A Saw-Mill
Worked By Water Power Is Almost Always A Pretty Object; And Stacks
Of New-Cut Timber Are Pleasant To The Smell, And Group Themselves
Not Amiss On The Water's Edge.
If I had the time, and were a year
or two younger, I should love well to go up lumbering into the
woods.
The men for this purpose are hired in the fall of the year,
and are sent up hundreds of miles away to the pine forests in
strong gangs. Everything is there found for them. They make log
huts for their shelter, and food of the best and the strongest is
taken up for their diet. But no strong drink of any kind is
allowed, nor is any within reach of the men. There are no publics,
no shebeen houses, no grog-shops. Sobriety is an enforced virtue;
and so much is this considered by the masters, and understood by
the men, that very little contraband work is done in the way of
taking up spirits to these settlements. It may be said that the
work up in the forests is done with the assistance of no stronger
drink than tea; and it is very hard work. There cannot be much
work that is harder; and it is done amid the snows and forests of a
Canadian winter. A convict in Bermuda cannot get through his daily
eight hours of light labor without an allowance of rum; but a
Canadian lumberer can manage to do his daily task on tea without
milk. These men, however, are by no means teetotalers. When they
come back to the towns they break out, and reward themselves for
their long-enforced moderation. The wages I found to be very
various, running from thirteen or fourteen dollars a month to
twenty-eight or thirty, according to the nature of the work. The
men who cut down the trees receive more than those who hew them
when down, and these again more than the under class who make the
roads and clear the ground. These money wages, however, are in
addition to their diet. The operation requiring the most skill is
that of marking the trees for the axe. The largest only are worth
cutting, and form and soundness must also be considered.
But if I were about to visit a party of lumberers in the forest, I
should not be disposed to pass a whole winter with them. Even of a
very good thing one may have too much, I would go up in the spring,
when the rafts are being formed in the small tributary streams, and
I would come down upon one of them, shooting the rapids of the
rivers as soon as the first freshets had left the way open. A
freshet in the rivers is the rush of waters occasioned by melting
snow and ice. The first freshets take down the winter waters of
the nearer lakes and rivers. Then the streams become for a time
navigable, and the rafts go down.
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