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Updated: May 21, 2025
"I've got a notion on that," said Orde. "First thing is to get the material together." A hardwood forest topped the slope. Into this went the axe-men. The straightest trees they felled, trimmed, and dragged, down travoy trails they constructed, on sleds they built for the purpose, to the banks of the river.
As soon as the axe-men had effected an entry to this deposit, other men with shovels and picks began to remove the filling. The work had continued nearly an hour when Orde commanded the fifty or more idlers back to camp. "Get out, boys," he ordered. "The sheriff will be here pretty quick now, and I don't want any row. Get out of sight." "And leave them to fight her out alone?
"Yet were it not for the constant vigilance of your leader, my child, the noble Varangians would be trode down, in the common mass of the army, with the heathen cohorts of Huns, Scythians, or those turban'd infidels the renegade Turks; and even for this is your commander here in peril, because he vindicates his axe-men as worthy of being prized above the paltry shafts of the Eastern tribes and the javelins of the Moors, which are only fit to be playthings for children."
Around all the encampments, and everywhere along the road, we saw the bare sites of what had evidently been tracts of hard-wood forest, indicated by the unsightly stumps of well-grown trees, not smoothly felled by regular axe-men, but hacked, haggled, and unevenly amputated, as by a sword or other miserable tool, in an unskilful hand. Fifty years will not repair this desolation.
"In the year 1764 the comparative solitude of this region was broken by a large party of chain-bearers, rod-men, axe-men, commissaries, cooks, baggage-carriers, and camp-followers.
And back along the line of the chutes were other men to fill out this crew of many activities old men to signal; young men to stand by with slush brush, axe, or bar when things did not go well; axe-men with teams laying accurately new chutes into new country yet untouched. Bob found plenty to keep him busy. Post, the woods foreman, was a good chute man.
Spend twenty-five of your forty years, as Luther Dallas did, in this perennial gloom, and your soul that which enjoys, aspires, competes will be drugged as deep as if you had quaffed the cup of oblivion. Luther Dallas was counted one of the most experienced axe-men in the northern camps.
Constantly he interviewed men of all kinds rivermen, mill men, contractors, boat builders, hardware dealers, pile-driver captains, builders, wholesale grocery men, cooks, axe-men, chore boys all a little world in itself. The signs of progress soon manifested themselves.
The best axe-men at once commenced felling trees. They were not long or thick enough, however, to form log-huts after the American fashion. It was settled, therefore, that they should be put in upright, close together, and the interstices filled with clay, while the outside walls, as well as the roofs, were to be thatched with the long grass which grew in abundance at the foot of the hills.
Strong, good hunters and axe-men, to the manner born and prone to look on any outsider as a tenderfoot. Their mode of building campfires was a constant vexation to me. They made it a point to always have a heavy sharp axe in camp, and toward night some sturdy chopper would cut eight or ten logs as heavy as the whole party could lug to camp with hand-spikes.
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