CHAPTER 9
THE RIVERS OF WISCONSIN were notoriously troubled in the spring of 1880. By May 6, even the Rock Island Argus carried the news: “The Captains and rafters say they never saw a season of disaster to rafters as this has been so far. Some of the skippers and wheelmen who have never known what accidents were, in their calling, in ten years of experience, are getting their fill of trouble this spring. What with high water and hard winds, they have had their rafts beached on islands, knocked to pieces against bridges and bad luck, generally.”
Early in June 1880, a week of heavy rains suddenly and dramatically raised the river to a level twenty-four feet above its low-water mark. The river at this height took on enormous power, sweeping away everything in its path. Not only the logs that had already been put in for driving downriver but those on the banks waiting to be put in were sucked under the expanding waters. The river went on a rampage, pushing 150 million feet of logs along and ignoring the dams and booms that had been painstakingly constructed over the past fifteen years on the upper Chippewa. The raging force crushed everything, its power increased by the solid logs it had appropriated as it rushed onward.
When the roaring flood beat like a drummer against the Dells Dam at Eau Claire, the outcome was uncertain. Then the river finally broke through and plunged over the dam. It was now an unstoppable, battering force that crashed into the bridge below and charged downriver. Houses, barns, shops, and bridges broke before its force. Two sawmills were washed away.
Of the 150 million feet of logs reported to be carried on this force of nature, 110 million of them belonged to the mills at Chippewa Falls and Eau Claire. And they were all headed inexorably downriver to Frederick’s Beef Slough. The wreckage was astounding. Most of the logs made it to the Beef Slough, but many were tossed on the riverbanks on the way, some as far as three miles from the river. The Wisconsin mill owners lost more than a million logs in this disaster—logs that now belonged to Frederick as they had finally come to rest in his slough.
A log exchange agreement was possible, but the Wisconsin men knew that the MRLC often charged for holding and/or sawing logs that belonged to other firms. The Wisconsin millmen—Ingram and Wallace, Shaw and Barnard—fully expected that a time of retribution for their years of harassment of the “invaders” had arrived.
The Wisconsin owners chose a young attorney from Chippewa Falls named Rouget J. Marshall, later a circuit court judge, who had previously performed intermediary services for Frederick as president of the MRLC. They charged him to approach Frederick and propose a log exchange. They must have been apprehensive at the cost.
However, even as the disaster was happening, Frederick had not been idle. He had already dispatched three steamboats and sixty men to begin to salvage the logs that had been scattered and to bring them down to the slough. He then called a meeting of all owners whose logs were involved in the catastrophe. (The exception in this invitation was the Chippewa Lumber and Boom Company officials, who, Frederick remarked in his understated way, “had kept aloof.”)
Frederick had Marshall draw up a legal agreement in which all the logs that had washed into the Beef Slough would be credited to their owners and those owners upstream would be given fair value in trade with MRLC logs that were still upriver. In other words, everyone would be made whole in this agreement and at no cost.
The Wisconsin men were astonished, Marshall said later, “by the utter absence of the downriver parties of any disposition to selfishly use their position of advantage to drive a hard bargain.” They resolved to administer the agreement in the same spirit of fairness in which it was made. When the season ended, the upriver firms, which had been in danger of ruin by this natural disaster, were in better shape than they had been before it happened.
Mathew Norton, a key member of the MRLC, wrote in his 1915 account of events,
In the Spring of 1880 there was a great flood on the Chippewa River, taking out the Little Falls dam and scattering the logs of the Company from one end of the river to the other. The dam at the Dells just above Eau Claire also went out, and the logs of the Eau Claire men, stored there in great quantities, went with the general mass as many as could be taken care of into Beef Slough and very many of them down to the mouth of the Mississippi. Of course this great flood, taking away the stock of the mill men on the Chippewa, put them in very bad condition; but an arrangement was made by them with the Mississippi River Logging Company to exchange logs so that their mills might have a supply of logs; and the [MRL] Company in addition purchased a very large amount of their logs, paying them in money so as to relieve them from the embarrassment which otherwise would have fallen upon them.
