Taking all this into consideration, I now and then permit myself the luxury of feeling that I perhaps have not done too badly in life.
—MATHIAS HEMMINGSEN
LEGENDS STICK TO PEOPLE LIKE Matt Hemmingsen. The story that he came from Maine and was the adopted son of logging magnate Frederick Weyerhauser was a plain lie. The one told by the old-time rigging slinger who said Matt came to Camp Three Chemainus as a common labourer and in no time at all became “boss of the whole shootin’ works” bore a passing resemblance to the truth. Some of the legends told about Matt Hemmingsen were true, but they sounded like tall tales. And then there were the parts of his life that nobody knew about, that he hid even from his family.
Matt liked to say that he was born in 1876 on a farm near Mason, Wisconsin, in a log cabin that had one room for cooking and eating and one room for sleeping. But Matt’s own sons say he was born in Norway. They don’t know for sure why he insisted on saying that he was born in the United States, but they have their theories. The most charitable reason is that it made it easier for him to come over the border to Canada. The more likely reason is that he was ashamed of being a Norwegian.
There were lots of Norwegians in the lumbering country of northern Wisconsin in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Norwegians had been coming there in large numbers since the 1840s. But the Hemmingsens were newcomers, and newcomers were called “square heads” and “dumb Norwegians.” They stood out, especially when they tried to speak English.
As a grown man, Matt spoke English without an accent. He encouraged his eldest daughter to teach him grammar and to point out any errors he made. But for all Matt’s determination to sound like a native-born North American, his sons can prove that he was born in Norway; and for all that Matt was known as a man without prejudice, a man who judged people not by their origins but by their willingness to work hard, somehow his sons grew up feeling that Finns, Swedes and other Norwegians were lesser beings.
Matt was proud of the fact that despite his lack of formal education he had succeeded in life. He liked to tell how he had read the fourth-grade reader twice and then quit school to go logging. The death of his mother when he was ten, the substitute mothering of his elder sister and an aunt who made sure he lived by his mother’s high ethical standards, the acquisition of a stepmother when he was fourteen—all this disrupted maternal attention drove Matt to move out the same year the stepmother moved in. He and his younger brother, Harry, got a job on a river drive.
Matt spent the rest of his teen-age years doing every job there was to do in the logging business, starting with cookhouse flunkey. He learned to build roads and make railway ties. In the winter he worked in the woods and in the summer he worked on the rivers, driving logs down the White, the LaCroix and the headwaters of the Mississippi. And on the Clearwater, he made himself a legend when he rode a log right through the middle of Hell’s Rapids.
Loggers learned by watching other loggers and then taking chances. Matt and Harry learned to build cold decks by watching men use the iron ferrule and jutting toe of the cant hook to lever logs expertly into winter storage piles ready for the next summer’s river drives. Later, when Harry got a job doing cant-hook work on the north shore of Lake Superior up in Canada, he sent word for Matt to join him. The brothers were building a cold deck together when an unbalanced log slipped out of the chain that held it suspended, struck Harry and killed him.
Matt headed back to Wisconsin. He was, by then, a man: deep-voiced, large-framed, already shaped by sorrow and the struggle to survive. His attempts to do something other than logging had been thwarted: the army needed no more recruits for the Spanish-American War and a wild bronco had demonstrated his disdain for Norwegians by tossing Matt off his back, injuring the man’s hip in the process. But Matt had a connection in the logging business that was about to pay off.
The word around northern Wisconsin was that John A. Humbird, a logging entrepreneur who came from a town not far from where Matt’s family lived, was going to sell his Wisconsin interests and develop the timber he had acquired in 1889 “somewhere out by the Pacific Ocean.” To that end, he and several partners had formed the Victoria Lumber and Manufacturing Company (VL&M).
Matt Hemmingsen had worked as a foreman for Humbird in Wisconsin, and a warm relationship existed between the two men—Matt called the older man “John A.” and Humbird said publicly that “Young Matt … produced the most, the best, the cheapest logs ever produced on the river.” Humbird asked Matt to come to his office in St. Paul, Minnesota, to listen to a proposition. He wanted Matt to go to Vancouver Island, learn how to log the huge coastal timber, and then John A. would make Matt his logging superintendent. Wages would begin immediately.
George Copley was a rigging slinger in charge of the chokermen on a side at VL&M’s Camp Three Chemainus on Vancouver Island. He never got over how fast the second chokerman, a newcomer named Matt Hemmingsen, graduated from being a minor player on the yarding crew to being boss of the camp. Matt didn’t stay on the island too long, however, because he had to take his sick wife back to Wisconsin.
The existence of the first Mrs. Hemmingsen was a secret Matt kept to himself until he was an old man. The pair had married before they left the midwest, but her health began to fail even before they arrived on Vancouver Island in June of 1906. She had tuberculosis. By fall, her disease was so advanced that a return to Wisconsin was deemed necessary. She died the following year of galloping consumption.
The robust Matt, newly widowed and thirty-one years old, returned to the challenges waiting for him in the forests of Vancouver Island, this time in the Courtenay area, preceded by a glowing endorsement from John A. that served mainly to alienate Matt’s immediate superiors. VL&M owned a large amount of timber around Courtenay and was still experimenting with the best way to harvest logs and transport them to market. Company supervisors understood how to drive the smaller logs of the midwest down the deep and swift-moving rivers of Wisconsin and Minnesota, but on the island the trees were huge and the rivers small, strewn with rapids, descending precipitously to the ocean in too short a distance to swell to a decent size. There were no logging railroads on the island, however, and no other way to bring large numbers of logs quickly to salt water, and so the new company tried log drives with disastrous consequences. The log jam that piled up on the river at Courtenay became fertile ground for another Matt Hemmingsen legend.
Depending on the storyteller, the length of the jam varied from three to six miles, and although no one was able to specify which river it was on, it was probably the Tsolum or the Puntledge. The Tsolum is a small river that joins the bigger Puntledge to become the Courtenay River shortly before it melds with the Strait of Georgia. Whichever one it was, Matt called it the “Little River,” failing to note in his later memoir its real name but remembering every detail of the procedure he used to clear it.
