On the fourth of July, 1870, Joseph Etienne pushed a bateau off the bank into the flooded Penobscot River above a stretch of white water the rivermen called the Heater. It was the last thing he ever did. The boat caught the current wrong and rolled, and Etienne went into the river and did not come back up. The stone over his grave recorded that he had lived forty years and seven months and that he was born on Christmas Day.
He was a governor of the Penobscot Nation, a man who had guided Henry David Thoreau through these same North Woods years earlier, and one of the finest rivermen in Maine. That same season, more than one hundred thousand logs came down that stretch of river to the sawmills below. The company counted every one of them. It never kept account of the men the river took.
The cutting of the trees is the part most people picture when they imagine old-time logging. Moving the timber down a river in flood was harder, far more dangerous, and almost entirely forgotten. The man who ran the drives was John Ross, known across the Maine Woods as the king of the river, and he was on the bank the day Joseph Etienne drowned. When the crew turned on the young bowman who had frozen at the wrong second and failed to swing the boat, Ross told them the man had only done what he was ordered to do, and he let it end there.
Ross had buried many men across his years on the water. He kept driving logs anyway, because that was the work, and the work did not stop for the dead. Every winter, crews went up into the North Maine Woods and cut pine and spruce by hand with axes and long two-man saws in the snow. They hauled the logs by ox and horse sled to the frozen banks of the West Branch and stacked them in great decks on the ice, hammering an iron stamp into the end of every single log, a private mark the way a rancher brands a steer.
A hundred miles downstream, that mark was the only thing that told one company’s timber from another’s. Thousands of separate log marks were registered along the Penobscot, each a small combination of axe cuts belonging to a single owner. A log without a readable mark was a log nobody could claim. The entire business of floating timber down a shared river owned by dozens of different companies all mixed together in one flood ran on nothing more than those little hatchet marks in the wood.
When the ice let go and the river came up hard on the snow melt, they rolled the whole winter’s cut off the banks and followed it downstream. That was the drive: floating a forest down a wild river on the spring freshet, through water violent enough to break a boat into kindling, to the great booms above Old Town where the logs were sorted by their marks and rafted to the mills. A single winter’s cut could run to more than one hundred thousand logs, and every one of them had to be walked, pried, floated, and fought down the river by men standing on the logs themselves. The West Branch fell out of the high country in a long staircase of pitches and falls, and the drivers knew every one of them by name: Ripogenus, Seboeis Lake, Grand Pitch, the Heater.
At each one, the current went from fast to violent, and a calm run of floating logs turned into a grinding wall of timber. Most of the men who worked that water could not swim a single stroke, and it did not much matter. A man who went into the Penobscot in flood, in a soaked wool coat and boots weighted with iron, was not usually coming back out. The Penobscot people had run this river long before the lumber companies ever existed, and their skill in a boat was recognized by everyone who saw it.
When Thoreau came north in 1853, the guide he hired was Etienne, and Thoreau filled pages with the younger man’s ease on the water and his knowledge of the country. Etienne was elected a governor of the Penobscot Nation and moved between two worlds, the older life of the river and the new industry of the drive, respected in both. He still spent his spring standing in a bateau in white water for wages, because that was the work he was best in the state at doing. When a man like that drowns, it is not because he was careless.
It is because the Penobscot in spring flood did not care how good he was. The boat was called a bateau. It was a long, heavy, flat-bottomed craft with flared sides and high, pointed ends, built to ride up over rough water instead of cutting into it, and to turn fast in a current that wanted to throw it. The best boatmen on the Penobscot were Penobscot Indians out of Old Town, and their reputation was so trusted that when John Ross took his famous drive to the Kennebec River in 1876, he brought eighteen Penobscot boatmen along just to handle the bateaux through the bad water.
One of the great ones was a man the rivermen called Big Sebatt, Sabbatus Mitchell. The story told of him was that he ran Sawatnahung Falls standing up in a bateau straight down a pitch most men portaged around on foot and came out the bottom having shipped only a little water. In that same year, 1876, Ross staked everything on the most famous single drive of his life, and it did not happen on the Penobscot. A company had a fortune in logs stranded on the headwaters of the Connecticut River, hundreds of miles to the southwest, and no local crew could get them out.
They sent for Ross. He came down with a crew of Bangor men and eighteen Penobscot boatmen and took on twenty million feet of timber that had to travel 320 miles down the Connecticut River to reach the mills at Hartford. Gamblers in Hartford were offering five to one odds that the drive would fail. Ross drove those logs the entire length of the Connecticut through low water that had to be raised with stored floods and blasted open with powder.