Later that year, on November 22–24, 1880, at the Grand Pacific Hotel in Chicago, nearly all the parties who had been feuding for more than a decade drew up an agreement for a new, common enterprise that eventually became known as the Chippewa Logging Company, later called the Chippewa Lumber and Boom Company, or CLBC. In this company, stock was taken out by eleven members of the MRLC group, including Weyerhaeuser and Denkmann, the Laird-Norton group, and the Mussers of Iowa. They were joined by six of the Chippewa Valley firms: Empire Lumber Company (O. H. Ingram’s company), the Daniel Shaw Lumber Company, Northwestern Lumber Company, Valley Lumber Company, Eau Claire Lumber Company, and Badger State Lumber Company. Although these six Chippewa Valley firms did not represent the entire valley’s lumber interests, they produced the great majority of the Eau Claire area lumber.
The results of this reconciliation were immediately apparent. As the historian Chuck Twining put it in Downriver, the story of the Orrin H. Ingram Lumber interests: “Whether officially members or not, all parties engaged in logging activities within the area soon came to realize that a conflict of interests was no longer possible on the Chippewa.”
For this new consortium—the Chippewa Logging Company (later called the Chippewa Lumber and Boom Company or CLBC)—a new way of doing business was installed. All of the logs taken out of the Chippewa Valley would now go into a pool, and members would receive logs from the pool in proportion to the stock owned. Although all would work together, the MRLC members would retain a slight advantage as they owned a slight majority of stock.
The signal outcome of this fateful flood was that Frederick was clearly in command of the new merger. He received authorization from the group to arrange for any timber purchases on behalf of the organization with no requirement to consult other members in the process. It is no accident that many of his business associates not only accepted Frederick’s leadership but sought it. In his quiet way he made decisions that others trusted would be to their benefit.
Many books and biographies of these early lumbermen, Wisconsin and Mississippi River alike, have been written. Their often outsized personalities created sometimes prickly relationships, even after the generally cooperative outcome of the great flood was achieved. But many fast friendships were formed among these men as well.
One of Frederick’s closest personal relationships was with Ed Rutledge of Eau Claire, Wisconsin. But there is ample evidence that another business partner, Mathew G. Norton of Winona, became a close and lifelong friend. Before he died in 1915, Norton wrote the definitive history of the Mississippi River Logging Company, beginning with its formation in 1870. In the work, he is strong in his praise of Frederick’s talents as the catalyst for the MRLC and its many successes and Frederick’s primary role in ending the Chippewa River conflicts. Letters between the two men survive in which business news and meeting notices vie for attention with the personal and family notes, increasingly interjected as the men aged.
One such letter, dated December 1892, was written after both Norton and his cousin and business partner William H. Laird had been to St. Paul and visited with Frederick in his home. (Sarah continued her open hospitality to Frederick’s business partners and employees into her last years.) Upon returning to Winona, Mathew Norton wrote to Frederick thanking him for his concern for Norton’s wife, who had taken ill during the visit. The tone of the letter is one of a correspondence between brothers. Mathew mingles the personal with business news: “Looks like the ‘Whitney’ option will bear fruit…Sauntry doing the best he can. There is a delay in prepping the estimates of the land.” Drawn together by common business interests, the men had formed a personal friendship that lasted all their lives.
The Laird and Norton family (several branches of a Scots immigrant family from Pennsylvania) had come to Winona in 1856, about the same time that Frederick had arrived in Rock Island and that railroad builder James J. Hill had moved to St. Paul from Canada. The connection with the Laird-Norton group that Frederick had begun in the formation of the MRLC was to run down several generations in both families and have an important impact in building the strength of the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company, later established on the West Coast.
However, not all the men were always friendly. Norton may have been a closely tuned associate, but other strong-minded lumbermen frequently tangled with Frederick. O. H. Ingram, an original competitor of Frederick’s and a powerful force in Wisconsin lumber history, was one of them. He ultimately became Frederick’s associate in the Wisconsin-Mississippi cooperative lumber efforts, but unlike the many who left warm private letters or public testimony to Frederick after his death, Ingram apparently carried little personal affection for his erstwhile opponent-turned-partner. Yet he acknowledged and acceded to Frederick’s advancing leadership position during the period of merger between the formerly warring factions. He had to accept that it was Frederick who arranged the terms of the new organization, in which the old MRLC members would retain 60 percent control and the Chippewa Valley–Eau Claire interests would be limited to 40 percent.
