I.

The Bullhead River Saga: 1858 to

1864
(c) 1998, 2008 by Clete Goffard

Ellis: 1860

I.

Ellis Thorvald's earliest recollections were of the sights, sounds and excitement of
buying and selling.
A parade of strange men came and went from their Buffalo farmhouse, and he
remembered standing in the kitchen doorway as a child watching his father and a man at
the table, the air sweet with the smell homemade wine, and a pile of bills lying between
them. His mother had come to lead him away, but he could still hear bursts of loud
chatter punctuated by explosive guffaws.
A little later he could recall sitting on a brown bag of linseed oil meal, nibbling some
of the meal from his hand, as he watched his father, Thomas, natty in a deerskin jacket
and boots, describe the admirable qualities of one of the horses that came and went,
seemingly without pattern. There was a gentle palomino he would have gladly cared
forever, but she went too, one blindingly bright day in summer when he was pulling
weeds in the corn patch. He half-expected every buggy that came up their rural road to
turn into their driveway.
But the source of his fascination with it all was the game being played out; the
gestures, the postures signifying acceptance or rejection, the anxious silence of
deliberation or reconsideration, and the final moment when the game was done, the right
hands clasped, and the animal led back to its stall, for a day or so, or out the barn door to
be tethered to the back of a buggy.
Larger wagons came and went, too. A meal might be interrupted at any moment by the
shout of a teamster, the snort of horses, and the sound of iron-clad wheels crunching
gravel stones. Everyone used the back door off the kitchen of the big white house. The
front door opened to the parlour, which no visitor wanted to track up with muddy boots,
and which was used largely as a place to serve tea to the minister or the school teacher.
The large wagons gave, and took, a surprising number and variety of creatures; red,
white, brown, black, and and varicolored cows and calves, huge Belgian farm horses and
shaggy ponies,usually towed behind, and once they brought a load of goats. When one of
the animals died, a seedy-looking man with a bizarre wagon that could winch a carcase
aboard with much grunting and pulling of ropes by its owner, came and hauled it away.
These animals were taken for "rendering" his father told him, but he sometimes hinted
they were headed for the meat markets.
Occasional and inexplicable surpluses of food would appear. Once it was stacked
baskets of ripe peaches that his mother took charge of, and which soon had the kitchen
fragrant with the smell of preserves. Every meal, until the baskets disappeared, offered all
one could eat of every dish incorporating the peach that his mother knew.
There were eggs, piles and bags of potatoes and pumpkins, and barrels of apples.There
were also loads of hay and bags of wheat and oats. Once there four stacks of white boxes,
piled one atop the other, that he was told were bee hives. They came in late fall and
disappeared in spring, so all he could remember about them were a few bees crawling
around on the outside of the boxes.
Thomas extracted a wooden frame from one of the boxes, which was solidly packed
with a fascinating pattern of wax and honey and which was called a comb. The comb was
removed from the frame and sliced up with a butcher knife, and dinner that evening
featured a dessert consisting of a piece of dripping comb served on a plate. His parents
devoured it with gusto, although he found the sticky honey a little too sweet for his taste.
He ate a part of the wax, too, until he was told not to.
When Ellis grew older, it was his task to do the chores involving the care of animals.
He dragged forkfuls of hay to the cattle and cleaned up their manure with a fork and
shovel, dumping it from a wheelbarrow into a rustic sled called a 'stoneboat,' which was
largely a shallow box nailed to a pair of logs that served as skids.
But this practice, like so many other things in their lives, was not constant. During one
period, the stoneboat held a tank and was used transport water to a yardful of horses. For
awhile, it sat abandoned in the corner of the farmyard while giant burdocks grew up
around it. During this time, Ellis dumped the manure in a pile, as he was told it was
better for the garden if it was thoroughly rotted. Later, at about the age of twelve, when
he was thought to be capable of handling a team, he would harness up the Belgians,
standing on an overturned pail so that he was tall enough to be able to throw the harness
over their backs, and used the stoneboat or wagon to do his chores.
There were long dull periods of work, and then times in which the farm was cleared of
animals and there was little to do. Ellis remembered a week in which the family's main
occupation was the putting together of a large,ornate, wooden puzzle, and during which
every other meal seemed to consist of milk toast.Then the winds of fate would shift, and
they would be off to Buffalo to pick up goods, with side excursions to see Niagara Falls
or to watch barges being pulled along the Erie canal.
The adventures took place largely in summer. The rest of the year his main occupation
was that of attending a small crossroads school about two miles distant. He learned to
read and write, of course, and something of the world, the country
and the state he lived in, which was the United States of America, and the State of New
York, being one of the twenty-four states, as everyone knew.From his mother he learned
he had been born on the morning of July fifteenth, in the Year Of Our Lord, 1823.
He was a good student, but not particularily ambitious in school or life-- he was not
driven to be someone else or live somewhere else. He was a dutiful son and his parents
were pleased. When he finished the little school he was a rapidly growing teenager who
promised to be a big, but not husky, man. He had sandy-colored hair and could be
charming with strangers, but no one could say they understood him.
Nor could he understand his father. The man both fascinated and eluded him.Ellis
knew he would never attain Thomas' skill as a horsetrader and cattle dealer--it was hard
for him to strike a pose without feeling awkward or insincere.What baffled him about his
father was that he was never certain which of the personalities he displayed was the real
man.
The boy's skill and care in looking after animals did not go unnoticed. The family
conclusion that he was headed for a career in medicine was tacitly arrived at. He was
informed one summer day that he had been placed in a preparatory school in Buffalo for
the fall semester. The school, at which he was to board, was highly recommended, and
operated by the Jamesons, a brother and sister who were both University graduates. Ellis
remembered them with fondness for the rest of his life.
Mr. Morton Jameson was a student of science, and like his sister Anne, a bright-eyed
disciple of optimism. His steady gaze, probing questions, and lectures dense with fact and
quotation left his students disconcerted, but his glowing encomiums of progress left them
elated. He knew, better than they, the unplumbed depths of ignorance in their minds, and
what intensity of light was needed to penetrate the stubborn meat of their brains. He led
them through the lucid formulations of Galileo, Newton, and Boyle. He lighted their path
through unbelieveably ancient ages with Lyell and Lamarck, he struggled with them
through Aristotle, Kant, and Goethe, he showed them the blue spark of electricity that
was pursued by Franklin and Volta.
From a battered leather case, he one day extracted an instrument of brass and glass
called a microscope, through which they peered at the diminutive agents of putrifaction
and disease. He toured the weedlots of Buffalo with them on field trips to improve their
grasp of Botany.
Miss Jameson --"Anne" was an intimacy that did not extend to the students--taught
them the rudiments of Latin, art, and the basic agreements of human society. Sometimes
an outsider would appear to talk of their profession.They attended concerts and recitals,
as properly attired as their wardrobes would allow. One trip involved traveling to an
ancient brick auditorium to hear an elderly flautist accompaning a soprano's rendition of
Old English Hunting Songs.On another excursion, they heard a violinist, wearing a red
sash, who played Hungarian folk songs--all this to bring to their attention that there was
life and art beyond the city limits of Buffalo.
Anne had the power to entrance Ellis with her sincerity, her lustrous brown eyes, her
soulful gaze that seemed privately intended for him, her outpouring of love for all that
was beautiful and good, the delicious curve of her arm and full bosom, her unerring sense
of what was proper and kind in speech and deportment, the beguiling intersection of her
throat and jaw.
He traveled with her to the ends of the earth. They stood with Napolean as he
pondered the inscrutable Sphinx with its gaze fixed on eternity, they strolled beside the
reflecting pool of the Taj Mahal in the moonlight, they peered over the shoulder of Keats,
as immortal words, yet unknown to the world, flowed upon paper. He fought beside her at
the Alamo; huddled together, they crossed the Delaware with Washington in his longboat;
and they watched, with awe, Caesar's triumphal entry into Rome.
Anne spoke with a passion against slavery, and championed the plight of the poor and
oppressed. She told of the hope of the future, of Robert Owen and his city of worker
cottages at New Lanark, Scotland, and of the Promise of Socialism.She was a most
untypical example of a spinster, in Ellis' mind, and he was dismayed when, before the end
of the second term, she left to be married.
And, in early 1840, in the 18th year of his life, Ellis Thorvald was shaken rudely
awake by one of the boarders who informed him that he had a visitor. It was his mother,
who in a subdued voice told him that his father had died.
They rode back to the farm with a local man Ellis knew by sight. Two days later,
dressed in their best clothing, they drove back into Buffalo for the funeral, then back to
the Jameson's for Ellis's things. Morton Jameson expressed his condolences, gave Ellis a
manly hug of regret and farewell, and his school days were over.

II.
In later years, Ellis would be called many things: cold, indifferent, grasping, and
insensitive. He would be accused of a single-minded drive to amass a fortune. But in
making this accusation, his detractors would be ascribing their own psychology to him.
Thorvald didn't discipline himself to work; that is done by those who want to be doing
something else. Work was his personal life, and it sometimes detracted from his personal
life, but not seriously. He was stirred by no great passions or ideals, which is not to say he
did not have ideals. He had no great unfulfilled desire or ambitions. What seemed to be
ambition was playing the game as he understood it was to be played, with single minded
attention.
With his father's death from heart failure, the Thorvalds' easy, if sometimes uncertain,
life of wheeling and dealing came to an end. The farm was theirs, to be sure, but to live
they needed a steady income. They decided the best choice was dairy farming, and they
learned the way of persistence and plainness.Ellis tended the small herd and traveled
daily to the small cross roads creamery that sold butter and buttermilk in the city, these
products being less likely to spoil than fresh whole milk.
Ellis had to learn the arts of farming anew. To plow, to plant, and to harvest. He was
determined not to become a rural drudge, but he knew that any career he might have for
himself was being ruined by being a farmer for any length of time. There was family
responsibility, though, and he frankly admitted that he was not suited for much else
However, there was no reason not to do well at what he was put to do. It became a
habit to discuss the operation of the farm in detail with his mother after supper on
Saturdays. The small herd was enlarged, and some unproductive pastures plowed to
produce more feed. The inefficient producers were weeded out--his father had taught him
how to judge an animal--and the farming operation grew.
Shortly after leaving the Jameson Acadamy, he posted a letter to his old classmates,
which Morton Jameson read aloud in class. He received a written reply from Mr. Jameson
himself, which was gratifying, as well as from several of his acquaintances. These
included a student name Milly Dowling who had sat near him in class, and while he had
not given her a good deal of attention at school, they soon began an earnest
correspondence. To make an old story short, Ellis and Milly were married a few years
later, and she became a country woman.
Milly loved the spacious farm house with its mansard roof, the garden, the orchard
which boasted seven different kinds of apples, two kinds of pears, three kinds of cherries,
and currents and gooseberries.
She thought the broad-leaved catalpa trees on the front lawn so graceful, and the
peonies and French lilacs in spring so pretty.She settled down to being a farm wife, not
only out of a sense of duty, but also with a sense of relief. She liked the country and
living things. She was not gregarious and always a little confused by people and what
they wanted from her.
She and brother Victor had lost both parents in an accident, and her life after the
acadamy was largely lived in the Dowling mansion with her aunt, and she always felt the
place was more of a museum than a house. With Ellis, she had the sole attention of a
confidant. Ellis was easy-going and put up with her tantrums, he was easy to cook for,
and he was always gentle with her at love. And, she soon became the mother of a
daughter they christened, Elisabeth. She was a delightful child, and Milly began to plan
her days around the time she could spend with her daughter. With the coming of
Elisabeth, the circle of her ambition had been closed. She had shut out the world.
Ellis was on the way to becoming a country gentleman, when his mother died in her
sleep one warm June evening. The suddenness of finding himself the sole proprietor of
the farm took him by surprise. He had somewhat given up on increasing the size of the
business, as his mother had grown increasing conservative in her later years. He supposed
that in her position he would have felt the same. Her main concern was to live out her life
in her own house, and the income from the business was enough to take care of that.
As far as the loss itself, in her later years she seemed to drift away from everyday
events and often suffered from bouts of dementia. She was no longer the person he had
known. When he had visited her husk in the funeral parlour, it was not grief he felt, but
gratitude. Certainly the cold body he saw was not the end of her as a person--didn't the
majority of humanity believe that? As a for the gratitude, it was the gratitude of a child
for its parent.
With the passing of his mother, Ellis felt he had two options. One was to move closer
to the city and set up a real dairy, or pull up stakes entirely and make a new beginning
elsewhere. Milly had relayed to him the wish of her sole sibling, her brother Victor, who
was making a name for himself in Chicago, that they come out to that city so he could see
her and Elisabeth more often. "Tell Ellis," Vic wrote her, "to knock the cow manure off
his boots, and come out here where money is falling off the trees in real estate."
After giving this some thought, Ellis concluded that he needed to broaden his
horizons.The place to be to make one's fortune, it occured to him, was where fortunes
were being made. If nothing else, he told Milly, since they had no reponsibilities
in the Buffalo area, they could well afford a long vacation to be with the family.
Ellis, Milly and Elizabeth took a rail trip to Chicago, and hired a carriage to Vic's
address. Expecting a modest home, Ellis and Milly were astounded when the carriage
took them to what seemed to be an exclusive community and stopped at a handsome
mansion. But there was no mistake as Vic, which a huge smile, came out of the house to
greet them.
The following day Vic takes Ellis on a trip to show his investments. They stopped at a
pleasant meadow property and Vic asked Ellis, what his off-hand estimate of its value
was.
"A few thousand, at best," replied Ellis.
"Then you will no doubt be surprised to know that I paid ten-thousand dollars for this
property a month ago," said Vic.
"Oh my!" responded Ellis."That was much too much. I doubt that you will ever recoup
your investment."
Vic studied Ellis for a moment and replied, " You know," said Vic," I think maybe I
will not. But I do think that you will recoup it, and more, for me. Look here, Ellis, I've a
proposition for you. I'm putting this property in your hands to sell. Seeing that you are the
husband of my dear sister, and the father of my favorite niece, I'll split the profit with
you. Are you game?
"Vic," replied Ellis with a rare smile, "I cannot turn down a challenge in which I have
nothing to lose. You're on."
 A few weeks later, a much wiser Ellis had not only recouped the ten thousand, but sold
the property for twenty-four thousand, making a personal profit of seven thousand
dollars, more than his business income of the previous year. From then on, Ellis was a
land speculator.

III.
In 1858, following the bank panic of 1857, continuing his his investment program in a
lower key, Thorvald visited a property on the Lake Shore which was being sold by the
agents of an elderly lady named Geindt to settle her late husband's debts. The Liberty
Lumber Company, as it was called, was only a few acres in size, with two rotting docks,
three or four shoddy-looking sheds, a few hundred thousand feet of white pine boards,
and one elderly employee named Dan Miller. As a business, it seemed to Thorald's
practiced eye to be of minimal value. He doubted that it even paid the wage of its
caretaker, who also, presumably, sold what there was left to sell.
A virtue of Thorvald was his ability to concentrate on details. Without an apparent care
in the world, he puttered around the lumber yard investigating every cranny, and he
passed the time of day with old Dan. Hobnobbing with important people suited Dan. Dan,
who fortune had never smiled on, had not been paid for the last six moths, and were it not
for the fact that he had nowhere else to go, would have departed the Liberty Lumber
Company long ago. So he chatted with the big, amiable, and still young-looking man who
he was convinced was a wealthy man by anyone's standards.
In the course of their talks, Ellis innocently and somewhat unwittingly asked Dan if
the company had any hidden assets. He expected a negative answer, having concluded
that the business was as decrepit as it looked, but his senses were alerted by the way old
Miller hemmed and hawed and evaded his question."Maybe if you look in the files you
might find something," Dan said, "But they're not here. The lawyers come and cleaned
out everything, including the papers in Mr. Geindt's desk."
Ellis sensed Miller wasn't saying everything he knew, so he gambled and asked him,
in the event he bought the property,
would he stay on as caretaker- at a good wage, of course. Dan looked at the congenial
face and made his decision. Yes, he would be glad to stay, and since Mr. Thorvald was
serious about buying the business, he guessed there were a few things he could show him
that he might be interested in.
The old man hitched up his pants and led Ellis into the yard and then into one of the
lumber sheds. There, in the corner of the tool room, he threw aside a pile of dusty boards
to reveal a small safe which he opened, and from which he extracted a folder of papers.
Ellis took the folder to the door of the shed and looked at the papers in the sunlight. To
his utter confoundment, he judged that what he held in his hands were deeds to almost
four thousand acres of land in Northeastern Wisconsin. It was undoubtedly timberland.
He was stunned and sceptical, but the papers seemed legitimate. He made notes of the
document numbers and handed the folder back to Dan with the instruction to replace it as
it was. The next day Ellis departed for Madison to verify his discovery.
Later that week he bought the Liberty Lumber Company lock, stock, and barrel for the
asking price, and the day after that he returned to the Lake Front to pay Dan the month's
wage plus the six month's back pay he claimed he had coming. He then collected the
folder from the safe and departed.
 Ellis Thorvald was in the lumber business.
Before he made another move, Ellis sought expert advice from Milton Miles, a retired
lumberman who belonged to his club in Chicago.Miles, who had spent years in
lumbering, was now content to spend his remaining days in the club library with a
volume of essays on his lap, a decanter of good whiskey at his elbow, and a cigar on a
nearby smoking stand. He was an encyclopedia on the subject of the 'Pinery,' as the
Wisconsin timberland was called.
"The Bullhead River, you say." said Miles. "Never heard of it. Can't be much--the
main logging rivers up there would be the Peshtigo, the Oconto, and the Wolf. To be
timberland it would have to be on some sort of stream and have at least two harvestable
white pines to the acre."
"It's no easy task to move a pine log three feet in diameter and sixteen feet long out of
the woods. You can jack it to a trail with horses or oxen and load it on a dray if you're
clever about it , and pull it to the river if you've got a real good ice layer built up on the
trail. Got to do this in winter, of course. Wagons won't work--too much weight for the
wheels and axles. Forty ton load is a good pull for a team of horses. You need the snow
cover to skid them to the trail, and you might need the spring flood in some places to
float the logs."
"How much lumber could I expect to harvest from this land?" asked Ellis.
"No way to tell," said Miles, "You're only interested in the pine. Most of the pinery is
a mix of hardwood and softwood. Maple, beech, tamarack, birch, spruce, black walnut,
oak, pine, hemlock, and so on. Go up there and take a look--it's the only way you'll know
for sure. Your main problem is that pine is only selling for five dollars a thousand board
feet on the markets here. No profit in lumbering since the Panic. My hunch is that if the
price recovers you might get a nice piece of change for your trees."
The old man lost interest in the conversation and turned back to his journal. "Ought to
read this sometime," he told Ellis, "Thomas Paine. Learn a lot." Ellis thanked him and
left.

