250 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
[Aug. 13, 1910. 
“John Axman” is as good a name as another, 
whatever his nationality or mingling of nationali¬ 
ties may chance to be. In the Northern States 
lie may hail you in a dialect that flavors of 
French, Russian, Swedish or Norwegian, but he 
is rarely of the blood of Southern Europe, for 
the sons of the vine-clad hills do not love to 
carve homes from the wilderness. John may be 
of English, Irish or Scotch descent in the At¬ 
lantic coast and Central States, and in the South¬ 
west he is more commonly a mixture of all 
three, with the Scotch-Irish pioneer strain show¬ 
ing well to the fore, as when the white man’s 
steel first blazed a route through the wilds of 
Virginia, Carolina, Kentucky and Tennessee to 
the prairies beyond the Ohio. The Celtic blood, 
its kindred streams parted through centuries by 
the Irish Channel, regains all its pristine fire in 
the remingling, with a love of free air and 
plenty of elbow room. In my acquaintance with 
John Axman I have noted this—if Englishman, 
German or Swede, he is quite likely to await 
old age and prosperity on the land his industry 
has cleared, fenced and tilled, but the Scotch- 
Irish settler bargains with the first buyer that 
approaches him, and usually knows of a better 
location a little further on. 
John McCrea—we will call him that to dis¬ 
tinguish him from the other “Johns”—lives a 
couple of miles back from the “big road,” be¬ 
cause roads have become so common of late 
years that he cannot make the distance greater. 
He owns a forty-acre tract that no one else was 
anxious for, perhaps ten acres of it tillable and 
the remainder pretty evenly divided between 
skunk cabbage swamp and stony ridges. I am 
not sure, and neither does it matter, whether he 
homesteaded from the Government or persuaded 
some land-poor speculator to sell him the place 
on long time. You reach McCrea’s by a foot 
path which turns from the road just after cross¬ 
ing Rocky Run—there’s small need of a wider 
trail, for McCrea has but one horse, a yoke of 
steers which he.sometimes uses in logging, and 
no vehicle of any description. When he goes 
abroad McCrea takes the shortest possible cut 
through the woods. The path is for visitors and 
for his wife and children when they go to Ma’s 
or E T ncle Jim’s to spend the day, the three girls 
astride the horse following the mother, who car¬ 
ries John, Jr., on her hip. It is merely a trace 
through the thickets, winding about to avoid 
fallen trees and to avail itself of the most prac¬ 
tical crossings of slough and rock patch. Going 
in, you pass to the south of John’s clearing to 
reach a footlog across the run. The ford is an 
old deer crossing, worn deeper in its approaches 
by the wide-spreading hoofs of the neighborhood 
cows. If you are light of foot, either at ford 
or footlog, you may see sizeable trout where the 
sunlight streaks the shadowed waters. McCrea 
takes toll from them now and then, but his 
daughters rarely coax a trout to join the chubs 
on their alder stringers. Why they cannot is 
one of life’s unsolvable problems. 
If from the city and handicapped with urban 
ideas of the wilderness, the first sight of Mc¬ 
Crea’s home is a disappointment, for it is not a 
log cabin. Rough lumber is cheap and one man 
can easily throw it together, boxing the walls up 
and down, and battening the cracks. But the 
roof is of riven white oak shakes and the doors 
are hinged and latched with wood. A fireplace 
furnishes warmth to the living room, and light 
as well in the long winter evenings, but Mrs. 
McCrea’s insistence has won a little stove for 
the kitchen. The tables are home made from the 
widest boards obtainable, and are as smooth on 
top as “boughten” tables, for McCrea has a jack 
plane which is an utensil that his sire and grand- 
sire lacked. The bedsteads are one-posters, the 
side rail and foot board butted against and nailed 
securely to the two walls, and the straight-backed 
chairs are bottomed with hickory bark, white 
oak splits or deer skin with the hair side upper¬ 
most. A deer skin chair seat is supremely com¬ 
fortable. In use it yields to its occupant’s 
weight, takes the right concavity and retains it. 
The rocking chair is also backed with deer skin, 
and seating yourself in it is like dropping into 
a mold. Home comfort! Civilization has noth¬ 
ing to approach it. The cupboards are grocers’ 
boxes, shelved and nailed to the wall. Iron wood 
forks above the door support a ’73 model re¬ 
peater and a Belgian double barrel shotgun, tjre 
latter rarely used except in the duck season, for 
McCrea does not take kindly to scatter guns for 
game that may be killed with a .32 bullet. Con¬ 
venient to the house stand a stable and corn crib, 
two little pole pens under one roof, yet large 
enough to shelter a horse, and what grain may 
be raised on two or three acres. The passage¬ 
way between them is hung with plow harness, 
log chains, steel traps and a few ’coon and musk¬ 
rat pelts stretched for drying. 