The first logs reached the Hartford booms around the first of September. He won the wager on the skill of Maine rivermen working a river not one of them had ever seen before. That was the reputation the Bangor Tigers carried, earned one impossible drive at a time. On the logs themselves, the answer to staying upright was on a man’s feet.
River drivers wore caulked boots, spiked boots, a single pair carrying as many as sixty-three iron spikes driven through the soles, some a quarter inch long, some closer to three-quarters of an inch. Those spikes bit into wet bark and let a man run across floating, rolling, half-submerged logs. In his hands he carried one of two tools, and the more important was invented right there in Maine. In 1858, a blacksmith named Joseph Peavey built a better tool for rolling logs.
He took a stout wooden handle, fixed a sharp spike in the end, and hung a hinged iron arm with a hook beside it. The hook grabbed the log, the spike gave leverage, and one man could roll a piece of timber that three men could barely budge before. It was called the peavey after him, and it is still made and used today. The other tool was the pike pole, a long shaft with a spike and hook for reaching out to pull or shove a log without going in after it.
A peavey, a pike pole, and a pair of spiked boots. That was the entire tool kit for moving a winter’s worth of timber down a mountain river. The front crew rode the main body of the drive downstream, running out onto the logs to break up small snarls before they could grow, leaping from log to log to keep the mass moving together and centered in the current. A good driver could cross a river on floating logs without wetting a foot.
When timber bunched at a narrow place, he went straight in with his peavey and pried the logs apart one at a time before the bunch could lock into a jam. It never stopped, and it was all done in and over water cold enough to kill, a single slip at the wrong place putting a man under the very logs he was steering. The moment every driver feared was the jam. It happened when a single log caught on a rock or ledge and stopped, and the logs behind it stopped too, piling up under the full weight of the flood until you had a jam twenty feet high or more stretching back up the river.
To break it, a man had to climb out onto the face of the jam, find the key log holding all the others, and cut or pry it free. The instant he freed it, the entire mountain of timber let go at once, and the man had a few seconds to get off before the released mass ran over the spot where he stood. Some men made it every time for thirty years. Some did not make it once.
There was a driver named Larry Connors who was killed doing exactly this at a place on the Ripogenus called the Dryway around the middle of the 1870s. By the account that came down, Connors swore he would break that jam if it took him to hell to do it. He went out onto the face of it, a log struck him, and the river took him. His body was never recovered.
Years later, two men out bear hunting found a human skull wedged in the rocks at the Big Eddy, three miles downstream, with a front tooth missing. That was how the men who had known Larry Connors got him back. On the Nama Kanta, a driver trying to set a charge of dynamite to loosen a twenty-foot jam was crushed when the key log shifted under him before he could get clear. At a place called Stair Falls, a driver named Tommy Knowles went over a drop of ten to fifteen feet on a raft that swamped under him, and the men on the bank watched him spin in the whirlpool below, going under and coming back up for a full five minutes before the current finally threw him to shore, barely alive.
Knowles got a name and a story only because the river happened to give him back. The dams were their own kind of danger. Because the West Branch did not always carry enough water to float the logs over the shallow stretches, the companies built dams up in the headwaters to store the spring water and release it in a controlled flood when the drive needed it. Each dam had a gate and a sluice, and the logs were run through the open sluice in a roaring shoot of released water.
A man could be swept into an open sluice gate and shot through it like a log himself. At a roll dam at Seboomook Falls, one account tells of four men going into the water together in the churn below the gate. Two of them came out alive. The record does not give the names of the other two.
Everything the drive needed, the food, the blankets, the tools, the cook, traveled with it in a floating outfit called the wangan. The days were fourteen hours long, in and out of water that had been snow a week earlier. The men slept in wet wool blankets on the ground and ate what the cook could put together on an open fire on a riverbank, then got up in the dark and did it again. Even the cook was not safe.
On one drive, a cook named Joe Parrish drowned when his canoe capsized on the way back from placing a supply order. He was recorded as the only death on that drive that season, which tells you what a normal season was expected to cost. The pay was the best in the North Woods. Around the turn of the century, an ordinary lumberman might make between seventeen and thirty dollars a month, but the river drivers stood at the top of the scale.
A driver could come off a full spring drive with two or three hundred dollars in his pocket, in that era real money earned in the hardest and wettest way a man could earn it. There is a story about a Penobscot driver named Spider Ellis who was offered ten dollars to deliberately ride a log through a sluiceway for someone’s entertainment. He turned it down flat and said the price for that particular trick was twenty-five, knowing exactly what he was worth. Driving the head of the logs was the dangerous and celebrated part.
