the next mornin’ till 
six instead of four.” 
So 18,000 logs were kept afloat, and in their 
proper time and season were guided by the river 
drivers through the lakes and down the long and 
tortuous waters of the Petewawa to the big mills 
of the company at Amprion, whose greedy saws 
must be fed as long as good white pine is in 
demand. 
To the casual observer a pile of lumber is one 
of the most prosaic sights of civilization, but 
traced back to the limits whence it came, it could 
unfold romance at every turn. 