IV.
Ellis never had any regrets about taking the Geindt windfall. He had enquired about
the widow at the time of the sale and discovered she was too ill to be involved; she was
expected to die soon. As for her heirs--more luck to them. The sale of Geindt's assets
would fall far short of the demands of the creditors, who would have to settle for so many
cents on the dollar. They reminded Ellis of a pack of hungry wolves circling around one
another watching for an unprotected throat. Law of the Jungle.
He did some thinking about Mile's assessment of the lumber market. There was a
surplus of lumber on hand because the Panic had slowed or stopped building. But that
was bound to change--panics were practically part of the business cycle every twenty
years, or so. Chicago had too much vitality to die on the vine. Why, it was the heart of the
West itself, and the country kept growing west.
The Union Stockyards had just been completed, the city was the world's busiest rail
center. Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin were the world's richest wheatlands, and Chicago
the world's largest lumber, wheat and cattle market. Everything here was measured in
superlatives.
The pine business would come back beause it was the heart of the building industry. A
house was framed with pine two by fours for studs and rafters, and pine two by sixes for
floor joists. The rough roofing was one inch pine boards, as were the floor boards and the
rough siding. The siding, soffits, windows and doors were all of pine. Carpenters swore
by white pine. It was easy to cut and plane, it took a good finish, it was strong and light, it
had an even grain, you could put almost any sized nail through it without splitting, and it
resisted warping when it got wet.
Miles' advice about looking over the property was sound business advice.Even if he
decided to sell the property, he would be a fool to do so without knowing its value. He
discussed his plans with Milly who had resigned herself to spur of the moment business
trips, packed what he thought he might need for a camping trip of a week, and took a
paddle wheel steamer to Green Bay to verify his claim at the Federal Land office. With a
map in hand, which had had paid a clerk to copy, he set out to find transportation to his
pine trees.Since there were no rail lines in the region, any lumber or logs would have to
come out by water. Ellis decided that he would be advised to rent a boat and guide and
explore Bullhead River en route to his six sections of land.
Some boaters were too busy, some were not interested and some wanted too much for
a week's trip. He finally arrived by direction and misdirection to a weather-beaten shack
next to a slough that led to the Bay of Green Bay, looking for one Eb Martin. Thorvald
knocked on the door, and the sunburned man who answered said that he was Martin and
was about to have his lunch, and invited Thorvald to join him.
He divided a pot of sliced, boiled potatoes onto two plates. poured smoking bacon
grease over them, and garnished the plates with salt, pepper and raw onions. He offered
half-a tumbler full of raw whiskey, but Ellis asked for water instead. While they ate, Eb
learned the nature of Thorvald's trip.
"Certainly I know where the Bullhead is," said Martin, "I expect that's why they
steered you in my direction. I even know where you land is, as far as I can make out by
the map--I've camped there more than once." When they had made a deal for the
excursion, they talked awhile, and Ellis learned that Eb was a legitimate Yankee from
Vermont via Portland, Maine, who had left the city because it was, as he put it, becoming
too crowded.
They went outside to look at Eb's boat, which to Thorvald looked like a cross betwen a
raft and a barge. It had a side mounted paddle wheel, which rivermen liked to use, said
Eb, because in going up and down a stream the rear mounted wheel had a tendency to
either dig mud or paddle air. This was the case on a stream like the lower Fox where this
boat had spent most of its worling life. On a big, slow river like the Mississippi, the rear
mounted wheel worked just fine, and actually made the boat easier to handle.But those
boats had chain drives. On an ocean going ship the side wheeler was necessary since it
could be driven by a shaft running to the engine, for increased power.
The deck of the boat was as flat as the top of a table, except for an ancient-looking
steam engine mounted on iron supports above the deck. Eb had to start a fire to generate
steam in the boiler, and this took awhile. In the interim they loaded their gear onto the
boat. Ellis had brought along his shotgun with the anticipation of a little hunting. Eb
stowed several bamboo fishing poles on deck and also brought along a pair of deck chairs
for them to rest on duting the trip.
The choppy waters of the bay made the shallow draft river boat wallow a little, so Eb
stayed close to shore. After a few hours they left the bay and made their way up a stream,
the entrance of which was bordered by a swampy area of cattails and wild rice."Bullhead
River," announced Eb, "We'll soon be there."The margins of the stream were covered
with sedges and wild flowering plants and some trees grew almost to the water's
edge.There was a good population of pine trees, Ellis noted, certainly more than a few
trees per acre.
He felt enveloped by the forest; it was like traveling down an alley with just a strip of
sky showing above. Despite the wheezing cough of the boat's engine, there was a sense of
profound stillness, almost a sense of majesty, here. How odd, thought Ellis, this is the
virgin forest, the Wilderness, and yet it isn't wild at all. It was a kingdom of ancient trees.
This was not something to fear, it was comforting in some deep way. It was almost like
coming home.
He stood on the deck of the boat and watched the trees move past. He saw a pileated
woodpecker and a few sandhill cranes flying overhead. He saw a dark stright ripple move
across the river in front of them. "Muskrat." said Eb. There was a brief summer shower,
and Ellis felt exhilerated by the water striking his face. The surroundings had darkened to
an eerie half-light, and a fresh smell of wet leaves came in on the breeze.
" 'Bout here is where your land starts," said Eb, There's a spot up a ways where you
can camp in comfort. They came to a widening of the river, a flowage that was almost a
lake. Eb steered the boat to shore on the North side of the River at the edge of a stately
grove of white pine. Eb pointed across the flowage to a small grouping of cabins a few
hundred yards away. "That's Rev. Boyd and his Chippewas over there."
They laid out their gear in an open space, and Eb dug out an odd looking gadget which
looked to Ellis like part of a flintlock musket attached to a handle. "Firestarter,"
commented Eb, who stuck a wad of cotton daubed in gunpowder onto a holder and
triggered the mechanism. With a flash, the cotton burst into flame and he deftly tossed it
onto a pile of pine needles and twigs.
When he was certain the fire was going to burn, Eb got out the fishing poles and
handed on to Ellis. "You never know what you've caught until you get it to the shore," he
said. After a few minutes, Ellis pulled in a two foot long black fish he recognized as a
catfish. While he was landing the fish, he noted Eb's bobber, a carved piece of wood
painted red, jerk beneath the surface of the water. He occupied himself removing the
hook from the catfish's mouth, and when he turned back he saw that Eb had landed a
three foot northern pike. "We might as well quit now," said the riverman, "These two will
be all we want to eat." It had taken them less than ten minutes to catch their dinner. Eb
quickly and deftly cleaned the fish while a frying pan with lard got hot on the fire. He
motioned to Ellis and led him to a spot a hundred yards or so away where a small brook
ran, and where they could get clean water. He made coffee from the pack Thorvald had
brought with him from Chicago. A few minutes later, the fish fried and the coffee made,
they sat cross-legged in the pine straw and ate. Ellis found it hard to remember a meal
that appealed to him as much as the fried fish and coffee he had beneath the pine trees.
"You make the art of living seem almost easy," he commented to the riverman. "Ee-yuh,"
said Eb, "This is the world the way God made it. It don't get hard until you get more
people in it."
Martin's reply set off a train of thought in Ellis' mind.
Why should that be? Why does it have to be hard? Eb had answered that: one family
on the banks of the Bullhead flowage could fish for their whole lives. But if more
families came, they would fish it out in a few years. Then more would come and they
would divide up the land and destroy the trees to feed themselves, and their days would
be spent hoeing ground and clearing brush to keep nature from reclaiming the cleared
ground they used to grow their crops. They would need more land to feed the hungry
cattle they kept for meat.
But what about the Indians? They have lived here for centuries! Ellis thought of
Walden, a book all of Milly's rich friends were reading and which she had passed on to
him.
"Have you ever heard of a man named Thoreau?" he asked Eb.
"Not that I can recall," said Eb, " 'Course there is a settlement of Frenchies by
Oconto--he could be from there."
"Not this Frenchie," said Ellis with a chuckle, "He lived on the banks of a pond in
Massachusetts for a year on what he grew in his garden.He called it the simple life and
wrote a book about it."
"I know quite a few folks who have lived like that all of their lives," said Eb. "Your
pond man could have come out here and had the genuine article. 'Course--not that I hold
any hard feelings against the folks in Massachusetts--maybe he didn't want the genuine
article."
Eb has a point there, thought Ellis, people have probably lived the simple life for
thousands of years. But if this is so, why do they make so much of Thoreau? Of course!
Thoreau wrote a book about it, they went silent to their graves.But then, they didn't have
to write a book about it because everyone knew it.. Good Heavens! They were trying to
escape from it. Thoreau wasn't telling us how to live, he was reminding us of how we
used to live.
He had a more disquieting thought. Thoreau's book was a requiem for that kind of life.
The pond man knew it would soon be gone forever.
The day was almost over. The red sun had sunk beneath the woodsy horizon upriver
from their place at the flowage. Ellis looked around him, taking in the view in the
twilight. He smelled tobacco from the riverman's pipe. "These pines are a good deal taller
than the ones I remember from New York," he commented.
These are lowland pines," said Martin, " What you probably remember are highland
pines, what they sometimes call sandhill pines around here. If we went down a little, we
could find some swamp pines, they're even taller. They're all white pines--they all have
five needles wrapped in a little brown wrapper--the difference comes from the place they
grow.
Second reason is that pine is a delicate tree.If you have a seedling growing in an open
space, there's a good chance that a strong wind will snap the top clean off,and the tree
will grow up short and bushy. Heck, a good sized pine can drop a quarter ton of boughs in
a bad windstorm. Branches two, three inches in diameter, or even bigger will be snapped
off. "
The two sat together in the deepening twilight. A blood-curdling yeowl brought Ellis
to alertness. "Panther," said Eb,
All sorts of critters in these woods." When it had become almost totally dark, the two
found comfortable spots in the pine straw beneath the trees, pulled blankets over
themselves, and quickly fell asleep.
 V.
Ellis woke to the smell of coffee and the sound of voices. They had a visitor, a
balding, mild-looking man in a well-worn suit. "Jack Boyd." said Eb introducing him,
"He comes from Boston and he might know your pond man." Boyd looked inquisitively
at Ellis who felt somewhat foolish.
"We were talking last evening about Henry Thoreau," said Ellis.
"Ah, Thoreau!" said Boyd, with animation, "My sister writes that she met him recently
at a lecture. I am quite attracted to Transcendentalism, you know."
Thorvald didn't quite know how to respond to this confidence, but he was saved from
an embarrassing disclosure of ignorance by Eb, who said, "Seems this pond man of yours
is causing quite a stir. Might be I should look at his book myself."
"I don't think you need to," said Ellis, "You probably could show him a thing or two."
"Don't doubt it," said Eb shaking his head, " Pond in Massachusetts!" He threw the
dregs from his coffee cup into the fire, got up, and left, saying, "If you want to look at
your trees, I'll get the boiler fired up."
"You've been here for a while," said Ellis to Boyd, as a way of breaking the ice.
"Going on ten years, " said the minister."You're probably curious about the
circumstances. Most of the state, north and west of here, was all Chippewa land. A little
over twenty years ago, one of the Chiefs went to Washington to negotiate the transfer of
the land to the Federal government. There seems to have been some trickery involved, or
unaddressed confusion, for the Chief thought he was agreeing for the transfer to occur in
eight years when the actual time was eight months. The Chippewa felt they had been
betrayed, and many of them ran off into the woods, some of them to this area, which had
belonged to their friends, the Menominee, who controlled most of the land east of here.
"A group of concerned citizens of Boston fortunately learned of the Indians' plight
and raised money to help them. Although the damage had already been done by a
government under the control of commercial interests, we could see to it that they at least
weren't hounded for the rest of their lives.A full section of land was filed for across the
river. This land was sold to the Chippewa, or Objibwa, as some call them, for a nominal
price. Being landowners, they are allowed to remain."
At this point in his narrative, Eb returned from the flowage and Boyd got up suddenly,
shook Ellis' hand, and walked down to his canoe. Thorvald was curious about his abrupt
departure and waited for the riverman to make a comment, but he didn't. He was probably
used to the clergyman's unusual ways.
Ellis dug the map from his knapsack and spread it on the ground. He located the
Chippewa section, and was able to orient himself to that. He owned two sections west of
the one they were camping on, on the noth side of the river, and three sections, starting at
the edge of the Indian land, on the south side of the river, a section being a square mile or
640 acres.
He showed the map to Eb who nodded in agreement. They left their camp as it was, and
boarding Eb's boat, steamed upstream.
About three miles upstream from the camp was a wide marshy area on both sides of
the river which they concluded Geindt wouldn't have filed for, but part of it might lay on
land that he claimed. Martin thought that Thorvald's land was all trees since they had
come a good three miles.
Ellis told the riverman that his main concern was the timber count, which did not need
to be exact, but close enough to work with. They would also look for whatever else was
to be seen. He didn't expect to find any mineral deposits, but wanted to know if there
were a lot of sand and gravel hills--as this region had been glaciated--or low areas that
were marshy. They would pick out likely areas, about average, and count the mature
white pine, estimate their height, and how many logs could be got out of them, and run a
tailor's tape around them to measure their size. They'd do this independently for each area
and compare their conclusions.
The river was narrower here--the Bullhead wasn't much more than forty feet wide at
its widest point excluding the flowage--so moving from side to side in the population
count was not a big problem. They returned to camp early that afternoon, and worked on
their estimates. After some discussion, and toting up their figures, Ellis and Eb agreed
that the land might be expected to yield about 25 pines per acre. They weren't as big as
some he had heard of elsewhere. About two feet in diameter, and you could easily get a
sixteen foot log from most of them, a pair of twelve footers from some.
Eb was in the mood for something beside fish so he got out his pots and pans and
boiled up potatoes, fried bacon, and made a pie pan of cornbread. Like many woodsmen,
he ate only one main meal a day and snacked the restt of the day on what was available--
jerky, nuts, dried berries, parched corn, pemmican, and so on.
Ellis contributed coffee and a tin of blackberry preserves. Martin commented that in a
month or so, Ellis cold have all of the blackberries he wanted. Matter of fact, one of the
sources of income for Jack Boyd's Chippewas was that of making blackberry preserves
for a Chicago firm. The company would send up huge iron kettles, the Indians filled them
with blackberries, using honey as a sweetener, and cooked the preserves over the
campfire. He usually took the full kettles out on his boat.
At coffee the next morning, Ellis told Eb he was free for the day as he intended to sit
around camp and mull over the calculations. Eb replied that he would visit an old
acquaintance of his, an Indian named Pine Snake, who lived the hell and gone in the
woods on the other side of the river.
When the riverman had departed, Ellis took a lungful of piney air and went down to sit
on a rock at the edge of the river. He watched a few fluffy clouds moving across a blue
expanse of sky.His attention was drawn to a snapping turtle making her way out of the
water. He peered into the water and saw some golden perch weaving their way between
ribbons of pickerel weed and thought he saw an eel lurking in the shadows in deeper
water. He looked across the flowage and was amazed to see a moose standing knee deep
in flowage, raking her antlers through the water. With a toss of her head, she lifted her
harvest of water weeds, and when it had drained, proceeded to the bank where her calf
waited. She dumped the load and she and her calf began to feed. "So that's why the
mooses' antlers are like that," thought Ellis, in admiration for the art of nature.
What was he going to do with his land?
If I were 18 again, he thought, I'd be tempted to come up here, build a cabin, and
maybe clear some land and take up farming. Why not? That's basically all I have ever
done; I'm just a farmer, and not as good of a farmer as some I know. The land boom was
pure luck, I was in the right place at the right time, had a little money for a start, and a
little help from Milly's brother, Vic. I still don't feel that I earned that money.
I've never had to face the problem of what to do with my life as a purely personal
decision. In Buffalo I had responsibility to my mother, and now I must look after Milly
and Elisabeth, although that is not a burden at all. It most certainly is not. I have to work
for people I care about, my family or my friends. I 've never really wanted anything for
myself if I had the basics of a decent living.
I could just hold onto this property and wait for the price to go up. I suppose that
would be the sensible thing to do. I don't need money. I'm a little short of cash, at times,
but hardly a week goes by without some agent pestering me about that acreage south of
the city, and they keep raising the bid.
I could build a house here and come up with Milly just to fish or hunt and enjoy
ourselves. Wonder how long she could put up with camping out? Her idea of a vacation is
a country club with servants and five kinds of dessert. Up here her vacation would be
scaling fish and hauling water in a pail. I wouldn't put her through that. Come to think of
it, I'm not a real outdoorsman myself. This is a lark, but after a week of sitting around at
the campfire trading stories, I'd want some work to do. And I'd be uncomfortable away
from my lodge and lodge brothers. I could join a sporting club in Chicago and have all of
this I wanted a few hours from town. But I've never thought of doing that--I guess that
says something.
Fact is, though, the idea of running a lumber company appeals to me. It's something
interesting to do, and I haven't been doing much of that recently, actually, since I sold my
farming business. A few hours here, a few hours there, and the rest of the time has been
pretty much free. I'm too young to spend my days sitting in a library like old Milton
Miles, reading Thomas Paine.
He watched a pair of loons land on the far side of the flowage.
Make up your mind, Ellis, he chided himself. You're a farmer, and a farmer is a
husbandman. He sees land as something to have and to hold, to improve, to make a living
from, not a commodity to be bought and sold merely for profit.
But there was something else he was not conscious of.. The thought of his boyhood
idols, Anne Jameson and her brother.What would Anne say, if he met her in some other
time and place and she asked him, "And what did you do with your life Ellis?" And all he
could say was "I made money." A shadow of sadness would pass over her open brown
eyes and she would reply, "Is that all? You made money? You were given an opportunity
beyond the reach of the common man. You might have been a hero, you might have made
a difference and have been worthy of the respect of many." And he would have felt that
censure like a dagger to his heart. But he concealed this thought from himself.
. He got up, stretched, yawned, and went back to camp. He took an ax and chopped up
more firewood, then made more coffee. Then he got out his ledger and gave the figures of
the previous day a business evaluation.
First things first. You're lucky to turn sixty per cent of the logs into boards, Miles had
said, and a good sawyer is worth his weight in gold. The first and last cuts turn out slabs,
You don't want the slabs too thin, for then you will have too much wane on the first and
last boards.You throw the slabs off to the side to be ripped up for lath or molding--you
might be able to get a two by four out of them.Of what's left of the log, twenty per cent
gets turned into sawdust if you cut boards to the standard generous inch.
You count on a dollar per thousand (board feet) for stumpage , that's to get the logs
into the water, and four or five dollars a thousand to ship them to Chicago.
But you don't need to send them to Chicago-- you can send them to New York instead
via sailing ship to Buffalo, by
river barge via the Eirie canal to Troy and then down the Hudson. Much of the lumber of
the eastern pinery goes to Buffalo and eastern Lake ports. The western lumber goes down
streams flowing into the Mississippi, and recently, Miles had told him, the lumber
companies were deciding that rather than sawing the logs in the woods and sending out
rafts of cut lumber, they would simply herd the logs down the Mississippi and saw them
into boards in Iowa, or further down.
After some additional calculations, Thorvald decided that if lumber rose to a decent
price, as it was bound to do, he might realize a substantial profit from his trees. But he
saw two major problems. The first was the size of the Bullhead River. It's deep enough to
float logs here, and that would never be more than three miles, and this is where I would
want to put up the mill, but the boards would have to be floated downstream in rafts and
towed to Oconto or Green Bay. The river is barely wide enough and deep enough for that,
but it probably could be done. Martin would likely have something valuable to say about
that, he take his boat up and down it all the time.
The second problem was what his quandary was all about. I've got enough trees to run
a straight logging operation, but I really don't need to personally be involved with that.
There are companies that log for landowners, and sell the logs.But the logged off land
really isn't worth anything--and its land that's my specialty. I'd probably be further off to
sell it outright to a company that would hold it through these depressed times. If I logged
it myself, I'd have to hire a fairly permanent crew and put up a mill. What I need is a
reliable source of income for the company. Bill Ogden makes woodenware at his
Peshtigo factory from his own lumber.I've always been fascinated with windows--that's a
possibility. If we made windows and developed a reputation, the lumber would last for
the rest of my career and it would generate a reliable income.
He walked back to camp and got his pole. When Eb returned that evening, Ellis told
him he would like to visit Peshtigo and Oconto the next day. Eb said that was fine with
him, and they had the fish and a pan of cornbread for supper. Ellis offered Eb a cigar, but
he preferred his pipe. They sat and talked after the meal and the conversation turned to
politics as it often did in those days.
"Think there'll be a war, Eb," Ellis asked.
"Ee-yuh," said Eb, "There usually is."
Ellis was not to be put off this easily. "Do you think the South wants war?"
"They make their money selling cotton to the Yankees, replied Eb, "so why would
they want war? No, what they want is to get their own way, only they're too pigheaded to
realize that times have changed and they ain't gonna get their own way."
This State is almost as bad in the other direction. The Sheriff in Racine threw a
Federal man into jail for trying to
catch a runaway slave.The state legislature declared the Dred Scott decision null and
void.They're just a step away from sedition down there in Madison."
The two men spent some more time talking abut hunting before they retired for the
night. Threy broke camp early next morning and steamed north to the Peshtigo river
which they followed to the town itself, and the Ogden factory. They were shown around
by a helpful millwright who was quite proud of his factory, and discussed the technical
details of the woodworking technology. Thorvald tried to take it all in, and made a
resolution to write down as much as he could at his earliest convenience. He questioned
the millwright about a hypothethical window factory and the kind of equipment needed,
to get a general idea of what was needed.
As they left the factory he commented on the piles of sawdust and shavings he saw
everywhere. "We don't know what to do with it," the millwright said, "When we have the
opportunity we haul it to the edge of town on wagons and use it for fill. A good part of
the town is built on such fill."
They didn't have time to tour all of the five lumber mills at Oconto, so Eb suggested
one of the smaller ones where he was known. They followed the work from the pond
were logs waited to be hoisted up to be sawed, the saw and saw carriage in operation, the
sorting of the cut boards, and the ripping of the slabs into smaller dimension lumber. At
every stage, wood scraps were collected to feed the boilers that provided power for the
saws. Like Peshtigo, the sawdust was too wet and dense to burn properly and was hauled
away.
When the left the Oconto River, they again saw ships in the lake at anchor, their sails
furled. Ellis counted twenty-five of them, and Eb said that he had once seen eighty ships
waiting their turn to load pine lumber.