But the job that broke men down slowly was the rear. As the main body of the drive moved downstream, thousands of logs got hung up along the way, stranded on gravel bars, wedged into banks, sliding off into quiet backwaters. Every single one had a mark on the end and belonged to somebody and had to be recovered. The rear crew, the last men on the river, waded and rolled and pried every stranded log back into the current by hand, mile after mile, in the coldest and wettest conditions on the whole drive.
They called it sacking the river. Joseph Etienne drowned in the first week of July, which means the drive he died on had already been running for more than two months. By the time the rear crew reached the booms, they had often been on the river, wet through, for the better part of three months. They were the last men off the water every year the drive ran.
Above Old Town, the Penobscot Company had strung the river with a system of floating log booms, chains of connected timbers reaching across the water to catch the entire flood of logs coming down. The sorting works stretched for something like ten miles, and here every log was pulled in, read by the private mark stamped into its end the winter before, separated by owner, and rafted to the right mill. At the sorting gap, boom men stood on the floating logs and read the mark on each one as it came through, shunting it toward its owner’s pocket, ten and twelve hours a day through the entire run of the drive. A scaler measured the timber and tallied the board feet, because every stick was bought and sold by the board foot.
Ten miles of river worked like a machine with no engine anywhere in it, run on current, chain, and the eyes of men who could read a hatchet mark at a glance. At the peak, something like three hundred sawmills ringed Bangor, and in a single peak year more than 250 million board feet of lumber went out of that one river system. In 1872, Bangor called itself the lumber capital of the world, and for a while the claim was simply true. As late as 1902, a single downriver boom at Argyle rafted 142 million board feet of logs in one season.
There was a reason one company came to run all of this. Before 1846, every outfit drove its own logs down the West Branch, and the result on a shared river in flood was chaos. The operators chartered a single company, the Penobscot Log Driving Company, and gave it authority over the entire flow of logs from the headwater dams down to the booms. One master driver commanded the whole drive, and the cost was divided among the owners by the board foot.
It was an early piece of scientific management worked out on a wild river decades before that phrase existed. The companies that ran these drives counted everything, and we still have their ledgers. One year’s records for the Penobscot Log Driving Company put the total cost of the drive at $13,572. 57, down to the penny.
They valued their storage dam at $35,000 and their whole floating outfit at $1,000. Every log had a mark. Every mark had an owner. Every board foot was measured, sorted, and billed.
The paperwork was immaculate. And the men. When a driver drowned, there was often no paperwork at all. There was a pair of caulked boots nailed to a tree at the spot where the river took him, which is a thing the rivermen actually did.
They hung the dead man’s boots in the branches over the water. There was a wooden cross cut into the bark of a pine. In the case of Joseph Etienne, a pair of boots was hung in a tree, and the men said they stayed there for years. In the case of Larry Connors, there was a skull found by hunters three miles downstream with a tooth missing.
The logs were counted to the last stick. The men were remembered by their friends in the trees until their friends were gone too. Joseph Etienne did not have to die that day. The account his own men gave afterward was that the boat went wrong, and Etienne could have gotten himself clear and would not, because there were men in that bateau with him who could not swim, and he stayed with them.
Whether that is exactly how it happened, no one can now prove. But it is what the men who were there believed, and they were not men who handed out that kind of story lightly. John Ross, who missed nothing and flattered no one, stood on that bank and watched the finest boatman he had lose the river, defended the living crew, and went back to work. They hung Joseph Etienne’s boots in a pine tree above the water.
His people said the boots stayed there always. The drives went on for another century. By the early 1900s, the operation on the West Branch had been folded into the Great Northern Paper Company, whose mills wanted spruce cut into short four-foot sticks. The bateau and the peaveys and the caulked boots did not change at all.
The men in the boats kept coming down the West Branch every spring until 1971, the last log drive in the state of Maine. In 1976, the state banned log driving on its rivers for good, because sunken bark and rotting wood were fouling the water. The booms are gone. The great sorting works above Old Town are gone.
Two of the old riverside boom houses still stand at Chesuncook and at Ambajejus, kept now as small museums by people who do not want this forgotten. We know the exact cost of the drive to the penny, because the company wrote it down. What we do not have, anywhere, is the number of men the Penobscot drowned across a full century of drives, because no one was ever assigned to write that down. We have a handful of names because a few people, a writer here, a hunter there, a grieving crew, took the trouble to save them.
Joseph Etienne. Larry Connors. Big Sebatt, who lived. For every one of those, the ledger of the river gives no name.
Only a number, and often not even that.