John McCrea has been a quiet, well-behaved 
citizen since his marriage. He used to drink a 
little, use profanity and aspire to renown as a 
rough-and-tumble fighter. Once, at a dance, he 
whipped three men in succession, and not until 
the last one begged did the spectators discover 
that McCrea’s left wrist was broken. Dr. Burns’ 
eldest daughter was there that night—came with 
one of the men who were thrashed—and she 
bound up McCrea’s injured arm as skillfully as 
her father might, though the two were compara¬ 
tive strangers, and there were other patients 
awaiting her care. A month later McCrea was 
able to swing an axe and maul, and took a con¬ 
tract to split 20,000 rails for the doctor, aver¬ 
aged 400 a day from the stump, and celebrated 
the wind-up of the job by a runaway marriage. 
It was reported that the doctor never paid his 
son-in-law for the rail making, but the two con¬ 
tinued friends and “W. L. Burns” occasionally 
followed “J. P. McCrea” on documents calling 
for the payment of certain sums of money on 
certain dates. And so McCrea omitted the drink¬ 
ing and fighting, and much of the swearing. He 
built for his bird a nest in the woods, and like 
other birds she grew to expect building a new 
nest every year thereafter. 
“It is this way,” said McCrea. “I was doin’ 
well over on the river till the sawmills moved 
away and there was no winter work for me. 
Bob Smith was needin’ log teams, and I swap¬ 
ped my place for four yoke and a wagon. The 
next year I bought an eighty on the mountain, 
built a house and cleared about four acres and 
sold at a profit that fall, but I lost money on a 
pilin’ contract I took from the railroad and had 
to buy my next place on credit. The first pay¬ 
ments I met by selling sawlogs, but Lucy wanted 
to live closer to the home folks, so I sold and 
bought a patch from Doc Burns, fixed it up a 
little and traded it for a farm over on Beef 
Creek, and that was the last move but one until 
I come here. Reckon I'm stuck now, for this 
place don’t look good to most folks. But if I can 
raise the price, there’s an eighty of mighty good 
pine over west of town that I aim to corner.” 
McCrea’s hobby is making railroad ties. Give 
him good clean w'hite oak timber on land free 
of gravel, and an eleven-pound broad axe with 
sixteen-inch blade that he can swing over¬ 
handed and sink in the ground to the eye at 
every blow, a sweet-cutting double bitt with one 
edge thick for knots, a ring maul and four tie 
wedges made just right, and he will turn out 
forty ties one day with another, and everyone 
will “go straight” at inspection. He is a first 
class judge of standing timber, and can estimate 
at a glance the height of a tree to the first big 
limb, how r much it will square at the butt, and 
its board measure contents. He can run a seven- 
foot crosscut saw single-handed, or with a part¬ 
ner without “dragging his feet” or putting a’l 
the work on the other man by undue downward 
pressure when the saw is drawn toward the 
other side of the log. He can make himself in¬ 
valuable as a swamper ahead of the logging 
teams, or he can pick up a bullwhip, curl its 
twelve-foot lash over four yokes of unruly cat¬ 
tle and induce them to snake thirty feet of a 
three-foot log through sapling thickets so dense 
that the average hunter would prefer going 
around them. 
A man of McCrea’s caliber is valuable 
wherever timber cutting is in progress. He is 
accustomed to receive fairly" good wages and 
feels that all farm labor is underpaid and con¬ 
sequently to be ignored. McCrea will farm a 
little on his own account, but not for wages. 
When more remunerative work fails to offer, he 
has always his rifle or fishing rod as an excuse 
to lead him to the woods, but the game and fish 
taken are consumed at home. Such men as he 
rarely become market hunters. They know only 
the hardest of hard work, love it for itself and 
feel no inclination for what they are pleased 
to term trifling callings and occupations. Their 
love for the big trees may be questioned by those 
who do not understand how one can love and 
destroy, but it is nevertheless the controlling 
passion of their lives, leaving, however, room in 
their hearts for the little trees, shrubs, vines, 
flowers and everything that has growth in 
forests. 
Said McCrea to me the other day: “There 
was a fellow in here last spring who helped me 
a whole lot with the names of flowers that I 
have been seein’ all my life, though he did mix 
up trillium and Indian turnip until he found them 
in bloom.” And again: “I used to wonder why 
the sweet smellin’ bushes, like spicewood and 
• sassafras, couldn’t have showy flowers same as 
dogwood and redbud, but I reckon it was never 
intended for any one bush to be the whole show, 
no more than any one man or woman. Every¬ 
thing in this world has got its good side, and 
we want to shet our eyes to the others.” There 
is genuine philosophy for you, and it savors of 
years spent in profound medita.tion. 
John McCrea, Jr., if he inherits his father’s 
ideas and proclivities, is likely to go through 
life a dissatisfied man, for the world will have 
outgrown its need for him and others like him, 
unless, indeed, he should turn his attention to 
practical forestry. And even in such event the 
name “John Axman” will be something of a 
misfit. There are no more forests to clear away. 
The day of the ax is nearing its close. 