The operation began in late summer of 1908. Working with a crew of twenty men, only one of whom was an experienced river driver, Matt ordered the river below the jam cleared of big rocks and debris for three miles. Then, whenever rain brought the level of the river up a little, the crew worked a channel through the jam. Having prepared the way, they waited for the rush of water that always came in the late fall. It arrived on December 4—enough water to send 15 million feet of raw logs hurtling down ten miles of river and rapids to the booming ground in less than forty-eight hours. Matt gave all the credit to the Almighty for supplying the proper amount of water.
George Copley, who had left the Chemainus camp because of the bedbugs and had come to Courtenay to work under his former subordinate, told a good story about the powder Matt used to clear that jam, about how it froze and how they thawed it in a farmer’s kitchen oven and how it caught on fire and how George put it out. But he tended to get the details wrong when he talked about Matt. He was accurate in his recollections, however, when he told about Matt meeting his second wife.
Margaret Neysmith Alexander was seventeen years old when she met the thirty-two-year-old logger. She was working as a waitress at the hotel near Courtenay where Matt’s crew was boarding. She had been just five years old when her coal-miner father left his family in Union Camp, a nearby coal town, and went to work for the Dunsmuirs in their Wellington mines. He died in a fall of rock. To ease the burden on her mother, who had two younger children as well, Margaret was sent to Victoria to live with her aunt. But when she grew up she moved back up island to Courtenay—just in time to meet the logging boss everyone was talking about.
Not long after he had cleared the log jam, Matt had clashed with his immediate superior and left the island to work at another Humbird operation in Sandpoint, Idaho. A chance meeting with one E. J. Palmer was all it took to bring him back to Vancouver Island, however. Within a year he had married Margaret Alexander and the first of their five children had been born.
E. J. Palmer was known to all who worked for him as “Old Hickory.” He was Humbird’s Vancouver Island manager and the recipient of the ultimate logger’s accolade—”He was tough but he was fair.” For some time John A. Humbird had been eyeing the timber at Cowichan Lake. In 1906, he and Palmer had travelled up the winding trail to the lake in a “fine automobile runabout” to have a good look around. Even though Joe Vipond had had his most successful log drive down the Cowichan that very year, Humbird and Palmer decided to wait for the promised railroad before mounting a full-fledged operation.
Matt Hemmingsen was on the scene to take full advantage of the E&N when it did arrive in 1912. He was the superintendent of all VL&M operations on Vancouver Island and the man chosen by Palmer and Humbird to open up Cowichan Lake for the company. But there were other companies just as interested, most notably Empire Lumber, an American concern that owned huge timber limits on the north shore, centred around the point where Cottonwood Creek flowed into Cowichan Lake.
Just after the arrival of the E&N, Empire built a small sawmill at that point. The Medina mill was separated from the E&N transportation corridor by several miles of thickly timbered land, but help seemed to be coming in the guise of yet another railroad. The Canadian Northern would run along the lake’s north shore, connecting Victoria to Port Alberni. Both Empire and VL&M were impatient to begin exporting logs. There was so much timber to be had and it grew so thickly on the shore that it made no sense to clear land to establish each camp. Floating camps belonging to both companies clung to the heavily forested shore, cutting the timber closest at hand and waiting for the laying of steel.
Everyone in the camps—the loggers, the Chinese cooks, the bosses and their families—lived on the water in cabins on rafts. Only the pigs were on land, exiles destined to live on scraps and die by a cook’s sharp knife in due time.
The Hemmingsen float, with its big square house and overhanging eaves that covered a walkway on all sides, moved from one VL&M camp to another, now on the north shore, now at Robertson River on the south shore, as Matt supervised the work of the crews. All the choice timber that grew within a mile of the shore was what he was after. The old-growth giants fell to loggers who were transient men, tough and proud of their independence. They worked with double-bitted axes and eight-, nine- and ten-foot felling saws, balancing on springboards set eight feet above the ground into Douglas fir, hemlock and spruce trees to avoid the tougher wood and the pitch-seamed swell at the base. Fedoras shielded weather-toughened faces, rough shirts covered grimy underwear, suspenders held up dungarees cut short in the leg, and caulk boots gave surer footing.
Felling one tree took several hours. The process began with the head faller carving an undercut to set the direction of the fall in exactly the right place. The trees grew thick as wheat. When the two men on the saw finally made it through ten feet of old-growth wood, the falling tree had to miss the stumps and other trees that crowded in on all sides. The bucker worked with axe, wedges and crosscut saw—shorter than the falling saw but thicker and heavier—to render forest giants into eight-foot logs.
In those days before railroad logging, when the trees along the shore had all been cut and the work had moved inland, the most difficult part of logging was getting those eight-foot logs down to the water. Horses and oxen had been used in the past to pull the massive payload over skid roads—a labour-intensive operation dependent for its success on the perseverance and skill of loggers and teamsters. Horses and oxen gave way to donkey engines. The tin-hatted, log-burning, steam-puffing new sources of pulling power squatted on rafts floating just offshore. On each raft was an A-shaped log frame that supported a wire rope connecting the donkey to the logs in the woods so they could be dragged over the ground and into the lake. Although the donkey engine was an improvement over horses and oxen, the likelihood that the logs would catch on stumps and trees in their path made the process a tedious one.
In the logging lore of Cowichan Lake, Matt Hemmingsen is given credit for the solution to the problem. He strung a pulley system as high up a sturdy tree as possible and ran the wire rope through the pulley before attaching it to the log. This gave the log lift and made it easier to drag. Matt was merely copying a process called high lead logging that he had learned from the cant-hook men on Lake Superior. Soon everyone on Vancouver Island was using the system, and Matt got the credit for it.
One of the best-known stories about Matt involved the birth of his first son. He and his wife had two daughters by the time they moved into the floathouse at the lake. On the day Margaret gave birth to their third child, Matt had what he would call a “personality clash” with E. J. Palmer.
Margaret had gone into Chemainus for her confinement. The rest of the family was at the Robertson River Camp when word was brought to Matt in the woods in the middle of the day that he had a son. He left the lake for Chemainus immediately.