Frederick was emerging in these years as a complex personality. Two stories, later related to F. E. by George Lindsay of the Lindsay and Phelps Company in Davenport Iowa, illustrate Frederick’s human characteristics. Lindsay had spent considerable time with Frederick in the Wisconsin woods when he was a young man, and his memory of some interactions with Frederick was quite clear.
The first story concerned a show of strong temper, unusual for Frederick. Mr. Lindsay had arrived at the Wylie House in Fifield, Wisconsin, and made his way to an upstairs bedroom. He overheard Frederick grilling another man in the next room. The unfortunate victim was Mr. Hinz, an officer in the Fifield bank, of which Frederick was a prominent shareholder. Lindsay reports that Mr. Hinz had enriched himself by mishandling accounts, leaving small stockholders much the poorer and being clever enough to avoid criminal prosecution.
Lindsay, who reports of the hotel’s “partitions being not of paper but almost,” was an unwilling witness to the exchange. Frederick listened patiently until Hinz was done. Then Frederick began talking, “gradually working up to a louder and louder voice and finally a violence of temper that was so unlike and so beyond anything I had ever known in him, before or since, that it actually frightened me in fearing that he might overtax himself.”
This episode stands in contrast to another of that period, also reported by Lindsay. The second scene also took place at the Wylie House, a short time after the first. Lindsay came back to find Frederick marking time while waiting for the eleven o’clock train to St. Paul. The lumbermen were talking of various things when two young boys entered the hotel. These boys were selling fire lighters and said they hoped to raise $2,300 to start a woodworking plant at Wausau, Wisconsin. Frederick became intrigued with their project. He told the boys to come back after they had sold what they could of their fire lighters around town. When they returned at ten o’clock, Frederick put his face quite close to theirs as he talked to them.
He then related to Lindsay that the boys were not drinking, although the only places open at that hour where the boys could be selling were the saloons. Frederick disappeared for some minutes. Lindsay finally went to look for him, for train time was approaching.
At that time I was but twenty-five years old and he [Frederick] had reached the height of his career. As I entered the dining room he had evidently been writing and, rising slowly and walking toward me with bowed head, his eyes looking at something in his right hand, he raised his eyes and with a really shame-faced expression, he extended his hand so that I might see two tickets and two lower (not upper) berths for Wausau, Wisconsin and a check for $2,300. He, in a most humble voice, asked me, “George, do you think I am foolish?” This man whose judgment was sought and accepted by thousands, found himself sentimentally uncertain, fearful of his judgment, seeking reassurance from the only source at hand, a twenty-five year old boy.
Many years later Lindsay asked William Irvine if he knew what had become of the boys who had been the recipients of Frederick’s generosity. Irvine made inquiries at the Wausau bank and discovered that “these two boys” at that time were each worth $150,000. Apparently, Frederick had not misjudged their abilities.
Perhaps Frederick was able to show trust because others showed it to him. It was this trust that the newly merged group had given to Frederick when it deputized him to make financial transactions in their name without consulting others. And it was this kind of unique authority bestowed by the Chippewa Logging Company, implying trust without reservation, that so irritated Chippewa lumberman O. H. Ingram.
Ingram was a strong personality and no doubt saw himself, also, as a natural leader. Born in Massachusetts, Ingram came into the Wisconsin lumber business through Canada in 1857, the same year Frederick and Sarah moved to Coal Valley. He formed a company with Donald Kennedy and Alexander Dole, later called Ingram and Kennedy Lumber. Eventually Ingram consolidated his holdings and partnerships into the Empire Lumber Company. He wrote his memoir in 1912, and in it he talks about how the MRLC won its fight to open the Chippewa River. F. E. later writes that in this work Ingram “singularly does not mention the generosity of the Mississippi group in freely sharing with the Chippewa River lumbermen the benefits derived from pooling most of the logs in the river.”
