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Updated: June 4, 2025
One gang cuts down the trees, another saws them in pieces, and the third gang is occupied in conveying them, by means of oxen, to the bank of the nearest stream, which is now frozen over. "'It is a hard winter for the lumbermen. The snow covers the ground until the middle of May, and the frost is often intense.
Lumbermen and miners, whose work is especially hard and isolation from good society complete, have been notorious for their lapses into intemperance, but it is not a serious problem in three out of four communities the country over, and a wave of temperance sentiment has swept strongly over rural districts.
A summer ride along the lower portion of this river presents scenery of a bolder and grander character than is often met with in Upper Canada, and it is enlivened by spectacles of immense rafts of timber descending the rapids, and by the merry chorus of the light-hearted lumbermen, as they pursue their toilsome and perilous voyage to Quebec.
The tale is complete. The logs go to the saw-mill. Sawdust floats seaward. The lumbermen junket. So ends the log-book. "Maine," said our host, the Damster of Umbagog, "was made for lumbering-work. We never could have got the trees out, without these lakes and dams."
Jamie lost no time in descending from his perch and in a moment stood trembling before his captors. It was quite dark now and snowing hard, and to the frightened little lad the two big lumbermen loomed up like giants. "What you doin' here?" demanded Bill with an oath as he seized Jamie's arm with a grip that made the lad wince. "I were I were huntin' for the cache," confessed Jamie.
"The sight of your pretty faces is enough," he replied gallantly, and with just the trace of a brogue. He smiled genially, bowed again and tramped off through the snow. "How odd!" exclaimed Grace. "Maybe he's one of the Jallow lumbermen, and didn't want it known that he had done the Ford family a favor," suggested Will. "Silly!" remarked his sister.
A man and his wife paddling an old dugout, with half a dozen children packed in amidships a crew of lumbermen, in a sharp-nosed bateau, picking up stray logs along the banks; a couple of boatloads of young people returning merrily from a holiday visit; a party of berry-pickers in a flat-bottomed skiff; all the life of the country-side was in evidence on the river.
Two of them were driven off to sea, dipping their bows clean under, and making shocking weather of it. One of them was lost in the bay, being whelmed by a green sea. The storm destroyed all the tools and provisions of the lumbermen, and left Dampier destitute.
The lumbermen at Muddy Lake, twenty miles away, heard of our arrival and sent down a special messenger with a large addition to the mail which I was carrying out and which had been growing steadily in bulk with its accumulations at every station.
"So help me! I'd a heap sooner meet a ragin' lion than a panther," said the old man. "My own father came near to bein' eaten alive by one when I was a kid. He was workin' with a gang o' lumbermen in these forests at timber-makin', and was returnin' to their camp, when the beast bounced out of a thicket all of a suddint. Poor dad was skeered stiff.
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