Palmer was at the Chemainus mill when he heard that his superintendent was in Chemainus on a workday. He sought Matt out and demanded to know why he had left the job. Matt’s relationship with Palmer was a tricky one. Each respected the other, but Old Hickory had a bad temper, and Matt, for his part, had always been disdainful of the fact that Palmer had begun his working life as a railway conductor. “How could a railway conductor become a sawmill man?” he would wonder aloud. When the “railway conductor” objected to Matt coming to see his own son, Matt quit.
Empire Lumber, VL&M’s rival at the lake, offered Matt its logging superintendent’s job and a $15, 000 annual salary—huge in 1913. Matt took the job, but only for one year. What he wanted most was to be his own boss. When his former employer offered him a contract that included the use of their rigging, Matt accepted, even though times were bad and prices low. As the First World War worked its sinister magic on markets, the value of his contract kept pace with lumber prices. Soon he could afford to buy his own rigging and become an independent contractor.
At the beginning of the war it had looked as if everything at the lake would have to shut down, a shortage of ships making it impossible to market lumber. But the Allies remedied the lack of shipping by the spring of 1915, and with markets accessible and growing by leaps and bounds, logging at the lake boomed.
The booming industry gobbled labour, labour that was available in abundance. In the years leading up to the war, thousands of European immigrants had flooded into Canada. The unmarried ones, the unskilled ones, the ones who could not speak English—many of them had found jobs in the woods. The work was hard, the wages were low and the living conditions were terrible, but a man could learn how to be a logger if he watched carefully and kept his head. And if a snag didn’t kill him or the lake drown him on his way back from the bootlegger’s, he might survive. And if he stayed clear of the camp poker players and watched how many chits he drew from the timekeeper, he might end up at the end of two or three months with the company owing him some pay. Then he could quit and head for Vancouver and Cordova Street in the heart of the Skid Road section of the waterfront. That was where a logger was treated with respect—at least for as long as his money held out.
When a dirty logger stepped off the boat in Vancouver with his pocket full of money, the first thing he did was to have a bath, a shave and a haircut. Then he bought new clothes—a proper black suit, a black shirt, black boots, a black felt hat, sometimes even a tie. He felt good as he walked up Cordova Street determined that this time the money would last. This time he would not have to check the blackboards outside the employment agencies for a quick return to the woods. This time he’d do things his way.
A decent hotel with a trustworthy desk clerk; a good meal; a wad of tobacco to chew; a few friends; a few stories; a few drinks; a few philosophical discussions about politics and Wobblies; a few more drinks; a bit of gossip and a good yarn; the occasional fistfight; the odd argument: a few days ran unnoticed into a few nights, and then another job from the employment agency became the only alternative. It was back to the lake and another few months of bad food, bedbugs, dirty blankets and hard, dangerous work.
The war persisted. The few Englishmen working as loggers had enlisted at the first sniff of battle. The locals were next, marching off in ragtag formation to learn about the wider world in the harshest possible way. As the years of the war piled one on top of another and the armed forces needed more and more cannon fodder, the long arm of the recruiter reached into the woods to snatch transient men who were unencumbered by wives or children. And since many of the countries these men had come from were at war as well and in need of all the cannon fodder they could muster, no new wave of immigrants came during the war years. The supply of labour at the lake dried up.
The irony of having voracious markets, plenty of capital and a shortage of labour frustrated Matt Hemmingsen. But he managed to carry on, logging for himself and for VL&M at several locations around the lake—Wardroper’s, the North Arm, Nixon Creek—and taking the cream of the timber. In 1917 two new factors made the labour shortage even worse: the federal government’s conscription legislation and the provincial government’s eight-hour working day. In the last year of the war, Matt was logging with old men and young boys.
When the war ended, the arrival of large numbers of Swedes, Norwegians and Finns improved the labour situation immediately, to Matt’s way of thinking. These were men born and bred to work in the woods. They were escaping compulsory military service and depressed economies; they were attracted to the opportunities in North America and by the stories they had heard from earlier emigrants who were now established in the New World. Most of the newcomers were single, from rural communities, and between the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine. They were big men, skilled and ready to work, and they knew from experience what unions could do for the working man.
But there were no unions in the logging camps and mills of coastal British Columbia, only a recent memory of the brief and glorious days when the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)—believing in militant industrial unionism, appealing to foreign-born migrant workers, calling for revolution—had tried to organize the logging camps of the Pacific Northwest.
When George Copley looked back, he thought it was around 1907, just about the time when Matt arrived on the coast, that the Wobblies were the strongest. “There was the IWW—we used to call them the ‘I Won’t Work.’ Probably ten or fifteen out of a hundred belonged to it—the others wouldn’t belong.”
The IWW disappeared as quickly as it had appeared, and then the war interrupted everyone’s agenda. Four years later, in the months after the armistice, a whole new labour picture unfolded. Returning soldiers, disillusioned with the way the world had been run, and new immigrants, accustomed to unions in Europe, were determined that the world of work was going to change. A union was needed, similar to the Wobblies, that would represent the workers ignored by craft unions—railway workers, miners and loggers. A meeting in Calgary in March of 1919 spawned a new, radical organization, one that would make life difficult for men like Matt Hemmingsen.
The One Big Union (OBU) was mostly a western Canadian phenomenon, its rhetoric filled with words like “revolution,” “Bolshevik” and “general strike.” When it reached Vancouver, it attracted the British Columbia Loggers’ Union, an organization only a few weeks old itself. By July 1919, the loggers’ union had changed its name to the Lumber Workers Industrial Union (LWIU) and affiliated itself with the OBU.
Organizing the 1919 brand of logger was not an easy job. He was a man used to being on his own, disconnected from his family, a rugged individualist, a drinker or a gambler or a loner. E. J. Palmer thought he knew what was best for that kind of a man:
I have known the logger for forty years now. I know he just can’t work if he has a dollar in his jeans. He is better off physically, morally, financially if he is broke.