****

Randy's Story : 1863

I.

Randall Hode leaned on his ax and gazed at the ground, his attention attracted by an
ant climbing over a pine cone.
He was one day past his twenty-fifth birthday, but that was his private knowledge. No
one here knew, or would have cared. He wondered if his parents were still alive, and if
they were, if the date triggered any memory in them. He wouldn't have been concerned if
it hadn't.
He was a handsome young man; his pale blond hair was tied at the back of his head
with a piece of string. He wore a blue watch cap with a colored tassel, French style. He
kept his short beard and mustache neatly trimmed, and he insisted on a fresh pair of
stockings every day to keep his feet healthy. He was clean.
His ax was a weapon to instill fear. Its ash handle was almost four feet long, and the
blade was straight enough to rule paper, and ten inches wide. It was a pine man's ax, a
swamper's ax, capable of cutting through a two inch branch in a single stroke. It was the
kind of ax that could take off a man's foot or hand in one misguided swing.
The little ant on the pine cone was a bad sign. The logging crew of the Bullhead River
Lumber and Manufacturing Company had been cutting logs for the past week that it
could not get out of the forest. A warm spell in early March had begun to melt off the
snow cover enough that the teams were no longer able to drag the big logs to the trail to
take them to the river.
Porlier, the foreman, had wanted to end the logging season; he was worried that he
would be called upon to perform an impossible task if snow did not come. Matt Manning,
his boss, insisted that it almost always snowed in the first week of April and they would
chance it for a week more. The logs might be gotten out next winter, but lying one the
ground for more than one summer would make the wood unusable as a result of insect
damage.
Porlier countered that the warm weather was daily rotting the ice base of the trail, that
had been built up by daily use of the sprinkler sled, but Manning had replied that they
needed the wood so they would risk the loss. Manning probably had it all figured out in
dollars and cents, one way or the other, Porlier told the loggers, but that was his job.
Randy was jolted out of his woolgathering by a shout of "Timber!" and he looked up
to see the big pine the choppers had been working on begin to totter. He didn't move. He
had positioned himself expertly and it was a clean fall. The tree dropped with a swish of
boughs, a ground jarring thump, and the sound of cracking limbs. By the time he got to
the tree, the scalar was already there measuring off the trunk for cutting. Randy's job was
to cut the branches off the trunk and help cut the logs out.
Most logging concerns were independent enterprises that just logged for the owner of
the land. They marked the logs on the end with a die ax and sent them downstream on the
spring log drive to a sawmill which counted the marked logs and paid the owner. The
logs were generally twelve to sixteen feet in length, Randy knew, because builders spaced
their studs on sixteen-inch centers.
The Bullhead River outfit was a different kind of operation. They owned the trees,
they hired their own crew to cut them down, they ran their own sawmill, and they had
their own factory. For making doors and windows, they figured the could use anything
the saw could cut, so if they could get a six-foot log out of a tree, they would take it, and
they would take smaller than the usual diameter logs. They also harvested red,or Norway,
pine when they came across it, and there was talk about taking tamarack, too, despite its
roughness.
The premium quality wood, though, because of its white color, fine grain, and green
knots that didn't fall out when they dried, was highland white pine, otherwise known as
pinus strobus.
Randy and the other swamper had just about finished their work when Porlier came
hustling up. He was a bandy-legged, barrel-chested lumberjack from the French
Settlement, whom everyone called by his last name, since he insisted he wasn't a
"Mister," and he certainly refused to be called by his Christian name, Noie, as none of the
lice-infested crew that worked for him were relatives.
Any of the seventeen, or so, men who worked under him would have been boiling mad
if he thought he was seriously being accused of heaving head lice, for no lumberjack was
more despised by his fellows than the "boomer" who showed up in camp with an
infestation of lice. They knew that Porlier was not being serious, because he had no
tolerance at all for head lice. His cure, with the full assistance of the camp cook Klotney,
who really ran things in camp, would be to have the entire crew shave off their body hair
with a straight razor and have them wash down the camp house with wood lye. They
would do this naked, as their clothing boiled.
The bottom falls out of the glass," announced Porlier, "We have one hell of a storm
coming. The cutting is finished!"
Randy looked at the sky.He hadn't noticed that clouds were beginning to move in and
there was a breeze stirring.
They finished cleaning up the logs, shouldered their axes, and walked back to camp.
Porlier came in after a few minutes, mounted the cook's sleigh, and said to the assembled
crew, "The snow she will last no more than a day, two days. We work in the blizzard, we
work in the dark. Eat your supper and get sleep,now." As if in response, a gust of wind
buffeted them.
They ate a supper of cold leftovers from the noontime meal in the woods which was
usually the main meal of the day. Some of them filled up on various kinds of pie which
Klotney, and his helper, "Cookie", had made to use up the dried fruit from the store at the
end of the season. They cleaned their tools, wiping off the gummy buildup of pine pitch
with turpentine and rags and touched up the blades of the axes with a steel, or grinding
them, if necessary, on a pedal operated grinding wheel. The axes would probably not be
used until next season, though.
There were a few minutes to have a pipe, if they had tobacco, and then they crawled
into their bunks.
The camp house, which usually was only used for one season as it was built where the
logging was to be done, was about twenty-five by fifty feet, and little more than a pole
shed. This particular camp house was built more cheaply than most, for it used slabs,
hauled in from the company's saws, pegged to posts, rather than being built of logs. The
roof was made from pole rafters or rejected two-by-fours, and covered with ship-lapped
rough pine boards to keep out the snow, and the cold. Crudely made bunk beds, three
tiers high, ran around three sides of the interior of the building. On the fourth side was a
doorway and Klotney's domain. Cooking was done over an open fire in one corner, and
there was a hole in the roof above it to let out the smoke.
Down the open space in the center ran rough tables with benches. Here the
lumberjacks had most of their their meals of bread (made from wheat locally grown and
ground on burr mills), beans which were either locally grown or shipped up from Green
Bay, eggs if they were lucky, and bacon which was usually smoked rather than salted in
barrels.
Bacon was easily available from frontier farmers who found hogs easier to raise than
cattle which required a large amount of winter fodder, Pigs would eat all sort of root
vegetables, acorns, cattail roots, pumpkins, squash, and so on, and they produced their
young in litters. Lard was a more digestible fat than tallow, and the meat was easily
smoked. Every frontier farm had a smoke house used also to preserve wild game and the
plentiful fish.
Porlier and a small crew had come up the previous October to build the camp house
and construct the skid ramps used to load the drays, the log sleds. They also laid out the
main trails the drays were to use, making them as level as possible without excessive
shovel work. The rest of the logging crew came up in November. With careful planning,
the logging season could be stretched to fifteen or sixteen weeks.
Logging was done in the winter because hard ground and snow cover was needed to
easily drag the logs from the woods to the trail, and because the weight of a load of logs,
perhaps thirty or forty tons, which a good team could pull, was much to heavy for the
axles and spokes of wooden wagon wheels. Instead, drays, were used that ran on an ice
cover several inches thick which were built up with a sprinkler-- basically a wooden
barrel, with small holes in the bottom, mounted on the back of a sleigh.
The Bullhead lumberjacks, most of them skilled at a specific job, were paid thirty
dollars a month (the going rate) plus room and board--if you could call it that. They had
plenty to eat and a dry place to sleep. These were not bad wages, for the time. It was
twice what a soldier at Bull Run had earned, and somewhat safer, although a good deal
more strenuous. The jacks were expected to work from dawn (when there was enough
light to tell a pine from a hemlock, as the saying went) until dark.
It was a job for a healthy, young man, and the jacks were mainly boys. They were
farm boys who found the long winters on a frontier farm boring and unproductive,
drifters looking for a berth for the winter, the young marrieds who wanted money to buy
land, and of course, the immigrants: odd-looking, bewildered, awkward young men with
drooping mustaches, who often dressed for heavy labor attired in hats, suits, and white
shirts, and who spoke a bewildering babble of Norwegian, Swedish, German, and
sprinklings of Italian, Russian, Czech and other languages many Americans had no idea
existed. What they wanted was not a career, but money for land.
The jacks lasted a year, or two years, or three. Then they moved on and found year-
round work elsewhere, or they had got their land; sometimes land they had helped log,
for when the white pine was taken, the logging companies lost interest in whatever
remained and sold the acreage for a low price, perhaps as little as a few dollars an acre.
Porlier awoke at one o'clock in the morning, laced on his boots, and went out to see
about the snow. There wasn't much to see, the night was black and a driving wind lashed
snow against his face. He could tell with his hand, and the resistance to his steps, that
there was about eight inches on the ground. That was plenty. He urinated and returned to
the camp house to tell Klotney they were sure as hell going to move some timber out of
the woods today.
Klotney was already up, adding hardwood to the cooking fire. Bread would take too
long to rise so he decided to whip up a batch of soda biscuits which only took a few
minutes. There was also bacon to fry and a pot of firecrackers to make for the noon meal.
He had the Cookie do this.
This latter task involved the cook's helper throwing about three handfuls of beans, per
man, into a large pot with a lock down lid, adding boiling water, salt, several practiced
pinches of cayenne pepper to kill the bean's blandness, a meaty chunk of pork for flavor
and greasiness, and an onion or two. He then dug a hole in the earth floor by the fire,
raked in embers from the fire, and covered the pot with ground to cook slowly for a few
hours.
Klotney was dimly aware of having a first name at an early time in his life, but now it
was no more than a memory. Someone in the family had told him that Klotney wasn't
even their original name but the best a harried immigration clerk could do after two or
three attempts to write down an impossible name pronounced in an impossible accent--
immigrants often did not have documentation.
He was absolute dictator of the camp house. Porlier wouldn't dream of crossing him,
and Matt Manning was deferential.
He was a good cook--perhaps a little too good as camp cooks went. He had a small
problem that he kept at bay during the winter when he had little leisure time, and he had a
paternal instinct toward the young men that he fed. He kept the crew healthy and happy.
Manning and Klotney knew of logging crews that had left camp en masse because they
couldn't eat the food. So in the tradition of other lumber camps, Klotney got his way.
Part of that tradition was a short , silent, meal. The owner, Thorvald, didn't make
winter trips up from Chicago, but if he had, and had talked during a meal, Klotney would
have told him to shut up and eat.
The jacks ate in silence to avoid being hit over the head by Klotney with a pot, or
whatever else was close at hand. The meal generally lasted no more than fifteen minutes.
Their beverage was "swamp tea," brewed from a selection of forest herbs.
Klotney mothered his "boys." He saw to it that they always had enough to eat, even if
it wasn't always what they wanted to eat. He saw to it that there was always a pot of jam
within reach, for he knew a little sweetness helped digest a heavy meal. He saw to it that
his boys had plenty of bacon for the morning meal for it was his conviction that nothing
kept a man doing hard work in the cold as healthy as a bellyful of fat meat.
Klotney had a small monthly budget to supplement the basic fare of bread, beans, and
bacon. For the noon meal in the woods, he would often have cooked rutabaga, thick pea
soup, Murphy's--which were fried potatoes--a rice dish, squash, hominy, cabbage or
turnips, donuts or fritters, and pies made from dried fruit. In short, the most appealing
menu he could create from simple, limited, supplies.
Meat, aside from pork, was more of a problem. But several people in the company
carried rifles and often shot a deer, caribou,or even a black bear. He tried to serve a
special meal for Christmas eve.
Kloteny allowed a few perquisites to deserving persons. One of them was to let Porlier
use the first two seats at the front table as an 'office.' He was, after all, engaged in
company business, and the foreman, so there could be no complaint of favoritism. The
front table had light from the fire, as well.
The back of the room, deep in a forest of sweaty, snoring bodies, with unimpeded
digestive systems processing heavy fare, maloderous feet, and underwear that had not
seen soap or water in recent memory, would have been too much for him to put up with;
besides, the boys needed their sleep. Also, if denied this favor he might claim valuable
floor space.
So Porlier would carry over the old suitcase that held his books and papers, sharpened
the nubs of his pencils with a pocket knife, at attempted to form a clear idea in his mind
of the where and how much of the wood he had lying on the ground out in the sticks.
Klotney brought Porlier a mug of scalding swamp tea to make his labor more pleasant.
Porlier thought that two days work would finish the season. He would assign jobs so that
the entire crew would be engaged in nothing else but moving wood. One of the local
farmers was scheduled to bring his team at the earliest snowfall, and there was a pair of
oxen coming.
Down at the river there was a boom of logs chained together to keep floating logs
from drifting off by themselves. It was such a short drive to Bullhead River sawmill that
they usually kept carefully constructed ricks of logs at the water's edge that the the
sawyers could send for when they were needed. Much of the winter's harvest was ricked
up, but now they would not bother to stack logs, but just roll them right into the river.
They had to get finished by tomorrow night, even if they had to work into the darkness.
"We'll close her down tomorrow, Klotney," said Porlier, "then we both take a holiday,
eh? Dinner tomorrow like usual, then you are done. If we work at night, the boys can go
into town to eat at the boarding house, for once." He pulled out his pocket watch and
said, "We start an hour early, today." He looked at the cook who replied, "Fine and dandy
with me," and went back to making his biscuits.
When he had finished his work, Porlier went over to chat with Klotney for a while
about trivial matters, and then lay down on his bunk for a short rest.
Around four o'clock Klotney was satisfied with his preparations. He raked down the
fire and put the big pans of bacon on the coals, and when the meat had begun to sizzle, he
took a large sturdy pot and a piece of firewood, and began a circuit of the room, loudly
banging on the pot and declaiming in a stentorian voice the traditional Pinery wake-up
call, " Raise up your dead bodies, it's daylight in the swamp!"