Ingram was a leader among the Wisconsin lumbermen, and he served on the executive committee of the newly formed Chippewa Logging Company with W. J. Young of Iowa and Frederick Weyerhaeuser. Whether because of Frederick’s experience, his force of personality, or his generally positive outcomes, the group usually heeded the young German’s advice. But, while most of the associates willingly took Frederick’s counsel, Ingram chafed under the strong Weyerhaeuser leadership style, as did a few others. In 1892, a decade after the Wisconsin timber wars’ resolution, a man named Will Tearse wrote to Clarence Chamberlin, saying, with some irony, “I suppose after Fred told you what he was going to do about it, you all went quietly out of the door to take the train for home.”
But Ingram himself was known by others for his own autocratic behavior. His biographer, Charles Twining, writes in Downriver: “It should be noted, however, that Weyerhaeuser was simply the strongest among a group of men in which strong personalities were hardly the exception. Ingram, for example, was accustomed to dominate most of those with whom he associated and this included many who must have resented his authority just as he resented Weyerhaeuser’s. One-horse loggers would occasionally mutter angrily concerning their treatment at the hands of ‘Rule or Ruin Ingram’ and business partners would complain of O. H.’s autocratic tendencies. Clearly at times it must have been difficult to be a Christian businessman.”
The friction between the two men could not have been too severe, for they appeared side by side in a picture taken a decade later on one of Frederick’s trips to look at southern timber. Despite the outsized personalities involved, all managed to work together—in the spirit of fairness—for their mutual benefit for some years.
Frederick’s rise to leadership seems all the more curious given that he was a reticent public speaker. In a letter to one of his grandsons, Fritz Jewett, Frederick acknowledged that he had been “ashamed” of his English all his life. He never lost his German accent and never cared for public speaking. Yet, his self-knowledge with its ironic edge understood that he had other leadership qualities. F. E. reports that Frederick once said of one of his partners, a man who was gifted in speechmaking at their business meetings, “I would give a thousand dollars to be able to make such speeches as __________ can; but” he added after a reflective pause, “somehow they usually do what I recommend anyway.”
The events surrounding the flood of 1880 showed Frederick at his finest: his leadership abilities coupled with his innate sense of fair play solved a problem that could have plagued his operations and those of his confederates for another two decades. He became, in a sense, master of the situation that had been handed to him. He could have chosen another path after the flood, but he took the high road, and the MRLC and its Wisconsin competitors prospered because of it. The festering conflict among the lumbermen on the Chippewa was now put to rest. Or so it seemed.
This history of Frederick’s success in creating the merger of interest between the Wisconsin and Mississippi lumbermen makes all the more peculiar an episode that occurred within a few years of the Grand Pacific Hotel meeting. Around 1885, a couple of Frederick’s colleagues became embroiled in a disagreement with him, and, when he would not succumb to their pressure, they insisted he was self-serving. He felt the charges were unfounded, but their actions had a severely negative effect on his state of mind. F. E. wrote about the situation in his Record, basing his account on Frederick’s personal diaries, while historian Charles Twining took an alternative view of events in Downriver, his book on O. H. Ingram. Two different perspectives emerge from these accounts.
In Downriver, Twining alludes to events that had to do with the sale of some land while Frederick was chairman of the Chippewa Lumber and Boom Company (the CLBC; the Chippewa Logging Company had been renamed by this time). Frederick owned a great deal of Wisconsin timberland, most, if not all, of it with various partners. Any transaction he made relating to these lands had a potential conflict of interest as the men bought and sold timber and land among themselves. He could meet himself, in the form of his holdings, coming and going in this business.
At the time of Twining’s story Frederick was both chairman of the newly formed CLBC and also owner of some land the CLBC wanted to purchase. Frederick’s way of dealing with his dual role as a partner in the sale group and as chief of the buyer group was to assign William Irvine, mill manager for the CLBC, to handle the negotiations for him. Thus he took himself out of the negotiations to avoid a conflict of interest.
Twining criticizes Frederick’s action because “Ingram and Irvine both knew that Weyerhaeuser could not remove himself. His interests were too wide spread, too large to be avoided, even if such avoidance were desired.” Twining also writes, “Weyerhaeuser apparently gave considerable attention to the creation of an image of honesty and fairness.” Twining does not say, however, what else Frederick ought to have done or could have done in the situation. Removing himself and turning negotiations over to Irvine was at least an attempt to put one layer between himself as owner of land and himself as chairman of the Chippewa Lumber and Boom Company, buyer of the land.