But the 1919 brand of logger was fed up. He was tired of bad food, bad bunkhouses, low pay, no medical care and no end in sight. Within weeks of the LWIU/OBU merger, a series of strikes occurred, including several in the camps at Cowichan Lake. In response, the majority of employers joined together to form the British Columbia Loggers’ Asso-ciation, which established its own hiring agency in Vancouver at 313 Carrall Street, near where Carrall intersected Cordova. Seventy-five percent of logging jobs would be handed out from this office, which established a system of reports assessing the reliability of each employee. From this information, a list could be compiled of union activists, and the blacklist, a tradition that went back as far as the England of King Charles I, would keep troublemakers out of the camps.
Wishing to head off a crisis at the lake, Empire Lumber met with its employees but found it impossible to accede to their demands. The loggers asked for unheard-of luxuries—hot and cold baths, fresh fruit three times daily, white sheets and pillow slips, clean blankets.
Hemmingsen camps were running as before, but despite the appearance of normality, things were not as they should have been. Matt was frustrated and enraged. He had no experience with unions and no tolerance for their demands. The tactics of the OBU were driving him crazy.
Union members held meetings every evening and sometimes during the lunch hour. Often they would vote to strike, leave the camp, head down the lake and hold a meeting among themselves at the Foot. Each time they voted to return to camp and tell Matt they wanted to go back to work.
It became difficult for him to keep order in camp and maintain production. The most frustrating tactic of all was the slowdown, in which the crew limited the number of logs they delivered in a day. If they decided on sixty, it didn’t matter what diameter the logs were, they would deliver only sixty logs. Matt was fit to be tied. “I offered once to let them see my books to prove to them that if they went on, I would be broke and they out of a job.”
The boss was baffled, but his problems would soon be over. The union was a flawed organization and not destined for a long life. Charles Marston was an OBU organizer at the north end of the island. In a 1958 interview, he said the union would have lasted longer in British Columbia if its officers in Vancouver hadn’t run away with all the funds. Even Marston’s fellow officers in Port Alice were a motley crew: “I had for associates two thieves, a murderer and a gambler … We were a fine bunch.”
But the OBU accomplished some useful things in its short life. Marston remembered when loggers were called “bindle stiffs” due to the fact that they had to carry their own bindles or blanket rolls with them from camp to camp:
Before the [OBU] the men were all packing their blankets you know. Ya, those blankets and things had probably never been washed for twenty years and they’d bring in the lice and the bed bugs and what have ya and diseases into the camps. It was disgraceful.
The loggers stayed in “bull pens”: bunkhouses where ten to fifteen men slept in bunks that lined either side of one big room with a window at one end, a door at the other and a stove in the middle. The food used to “run pretty heavy to bacon and beans and rice and prunes and stuff like that.”
As a result of OBU agitation the food improved, and the men no longer had to carry their blankets from camp to camp. Bunkhouses provided laundered sheets and blankets. Deductions from wages made for payments to the Workmen’s Compensation Board insured men who were injured on the job. Fees paid to the Duncan hospital provided care when a man needed it. But the injured still had to travel the winding, decrepit road to Duncan, the woods were still dangerous, the wages were still low, and the bedbugs still held dominion over the poor itinerant logger.
After two years of vibrant activity, the OBU began to sputter and die. And since there had always been tension between the LWIU and the OBU, it was no surprise when the former seceded from the latter in 1921. A tiny, dedicated group of unionists persisted through the 1920s—a few die-hard Wobblies and a few members of the newly formed Canadian Communist Party, many of whom were recent immi’ grants from Norway, Sweden and Finland.
It hadn’t taken long for the men from Finland to make their presence felt. One of the first strikes after the war occurred when seventy Finnish loggers struck Empire Lumber for a fifty-cent-a-day raise in 1919. The strike was remarkable not for its results but for the fact that there were so many militant Finns working in one camp.
When the big experienced loggers from the countries of northern Europe started to arrive at the lake, it was the beginning of a change in attitude. Slowly, over many years, lumbermen would acquire a more respected position in society.
Carl Swanson became a valued citizen in his adopted community. According to his own reckoning, he was Cowichan Lake’s first Scan-dinavian when he and his family arrived in 1913. Carl was a huge man who had come to the West Coast eighteen years previously, spending the time before he settled at the lake working and wandering the coast from San Francisco to Alaska. But eighteen years in Canada had not entirely erased the Swedish lilt from his speech.
Annie Swanson spoke with even more of an accent. Her main preoccupations were her three daughters—Edith, Ethel and Bonnie—her two hundred chickens and her garden. The family lived in one of the finest floathouses on the lake, the shack painted brightly and surrounded by flower boxes that overflowed each summer with a tumble of brilliant colour.
Annie and her daughters belonged to a rare species at the lake—Swedish women. The vast majority of Cowichan Lake Swedes in the 1920s were men. Among the 11, 500 Swedish people who came to Canada in that decade, there were three times as many men as women, mostly young and mostly from rural backgrounds. Employers liked these tall, strong men. Swedes knew logging and Swedes worked hard. And they fit into the community fast because most of them came to Canada unattached and then married Canadian women.
Finns, on the other hand, though they came to the lake as single men, usually had girlfriends or wives waiting at home for the summons to join them. And Finns were clannish. They stuck together and spoke their own language. For Jack Atkinson, a man with a wide knowledge of the working men on Vancouver Island, it was easy to tell the difference between a Swede and a Finn.
Just by lookin’. Well, they’re a different build for one thing. A Finn is stocky, stout and kind of a round face, round head, and the Swedes are built more like Anglo-Saxons. Tall. You can pick the Finns out right away … And their women were bigger than they were.
Finnish women were in short supply at Cowichan Lake. The Finns fought off their feelings of loneliness by working together and staying separate from other groups. But clannishness was not always enough, in a backwoods camp in a strange country, to beat back despondency. When a Finn went crazy at Camp Three James Logging, seriously injuring his friend with a razor and escaping into the night “lightly clad,” the constables who were called in to find him attributed the attack to the effects of “strange drink.” Neither bloodhounds nor the three constables who searched for a week were able to find the poor man, and they had to content themselves with placing a third Finn, whose apparent dementia seemed to be caused by the same beverage, in a mental hospital on the mainland. Residents of the lake were not mollified, however, pointing out that there had been “a considerable number of cases of insanity in the camps of late months.”