II.
Randy Hode woke with a start from his sleep. It seemed as if he had only lain down a
moment before. He felt sweaty and tired and was disgusted with the sounds of farting
(humorously called 'mockingbirds') and belching. He was tired of the constant fare of
coarse, heavy, food, and the tiring labor.
He had stayed too long at logging, drifted too long, waited too long for some sort of
lucky break that would set him on his course for the future. He was getting old with
nothing substantial to show for his work. His life had been to get his pay at the end of the
logging season, then loaf around all summer, and be barely able to survive to the
beginnings of the next season. If he had had the sense to get some land while he had the
chance, he would have some sort of farm by now. That's what the smart ones did--they
took their pay and bought a piece of land where they could live free during the summer
instead of spending it in the saloon. He would have something permanent he could rely
on in his old age. The problem was that he didn't much care for farming.
He rubbed his eyes and the bunk platform began to shake and tremble beneath him as
his fellows made their way out of their bunks, and he knew he would have to make the
effort to get up. He retrieved his cap, heavy shirt, leggings and boots from a corner of his
space, and as he did so he noticed the white line of snow filling the cracks between the
wall slabs. It had snowed and that meant that winter's work would soon be finished. He
thought of the enticing prospect of a long sleep in the summer sun to get the cold out of
his bones and make him feel like a man again instead of a workhorse. He thought of long
cooling droughts of of beer or buttermilk.
Dressed, Randy clambered down the ladder and tucked in his shirt. The two Swedes
next to him at the table seemed to be engaged in a long, furtive, jabbering conversation.
Silenced now by the fear of the cook's pot banging on their noggins, they communicated
with expressions of questioning answered by shrugs and hand motions. Damn the Swedes
and Norwegians, thought Randy, they had their own country, why did they have to come
here? And here he was, an American, and he couldn't find a better way to make a dollar
that compete at work with a foreigner who couldn't even speak the language.
The cook and cookie had already distributed heaping pans of food on the table and
were setting down steaming pitchers of tea. Randy observed it with a tired eye. Beans,
bacon, and bread! What a delightful surprise. Served with a lukewarm slop made from
sumac and swamp weeds that they called tea. God--to have a decent cup of coffee and a
bowl of cornmeal mush, for a change, or a couple of eggs fried in butter. He decided to
fore go the tea and quench his thirst with a dipper of cold water from the barrel by the
door when he left. He chewed away on a bacon sandwich that he had put together from
pieces of bacon that weren't raw or have pig hair bristles protruding from the skin.
When the meal was over, they filed to the front of the room, and made their way
outside into the darkness. Porlier always gave them five minutes for necessary things.
Randy shuffled through the snow to what he considered to be a proper distance from the
camphouse, undid his suspender's, and squatted down in the snow. After relieving
himself, he wiped himself clean with a handful of snow--it was cold, but a good deal
smoother than dried leaves.
He set a great store on personal cleanliness. Some of these foreigners probably didn't
even wipe themselves. Anyone that dirty deserved to be whipped. He shuddered
involuntarily at the last word. Somebody's walking over my grave, he said to himself,
then thought better of it and laughed. Here I am with my bare butt sticking into a
snowbank and I'm getting spooky because I've shuddered. He stood up, pulled up his
trousers and braces, and made his way back to the camphouse. Several teams of horses
were waiting already hitched to drays, and some of the men were carrying hurricane
lanterns, as was Porlier, who was standing off to the side. Randy wanted to ask the bull-
of-the-woods a question, but the excitable Dutchman had his attention. He was holding
up his fingers and asking " Ein?, Zwei?" over and over again. To hell with the Dutchman.
Randy turned away and began to follow a team of horses.
After awhile it stopped snowing, but the wind kept up so there wasn't much of a
difference as the breeze whipped the fallen snow into their faces. Gradually it seemed to
get lighter, and Randy could see yellowish and pinkish streaks in the east. That was a
good sign. The snow was breaking up.
By the time it was light enough for them to see one another as silhouettes, the farmer
with the team had arrived. He should make a good three dollars today, thought Randy,
maybe four, if he had driven a good bargain. The steel-shod hooves of horses had much
better traction on the ice than the cloven-hoofed oxen. Hard to find good horses, though.
The Army was buying all they could get to pull their cannon, limbers, and wagons
through Dixie.
The huge sleighs, or drays, that carried the logs were made from two pairs of runners
separated by about ten feet of connecting beams. The front pair of runners could swivel
for steering. The runner faces were covered with iron strapping which served as a running
surface on the iced trail.
The logs were loaded onto the drays using skid ramps, a pair of large logs with their
large ends buried in the ground. They canted up at an angle, and their small ends were
supported by a transverse header, a short crosswise log supported by two posts. The
parallel logs thus formed a ramp, the highest end of which was at least as high as the bed
of the dray. Oxen, horses, or a block and tackle were used to skid the logs sideways up
the ramp onto the dray.
The clouds had begun to thin out, now, showing a light blue sky beyond them. The sun
grew brighter, the temperature began to rise, and the snow began to get sticky. Porlier
began to get uneasy again. April snow didn't last.Winter was clearly over now, and it was
a race with time to get the logs out before the snow and the ice base of the trail melted
off. He sent Randy along with a loaded dray to get the logs unloaded as rapidly as
possible.
Riding atop the logs on the trip to the river gave Randy time to reflect. He wasn't quite
sure where he was going to spend his summer. He supposed he might mosey down to
Chicago, on one of the lumber ships out of Green Bay or Oconto, where he had a few
pals that might help him find steady work; a wagon driver, work in the building trades, or
maybe something he didn't know about yet. You had a chance in a boomtown like
Chicago, not like out here in the Godforsaken swamp. Yes, it probably would be
Chicago--that was the only place in his world that held the least bit of interest for him.
He watched a yellow hammer fly down to investigate a dead tree for grubs. There was
a combined smell of woodsmoke and pine trees in the air, and it was getting warmer and
a little hazy.
When the dray reached the river, Randy undid the side stakes, and rear chain that had
been wrapped around the load to kept the logs from moving. He was undoing the front
chain, standing atop the load, when his boot slipped on the wet bark of a log, and he felt
himself tumbling to the ground. He looked up just in time to see one of the logs rolling
off the dray. He pulled himself out of the way as fast as he could, and almost made it.
There was a searing jolt of pain in his right leg at the ankle, and then he passed out.
When consciousness returned, the first thing that he was aware of was the pain. There
was something terribly wrong. He heard the shouting of voices and saw Porlier waving
his arms at a pair of men trying to raise the log on his leg. The he passed out again.
Of the next week of his life he later had only the haziest memory of jumbled images,
or people coming and going and asking him questions he could quite understand well
enough to reply to before he slipped away again.
Once he woke to see moonlight on the wall of his room, but he was never sure if this
was imagination, or not. There were some things that his mind told him couldn't be true
or real, but when he was in the midst of them they seem as real as anything else he had
ever known.
At some time, and somewhere, and in some way during this period of delirium, what
he called The Dream began. He didn't know what the Dream was, except that it was a
great, ugly, contentious thing that wanted to suck the life out of him. No, it was more
malign than that. It was something he would rather die than face. He struggled with this
faceless adversary, not fearful of dying, but fearful of being torn apart if he saw its face.
That was its power over him, it knew he could not bear to see its face, for then it would
have defeated him. And when he felt that it at last had him within its grasp, he came
violently awake and felt himself wet with sweat and gasping for breath. He would
compose himself and be comforted by the innocent darkness of the room, and then fall
asleep in dreamless slumber.
Slowly his attention became more focused on the dull constant pain in his leg. But it
was something he could hold on to and be drawn out of the pit of delirious confusion.
When there was only the pain, he knew that he was back in the world of the living.
As his periods of lucidity increased, he began to remember his visitors. One day
Porlier came with a well-dressed man who had the manner of an important person. Randy
heard Porlier speaking with a certain degree of agitation.
"I tell you, Mr. Thorvald, "All this hurry, hurry, hurry is no good. I lost one of my best
men."
"There's no helping that, now," replied Thorvald, "Tell me, "Will he live?"
"Oh yes, he will live, but no more good as a lumberjack."
When the two had left, Randy suddenly realized that his visitor was none other than
Mr. Ellis Thorvald, the owner of the lumber mill.
Randy learned by bits and pieces that he was being cared for by a Mrs. Olsen, who
with her husband ran the town boardinghouse. He also learned that apparently his only
lasting injury was his broken leg, which he was told was broken in more than one place.
They had put a splint on it and had thought of taking him to Green Bay to have it set
better, but they were uncertain about what other injuries he might have. A large half-
buried rock was found very close to his head where he had been struck down, and they
thought that his head might have struck that. He was unconscious most of the first few
days and seemed on the verge of death.
Porlier stopped by again, this time dressed in a jacket and hat. He explained that he
was leaving, and said, "If I don't see you again, I want you to know I was always glad to
have you working for me. You never gave me any trouble, and you never slacked off."
"You always treated me good, Porlier," said Randy, "We sure as hell got some timber
cut."
"Mon Dieu!" said Porlier laughing, "We sure as hell did. Klotney will miss you too.
He was here every day to see you." After a brief pause he continued, "I think this my last
year, too. I am arranging to get a farm and spend the night in bed with my wife instead of
in a stinking shed all winter." He grasped Randy's hand warmly and left.
As his health began to improve and his ankle mend, he began to hobble around with
the aid of a crutch. He borrowed a knife and cut out his own crutches, which he thought
suited his need better than the one he was using. He developed a habit of going down to
the flowage to sit in the sun and watch the eels wend their way through the river weeds,
or the loons in the distance. The flowage was like a lake with the river flowing through it.
Across the flowage, where the land sloped up, he saw Indians working on a building, who
he was told were Reverend Boyd's Chippewa parishioners putting up a church for him.
As soon as he could get around, Randy went down to the mill to draw his winter's pay.
Manning told him not to travel until he felt like it. Mr Thorvald had insisted on that. His
bill at the boarding house would be paid by the company.
Randy was grateful for that. He hobbled around town and found a man who could get
whiskey from a local farmer who ran a still. That helped with the pain in his leg,
especially at night when it began to throb.
He began to feel stronger, but when he looked in a mirror he saw a haggard, unkempt
man who he would have said, a few months ago, looked like an older brother. In May he
began to get restless, so he took a trip to Green Bay with the river man who often came
up with supplies for businesses in the town. While there he visited a Practitioner who
looked at his ankle and shook his head. He did put a plaster of Paris cast on it though, for
additional support while it finished healing.
Green Bay bored Randy, so after a few days he boarded a lake steamer for Chicago.

III.

Chicago was a disappointment-- the city was growing too damned fast. The pleasant
residential neighborhood he remembered from only a few years ago was gone; well, not
gone, the buildings were still there although rundown, but the people he had known had
all seemed to be gone. How odd that none of those he talked to had ever heard of them.
Now the place was shabby and filled with foreigners.
He had counted on his old gang at the corner greeting him with a smiling, "Look what
the wind just blew in!" He would set them up to beers, just to show he hadn't hit rock
bottom, talk about the old days, and they would set him straight about the world. One of
them would know a friend who knew a friend who would pass the word that a regular
fellow who had had a little accident was looking for some honest, decent, work that didn't
involve too much moving around or lifting. They sure as hell would have found
something for him or they would have dropped dead trying.
Not now, though. They probably all had gone off in different directions and one or two
had died. He wasn't sure he wanted to know about that part. Things didn't seem as
easygoing anymore. People were suspicious, guarded. Part of that was the war, he
supposed.
He took a room in a boardinghouse run by a large dusky widow who might have been
Russian, or Gypsy, and who had an accent thick enough to cut with a knife. She was
always boiling beef bones or rutabagas or cabbage on the big kitchen range. Her name
was Lila, or something like that, and she wanted to know how he had hurt his leg, and he
told her it was busted by a falling log. She looked at the cast and asked if they had put
that on, and he said no, he had it put on before he left to protect the leg a little. She
insisted that he take it off and soak the ankle in a pail of hot water and Epsom salts to
promote healing.
He had been on the verge of convincing himself to do just that before he talked to her.
Due to the way it had been set, his right leg was a little shorter than the left . He feared
that if he favored it too much he would always need a crutch. He needed to strengthen it
by use, even if it was painful, so it would bear his weight.
So he sawed off the cast, massaged the leg twice daily, rubbed on a strong black salve
that Lila had said had been used during the Crimean war, practiced walking on it several
times a day, and sat by the cook stove chewing the fat with his landlady while the leg
soaked in hot water. He enjoyed her company; she was a down-to-earth woman who had
gotten around in her life and who knew a few things about the world and what went on it,
which was more than you could find in a newspaper. But she liked to tell him fairytales
about the "volves" of the taiga who had glowing eyes, or something like that.
He put away his crutch and made himself a cane; that wouldn't look so bad. There
were a lot of wealthy, important men who used a cane.
He was sitting on the back porch adding an improvement to the cane when he looked
up and saw the boy from next door standing nearby watching him. He knew the
youngster, his father was a worker at the rail yards. He was an innocent looking kid, with
bare feet, overalls like the trainmen wore, and had a freckled face.
"What's your name kid?" asked Randy continuing to work on the cane.
"Kyle Flanagan," said the boy.
"I'm Randy Hode, except to a pretty little boy like you, it's Mr. Hode."
"What're you doin'?"
"If you got eyes, you can see I'm fixing up my cane." Randy picked up a piece of lead
he was shaping to fit over the end of the cane, and was examining it when the boy asked,
"What's that for?"
"Don't get smart with me, kid," replied Randy, "You know what it's for. A cripple man
has got to defend himself, and you know it. I seen you over there grinding away on your
knives. I seen you take rocks from the landlady's garden for your pocket. An innocent kid
don't do that."
"If you don't use that piece of lead, there," said Kyle motioning to a scrap, "Can I have
it. . . Mr. Hode?"
"I had you figgured out, kid," said Randy laughing," You want that piece to make a
sap of your own." He looked behind him, and continued, "See that pail? Run down to the
corner and get me a pail of beer and I might let you have that piece." He tossed a coin to
the boy who fielded it, took the pail, and left.
Randy fastened the lead securely to the tip of the cane and gave it a practice swing.
Satisfied, he set about making a cowhide boot to conceal the lead tip and to keep the end
of the cane from slipping while using it to propel himself forward. The kid returned with
the beer and Randy tossed him the coveted piece of lead.
Randy found that a tightly wound piece of cloth, or leather, secured with a pin, gave
the ankle support and make walking on it easier.
He spent most of his days rehabilitating the ankle and looking for work. One
downtown establishment has a notice posted that it wanted a doorman. He thought he
might be able to handle that. The manager looked up from the from desk where he had
been working, saw Randy's cane, and asked if he was a pensioner. Randy replied that he
was not. "You can't live on what we pay," said the manager, "but if you had an income
from elsewhere, it wouldn't be such a bad job." Randy thanked him and left.
He often walked, as best he could, down to the lake to watch the gulls, feel the breeze,
and smell the swampy smell of the fresh water ocean. He thought he could almost see the
forested arc of Western Michigan three hundred miles north across the choppy gray water.
He watched the sailing ships coming in to port, and wondered if he should buy
passage to Buffalo and beyond. He decided not; that was the way a kid thought, that there
was something better out there at the end of the rainbow. It would be the same as here,
because it was the same world, wherever you went, for a cripple.
He did like to swap stories with the sailors, hoping that something they could tell him
of the world beyond Chicago and the Wisconsin Pinery might give him a clue about how
to go about taking care of himself. When he was depressed, he went to one of the fancier
saloons with a tinkling piano or a small band, lanterns with colored glass shades, and
mahogany bars with polished brass foot rails and spittoons.There were pretty barmaids
and the bustle of change and excitement, but they were expensive.
He had put together a casual but substantial looking wardrobe for himself by carefully
choosing from the wares of street vendors selling the castoffs of the well-to-do. He had
his hair cut, and had the patience and time to keep his beard carefully trimmed. With a hat
on his head at a rakish angle, and his well polished cane, he might have been a
comfortably retired army officer nursing his pension, but with adequate resources for a
good time if he wanted it.
He might have been, but he wasn't. He was an out-of-work gimp, with no education to
speak of, and no prospects that he could think of.
Much, if not most of the lumber of the eastern pinery was transported by sailing ships
to Buffalo where it was loaded onto barges that traversed the Erie Canal across New York
State to Troy, and thence down the Hudson River to New York City or beyond. But much
more than lumber was taken by this route. There was beef, pork, wheat, and other
produce of the lake states that also traveled to Buffalo on sailing ships.
Chicago was a very busy port, and thousands of fresh water sailors walked its streets
every year. Many of them were alcoholics who had been deprived of their drug for weeks
on their ships and who could barely wait to hit dry land before they headed for the nearest
drinking establishment.
Establishments like Turk's Saloon were not uncommon. There was little to it-- an
empty street-level room, a rough bar, a few chairs, a few barrels of beer, a few casks of
whiskey, a case or two of wine, and a collection of glass mugs.
There were a few amenities--sawdust and shavings on the floor to soak up the spilled
beer and vomit (but you could get all the sawdust you wanted for nothing at a saw mill),
shelves with kerosene railway lanterns on them to light the room, and behind the bar a
row of fancy bottles of famous name liqueurs and whiskeys filled with clear and colored
water to give the illusion that you could get what you wanted there. There were a few
fishing nets with cork floats nailed to the walls to conceal the cracks and the lack of paint.
Sanitation consisted of a board with holes in it fixed over a hole in the floor of an
adjoining room. Turk's employees threw some quick lime into the cess pit when the smell
got too bad. One didn't really need to wash one hands, so washing facilities were
considered unnecessary, and if you want drinking water, there was enough of that in the
beer.
Turk himself was a good sized man in his late thirties, perhaps, but slope-shouldered
and soft looking, not hard-muscled. The hair of his bullet head was cut closely, but not
well--possibly he did it himself with a scissors. His white scalp and face were a relief
map of proud-flesh and poorly healed wounds. He was ugly.
He could be belligerent, threatening, demanding, contemptuous, and merciless to
those over whom he had an advantage or no cause to fear. No doubt some of the scars had
resulted from such attitudes. He could be accommodating, servile, fawning, and
obsequious to those who held an advantage over him. He had no honor to defend.
His competitors spoke of Turk with scorn. But this was not entirely to his
disadvantage, since there were those who thought that such disparagement must be the
result of jealousy or fear, and that he must be a clever and dangerous fellow to merit it.
They said he abused young boys. They said he was making a fortune in his bar
business selling watered beer and had a fine home in an exclusive neighborhood of the
city. They said his glassy-eyed faraway look at times was the result of an opium habit he
had picked up in the South China Sea. No one knew why he was called Turk, but
supposed it might have referred to some vice of his they did not know of. Most of his
front teeth were missing, probably lost in dives halfway around the world. However,
missing teeth, in itself, was not necessarily noteworthy in his neighborhood.
Almost every group of workmen, by definition, members of the lower class, would
have several examples of physical deformity or deficiency. The term "able bodied," as in
the reference to seamen, was not used loosely, but even so it did not preclude missing
teeth, hare-lip, growths on the face and body, boils, running cysts oozing pus,or port-wine
stains.
Among those not able-bodied one could find club feet, humpbacks, cataract blindness,
missing eyes, peg legs, missing fingers, missing parts of hands or feet, dwarfism, and
unrepaired abnormalities of birth and early diet. One might often see men with barrel
chests and bandy legs, or men with legs so short that while they looked huge while
seated, they were not even of average height when stannding. There were men who were
simple minded. And the war was turning out an additional supply of deformities in the
way of missing limbs. No, Turk's missing teeth hardly rated attention.
Into Turk's Saloon one bright summer morning limped Randall Hode. He was not yet
desparate enough to make bar tending his last choice for a career, but he somewhat
underestimated the challenge. He had the ill-formed plan of getting bar tending
experience in a dive where he hoped his mistakes would be overlooked, and see for
himself if he could tolerate the trade. If this proved successful, he thought he might move
up to a better establishment. With luck, he might even get his own saloon and be set for
the rest of his life.
Turk had more than one iron in the fire. Were he only the proprietor of the saloon, he
would have operated it himself. But as it was, he always needed help, and his help was
always leaving. The cripple with his cane was just another in a long line of comers and
goers, but he might work out. At least he looked as if he wouldn't drive away the
customers.
Randy's first two days on the job were busy but tolerable, even pleasant. Turk was
almost friendly and showed him the fine points of bar tending in his place. For example,
if an inebriated customer nodded off at his table, he was to be shaken awake and sent on
his way. If he couldn't be shaken awake, and there were other customers, he would be
dragged out the front door and deposited in the street. If there were no other customers,
he was to be dragged out the back door and his pockets gone through. "And don't hold
out on me," advised Turk.
A frowzy-looking woman who apparently shared residence with Turk up the stairs,
and who did her best to solicit the customers who spent freely, looked Randy over and
decided he wouldn't be interested in her services. He was good-looking enough to have
his pick.
He wasn't interested. He had several encounters with prostitutes that were
disappointing, and one was downright embarrassing. He guessed he just couldn't get
romantic with a woman who wasn't clean. When he found a woman who appealed to him,
it was bound to be different.
After two days on the job, he was beginning to feel that he was getting the hang of bar
tending. The surroundings and filth of Turk's Saloon disgusted him, but he had been
around the block, as they said, and he knew what you had to put up with to hold a job. He
did his best, trying to achieve the casual camaraderie that kept them laughing, talking,
and pushing out their glasses for refills.
A customer had just left on the morning of the third day and the barroom was empty,
when Turk came in to collect from the cigar box under the counter where the receipts
were kept. He seemed disturbed and his little black eyes were suspicious and threatening.
He roughly grabbed the cigar box, peered into it, and snarled, "You're stealing from me,
you bastard!"
"No I ain't," Randy almost shouted.
"Be goddamn sure you ain't!" snarled Turk who turned and left.
Randy was upset. Challenging his honesty meant you were trying to provoke a fight.
Turk had no reason at all for his accusation except his conviction that all bartenders stole
from the till. Payday was approaching, and Turk didn't believe in paying wages to a
beginner unless he knew that they would tolerate abuse and thus likely stay on for awhile.
Turk was also building up an excuse for docking the aforesaid wages.
From then on, relations between the two became more and more unpleasant. Turk
began to complain about the lack of housekeeping in the barroom, that business had gone
to pot since Randy started, and that he, Turk, was being trifled with. The final straw was a
confrontation in which Turk began to hurl a stream of obscurities at Randy, ending with
the ominous threat, "You don't know what I do with pretty boys like you!"
 Turk was turning to leave, when, with a speed and accuracy that surprised him, Randy
found the lead tipped cane in his hand swinging toward the back of Turk's head. The boot
of the cane hit him right behind the ear, and he fell to the flour like a bag of wet flour.
Randy found himself shaking with anger.
Turk lay with his face in the filthy sawdust, with a trickle of snot and blood coming
out of one nostril. His scalp had been cut where the cane had hit him, and the cut was
beginning to ooze blood, as well. Randy turned and went out the door without looking
back. It took several blocks before his arm stopped shaking enough to plant the cane
firmly.
He spent the next few days in his room in secret fear that the police would come
looking for him on a charge of murder. They didn't and he never knew if Turk had
survived his cane whipping.