This episode looks much more complex, however, in excerpts from Frederick’s diaries, as quoted by his youngest son, F. E., in his Record. From his early days at the sawmill in Rock Island through the formation of the MRLC to the Grand Pacific Hotel meeting, Frederick’s public career had followed an upward trajectory, his confidence appearing to grow with each new victory. Or at least that was the external picture.
But the private thoughts recorded in his journals portray a man trying for fairness as he makes good deals but a man also highly, perhaps overly, sensitive to any criticism of his ethics. The land in question was part of a parcel in northern Wisconsin that lay in the Chippewa watershed. Frederick owned one-third interest and the Laird-Norton enterprise owned two-thirds. After negotiations, presumably conducted by William Irvine, that parcel of land was sold to the Chippewa Lumber and Boom Company at the January 14, 1885, meeting.
The minutes record that Mr. W. J. Young of Iowa seconded the ratification of this sale. Immediately after that vote Young urged Frederick (as chair of the Chippewa Lumber and Boom Company and on behalf of that company) to authorize the purchase of another set of land parcels that Young himself owned. These parcels were units of land that extended from Shell Lake, Wisconsin, all the way into Michigan. Frederick was not interested in recommending that the CLBC buy these land bits because they were not a cohesive package; they were too scattered to be valuable.
After this meeting, Mr. Young, who was known to be “a man of violent temper,” wrote a letter to Frederick accusing him of urging the purchase of his own lands but denying Young the opportunity to sell his. E. S. Youmans, perhaps at Young’s instigation, subsequently demanded an audit of the books of the CLBC and the MRLC and the land transactions of both companies involving their members. It was unusual in those days to audit books of these consortia, and Frederick seemed to feel this was done in part to embarrass him as chair, a vote of “no-confidence” in its way.
Frederick left a series of entries in his notebooks evidencing tremendous anxiety around and preoccupation with these accusations. His notes suggest that he felt he had done much work for the companies (MRLC and CLBC) for nothing, when others had been paid well. One such entry series reads as follows:
1) Get the land back. 2) History of land trades. 3) Talk to MRL Company. 4) Beef Slough Company. 5) Same salary as Schricker [the former president of MRLC; under this note appears the word resign]. 6) Read letter—not give name. [This may refer to Young’s accusatory letter to him.]
A subsequent entry reveals real suffering of mind and spirit: “Leave you hope God may bless you all, may you prosper and NEVER FEEL AS I HAVE FELT FOR THE LAST FIVE WEEKS.”
The Chippewa Lumber and Boom Company board of directors meeting in December 1885 was full of drama. Purchase of the Weyerhaeuser-Laird-Norton lands by the CLBC was re-ratified. Frederick resigned as chair, but his resignation was not accepted. Ingram and Young both resigned from the executive committee, but their resignations were also rejected. It appears that all the men kept their offices and the group went forward much as before, with Frederick as chair.
As in the case with Ingram, the animosity between Frederick and Young could not have been longstanding, as many years later Frederick invited Young and his family to accompany him on a trip to Alaska. As F. E. notes in the close of this section in the Record, “Father never harbored ill will toward anyone. He used to say “If you forgive, you must also forget.”
“Some Unhappy Incidents,” as the heading for this story appears in F. E.’s Record, reveals much about Frederick personally: that he valued his good name above all; that he was as human as anyone else who has put in hard work and wants to be appreciated; that he was not afraid of a good fight but also that he was extremely sensitive to any challenge to his honor.
It was not only, as Twining opined, that Frederick was concerned about the appearance of fairness. He seemed too deeply troubled by an accusation that he actually acted unfairly, especially as he had tried to remove himself directly from the negotiations over this land. Many letters written upon Frederick’s death, and to F. E. years later from men who knew his father, testify to Frederick’s actual fairness. But what was little known was that the charge of unfairness was privately devastating to him.
As the Wisconsin chapter in Frederick’s life wound down, he would recover and seek new challenges elsewhere. But the sadness in the midst of his many leadership victories here cannot be denied. In these years he began to turn to travels and to family in a way he had not done for the previous twenty-five. Perhaps he had begun to see that public leadership and the conflicts it engenders carry their own price.