There were a lot of strange stories coming out of the James Logging camps. The stories had begun in 1921 when the colourful and controversial Henry G. James, better known as Jesse James, formed an alliance with one C. C. Yount of the Medina mill on Cottonwood Creek. In the complicated gavotte danced by the various owners and contractors on the Empire lease and at the sawmill, the names of James and Yount stand out—Yount for ubiquity, James for notoriety.
C. C. Yount seemed to crop up everywhere in the years after 1915 when his title had been vice-president and general manager of Empire Lumber. He moved between the state of Idaho and the lake, entertaining extensively at the Residence, a grand-sounding name for a cookhouse cum dormitory, one of only six residential buildings on land in Cottonwood in 1925, all the others being on floats. Yount had won skeptical approval from the local people by buying all the logs in the lake that weren’t fit to ship out, putting them through the mill and selling the lumber. In the days when cedar was considered useless, it was he who went into the camps and bought cedar logs for next to nothing, held them for two months and sold them for a 50-per-cent profit. It was hard not to admire a man like that.
Jesse James was another matter altogether. Like Matt Hemmingsen, he was a Wisconsin-born logger with a tendency to generate legends. But where Matt was a family man with an appealing steadiness about him, Jesse was flamboyant and did everything in a big way—he was “a sporting man,” as one observer put it. He bought property on the river near where it widened into the Upper Pool and had a speedboat built and christened War Eagle. News made it back to the lake of the parties he hosted in Vancouver and Victoria. Jesse was getting on in age when he came to the lake, and his rheumatism made it difficult for him to get in and out of his car. Matt Hemmingsen remembered the time Jesse got in trouble with the local constable.
This was because he had cut a big hole in one window so he could hunt game birds without getting out of his car. They fined him for this but he made another hole soon afterward.
Jesse James had made a fortune logging in Washington and in the Fraser Valley, but the operation at Cottonwood Creek was his final project.
Negley Farson, a writer who spent time at the lake in the 1920s, wrote a novel based on his observations of the residents, most of whose reputations he protected, if scantily, by giving them pseudonyms. But he offered no protection whatsoever to Jesse James. By the time Farson wrote about him, James had died choking on a piece of steak. Farson called him the “pompous little king in this part of the world,” a “strutting little Napoleon” and the “enemy of everything that was decent at the lake,” a man who would ruin the area with his ruthless logging.
It takes a man who is larger than life to make the kind of impression that Jesse James made at the lake in just four years. And although James employed hundreds of men, built miles of logging railroads and estab’ Ushed camps in several locations, it was probably his association with Yap Alley that made him one of the more memorable lake people.
Yap Alley was a controversial concept. It depended on who was defining it. A former resident said that Yap Alley was what they called the town in the days when it was above the mill. Trevor Green said Yap Alley was the name given to Cottonwood Camp because the women who lived there talked a lot. Clarence Whittingham, a lake person since 1925, said Yap Alley was where about four loggers’ families lived and where Jesse James Logging erected a two-storey building with a dual purpose.
[D]ownstairs they had pool tables and stuff like that and upstairs they had friendly girls and if you didn’t spend your money in that place there which was owned by Jesse James Loggin’ you hit the ties—you had no choice.
People choose to remember what makes them most comfortable. Everyone who lived in Yap Alley remembers the railroad that snaked its way for seven miles up the Cottonwood Creek valley to bring the logs out. The logs were supposed to make the rest of their journey to market on the Canadian National Railroad (CNR). The grade for the railroad had been built from Victoria through Sooke, along Shawnigan Lake and up the Cowichan River valley to the village at the Foot, then across the river near where it empties the lake, swinging around Bald Mountain and along the North Arm to Cottonwood and beyond to the head of the lake and through the wilds of the Nitinat, where it was supposed to meet the grade that had been prepared for a few miles at the Port Alberni end. All this had been done before the war by the CNR’S predecessor, the Canadian Northern. But steel for the railroad, the actual rails, had been laid only from Victoria to the village of Lake Cowichan, leaving a frustrating gap between there and Cottonwood, which was the only location on the rest of the line with a pressing need for rail transport.
The editor of the Cowichan Leader assessed this situation in a statement that seemed to miss the point: “It is the direct result of placing mediocre men in high positions—entrusting important technical tasks to amateurs.” Mediocre men may well have been involved, but the reason the steel had stopped was because of the woeful state of CNR finances. Under pressure from businessmen, the company went ahead to inaugurate a gas car service to Lake Cowichan in 1924, and soon extended steel as far as Cottonwood.
The gas car was a single, self-propelled passenger coach that travelled directly to Victoria, thus allowing riders to avoid having to change trains in Duncan as they did on the E&N, which was just about to end a short-lived experiment with passenger service to the lake anyway. Setting a pattern for future up-island transportation, however, the gas car set its schedule so that it was necessary for its patrons from the hinterland to stay overnight in Victoria. The gas car had other problems: it did not deal well with snow; its single compartment meant that the occasional female passenger had to travel with a preponderance of male passengers, most of whom smoked; and it often ran down animals—on one notable day the gas car hit both a cow and a dog.
At the very least, however, having the gas car meant that the mail now could come directly to the lake without having to go through Duncan. This service proved to be hard on the postmaster, however, due entirely to the location of the train station.
The CNR ran through the village, crossing the E&N almost at right angles and passing over the main street on a trestle. The station, if such it could be called, was a rough, narrow building perched where the tracks met the trestle, high above the street and connected to it by more than twenty stairs. On mail day, postmaster Sidney Scholey dragged a wheelbarrow up the stairs, filled it with bags of mail and bumped it down again. If there was extra mail, he had to repeat the process. Sid’s dog always accompanied him but climbed aboard when the gas car came in, leaving his master behind as he travelled to Mile 83 at the end of the track.