IV.

After his experience with Turk, Randy began to feel he had come to the end of his
options. There was one slim chance left. Before he had left the Bullhead River settlement,
Mr. Manning had said something about looking up Ellis Thorvald if he was really up
against it. Thorvald would try to help him out if he could.
He found Thorvald's office, and gave his story to David Evans, Thorvald's secretary,
and he could see Mr. Thorvald in his office through the open doorway, at his desk, poring
over a piece of paper. Evans was writing down the details when Thorvald looked up, saw
Randy, waved him into the office.
"What can I do for you?" asked Thorvald.
"I don't know if you remember me, sir, " said Randy, "But I busted my leg last spring
up at Bullhead River."
"I remember that," said Thorvald, leaning back in his chair, "What is it that you
want?"
"I need a job, Mr. Thorvald. I can't get around to good, but..."
"Let's see that leg," interrupted Thorvald. Randy undid the binding, and the
businessman looked at the lumpy ankle. "Surgeons can't fix it?"
"Nossir," said Randy, "They're scairt that if they reset it, it might turn out even worse.
One said I was lucky to be able to walk at all."
"Hmmm" said Thorvald making a tent of his hands, "I suppose you have looked for
employment elsewhere in this city?" Randy nodded. The lumberman considered this and
then asked, "You're not blaming the company for this, are you?"
"Nossir," said Randy, "It was my own damn fault."
"I just wanted to get that straight," Thorvald said. "Now, do you think you can do a
full day's work on that leg?"
"I'm sure I can, sir," replied the young man.
"What I have in mind isn't selling posies on the street corner. We could use help in the
sawmill. If you work out at this, we can find you a more suitable job as time goes on, if
you think you would like to learn how to make windows."
"I just want a fair chance," Mr. Thorvald."
"Let me tell you something about the way we see things in this company. Loyalty is
most important. Reliability, yes, but the loyal man is bound to be reliable and trustworthy.
I want people who will work as hard for this company as I and Matt Manning do. I'll tell
you something else that might surprise you. My personal profits from this work are much
less than you might suspect."
"When I find a man who will put the company's business ahead of his own--well, I
believe in playing fair and square with a man like that, and I'm not going to throw him
out on his keister without a damned good reason. What I'm going to do is to send you up
to Matt at the Bullhead River mill, and we'll take it from there.."
Thorvald slammed the palm of his hand on his desk and Evans appeared from the
front room.
"Dave," he said, ""take some money out of petty cash to recompense this young man
for traveling expenses to our mill up north. Write a note of introduction to Manning too."
"Now," he continued as he stood up and beamed at Randy, "Does that solve you
problem?"
"Yessir," said Randy.
"Good luck, then," said Thorvald, pumping his hand. Randy followed Evans -- a
young Englishman who paused in Chicago en route to the California gold fields, and
stayed--and the businessman went back to his paper.
As Evans went about his task of writing the note, Randy glanced back through the
doorway into the office. Thorvald was again furrowing his brow as he read, as if he hadn't
been interrupted.
Randy left the lumberyard and made his way back to his room. He was somewhat
awed by his meeting with Ellis Thorvald, himself. The President of the Company! He
was a man to be admired, that was certain. Randy had once heard Porlier say that he had
made his money the hard way, starting off by shoveling manure on his mother's farm, and
worked his way up to the top. His magnetism, assurance, and the gold rings on his fingers
showed that he was an important person. The immaculate white collar of his shirt, a suit
that cost more than Randy could ever afford to wear, the subtle hint of expensive cologne:
money; That's what the man represented.
The man knew what he was about all right. Why he had practically promised him a
lifetime job. Damn! Don't sell me out, he had said, and I won't sell you out.
Yes, there were good signs that it might work out all right after all.
Randy quickened his shuffle down the street, no longer an aimless drifter, but a man
setting out to tend to this business of the Bullhead River Lumber and Manufacturing
Company.
The next day he was on the steamer back to Green Bay or Peshtigo en route to the
Bullhead River mill. The interview with Thorvald kept running through his mind. What
was it that he had said that seemed so important, now? The company -- that was it -- a
company, a group of people all working for the same thing: to make a living for
themselves. The company paid their wages, and if you were important to the company,
you were helping them. So they would help you.
The idea hit him like a revelation. Goddamn! He had finally got his head on straight. It
was simple once you got it figgured out.
Like a fool, he had been concerned only with his own affairs, and where had it taken
him? It had taken him straight to the lair of Turk, a gutter rat with feral eyes who would
go straight for your throat if it had a chance. Well, that was all over, now.
He was standing at the rail of the steamer when it entered to bay of Green Bay and a
summer thunderstorm blew up. He watched a white curtain of rain sweep across the bay
toward him, and felt it lash his face. He shuddered slightly. Suddenly a dazzling bolt of
lightning struck nearby, accompanied by a prodigious clap of thunder that shook the boat,
and went rumbling off into the distance.
It was one of the great dramas of nature. As suddenly as it had come, the rain was
gone; the huge, boiling, blue and gray clouds rushing east to lower Michigan.
Behind the storm was a blue cloudless sky that seemed to reach to eternity. The breeze
brought the rain-fresh smell of the lake and the pine forests behind it. The peaceful red
sun was preparing to set, and all was well with the world.
It was a good sign. In a sudden impulse of enthusiasm, Randy thew his lead tipped
cane as far as he could, and watched it cartwheel over the water.

***

Johnny and Rose : 1863

I.
It seemed as if the rains would never end, that cold wet summer of 1846, when even the peat
stacked on end in rows would not dry enough to burn. Emmett Sweeney huddled in the doorway
of the shed behind his cottage in Cork County, and with absent-minded thoroughness carved
another notch in a tally stick. According to his count, today was the forty-second consecutive
day on which it had rained.
His main concern, the thing the destiny of of his family rested on was his crop, a full
acre of bushy potato vines which in normal times would have made him a contented and
happy man. He waited for the scourge he prayed would not come, and which he sickenly
knew would come. They said it had spread as far away as Norway. Even as he waited,
small tubers were beginning to bud out beneath the plants. They would grow rapidly,
now, if they were allowed to live.
When it did come, he missed it at first, the small black specks that could have been
dirt on the leaves, which grew larger day by day, rotting and blighting the leaves until the
yellowish vines could be seen. He went out one morning and collected a few cups full of
white marbles from beneath the vines before he became too discouraged to finish the
task.
"That's it,then," he told his wife, "It's good land but we cannot risk another year, and
as for me, I have not the heart to plant another pratie."
They sold what heirlooms they had for a small price--the silver spoons and the linen
and a stick or two of furniture-- and found passage on a small sailing ship bound for
America. The ship owner and captain, a fisherman, found it more profitable to ferry
human cargo across the Atlantic, and to bring back hides, tobacco, and a few concealed
barrels of whiskey, that it was to catch fish.
Emmett's dream was to pass on to the unclaimed interior of the nation and establish a
freehold of his own. But upon landing in a city named Hoboken, the little girl was too ill
from the voyage to continue on immediately, and so they had paused awhile. But the pace
of life was more demanding here, without the familiarity of comfortable tradition. It
seemed as if there were too many loose ends, and one had to rush just to keep up.
 Emmet took a job in a railroad labor gang clearing land, contracted malaria, and then
he was ill. When they had almost exhausted their money, he got a job on the New Jersey
docks , and a few years later moved to a similar but better paying job in the city of New
York. When he took that job he had the premonition he would be there for the rest of his
working life.
When disgruntled by their lot or unhappy about being sent home with only a half-day's
work, the longshoremen would talk about "heading west," and this talk would revive
Emmet's regret. A seemingly endless line of barges came down the Hudson from the Erie
Canal and were towed to the whaves with their holds bulging with wheat and resinous
pine, sorghum molasses, bales of hops, smoked sides of pork, and barrels of corned beef,
he knew from where this bounty had come; it came from the West.
When they talked longingly of the frontier, one of their members, a cycnic, who had
little patience with daydreaming, had said, "An Irishman makes a good pioneer only if he
can travel from one parish church to another."
"What about St. Brendon, eh?" asked another.
"St. Brendon was a priest, " said the cynic, "and he took his parish with him." They
had all laughed at this, even Emmet.
The Irish were reminded daily of their inferior social status. It seemed as if the social
hierarchy of old Europe had been transplanted complete to the new world. Help wanted
signs invariably had a line at the bottom which said simply, "Irish need not apply."
A Southerner was to write later, "The mistake with us was thast it was not made a
felony to bring in an Irishman when it was made piracy to bring in an African."
"The difference between an Irishman and the black negro," said the cynic who paused
until he was sure of the attention of his audience, " Is that the sassenach sees the black
negro as a horse, but the Irishman as a dog." His listeners looked at one another and
scratched their heads over this odd conundrum.
"It's a poor dog I would make," said one, "What master would keep a dog that was
always nipping at his heels?"
"Ah," said the cynic, "You're learning a bit."

II.

Emmet's youngest son, John Xavier Sweeney, had been born in Ireland in 1842. To
Johnny, the woes of the potato famine and the promise of the West held little interest.He
was an energetic, adventuresome boy who could not hope to explore all of the unending
riches of his own city, which, for all he knew, might have stretched out endlessly.
There was always something new to see, some unexplored street, some wholesale
yard, something happening if you were bold enough to find it. Johnny didn't hunger for
food, even when meals were spare, he hungered for money, which everyone he knew
insisted was in short supply. There was no shortage of food. Why, there were groceries
and bakeries and fishmarkets and greengrocer shops full of food, there were restaurants
and foodstands and vendor's carts full of food ready to eat. The warehouses bulged with
food, more food than you could ever put in your mouth. What you really needed was not
food, but money, for with real coins to put down on the counter, smiling faces and eager
hands would load down your arms with any food that you asked for.
Johnny passed through his years at the parish school with scarcely a thought.He was
quick, and the lessons wereo more than a pleasant chore. Any aspirations he might have
had, educationally, we quickly snuffed out by the observation that being Irish , the best he
might expect would be a workingman's job. His attention was focused on his free time
with his pals, which was his real life.
He passed into working life, too, simply enough. His father informed him at one
evening's meal that he was to come with him the next morning to unload barges, and
Johnny cheerfully agreed, pleased at the prospect of new adventure and the chance to
make money. He did well at the docks --he was reliable and a good worker. He grew to
manhood there. By the time he was sixteen he was nearly six feet tall and well-muscled.
He sometimes passed an evening with Emmet and his cronies, some of them men from
work, who in their cups tended toward patriotism and sentimentality rather than
boisterousness. They knew all of the old songs, the Gaelic toasts, and the old stories.
Johnny remembered the one about the naked Celt woman, her long red hair streaming in
the wind, screaming like a banshee, who led the old time troops into battle, the enemy
soldiers being too startled to fight back before they were overwhelmed.
"As I would be," thought Johnny to himself with amusement.
When the evening was over, Johnny would lead his old man home, and Emmet would
sink into his favorite chair, his usually well-combed pompador wet with sweat and lying
in lank strands over his face, and in the privacy of his own home weep so profusely that
Johnny could see the tears coursing in rivulets down the furrows of his face.
Emmet Sweeney cried for his dear Irish mother, and for the foregiveness of his sins.
He bemoaned the shortness and futility of life and the plight of the common man, and
beseeched God to strike down the perfidious English, and all forms of government. He
was the rare bird, the eloquent drunk.
"The Sovereign State, Johnny," he would say, "may have a variety of enemies based
on the circumstance and belligerence of its neighbors. But its second enemy is always its
own citizenry, and for this reason it will always have a standing army, even if there is no
external foe. And it will have its police--even here."
"And despite invocations of peace, and its high flown talk about righteousness and
freedom, it will never hesitate to use naked force against whom it chooses.The banners
proclaiming peace are always held up with bayonets--even here."
"And the Sovereign State which decries killing and speaks of the life of its citizens as
an inalienable right, will never relinquish the power to take the lives of its own citizens,
in its' own time, and in its own way--even here."
"And the power of this monster is controlled by those with property--even here.
Especially, here. Never forget this, Johnny." Johnny never forgot.
From his mother he learned other things. When the conscription lists were posted, July
13, in the City of New York, to raise troops for the federal army, she anxiously took him
aside and asked, "Will you be going to soldier, Johnny?"
No, mother," he replied, "my name was not written."
"What is it they pay?" she asked.
"Thirteen dollars to the month."
"Little enough," she replied, "and not enough for the likes of you."
She led him into the sitting room that Sunday evening in 1863, and recounted once
again the story he had heard many times before.She was wearing a plain green dress and
smelled of medicine. She remained like this in his memory. He patiently listened to her
recital of her ancestry and his own pedigree. He had come from a line of warriors whose
family studied their family tree with the painstaking attention of scholars.
Warriors were bred as well as made and not left to accidents of nature. His line was
that of professional soldiers who could trace their roots deep into the heart of the ancient
Celt empire.They were men who were hired for their skill with mace and crossbow, the
sword, the long bow, and the lance. They were men who could fight either mounted or
unmounted, in the snow, in the rain, in the night, in the gloom of the forest or the
brightness of noon, because they were trained for all these things while most they faced
were not. This was their skill and the living of their families.
They were men who would fight for their own king, but if wise, never against him if
they prized a home to return to. But they would fight for anyone else who paid well.
Each maale child was carefully observed by his teachers, those of skill whose fighting
days were past. The child was trained from the beginning to compensate for natural
weaknesses, and to use his strength to advantage. If stolid, bulky and apt to be slow, he
would be taught to plan his strategy well in advance to avoid contests with swordsmen,
especially those with light swords.
But slowness is a dangerous weakness, and his sons must not be so limited. The
pedigrees of the great warrior families would be pored over as diligently as a horse
breeder scrutinizing a stud book for the purpose of improving the bloodline of his stable.
There was no room for delicacy of thought in the family business, the Law and the
Church be damned.
Thus the warrior's sisters might be sought by those families whose weakness was a
lack of size and bulk. Arrangements would be made, and contracts of marriage signed.
Sometimes a female child would be contracted for in infancy, or a husband would
interview the great fighters to find a suitable stud for his wife and thus assure a valiant
son. If the husband or wife found their contratced mates not to their fancy, there were
opportunities enough to be had with care and discretion, the Church be damned.
The his mother looked at him sadly and said, "But not for you, Johnny, or your sons.
No man is huge enough, or strong enough to fight a bullet, and no man, however
unskilled, is unable to learn how to pull the latch of a gun."
He left her with a kiss and an embrace. He went off to bed and she remained in the
darkening parlor, immersed in her revery of the lost past. He never forgot this moment,
for it was the last time he ever talked to her alone.

