Until a few years ago I knew little or nothing of mill-towns or lumber-camps. I had seen a saw-mill that cut its thousand feet a day when running, and it was generally connected with some farm through which ran a stream. It was a very innocent affair. But in 1889 I saw for the first time the great forests of pine, and became acquainted with part of the immense army of lumbermen. Michigan alone had at that time some forty thousand; Wisconsin has as many; Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana are now engaged in a vast work; and when we add the great States of Oregon and Washington, with their almost illimitable forests, we feel that we are speaking within bounds when we say an immense army.
[245]The one great difficulty of the problem is the transitory character of the work—like Count Rumford\'s stoves, if they could only have been patented and money made out of them, every house would use them; so if the lumber village had come to stay, many a church would have gone in and built. But more than once a man in authority has said, "Oh, I have looked that field over, and it won\'t amount to much." No one who has not had experience in the field can form any adequate idea of its vastness or its crying needs. The one great trouble of the whole question is the massing of so many men away from the softening influence of wife and mother. It is unnatural; and nature\'s laws, as sacred as the Decalogue, are broken in unnatural crimes, and sins unknown to the common run of men.
The lumber business may be divided into three distinct classes of workers,—the mill-men, the camp-men, and the river-men. The last are the smallest company, but the hardest to reach. They[246] flit from stream to river, from the river to the lake, from scenes of sylvan beauty to the low groggery—and worse. Their temporary home is often made of blackened logs papered with Police Gazettes, which come in vast numbers, and form the largest part of their not very select reading. Books of the Zola type, but without their literary excellence, are legion. Good books and good literature would be a boon in these camps.
To give you an idea of the rapid march of the lumber-camp, come with me into the primeval forest. It is a winter day. The snow is deep, and the lordly pines are dressed like brides in purest white; one would think, to look at their pendent branches, that Praxiteles and all his pupils had worked for a century in sculpturing these lovely forms. Not a sound is heard save our sleigh-bells, or some chattering squirrel that leaps lightly over the powdery snow; a gun fired would bring down a harmless avalanche. It is a sight of unsurpassed beauty in[247] nature\'s privacy; but alas, how soon the change!
An army of brawny men invade the lovely scene. Rude houses of logs are quickly erected; and men with axe and saw soon change the view, and with peavey and cant-hook the logs are loaded and off for the rollway. Inside the largest house are bunks, one above another; two huge stoves with great iron cylinders, one at each end, give warmth; while in picturesque confusion, socks and red mackinaws and shirts hang steaming by the dozens. There is a cockloft, where the men write their letters, and rude benches, where they sit and smoke and tell yarns till bedtime. In a few weeks at the farthest the grand old forest is a wreck; a few scrubby oaks or dwindling beech-trees are all that are left. The buildings rot down, the roofs tumble in, and a few camp-stragglers trying to get a living out of the stumpy ground are all that are left; and solitude reigns supreme.
On stormy days hundreds of the men[248] go into the nearest village, and sin revels in excess. In many a small town, mothers call their little ones in from the streets, which are soon full of men drunken and swearing, ready for fight or worse. At such times they hold the village in a reign of terror, and often commit crimes of a shocking nature, and no officer dares molest them. A stranger coming at such a time would need to conduct himself very discreetly or he would get into trouble. A volume might be filled with the outrageous things done in these small lumber-towns. Ireland is not the only place that suffers from absentee landlords.
The condition of the children is pitiable, brought up in an atmosphere of drunkenness and debauchery; swearing as natural as breathing; houses packed so closely that you can reach across from one window to another. The refuse is often emptied between the houses; diseases of all kinds flourish, and death is ever busy. Eight or ten nationalities are often found in these towns,—men who cannot spell[249] their names, and men who went to St. Paul\'s and admired Canon Liddon, or New York men that went to Beecher\'s church.
Here a house which cost less than a hundred dollars, and inside of it an organ costing one hundred and twenty-five dollars, and a forty-dollar encyclop?dia. The next house is divided by stalls like a stable, with bed in one, s............