At the end of the track was the old sawmill, with Cottonwood Camp lying just beyond. The new station at Mile 83, on a new townsite below the mill, would not be named Cottonwood, however. The Dominion postal service had decreed that the post office in the incipient town would be named Youbou, in honour of C. C. Yount, now in charge of Empire operations at the lake, and G. D. Bouton, the little-known president of Empire Lumber.
It was hard to find anyone who thought much of the new name. The people deliberately mispronounced it by saying “Hoodoo.” The Duncan newspaper was terse in its headline: “Fancy foxtrot name does not suit Cottonwood station.” The new town was to be located on a narrow strip of land with a train track running through it from one end to the other. The entire site was squeezed between the lake and a wall of tree-covered rock.
When a consortium of businessmen took over from Empire Lumber in 1929, calling their new company Industrial Timber Mills (ITM) and building a new sawmill, the shape and future of the town and the citizens of Youbou became a company matter.
The company laid out the town and built the houses—only a few at first—for a list of impatient would-be occupants. The electricity for the houses came from the mill, and when the mill was shut down, as it was over the Christmas holidays, there was no electricity. When the mill worked, the town worked; when there was a shutdown, everyone went without.
Only management personnel lived in the company houses. Everyone else lived in floathouses until they could build a dry-land house for themselves. East of town on the water’s edge lay a stretch of unorganized land that attracted a few squatters, including Hildur and Lars Grip and their young family. Lars was a Swede and Hildur was a Finn, and each had been in Canada only a few years. They met in Port Alberni, where Hildur owned a boardinghouse bought with money earned in a Greek restaurant in Vancouver that had a loyal Scandinavian clientele. When Hildur first laid eyes on him, Lars was drunk, leaning against her back fence “like a newborn calf.” As their daughter tells it,
She laughed at him and picked him up by the middle and sort of walked him over home and that was the beginning. I don’t remember my father taking a drink when I was young. She laughed at him and that did it. So they were married in 1929.
Married life began on a stump ranch in Port Alberni. Lars felled trees and brought in money by working at a sawmill. Hildur dug out stumps, undeterred by the advancing stages of her first pregnancy. By the time their second child was born, the Depression had driven them off the land they had hoped to make into a farm, and Lars had been blacklisted.
[The company]’d hired the Japanese to do really joe jobs in the mill. Cleaning up underneath where the chains went carrying all the junk. And they had them crawling underneath there. Well, my dad was a small man, so he was working underneath there too. When they got their paycheques, his was bigger than this Japanese friend of his. He says, “How come?” And he was told “Keep your mouth shut, Grip.” And he was blacklisted. Fired down the road.
The only place Lars Grip could get a job was with ITM in Youbou. He had friends there and they spoke up for him. The young family—four people with a fifth on the way—shared a floathouse with another family.
[Mother] couldn’t get down on the floor and wash underneath [the bed]… and I remember squeezing between the bed and the wall and she threw the floor cloth across to me and I would throw it back to her and that’s how we washed the floor.
The stove in the house was a wreck that often filled the shack with smoke, but the real fire danger came from the mill across the bay. In those days the company got rid of all the mill ends and scraps in a massive bonfire that burned continuously. It became necessary to post children as spark watchers on the hill above to stamp out the small fires that started from flying pieces of burning wood. It made problems for the Grips on their floathouse as well.
We had burning chunks hitting our roof all the time. So it was a little hairy. I mean, my mother had two little children who couldn’t swim and we lived on a floathouse and our roof was always on fire and she was pregnant.
Since the weather that year was unusually warm, Lars and Hildur figured they could last the summer in makeshift accommodation. They squatted on a piece of land in the unorganized territory and built a woodshed for shelter. One day Lars saw a stack of two-by-fours floating by—a pile of lumber that the unusually high water of the lake had floated out of the mill yard. Although the pile had shifted from the square to an angle, it refused to break up, floating instead on the calm water in stately fashion like a small inebriated barge. Lars borrowed a neighbour’s boat and laid claim to the lumber.
Since the mill offered him very little for the salvaged wood, Lars kept it, building his house with materials supplied by fate or some higher power. And what a solid house it was. With walls made entirely of two-by-fours, the house was as sturdy as if it had been made of iron, and it was very difficult to renovate once the wood had seasoned.
Eventually the unorganized land was surveyed and the inhabitants were allowed to buy the lots they had squatted on. But in the early 1930s, 75 per cent of the inhabitants of Youbou lived in floathouses.
Living in a floathouse qualified a person for bona fide lake citizenship. Sooner or later everyone, often in the dark and usually on their way to the outhouse, fell off the planks that connected the floats to the shore. At Youbou, those planks were at least thirty feet long because the water got deep so gradually. When the level of the lake came up, as it did regularly in the days before the river outlet at the village was controlled, the floathouses drifted away from the land, abandoning the people who happened to be ashore and stranding those already on board.
Floathouse people sometimes drowned; they sometimes got sick when storms made the lake rough; and they had to get used to the sound of rats running in the rafters. Floathouses had no electricity, no plumbing and no telephones. But people living in floathouses paid no property taxes. They had all the running water they needed just outside their door, and when the water got too dirty to drink, all they had to do was move house. Most people moved onto land as soon as they could, but they kept their floathouses to rent to other newcomers. And some people lived in floathouses by choice.
But the ideal situation in Youbou in the 1930s was to qualify for a company house. By 1935 more and more married men were able to get one. Two years later a new street was added to the one already there, running parallel and higher up the slope. The town looked very respectable. The company had painted each of the twenty-one houses on the main street two shades of brown with cream trim. The cream matched the colour of the community hall and the schoolhouse.
The company had built a big new mill with a large boardinghouse and separate bunkhouses for each of the major racial groups working at the mill—East Indians, Chinese and whites. An enormous craneway 1100 feet long was the pride of the community—”the finest lumber handling installation of its kind in British Columbia.” When that craneway caught on fire in 1932, the community rallied to save the adjoining sawmill.