III.

On Monday morning, July 14th, Johnny and Emmet were discussing repairs to the
house while waiting for another barge to be pushed to the docks for unloading, when a
part-time worker named Lafferty came running around the corner of a building shouting
at the top of his voice, "The bastards have posted another list!"
The dockworkers were immediately alert. Another list! Lincoln had ordered a draft of
three hundred thousand men a week earlier to replace the volunteers whose enlistments
were expiring. You could buy your way out with three hundred dollars, if you had it, but
the dockworkers were also aware that a majority of the names on the previous day's list
were those of the foreign born, especially the Irish. And prominent among them were
those of a group that was on strike and whose jobs were being filled by negro
strikebreakers.
"They plan to put us all in uniform and give our jobs to the niggers!" shouted another
one of the dockworkers, "There'll be another list tomorrow and a list the day after that.
They know we do not have the money to buy out. It's a sad day when Irishman is fool
enough to trust the word of an Englishman!"
"There ain't gonna be no more lists, goddam it, no more lists!"
"Three cheers for Jeff Davis! If the bastards want war, we'll give them war!"
It was the final straw. Years of meekly submitting to the indignities of second-class
citizenship suddenly ended. The rebels were right. You could only change things by
fighting back; the Lord was meek and mild and they nailed him to a cross and spit on
him.
The workmen threw down their ropes, lumberhooks and gloves, and went off to show
the goddam Sassenachs that there was a limit to their meekness. In a few hours, New
York would be paralyzed by roving mobs.
Johnny and Emmet were not so violently affected, but they felt the surge of emotion
that the protest had released. There would be no more work done today. It would be best
to go home and avoid the trouble brewing.
For all of his talk, or perhaps because of his own deep feelings struggling with his
common sense, Emmet was not one to openly defy the Sovereign State without an army
behind him.Yet he yearned for a fight and distrusted the excitement generated within him,
so he confined himself to his chair in the livingroom with a book in hope that the rioting
would soon be over.
Johnny was also wary, but not from fear of himself. He had never really been
intimidated, and he was not basically concerned with the problems of the Irish unless
they affected him personally. Yet, he felt left out of things, as if a great adventure were
occuring and he was standing on the sidelines missing all the fun.
So when a casual pal with the odd name of George Washington O'Reilly showed up at
their front door looking for someone to assist him in liberating a few items from a
furniture store, Johnny agreed to help him against his better instincts. He had been
planning the purchase of a new diningroom table that his mother wanted, but if it were to
be had for the taking, why not take it. The whole city was being looted. With a little care
no one would be the wiser. The police were busy with other things, and the store owners
were no doubt cowering behind their own curtained windows at home.
He and O'Reilly drowe to the furniture store with a horse and wagon O'Reilly had
managed to find, and parked it next to the store's back door in an alley, out of sight from
the street.
The two were csrrying a lowboy through the smashed back door, when they were
spotted by two policemen who had yet to be intimidated by the mob. Johnny considered
heaving the furniture at them and and escaping, when a shout rang out from the alley,
"Coppers! Let's get them!"
A gang of toughs charged down the alley, swinging sticks and shouting threeats, and
the cops, after a quick glance, took to their heels and ran a distance of fifty yards or so ,
where their decorum returned. They watched the mob with careful eye, prepared to flee
again, but the sound of splintering wood indicated the mob had found a more diverting
interest. Several of their members emerged from the back of a building carrying casks of
whiskey which were broken open and passed around.
 One young man held the cask to his mouth as if prepared to drink the entire contents,
and was egged on by his fellows to do just that. Some drank out of the kegs with cupped
hands, and one used an expensive leather shoe from his foot.They were dressed in an odd
assortment of garments. Expensive top coats, looted from shops, covered threadbare
trousers, a new Derby perched on the head of a fellow wearing a dirty workshirt and
scuffed shoes.
Upon further thought, the cops decided the wisest course of action was to retreat
unobserved before the crowd took up the chase again. There would be another day when
things were different.
Johnny could not shake the feeling that in the instant before the two had taken flight
that one of the cops had marked him as a man to be remembered. He was not so much of
a fool as to believe that the social outrage of a mob could last forever. The police would
be in force again soon enough, and if the normal pattern held, and there was no reason to
believe that it wouldn't, the law enforcers would be put under social and political pressure
to produce someone to be punished. While the two policemen would have limited
memory of the mob that had routed them, Johnny knew that he would be remembered.
Several years before, while steadying cargo hoisted by a steam winch, the winch had
jerked the load, and the hemp rope he had been holding was torn through his hands and
burned a long abrasion on the side of his face. The wound had takena long time to heal --
some said because of the oil on the rope--and when it had, he was left with a permanent
scar. Such a mark was not likely to be forgotten if seen.
But this this not begin to concern him until the excitement had died down and the city
had returned to normal. The riots had lasted four days, and a negro had been hanged from
a lamppost. It was said that a hundred and fifty were killed in the riots, of whom thirty-
one were unidentified.
A few weeks later, Johnny was on the street when he glanced up to see a policeman
glancing in his direction, as if he were searching his memory. A rearing horse had
allowed Johnny to slip out of sight. The policeman's notice might have been his
imagination, but an inexplicable certainty came to him that he might face a serious
problem if he were to remain in the city. He was not worried enough to flee, but caution
advised him to be ready to do so.
A month or so later, while sitting at a rear table in a saloon, drinking with his friends,
two burly cops entered the door. Their demeanor was not that of a casual look-around or a
visit for a free sandwich--they were looking for someone. A cold sensation in his gut told
Johnny they were looking for a man with a scar on his face.
He got up from the table casually, his head diverted, and moved toward the back
entrance as causually as he could. He heard a shout, looked up to see a nightstick pointed
at him. and with a few unhurried steps reached the back door. Every fiber of his body
screamed at him to run, but he opened the door and stepped outside without apparent
hurry.
He closed the door, and then he did run, as rapidly as he could, and with a vault cleared
a fence, ducked around a corner and cleared another fence, and lay still in the darkeness
of a garden for what seemed to be hours. When he was certain his pursuers had given up
chase--they could not be certain he wasn't blocks away by then--he got up and moved off.
He thought it unlikely that his friends would betray him, but there were those who
might, and perhaps someone in the establishment might remember the name of the young
man with the scar on his face. The chase was on, now, and the police might find his
identity by asking around the local neighborhoods. he had, perhaps, a few hours before
the game would be up.
He mad his way home by a circuitous route, carefully enetered the back door without
striking a light, and made his way to his room where he gathered his most valuable
possessions, and left. Caution told him to not even leave a note for the family.
He walked to the parish graveyard to avoid being found on the street or in a public
place at that time of night, and sat in a secluded corner. It was the best place he could
think of to spend the hours until daylight without attracting attention.

IV.

When the city was up and about he made his way to the streets and left the city.Once
out of the metropolis he felt relatively safe. He bought used garments at a store to give
himself a rural look. He though about the disguise of a Union soldier on furlough, but
decided against it. He might be stopped and asked to show his papers.
He traveled by stage and train to Buffalo, for he thought his best plan was to go west,
preferably Chicago, or even California, and to not return until the memories of those
pursuing him had grown dim.After a good week on the Lakes with stops at Detroit and
Port Huron, the ship reached the port of Green Bay where it stopped again--to unload
some sawmill equipment he was told.
He got off the ship to spend a few hours on dry land after his long journey on the
water.It occured to him, ironically, that he had reached by accident the very place that old
Emmet had spent his life regretting not having gotten to.
And a good thing too, thought Johnny as he looked around. The old man's dream
would have been shattered if he had actually reached the place he had been longing for.
The place was little more than a village--thank God Emmet had not succeeded in
dragging them all here years ago. For all of his dreams, Emmet was a man of the city,
used to paved sidewalks, quiet parks and comfortable pubs within walking distance of his
home. His potato farm had been in the country, but this wasn't countrry, it was
wilderness.
Some of the residents to be seen on the dirt paths that served as streets appeared to be
dressed only in underclothing, trousers, and boots so scuffed and battered that one
couldn't tell the original color of the leather. Some of them carried huge axes that could
have taken Anne Boylen's head off with a flick of the wrist. Johnny smiled to himself.
These were the type of men the naked lady of the Celts might have lead into battle. Well,
maybe not. Some of them were puny looking immigrants from the depths of the
Continent.
"You're from the ship, aren't you?"
"Johnny turned and found that the query was addressed to him.For a moment he was
at sea, half-believing that his imagination had summoned up the naked lady herself,
although the girl regarding him was quite modestly, if plainly, dressed. But her
shockingly red hair hung to her waist. Bold green eyes stared out at him from a face so
covered with freckles that it seemed sunburned.
"Now, my girl, " he replied with a smile as he stepped beneath the crude canvas
awning protecting her from the sun. "That may or may not be the case."
 "Where might you be headed then?"
"Why, it may be to this fair city itself, me lass."
"There's little for the likes of you here," she replied, "Unless you can ride a log or
swing an ax."
"It may be that such would suit me fine," he replied, continuing his banter.
"Well, then, a strapping man like you would need a good piece of meat inside him to
ride a log. I have some fine roast venison here that I prepared with my own hands."
"Give me a good hunk of it, then, and beer."
"You'll get no beer here," she replied, "but cold tea from sumac sweetened with honey
is surely to be had."
Johnny put coins on the counter and asked, "What name is it that you go by?"
"Rose O'Connor," she replied without coyness, "And you?"
Johnny was about to introduce himself when he was abruptly brought to a stop by a
problem he had not considered. He must choose a new name to go by. He thought of a
large sign that he had looked at for years at dockside in New York. "Johnny," he said,
"Johnny MacLochlin."
"You're no more MacLochlin than my own brother, and might you be one of Grant's
butchers, too?"
"I've had no part of Grant," he replied soberly.
She studied him carefully, and said, " I'm thinking that it may be that you are one of
those who does not care to fight." Johnny was devastated by the ease at which she had
penetrated his disguise.
"Do not concern yourself, " she said, "Here it is the Walloons who do not care to fight.
I have been watching to see what sort of fish the storm in New York would blow into our
waters."
"I am at your mercy," my lady," Johnny replied, touching the visor of his cap."
"Yes, you are," she replied, "In more ways than you know."
Johnny winked and sauntered off. After a glance at the wharf showed the ship would
not be underway that day, he decided to find a room on solid ground for that night. The
next morning he stopped by her stand again, and she greeted him abruptly.
"So you're still here."
"That I am."
"What is it you're about, Johnny McLochlin?"
Her question held no banter. so he answered truthfully. "I must find a place to live, and
work to do."
"You'll be staying, then."
Why not? Johnny asked himself, my foot is already on the path. "Aye," he told her.
"Do you have money," Johnny McLochlin?" she asked bluntly.
"Enough," he said, " And perhaps more than enough."
" It's four hundred dollars that you'll be needing."
"And for what is this?'
"My brother Sean," she explained, "is a window maker at a place nor far from here at
the Thorvald factory on Bullhead River. The company that owns the mill is selling land
from the logs have been taken. For your money you will get eighty acres of good farm
land across the road from the company buildings. It was my wish to have this land for my
family, but you will do as well as any other man."
 "You shall have the money within the hour," he said, with a speed that surprised him.
"It is well, then," she said, closing up the stand, " Go from here to the street with the
tree on the corner, and walk until you come to a yellow house. I will watch for you."
When Johnny reached the yellow house some forty minutes later, he found Rose
waiting for him at the door. She led him into the kitchen where he withdrew a heavy
chamois pouch from his pocket and put twenty double-eagle gold coins in her cupped
hands. She looked at them in disbelief. "I've never before held gold in my hands, and here
are twenty heavy coins of it!"
She led him to the back of the house where a horse and buggy waited. "We've no time
to lose. Mind the horse while I get food and blankets," She hurried away and Johnny
brought the horse a pail of water which it drank.
They were soon off, following a dirt road that soon became little more than a path
through the trees.It was a warm September day, and after an hour or so they stopped to
have a small lunch which consisted of some bread and some of the previous day's
venison, and to rest the horse. Johnny wanted to talk about the property, but she would
have none of it. "Do not talk of the chicken before the egg is hatched," she said, "It is a
superstition of mine."
They arrived at the Thorvald factory around three o'clock. She showed him to her
brother's cabin, and he stabled the horse in a cabin leanto. He was sitting on a chair in
front of the cabin when she came running.
"It's ours!" she cried joyously, and kissed him on the cheek, then blushed and said
more sedately, "It's yours, Johnny."
"It's ours, Rose," he replied spontaneously.
"Are you asking me, then?" she bantered. Johnny's reply was interrupted by Sean who
pumped his hand and invited them to a meal at the local restaurant.
The next morning they looked over the property. The land did seem well aspected to
Johnny. It was almost completely level with no hills or hollows but with a gentle swell
that sloped down to the river. A small spring trickled down to the Bullhead.
He was astonished by the size of the parcel. Why it had a good quarter of a mile of
river frontage, and was half-a-mile deep. All of this for only four hundred dollars! If
Emmett could only see this-- Johnny had grown tired of hearing about his great
grandfather's precious tree, that he had traveled twenty miles to poach, and which had
given its life that Johnny could have hot soup.
"This," said Johnny with a sweep of his arm, " would be like Heaven to my father.He
dreams of this as he works the docks."
"And why not?" she replied, "If it will allow a man to live without answering to
another."
"But did you not tell me they had taken the logs from here?" asked Johnny, "I yet see a
forest."
Rose walked over to a small pine tree twice her height. "This is the only forest they
can see. All of the other trees are worthless to them, and the land itself is worth only a
pittance. For this tree, they will destroy all else."
Johnny leaned against a birch tree and surveyed his domain. He was rich! Emmett had
thought so much of his acre of potato vines. Why, this land would make him a man to be
reckoned with in Ireland, and in New York City it would make him wealthy. And yet, it
was as much as part of the world as any other, . The sun shone as freely on it, the rain fell
as generously, and the air was as sweet, if not sweeter.
He suddenly understood the wisdom of his father's heart, and knew the depth of his
longing.He felt the possessive lust for the land that came over the Europeans whose
families had lived in hovels for a thousand years, who would take a tree,or trout, or deer,
in fear of the law and in fear of their own life, and who existed at the will of their
landlord, the King, or the Church. To be a free man with land enough to feed himself
would have been considered a daydream by many of Johnny's ancestors. He understood
how this lust was as unbearble in its intesity as the craving of a fox for a fat hen. He knew
that this lust would compel the white European to use any strategem, any lie, or even
unapologetic naked force to wrest it from the red American. This was wealth itself, which
would endure forever.
But you will never posses it, Johnny, his mind told him, you will be lowered into a
hole soon enough, and become part of it. It will endure, but you will not.
Rose yawned, stretched herself, and rose from her seat beside him. "Enough
dreaming," she said, "Now we will see what has to be done."
She took him by the hand and led him back to the road next to the factory land. "This
is where we will build," she said. "All I am asking of you, Johnny McLochlin, is the rent
of two acres along this road, to put up a store and a house. The millworkers have money
and little place to spend it, except the company store. We will put up our store, and a
house for Sean, myself, and my two sisters. These will be built, not of logs, but boards
from the mill. There are many boards, good enough for use, with a little care, that the
customers of the company will not buy."
"To pay the rent on these two acres, we will build for you as snug and as fine of a
house as you would want, and dig a well. Then you can come and go as you wish."
"Can this be done before winter comes?"
"Do you have money to hire carpenters?"
"Yes," he replied, "And this is where I will spend it."

V.

