There were a few minutes to have a pipe, if they had tobacco, and then they crawledinto their bunks.The camp house, which usually was only used for one season as it was built where thelogging was to be done, was about twenty-five by fifty feet, and little more than a poleshed. 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. Theroof was made from pole rafters or rejected two-by-fours, and covered with ship lappedrough pine boards to keep out the snow, and the cold. Crudely made bunk beds, threetiers high, ran around three sides of the interior of the building. On the fourth side was adoorway and Klotney's domain. Cooking was done over an open fire in one corner, andthere 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 thelumberjacks had most of their their meals of bread (locally grown and ground on burr mills), beans which were either locally grown or shipped up from Green Bay, eggs if theywere 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 thancattle which required a large amount of winter fodder, Pigs would eat all sort of rootvegetables, 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 easilysmoked. 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 houseand construct the skid ramps used to load the drays, the log sleds. They also laid out themain trails the drays were to use, making them as level as possible without excessiveshovel 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 toeasily 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 theaxles and spokes of wooden wagon wheels. Instead, drays, were used that ran on an icecover 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 thirtydollars 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 wastwice what a soldier at Bull Run had earned, and somewhat safer, although a good dealmore strenuous. The jacks were expected to work from dawn (when there was enoughlight 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 werefarm 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 buyland, and of course, the immigrants: odd-looking, bewildered, awkward young men withdrooping mustaches, who often dressed for heavy labor attired in hats, suits, and whiteshirts, and who spoke a bewildering babble of Norwegian, Swedish, German, andsprinklings of Italian, Russian, Czech and other languages many Americans had no ideaexisted. What they wanted was not a career, but money for land.
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