It had been a week of intense heat. Depression-ridden markets were slack, so the mill was down. When the mill was down, there was no steam, no electricity and no work, but there was a chance for a gala weekend, and one had been planned: a dance at the community hall on Friday, a Swedish dance at Cottonwood on Saturday, a tennis tournament and a softball game to be played against the Foot on Sunday. At 5:00 A.M. on Sunday, tennis players were already on the courts when someone noticed smoke coming from the mill. Everyone swung into action.
Someone ran to the boardinghouse and rang the bell frantically and continuously until the whole town was awake, the siren being incapacitated by the lack of steam. The fire hoses needed steam to supply water pressure, too, so the volunteer firefighters had only gravity pressure for their hoses until the steam built up; then the pressure was so high it took three or four men to hold each nozzle. The CNR sent a special train from Victoria carrying firefighting equipment; pumps arrived from the forestry department and Camp Six. But despite the efforts of one hundred men, most of the craneway burned, and millions of feet of lumber with it. And it looked as though nothing could save the mill.
Then, at 9:00 A.M., the wind shifted slightly to the west, taking the heat and flames away from the mill. The next twelve hours were spent hosing the buildings down. The food that the women had prepared for the softball tournament fed the firefighters instead. By 6:00 the next morning a steady rain had begun to fall.
Things returned to normal within four months. The sharp repeat of the mill’s gunshot feed carriage reassured old-timers and robbed new-comers of their sleep. Exhaust steam wreathed the mill in a comforting aura. Youbou was up and running again.
The revival of the mill coincided with the rejuvenation of lumber markets laid low by the stock market catastrophe of 1929. The men at the lake were working again long before the Dirty Thirties ended. The relief camp in Youbou, which had housed unemployed men, was dismantled. “Relief, as far as this neighbourhood is concerned, is a thing of the past,” trumpeted the newspaper.
Times had been hard and there would be hard times again: markets would slip, workers would strike. Whenever that happened, the only store in town came to the people’s assistance. Just as he did in Lake Cowichan, Stanley Gordon would carry anyone who needed credit. He had opened in Youbou a branch of his successful Lake Cowichan store financed by his partners, John Castley and Matt Hemmingsen.
Cowichan Lake had been good to Matt. The legendary boss logger was wealthy enough to construct an office building in the village and a garage to house his Packard Straight Eight. He had moved his family to Victoria so his five children could attend better schools, but the family always returned to the lake in the summer. When the William Oliver place became available following Oliver’s untimely death at the age of fifty-three, Matt bought it for a summer place. To supply the house with electricity, he installed a Delco Remy light plant in a big storeroom lined with shelves to hold over one hundred glass batteries. His children played on a raft anchored off a little island in the river connected to the property by a small bridge. In the terraced lawn was a collection of glass far more interesting than their father’s glass batteries—buried rows of upended champagne bottles.
No one knew who the drinker had been or why the bottles had been buried so meticulously. Someone with a secret, no doubt. Matt made no secret of his drinking. He drank to kill the pain in his hip injured so long ago in his one encounter with a bucking bronco. “The only relief I had,” he wrote years later, “was to keep about three sheets to the wind.” It did not upset his family unduly. Loggers worked hard at camp, and when they came out they drank. His youngest son cannot remem’ ber him drinking too much at home. His oldest son remembers him coming home to Victoria from the lake “a little tipsy.”
The pain in Matt’s hip had begun to worsen about the time the new Chemainus mill demanded a huge increase in the supply of logs. The old mill burned to the ground in 1923. Then E. J. Palmer died, ending a volatile relationship with Matt and leaving VL&M in need of a new manager. The new manager arrived in the person of the namesake and grandson of Matt’s mentor, John A. Humbird.
John Humbird Jr., whom Matt referred to as “Young John,” set about building the largest mill on the coast, and he needed a superintendent at the lake who could deliver the greatly increased number of logs he required. Matt was his man, and although Matt liked to say he took a few years off after the old mill burned down, the truth was that he kept right on working. Included in his responsibilities was Camp Ten, just outside the village of Lake Cowichan.
Camp Ten had been built in harmony with the ideas of the almost defunct OBU. Loggers lived eight men to a bunkhouse—portable ones on skids with decent floors, lots of light and lots of ventilation. There was even a washroom with hot water showers.
It was where young Kynaston Gisborne came, all six feet, one inch of him, a teen-ager, and ready to take on the world. He’d been born in Ladysmith and raised a few miles to the north on a small farm in the Cedar district between Ladysmith and Nanaimo by a family that prided itself on being well educated. Kyn was having none of that. He liked to say he quit school early because his spelling was so good and because he was “born smart in everyday life.”
Promising his father he wouldn’t return home until somebody hired him, he spent three days without eating and three nights sleeping on the ground until he landed a job greasing skids at an operation owned by his next-door neighbour. Greasing skids paid good money—$1.50 a day. But living at home didn’t seem like much of an adventure, so he headed off to Cowichan Lake within a year.
Despite the improvement in living conditions, there were a lot of loggers dying on the job in those years. But Kyn wasn’t worried. Young men never think that they will be the ones to die. Then one day in 1926, when he was working as a rigging slinger, he was hit on the head with a sapling.
It shot me thirty feet in the air and I went down into a hole. I was knocked out cold. And they looked at me and they thought I was dead. And they just left me lying there. They went to camp and said, “Gisborne got killed,” so they phones for the foreman and the locie and the crummies. They’re all sittin’ in the crummies waitin’ for the police to come up and identify the body, and I walked over the hump.
Kyn was a lucky man. The next year was the worst year ever for deaths in the woods at the lake. Oscar Siren died in hospital of crushing head injuries after the broken end of the main guy line for the spar tree struck him at Camp Five Cottonwood Creek. Pally Bernard Paulson died in hospital from shock after his leg was smashed at Camp Six. Elias Uusitala and U. E. Saargarvi were killed instantly at Camp Six when the rigging gave way, “catching them in coils of writhing cable and inflicting terrible head injuries.” John James Jackson died instantly when he was struck by a sapling that fell when sideswiped by a high lead line at Scottish-Palmer camp. Elvino Haugland was killed instantly at Camp Ten VL&M when a falling snag broke his neck.