Three men of Thorvald's crew could reduce a healthy pine to clean logs in about ten
minutes. That was the easy part of removing a tree. They never bothered with the hard
part, which was removing the stump. That they left to the farmers. A mature, fouror five
ton tree of any species must be solidly anchored to withstand a gale, for the height of the
tree becomes a lever that multiplies the wind force.
Tree roots are generally tough, fibrous, and capable of extensive bending without
breaking. One successful method of removing stumps was to blow them out with
gunpowder--Alfred Nobel was still in his lab in 1863 working on a way to make
nitroglycerine safe to handle and transport--but gunpowder at the time was
understandably hard to come by, and expensive[ In a few years, the government would
promote the use of ordnance for clearing land to use up munitions from the war]. There
also were a number of patented stump pullers to be had for a price.
One could jerk the stumps out with a good team of horses, although this usually took
some doing, or they could be dug out by hand. This method involved a good deal of
levering,digging, and chopping. The stump could be excavated to a certain depth and the
deeper roots hacked off with a sharp ax. If deep enough in the soil to avoid interfering
with a plow, they would gradually rot away. This was the wholesale, wanton, destruction
of all species of trees and the entire forest environment.
The newly cleared land was and almost impassible wasteland of stump holes,
protruding roots, piles of subsoil, forest debris, and rocks. And one might add, the charred
remains of burn piles. On some tracts, a large, wheeled, implement called a breaking
plow was employed. This helped to level it off somewhat. And, a sheet metal scoop with
handles might be hitched behind a team and used to fill in holes and level mounds of dirt.
Following that, some kind of harrow or drag could be used to further level the ground,
which was allowed to settle before it was plowed with a regular plow. It still took years of
plowing and harrowing to get the land leveled-off, but since most of the farm labor was
still done by hand--the planting, reaping, and harvesting-- this could be lived with. Unlike
the pioneers of the western prairies, the pinery pioneers expected to labor much of their
lives to get their land cleared and farm-like.
Johnny McLochlin took out stumps and filled in holes with a shovel. He had cleared
about an acre of land by October. It was Indian Summer, with daily temperatures of
seventy degrees, but this would change. His little house had been built and the well dug,
and with a few accomodations his place would serve him quite well. It was crude, but he
liked the smell and feeling of rough-sawed pine.
He was free here, and he wondered if he really needed to make money for the next
few years. He had no rent to pay, no wife and children to support, and few vices. He rose
when he felt like it, he had discovered the pleasure of fishing from his own bank on the
river, and he was learning the little arts that made frontier life tolerable. If he needed
money, he still had more than one or two of the double eagles left.
He smiled at the quizzical look that had come over Rose's face when he gave her the
money for the carpenter in gold pieces. She had stared at him a long moment, and he
knew she was dying to ask how he had come by them, but--bless the girl--she had the
pluck not to ask, afraid, perhaps, that she might not like the answer. But she did say, "
You must not become known hereabouts as the man with the gold. I will see to it that the
workers are paid in greenbacks.
He sat on the ground to rest from his labor with his back against a tree stump. He gazed
at the land he had freed from roots and brush, and debated with himself the wisdom of
spending the rest of the autumn before the ground froze leveling off the cleared land to be
ready for spring planting. It was much, but with a cash crop--rutabagas, potatoes..."
He stopped in mid-thought, threw back his head and laughed. "It's you father's son, you
are, Johnny Sweeney. You are in the new world and your mind thinks of planting an acre
of potatoes!"
He noticed a figure making its way toward him, picking its path carefully between the
stumps and the rocks. It was Colleen, Rose's yonger sister. As she drew closer, he could
see she was carrying a small jug. "I've brought you tea,Johnny!" she cried. When she
came up she smiled disarmingly and handed him the jug. She was seventeen, and thought
pretty by some.
"You are bringing me hot tea on a warm day like today?" he asked.
"Oh," she replied, "It's what we drink when it is hot and we have heavy work to do.
It's real China tea with milk and sugar, and is more refreshing than a cool drink.You see,
it warms you up and makes you sweat, and then when the heat goes you feel cooler.It's
better for the stomach, too."
 "I don't understand that, but I will try it, once."
"Why were you laughing when I came up. Did you see something amusing?"
"I was laughing at the thought that I might grow potatoes."
"What is amusing about growing potatoes? " she asked. "We would do well to have
potatoes to eat."
He pondered answering this, but instead asked, "Did Rose send you out with the tea?"
"Heavens no," Colleen answered, She doesn't know. She is very cross these days when
your name is mentioned."
"What have I done to make her angry?" Johnny asked innocently.
"You mean, what haven't you done? Really, Johnny, you are quite slow." She then
continued dreamily,"But I love slow men." She edged closer. After a moment she looked
out and said, "Speaking of the devil..."
Johnny looked up and saw Rose making her way toward them with determination,
holding up her skirts to keep from dirtying them. As she drew nearer he could see that she
was not at all pleased.
"Colleen!" she cried, "You have left your work undone. Don't think that I don't know
what you're up to young lady! Now go home." Colleen picked up the jug sulkily and
walked off.
Rose then turned her attention to him. "I'll thank you not to make my own work
harder, Mr. McLochlin, by luring my sister out here to have chats to relieve your
aimlessness."
"But..."
She had abrupt;y turned and was leaving when as an afterthought she turned again and
said, "If it is not too inconvenient, you may wish to have supper with us tonight." She
turned once more and rapidly strode off, again holding her dress from the ground.
Johnny stared blankly after her. She had a bee in her bonnet, alright, but what was that
all about?
The episode with the girls had ruined Johnny's ambition and he decided to end work
for the day. He didn't feel exhausted, though, maybe Colleen had something with the hot
tea. He led the old horse back to the cabin and put it into the little stable at the back of the
building.After an hour or so of tasks, he cleaned himself up and made his way to the
O'Connor residence next to the store. Rose was doing well enough at that, being canny at
understanding how desparate the millworkers and their wives for the small luxuries they
treated themselves to for a hard day's labor.
After the meal, Johnny sat at the table with Sean sampling the elderberry wine the girls
had put up for sale at the store. He mentioned the question of what crop to grow, and
Sean proposed that he put the land back into trees. Johnny raised an eyebrow at this, and
Sean explained with a smile that there were few things he liked as much as a slice of
apple pie, but there was little of it to be had on the frontier. Johnny mulled on this and he
replied that the idea held some merit, because if he put in some fruit trees, he could plant
in the open spaces between the stumps.
The conversation stalled at this point, and Johnny senses that something involving him
was occupying Sean's attention. "What is it, Sean?" he said, "Speak up."
Sean's response was to uncork the wine and replenish their cups. "It's you and Rose,"
he finally said, " It's a matter of intention."
"Intention," replied Johnny, confused, "Have I gone back on my agreement?"
 "In Rose's mind you have," said Sean, "You see, she is waiting for you to ask her to be
your wife."
"My wife?" said Johnny somewhat densely, and then he saw it.
"She is a young woman growing older," said Sean, "Who is there for her in this
godforsaken wilderness but you? And, for that matter, my friend, who is there for you,
except her? It's really quite simple if you think about it. There is no need for you to
trouble yourself about family approval, you have that from all of us."
As the impact of the situation hit him full force, Johnny was too stunned to make an
intelligible reply. He drained his cup of wine in one gulp and walked off into the night in
a daze. Sean sipped his wine unperturbed. He had no doubts as to what Johnny's decision
would be once he had time to take it all in. It was the only sensible course of action open
to him.
Johnny was too exhausted from the labors of the day, and too sleepy from the wine to
ponder his future that evening. He went home, fell into bed, and was soon asleep.
He awoke the next morning knowing that the entire pattern of life of his life here
made it almost inevitable that he marry Rose, but there was still the sacrifice of his
present carefree life--aimless, Rose called it. It was the custom of Irish men of the old
country to marry later in life than others, sometimes not until they were in their thirties.
He walked to the river and sat on a rock, watching the ripples of the current.Sean was
right. Once he thought about it, there was no other sensible decision. It was because of
Rose, he had to admit to himself, that he had stayed on at Green Bay, and because of her,
and for her, that he had bought this land, and because of her he had remained. Get on with
it lad, he told himself, are you the scion of the mighty warriors, or a spineless idler
getting older by the day?
But how would he go about it? Was he to walk in while she was chopping carrots for
stew and put the question to her directly? Perhaps if he invited her for an evening stroll.
No, that wasn't the right approach. Things were too tense between them right now for the
romantic approach.He never really given much thought to this part of his life, he had
expected the usual courship that led imperceptibly to engagement and marriage.
He emerged from his revery to find his feet had taken him to the back door of the
O'Connor residence. Ah well,he would go in, find Rose, and hope he didn't botch the
thing to badly. He was ambling forward, steeling his courage to knock on the door, when
an arm reached out of the early morning shadows to bar his way. He saw that it was Rose,
herself. "Be still!" she commanded him.
He followed her gaze and saw that she was watching a pair of hummingbirds at the
honey eater feeder ean had made for her. The stood closely together and her hand still
rested on his arm. He reached out and encirlced her waist and pulled her closer. "Oh,
Johnny," she said. But then, after a blissful moment she pushed him away from her and
said, "Come tonight, after supper." She turned and hurried into the house to chop her
carrots. When Johnny returned that evening he found that Rose's reserve had been due
entirely to her uncertainty about his intentions, and not in the least because she was a coy
maiden who needed to be wooed. She had the evening firmly in control, and as he left
later, he found that he had proposed, been accepted, and that they had a date the next day
to travel to Green Bay to see her parish priest, Father McMahon.
The next morning she took him to the rectory of the church where they were admitted
by McMahon's housekeeper. A few minutes later, the priest, his breviary in his hand with
a finger marking his passage, came into the parlour where they waited. He greeted Rose
warmly, being of the opinion that she still lived in his parish. When he told of her
residence on the Bullhead south of Peshtigo, he held up his free hand and left the room.
He returned a few minutes later, unfolding a map. The entire area of Northeastern
Wisconsin was in the diocese of Quebec, Canada, so that would not be a problem if she,
as he suspected, wanted to marry thew young man she had brought with her.
Upon receiving an affirmative nod, he said he wanted to know, first of all, a few things
about life up on the Bullhead. The region was changing rapidly and almost every day
brought news of a new town or settlement out in the woods. And, just last week he had
attended a meeting of local clergy who discussed the plight of the faithful who had
relocated to a remote area and could not attend mass as regularily as they liked. Those
that lived in the wilderness were granted a Special Dispensation, of course, that did not
require weekly attendance at Holy Mass. They had discussed the idea of the younger
priests riding circuit, but they couldn't be everywhere at once and many locations didn't
have a chapel.
McMahon then plied Rose with a seemingly endless series of questions about her life
on the frontier until she realized she had told him more than she would have thought she
knew. He was curious about everything, as if he were a child discovering the world. It
was not an interrogation, Johnny realized after his initial irritation with what he thought
was excessive officiousness,
but simply the priest's desire to know of things, and his great curiosity to know about life
in primitive conditions.
Johnny felt less pleasantly disposed to the questioner when moments later, the priest's
attention was drawn to the young man from New York. Father McMahon was filled with
questions about that city and what went on there. And then he discovered Johnny had
been born in Ireland, and that led to even more questions which McLochlin evaded by
saying (truthfully) that he had been too young to remember the potato famine and life in
Hibernia.
Finally, when the priest had satisfied his inquisitiveness, he briskly got down to
business. There was the matter of the Banns which had to be published on three
consecutive Sundays, and then there was the question of availability. He would like to do
the wedding. He looked at his calendar and suggested a date eight weeks in the future,
and they agreed.
About this time, the housekeeper who had been lingering at the edge of the discussion
with growing impatience, whispered something in the priest's ear and he excused himself
for a moment and came back with a small book, pen, and ink. They were to individually
write down the names of their parents, their parishes, the place of their baptism, and their
full names, including their confirmation names. He then hurried off to attend to the duties
that had called him.
When Johnny had finished, he handed the book to Rose who said, "Write it down for
me, please, I will tell you." When the time came to sign, she stared at the paper a long
while before she picked up the pen,dipped a little ink from the jar, and pressed down hard
on the nib, making a blotch. She tried again and again until she had produced no more
than a childish "R." Mortified, and her face burning, she threw the pen on the table and
left the building.
Johnny placed the pen and the book neatly at the edge of the table and hurried out to
where she was staring desparately into the distance. He reached out for her hand and after
awhile felt it join his.
Rose sat silently in the wagon on the ride back. He understood what was bothering
her. It wasn't her inability to write her own name-- he already knew that fro talks with
Sean, and he wasn't a great one for books and the like himself. No, Rose's problem was
not her ignorance, but her terrible pride. But somehow that made her appealing to him,
and he felt the urge to protect and defend her. So this is what a woman does to a man, he
thought. She had exposed a side of himself that he had not known existed.
Johnny knew that he had to make another trip to Green Bay, maybe tomorrow, to see
the curious priest again, and explain why the parish records of New York would not
reveal a person named Johnny McLochlin, the name he had signed to the priest's paper.
He must explain that he was known in the city, and his old parish, as Johnny Sweeney,
and that would make the curious priest curious indeed. Why had he changed his name, he
would be asked, and what would he answer to that? Did he trust McMahon enough to
throw himself on his mercy?
Johnny suddenly saw the approach he must use. He would reveal the information in
confession, and rely on the priest's respect for his duty as a Confessor --that would bind
him to some sort of silence. But you would not be honest with yoursel;f, the priest, or
God if you did that, would you lad? The police are not looking for you without a reason,
are they, now? They are looking for a thief. Dare you confess to yourself, Johnny, I am a
thief? And you dare speak of Rose's terrible pride.
Sobered by this reflection, Johnny drove on in silence. After awhile Rose moved next
to him and put her hand on his shoulder, and they comforted one another.
Rose and Johnny were married in Father McMahon's church the week before
Christmas. A caravan of wagons left the Bullhead flowage that was part Wedding tripand
part Holiday shopping trip.The inquisitive cleric officiated, Sean gave the bride, who
wore a borrowed lace dress, away, Colleen and Mary were bridesmaids, and the Reverend
Boyd was pressed into service as the best man. A brief reception was held in the church
basement, McMahon and Boyd struck up a fast relationship which continued for years--
McMahon sometimes came up to Boyd's church to say mass, which the Chippewa's
attended, having been nominal Roman Catholics before having been converted to
nominal Unitarianism-cum-Transcendentalism (which they never quite understood).
The bridal couple returned to Johnny's cabin, in which the newly weds had decided to
live temporarily. Rose had succumbed to the importunings of her sister Colleen who
coveted Rose's room next to the store. Later, Rose sat on his lap and they toasted their life
together with a small bottle of champagne. She caressed the scar on his face with her
finger and suddenly asked, "What now, Johnny?"
"Why now,lass," said Johnny, "I expectit is my duty to see if the rest of you is as
freckled as your pretty face." She smiled and put her hand against his chest, "First, what
of our life together. I must know that before we begin"
Johnny put down his champagne, set her gently on the floor, and went to a corner of
the room where he pried up a floor board and pulled out an odd-looking harness of
leather. Attached to the harness were pocket. Some of them had been opened, but most of
them were sewn shut. Taking a knife, he began cutting the pockets open, putting the
contents on the table before her. She looked wide-eyed at the coins, all of them double
eagle gold pieces. She counted sixty of them--twelve hundred dollars. "Johnny," she
asked quietly, "How did you come by this money?"
"Will you take my word that I worked to earn them?" he asked. She was silent for a
moment looking at the coins before she replied, Yes, I will."
"With these," said Johnny, "We shall build a magnificent Saloon and hotel, that will be
a place of comfort for travelers. It will have carpeted hallways, brass spittoons, colored
glass lamps, a mahogany bar, and we will be proud to call it our own. Do you approve?"
"I approve," she replied, "It will be like a dream come true. Now go say goodnight to
Sean, Dear, while I make myself ready for bed."
***

Randy's Story: 1863-64

I.

They gave Randy Hode a horse, a straw fork, a grain shovel, and a wagon, and set him
to hauling sawdust. When he showed up for work the first morning, Torkelson, the
foreman, motioned him over to the big circular saw blade and explained that the saw cut
a five-sixteenths-of-an-inch kerf so that the blade would not bind up as it was cutting a
log. This wood ended up as saw dust and it had to be kept cleaned away from the saw. A
long handled rake was used to pull the sawdust from under the machinery, including
pieces of bark that had come off the log. One of the workers would take care of that.
Randy's job was to load the piles of raked-up sawdust into a wheel barrow, dump it into
the wagon, and haul it away.
A pile of green sawdust didn't burn too well, making a hazy smoke that hung around
and irritated everyone's eyes. So Randy was to haul the sawdust down the road and dump
it in piles. This was the main job.
The scrap wood from the main saw and the various rip saws that cut the edges of the
boards and turned the slabs (the rounded parts of the logs made on the first and last cuts)
into usable two-by-fours, mouldings, and lath, was thrown into carts, and the carts had to
be pushed over and unloaded on the burn pile behind the mill. The boiler man fed the
boiler fire from the pile. This created the steam that ran the mill machinery. Tending to
the carts was the second part of his job, said the foreman, and if Randy had any time to
spare from this, he, Torkelson, could sure as hell find something else for him to do. Be
sure you ask, said the foreman, with a smile and a wink.
Randy was assigned a room in the boarding house, and given an account at the
company store. He wasn't paid much, but his needs were few. His main expense was the
weekly jug of corn whiskey which he nipped away at during the week. He grew more
inured to the dull ache in his ankle. He kept it strapped up good and it usually wasn't too
much of a bother, although there were times when it was pure agony. The whiskey helped
him through those times. After a few weeks he faded into the background of the town,
being generally known as "Gimpy," or "Gimpy Hode."
Life had been rough with him, and he no longer cut a dashing figure. He was
becoming a heavy man, his face filling out and coarsening, his speech blunter and more
vulgar. His life wasn't much, but it was enough, and he cut down his expectations to make
them fit. His main goal was to simply endure.
This isn't to say that life was a burden-- it wasn't. His gimpy leg had given him a
perpetual excuse for a slower pace, and his job was far from being as strenuous as a
factory worker elsewhere, and he knew it.
Besides, he was gaining security. He was Matt Manning's right hand man in many
ways. It was not uncommon, as time passed, for Manning to pull him away from his
sawdust job and send him to Oconto or Peshtigo to pick up a saw blade, or to see if a
shipment of supplies had arrived by ship. Unlike some mills elsewhere, there was still
little rail service, none in fact above Green Bay, and almost no paved roads north of
Chicago. Randy was trustworthy, reliable, and put company business ahead of his own.
He didn't gossip or criticize; he was a company man.
He was also promising to give Manning a sense of power that he realized he didn't
have before. It was almost like the satisfaction of knowing that one has a hired thug to do
one's bidding when dealing with unpleasant circumstances or people. Manning didn't like
nasty confrontations, and Randy had no qualms about attending to that.
There was a aura of repressed violence growing about Randall Hode.He had taken to
carrying a coiled horsewhip, which gave him a menacing appearance. The whip seemed
hardly necessary for his job, for his little horse looked as if it would fall over if you blew
on it.
The sawmill shut down in late November or early December, as did the door and
window factory. The building trades all but closed down for the winter months, and little
demand for windows. Lake Michigan, their only real shipping route, froze over.
In Randy's case, the winter shutdown corresponded nicely with the beginning of the
logging season. Randy's winter job was to supply the logging camp with goods brought in
from outside and with meat, when possible. He had been given a gun, and he carried it
around with him in a wagon on his trips to supplement the diet of the loggers and mill
workers with wild game, especially white-tailed deer. It was meat for the taking. The
Manning's tried to get away for a winter vacation at his wife's parents in Oshkosh, so
Randy had the additional task of keeping an eye on the factory and sawmill, as well,
during those times.
With these tasks taken care of, Randy often disappeared for days at a time on hunting
trips. When there was enough snow on the ground, he began to use the company's light
cutter sleigh. It took the better part of a day to make the trip from the mill to Green Bay.
He could have lodged over night in the city and returned the next day, and he did that for
a while, until he found his special place about half-way on his route. It was a more or less
permanent camp set in a small cove in a stand of black spruce. The space was large
enough to accommodate his horse and a crude canvas tent, and was a convenient haven in
a storm. Once he was holed up there for three days as a blizzard raged. He was snug and
cozy, but had little to occupy his mind. At times like that, when he slept, the Dream came
again.
Old Porlier had retired from logging, but Klotney had returned for another season. He
remembered Randy and recalled the awful scene as the young man lay unconscious in the
snow with a huge pine log on his leg. It was he, Klotney, the cook reminded Randy, who
had transported him to the settlement in the back of his cook wagon.
Klotney always welcome Randy warmly when he stopped by the camp house, and
saved a piece of pie for him if he knew he was coming. But alas, he could not serve him
coffee--it wasn't fair to the loggers to come back to camp and be tormented by the
lingering smell of fresh coffee. Randy understood very well what he meant, and usually
had a small glass of whiskey from Klotney's bottle. Randy knew that it was part of his job
to see to it that Klotney always had a jug of whiskey to replenish his bottle. If he was
crazy eough to cook for a logging crew when he could get a job in almost any of the
establishments that called themselves restaurants, at a much higher wage, then it was
crazy for the company to deny him a few small pleasures.
Many of the residents of Pine Flat wintered elsewhere. The factory workers wanted a
change of scenery, as did the boardinghouse cook, so the building became a rooming
house in winter for the few that remained. All who did not have homes of their own ate at
the restaurant. Randy did too, although he had been taken out of the boarding house
earlier by Manning who installed him in one of the small houses the company owned in
town. Manning liked to stop by and give Randy instructions for the next day or discuss
small problems and the house gave more privacy for the discussion of company business.
Randy was sitting in front of his fireplace one morning, when he was disturbed by a
pounding on the door. One of the loggers from the camp, breathless from the long run,
told him that a logger named Peter Schmidt had been badly injured by a falling tree, and
that Randy should bring the cutter and Schmidt's wife along to camp.
He harnessed the horse, and he and the logger went off to collect Clara Schmidt. She
and her husband were from Pittsburgh and had bought forty acres of land that had been
sold by the Bullhead River company when it had taken the pine from it.
Clara was a pale, blonde,thin, timid woman who was living by herself this winter,
although her husband worked daily only a few miles away. Rarely, Peter was able to
make it home to his wife on Sundays.Since logging was a short season, the loggers
seldom had much free time. Peter was working to buy livestock for the farm and had
promised his wife it would be for only one or two winters.
With an even paler, frightened Clara on the seat beside him, two had taken the cutter
to the logging camp, where he had been waved in the direction of the accident. When
they had gotten there, they found Schmidt still pinned to ground by the tree.
Randy thought at first he was dead, but he was told that he was not. There was no
question that when he had been freed he would have to be taken to Green Bay if there
were to be any chance at all for his survival. They were afraid that his back had been
broken.
Randy tried to visualize the accident from the sketchy accounts he heard from his
fellow lumberjacks. Schmidt had been working as a swamper, Randy's old job, waiting
for a pine to be felled so he could trim the braches from it. The tree, in falling, had
twisted slightly, and one of its larger boughs had caught in the branches of a close
growing maple. It hung there, suspended in mid air by the maple. Lumberjacks called
such a suspended tree a "widow maker," and it was a dreaded event for they knew the
pine would eventually fall, but they could not be certain of exactly where.
One would think that the wisest course of action would be for everyone to speedily
remove themselves from the vicinity of the suspended tree. But perhaps there wasn't time
for that, although it seemed to hang there forever.Then the tree began to roll away from
the maple and Peter Schmidt anticipated it falling on him. If he had run away from the
tree, Randy was told, he might have been uninjured. But at the time it may have seemed
like the wrong decision, because if the tree had continued to roll it probably would have
hit him, running or not.
Peter had made the wrong decision, which at the time probably seemed to be the safest
thing to do. He ran toward the tree, expecting, Randy thought, to run under it and let it
roll away from him. But the tree didn't continue to roll. The brittle green branch
supporting the tree, hanging it up, suddenly snapped with a loud crack. The tree had
fallen almost directly on top of the running Peter Schmidt. None of the witnesses
remembered, at the time they related events to Randy, that Peter Schmidt has screamed
when the tree hit him. They wouldn't have mentioned it anyway, just then, out of
consideration for Clara. But it was something they just were unable to remember
themselves until later.
They cut the tree from around him, carefully laid him on a wide board brought from
the drying shed at the sawmill, and put him in the back of the cutter.They collected all the
blankets they could find to cover him, and his wife lay down beside him to hold him, talk
to him, and pray. Randy urged the horse forward, driving as rapidly and as carefully as he
knew. In a few minutes they had passed over the bridge and were on their way south. He
tried to drive and watch the woman and the unconscious man beside her, prepared to stop
if needed. Then, he learned to listen for her anguished pleading, counting on that to mean
that there was still hope.
They had just passed the entrance to Randy's secret camp when he became aware of
her silence. He stopped the cutter and looked back. She stared at him in wide-eyed
silence, and then got up to sit in the seat beside him. Randy put a blanket around her
shoulders and made her take a good swallow of whiskey from his flask. They delivered
Peter's body to the hospital in Green Bay, and Randy answered a few questions and swore
to a paper the doctor in charge had made out.
Peter was buried two days later in Green Bay. Randy took it upon himself to charge all
expenses to the Bullhead River Lumber and Manufacturing Company. He half-expected
Matt to bring the matter up later, but he didn't care. He had a few things to tell Matt about
what it meant to be a jack. But Matt never mentioned it except to thank him, one morning
in the office, for his help in the tragedy.
About a month later, he was returning to his house in the afternoon when he came
upon Clara trudging along the road to her farm with a basket on her arm. She had been to
the store for a few things she said. He took her home and she invited him in for coffee.
He studied her face as he sat across from her at the table, a kerosene lamp illuminating
her features. She looked young--even younger than he knew was possible. A child. She
began to tremble, excusing herself by saying she had taken cold. He got up to fetch a
shawl from the corner of the kitchen to cover her, and she grasped his arm, put her head
against his chest, and sobbed.

II.

In the Spring of 1864, Manning put Randy to work as a sawyer's helper. They had
made certain improvements in their sawmill lumber handling. Boards coming off the saw
were sent down a conveyor system of iron rollers to the next job in the production of
lumber. This increased mill output somewhat--they were still limited by sawing speed--
but it reduced the amount of heavy lifting and the number of workers required.
As the boards were cut, Randy was to hook them with a sharp iron hook and send
them down the rollers to the rip saws, of divert them to a scrap pile where they would
later be sorted for small window boards.
The rough mill foreman, Torkelson, had failed to show for the beginning of the new
season, and there was some question of when, or if, he would report in. Rumor had it that
Torkelson had family problems. For the time being, Jimmy Wilson, the window factory
foreman, was filling in.
Wilson, a Vermonter with a perpetual sour look on his face, thus had to do double
duty. Jimmy was more comfortable with a calipers in his hands than bossing rough work,
but even so, he still could not be in two places at the same time. Naturally, his first
concern was window making.
This situation left the sawyer, Heinz Wendt, the "Dutchman,"as the ranking member of
the saw room. But Heinz was a professional sawyer who had no patience in riding herd
on what he considered were a group of undisciplined boys and not real lumbermen who
wouldn't have to be prodded to do their work.
Heinz did his best, but he was not skilled in the art of dealing with subordinates,
especially the don't-give-a-damn frontiersmen, who might walk off the job or cold-cock
the order-giver if the spirit moved them. He communicated to them by his reticence that
they could get their way, and they took advantage of it.
When the joking and horseplay got too far out of hand, Heinz would stop the saw with
an exasperated German curse, and go stalking off to find Jimmy Wilson. Wilson would
come out and the men would put their backs to their work again. After standing there and
seeing apparently normal operation, Wilson would leave and the workers would relax a
little. In a few days time Heinz would have to go get the window shop foreman, and he
would come out again. They both complained to Matt Manning, who promised a change
soon.
Randy. standing behind the saw with his hook, took it all in, and grew exasperated by
what, in his own mind, was a "goddamn circus." It hadn't taken him long to pinpoint a
worker named Blacky Walker as the rotten apple in the barrel, and had he been in charge
he would have kicked his butt out the door a long time ago. But being a greenhorn helper,
he knew he had no authority to interfere with the game being played out. Walker seemed
to be determined to cause trouble for the company.
One morning Manning had sent Walker and a helper upstream to float down a rick of
logs that had been piled by the river during winter logging. Part of the Bullhead River
flowage was used to store logs to be sawed, but since the size of this log pond was
limited, they floated down groups of logs as they needed them, and the distance was
never more than two miles. The company owned the land and timber on both sides of the
river upstream that far.
Blacky and his helper basically only had to knock out the supports keeping the logs in
a pile, and let them roll into the river and float downstream.
The next day when the first of the logs that Blacky had sent down was locked in the
saw carriage, Heinz put on his gloves slipped onto his seat next to the saw and looked at
the log to be cut. After a moment, he swore, threw down his gloves, and headed directly
to Matt Manning's office. Manning came out, looked at the log, went outside and looked
at the other logs in the pond, and went off to get Jimmy Wilson. He explained to Wilson
that Blacky, who was an old hand, was supposed to know his ass from a hole in the
ground as well as the difference between a pine log and a hemlock log. Blacky had sent
down one of the ricks of hemlock that Manning was going to saw up into dimension
lumber for a new bridge, when they had time between orders.
Hemlock, which closely resembled pine, was considered largely worthless in the
lumber market. It sawed into rough splintery boards that almost no one could find a use
for in the house building trade. It was stiffer and stronger than pine, though, and was used
mainly for the large weight-bearing timbers of bridges and railroad trestles.
That was Blacky's first Big Mistake. His second Big Mistake came a few weeks later.
One of the workers, distracted by the general bantering, carelessly neglected to secure the
end of a log in the saw carriage. As the log moved forward, the force of the saw blade
caused the end to move, which jammed the saw in the cut, stalling it. Randy's quick
action in leaping forward to disengage the clutch that regulated power to the blade
probably saved it from being damaged.
Heinz was so utterly disgusted by this bungling his did trust himself to say anything,
but simply walked out into the yard, trying to get his perturbation under control. Randy,
whose own patience was near the breaking point, moved forward and began giving
instructions for backing up the carriage by hand and freeing the blade. Several of the
workers, ashamed at being members of the insubordinate group, started to assist him,
when Blacky sneered, "You ain't no foreman, Gimp, get the hell out of here!"
This proved to be the last straw for Randy's temper, and he exploded. Running
awkwardly forward, he grabbed Walker by the front of shirt and pushed him backward
against the factory wall with such force that Walker fell to the floor. When he started to
regain his feet, Randy threw a roundhouse punch to the side of his jaw and knocked him
unconscious. Limping and tugging, he pulled the man's dead weight into the mill yard
and dumped him.
The others stood mouths agape watching this episode. "Goddammit!" shouted Randy,
"Are you going to help me with this saw, or not?"
Stunned, they moved forward and completed the task. He then directed them in
pushing the errant log off to the side and the putting of a new one in the carriage. He
engaged the clutch of the saw blade and watched it turn carefully. He decided that the
blade had not been bent and went outside to find Heinz and inform him that the problem
had been solved.
There was no sign of Blacky Walker. Heinz, somewhat cooled off, returned to the mill,
made his own check of the saw blade, and work began again on a more serious note.
The next morning Matt called Randy and Heinz into his office for an explanation.
"You're not very popular with the man you assaulted," he told Randy, "And I do not want
violence on the premises. On the other hand I can understand your frustration, and it is a
result of a failure on my part by giving Torkelson too much leeway in returning. For your
information, I fired Blacky Walker yesterday. The next time though, if you can't stand
something come to see me first. Understood?"
Randy nodded sheepishly, said it was, and Manning sent him back to the mill.
Matt asked Heinz about a few technical details concerning the production rate. Heinz
replied that without loafers and troublemakers he could "Saw like the wind."
"What about Randy Hode, is he a good worker?" asked Manning.
"Ja," replied the sawyer, "But no patience with fools."
That makes three of us, Manning thought to himself sourly.
Then he said to Heinz, "I'm not blind to what is going on, Heinz. Show Randy the
ropes and a few things about sawing lumber, and see how he does. If he can handle it, I'll
give him some authority."
Randy Hode was working out well in his new position as lead man. His ability to
organize work and relentlessly plan ahead eliminated the confusion, uncertainty, and
finger pointing that the workers found more tiring than the actual labor itself. They would
set a fast pace for one another, knowing Randy would spot problems before they arose.
Things ran smoothly, which made everyone happy. Heinz was delighted to be relieved of
the responsibility for everything except seeing that the lumber got sawed well. Jimmy
Wilson was happy, and of course, Matt was happy.
In his weekly report to Thorvald, Manning had suggested that Jimmy Wilson be given
the authority to oversee the entire factory production, with Randy as a subordinate in the
sawmill. Thorvald's reply was that Wilson should concentrate on window production for
the time being, and the plan be shelved temporarily until he could come up and look over
things for himself.
Thorvald came up about a week later to inspect production. They went down to the
factory floor to watch Randy in operation, and Ellis thought the mill was running as well
as it ever had, in fact, according to Manning's figures, the efficiency of the operation had
never been higher. He advised Matt to make Randy acting foreman for the rest of the
year, and to adjust his wages proportionately. His direct supervisor would still be Wilson,
who, with Heinz, would have to groom Randy for a management role.
As far as running the saw mill, Randy was to have pretty much a free hand provided
he didn't antagonize Heinz and met Matt's production schedule.
Although they would always refer to him as Gimpy, the townsfolk and factory workers
now thought of Randy as part of the management of the Bullhead River Lumber and
Manufacturing Company, and hatchet man for Matt Manning. The store clerks treated
him with respect, and he found to his continual surprise that strangers not only knew his
name but his reputation as a man not to be crossed.
Randy had taken to dropping by on Sundays to help Clara Hode with her farm work.
She was a nominal Catholic, but some experience of her life had turned her against
religion, which he couldn't disagree with as he considered religion buncombe anyway, so
they found no difficulty in getting in a good day's work on the so-called Lord's Day. He
did the chores, chopped wood, cleaned the barns, and did little odd jobs that she wanted
done. He considered it recreation from his time in the noisy factory. Of course he was
invited to stay for dinner. He was someone she could talk to, and confide in.
At first, everything she told him was about Peter their life together. Randy could see
that she was shy, fearful, like a wild bird that would fly away until it learned trust.
One Sunday he was invited to stay the night. A few months later he informed Matt
Manning that he would be vacating his cottage as would be moving to Clara Schmidt's
place. Sometime after that, he and Clara made a trip to Oconto, and she became Clara
Hode. For all anyone knew, or cared, it was an uneventful marriage.
Randy ought to have been a satisfied man, but he wasn't. Some nameless thing
festered inside him. He tried to put his finger on what it was, or might be, but to no avail.
It wasn't anything he knew about--he wasn't always proud of everything he did, but it
wasn't so bad he would have to hide it from himself. He minded his own business and did
his job, and though he might have gotten a little rough with Turk and Blacky Walker, but
he hadn't done anything to be ashamed of--hell, the sons-of-bitches had it coming.
 If he felt he knew where the problem lay, he felt he would be able to confront it. It
might take all the guts you had to do so, but you knew it was better to deal with
something like that directly than to suffer your whole life just to avoid it.
He didn't remember much of his early life, anyway. He remembered his mother as an
anxious, shrill woman given to strange maladies and tantrums who would lock herself in
her room and pound on the walls and furniture to communicate her agony and
displeasure.
His father was an even more shadowy figure. He remembered the smell of fish and the
feel of wet nets. He got his foot caught in one of the nets, once, and was dragged
overboard and nearly drowned. He remembered cutting a deep gash in his hand while
gutting some fish they couldn't sell and were going to smoke--he thought of that each
time he examined the scar-- but that was about all.
His sympathy for his wife Clara began to wane when he discovered she was a
hysterical nagger who seemed to know how to strike back at him in his most vulnerable
spot, and in his moments of greatest weakness and doubt. She was very insecure and
maybe wanted him to always be strong to hold her up. At times he wasn't sure he ought to
have taken up with her, but they had some happy moments and times, and he didn't have
many happy moments before he met her.
But Clara wasn't the problem. The problem was the nameless terror that sometimes
came upon him in his sleep, some shameful thing that broke his spirit and enthusiasm,
from which he couldn't escape, and which was slowly twisting him. Something that made
him flail out in fear, like a drowning man clawing at the water.

***