There had been 286 accidents in the Cowichan area in nine months, 11 of them fatal. Some of those who died had survived their accident but succumbed to shock en route to hospital in Duncan. There was no hospital at the lake, despite repeated calls for one. None of the large companies working there was prepared to take the lead in providing some kind of emergency care for their injured men. Not even the company at the Youbou mill seemed interested in that kind of an investment. It was at the Youbou mill that Charles Robertson was cut in two by the head saw on his last shift before he retired. Robertson was an experienced man, but it was intimated that he was always out for high production.
Almost all the deaths in the woods were also blamed somehow on the victims. The Workmen’s Compensation Board said, “The experienced loggers will insist upon taking chances … familiarity breeds contempt.” Charles Marston said years later that almost all the deaths he saw in the woods were the men’s own fault; they’d be warned but would ignore the warnings. Kyn Gisborne agreed:
The safety was as good as the individual himself … The companies didn’t want to see you hurt. The Compensation would charge them more, you see.
And Kyn believed a man should look after himself. One day he was talking to Stanley Gordon in his store in the village, and he told Mr. Gordon that he felt as if he was going to have a nervous breakdown. The kindly storekeeper recommended taking Fleischman’s Yeast. Kyn swallowed a rubbery yeast cake twice a week for a month and it made him feel terrific.
There were lots of ways for people to get their minds off the carnage in the woods and make themselves feel terrific. Matt Hemmingsen favoured step dancing, which was quite a feat for a man with a cranky hip. He could be seen regularly at Beeches’ dancehall until they converted the whole thing to a house. Carl Swanson came to the rescue of dedicated dancers when he and his family converted a floathouse into a dancehall. Resting on huge logs and moored at the mouth of the river in the Upper Pool, Swan Hall was the place to go on Saturday night at the lake for a few years in the late 1920s. Carl sold the hall to a religious group to use as a meeting place when he built a large new building on Riverside Drive. Included in the building was a house, a café and a beauty parlour where his daughter Bonnie dressed women’s hair.
Carl and Annie Swanson’s three daughters all married and stayed at the lake. Matt and Margaret Hemmingsen’s children found their mates and their futures elsewhere. But the part of their lives spent in the floathouse at the logging camps and in the log house on the river remained a vivid part of lake legends.
A lot of people tell the story of John’s appendix operation. Matt’s oldest son was twelve years old the summer of 1925. He remembers that summer because his mother fed him so much boiled cabbage, and he blames that for the stomach ache he got. No one took him seriously when he complained. “They just gave me more cabbage.” But one day they could ignore his complaints no longer. His father drove him to the Duncan hospital, where the doctor diagnosed a ruptured appendix.
And it was quite a messed-up operation. My dad always told me the doctor had been drunk when he operated, and anyway, with it rupturing and all that and the drunk doctor, I got gangrene.
John spent months in hospital. Finally one day his parents arrived to visit him in a brand-new car. Cars were just as important to John as they were to his father. John remembers that this was when the Packard Straight Eight came into their lives. His father whisked him out of the hospital and into that beautiful car and drove him down to a Victoria hospital, where he was returned to good health.
A car figures largely into Bob Hemmingsen’s lake memories too. Bob was the baby of the family, five years younger than his closest sibling, and in the care of a nurse when his mother took him down the road to Duncan in the family McLaughlin Buick. One of the many problems presented by that rough road was its narrowness. When drivers encountered oncoming traffic, they were required to exhibit great presence of mind. But Margaret Hemmingsen was not a very good driver—Matt had chalked a diagram of the gearshift on the floorboards so she wouldn’t forget which gear was which. Unnerved by an approaching horse and cart, Margaret pulled over too far. The wheels on the right side of the car sank into the soft shoulder, and the car very gently tipped over onto its side, leaving mother, child and nurse unharmed but at a considerable disadvantage until they were rescued.
That Bob Hemmingsen became a soldier made his father very proud. And John studied forestry, then worked with his father at Port Renfrew in the logging company Matt formed with J. C. Cameron in 1936. Matt was sixty when he started that new project, but an easing of his hip pain had given him a new lease on life. Having given up on a number of “get rich quick projects which I had fallen for more or less since 1908,” he was ready for a challenge.
His sons are proud of their legendary father. John, who became a vice-president of the giant forest company MacMillan Bloedel, says,
My dad wasn’t a big private-enterpriser in terms of, say, H. R. MacMillan, so he didn’t go to the top of this heap, but he did succeed in doing what he wanted to do, I think—produce logs.
Bob agrees.
He was a leader and men respected him absolutely, because he could outrun anybody in the woods, he could do almost anything, but he was a very fair-minded man. If men produced, then they got ahead, and if they didn’t produce, they left.
His sons had to produce. At a very young age they had to be able to walk behind their father in the woods and go on long treks up and down mountains. John remembers when he was eight years old being taken to visit some timber his father owned on the Malahat. His brother, Bill, a year and a half younger than John, was there too, and Matt was very annoyed that the six-and-a-half-year-old couldn’t keep up with them on that rugged terrain between Duncan and Victoria. “He thought people should be strong.”
And although his children say they grew up with the wrong feeling somehow about Scandinavians and that they sneered at Finns and called them “white Chinamen,” and though Matt hid the fact that he was born in Norway and worked hard all his life to sound like a North American, they insist that Matt had no prejudice. “He respected people who could work and produce regardless of their background.”
Matt was ninety-one when he died, his name well known on the island and among lake people. He set high standards for his employees and his children, and they did their best to live up to those standards. When his two eldest sons were in their teens and had begun to hike and camp out on their own, he encouraged them to travel farther and farther afield. A few years after John’s nearly fatal appendectomy, the lad was hiking to Elsie Lake just north of Port Alberni carrying a very heavy pack. After one particularly gruelling day, when he stopped for the night, he became aware that his appendectomy scar was bleeding.
Telling the story when he himself is an old man, John brushes aside a comment that he must be made of sturdy stock: “I don’t know. It was stupidity.” His brother, Bob, agrees: “Dumb Norwegian.”