Forest History Center Real Horsepower Days - Logging

[Music] rural heritage on rfd tv is brought to you by rural heritage magazine a bi-monthly magazine featuring articles about farming and logging with draft animal power small-scale diversified family farming and homesteading and other aspects of our rich rural heritage rural heritage magazine borrowing from yesterday to do the work of today for subscription information please call 319 362 or order online at www.ruralheritage.com hi i'm joe mishka from rural heritage magazine welcoming you to another episode of rural heritage on rfd tv today we're at the forest history center in grand rapids minnesota where they're putting on real horsepower days teamsters from around northern minnesota brought their horses and are demonstrating how the logs were harvested and hauled back in the day the minnesota circle society maintains sites around the state and they have agriculture sites milling sites and logging was a real important industry in minnesota so they created the forest history center the nature of the logging camps were that they were usually only for a season see they got their um stumpage the companies got their stumpage they figured out how many men how many horses it was going to take to log that during that winter and this the back in 1900 they depend on the rivers to move the logs so often the distance from here is the mississippi river so but the camps are all gone after a season they just disappeared so using historical records and pictures and stuff they recreated this logging camp as it might have been for a contingent of about 80 men so this is the office this is where the business would be right yep yep these folks have come in oh welcome to uh northwoods number one um my job here is the clerk of the camp every camp has workers every camp has management well i'm considered one of the management here and i keep track you see these fellows wanted to sign on here they're working on a promise they come in and get room and board and a daily wage depending on what they do but they can't collect until they leave camp and it's a yeah it's probably a 12 to 15 maybe 20 week season start in the fall get the camp set up in october and by the time november comes you're hoping for a little bit of snow and frozen ground and then you start cutting and spring can come in the end of march april you want to have your cut done you want to have all your logs in the landing because we depend on ice roads and horses to move the logs so that's why we're we're doing all logging in the winter some of these sleds are 25 ton moving downhill now you come into the camp and you sign on let's see here we got a page from the book now it looks like our form in here this is secret information so don't be spreading it wrong our foreman is making seventy dollars a month paid big but you see he's the fall that keeps the camp together keeps them working makes the assignments and you'll be you'll be held responsible and if you don't get your logs to the mill in the spring nobody gets paid your scaler scaler is the fellow that keeps track how much is cut you go out there you scale every log you take your stamp hammer and you put a mark in the end this is the this is the mark for northwoods number one it's a dollar sign and you mark every log and he keeps a record a scalar's record so he knows at any given day where we're at in the cut and we're trying to make seven million board feet and that's a and if we can get an overcut then we make a little more money but if we get bad snow and undercut could be a tough winter but you know everybody has an important job and they get paid accordingly a scalar he's making about 45 clerk myself would be making 35 um and you've got uh sawyers who are making 30 bucks a month and their job is to cut the trees into 16 foot lengths and you've got skidders teamsters that are are running horses 35 a month the holiday teamsters making the same everybody is very specialized and there's a fellow named the road monkey or chickadee probably the lowest paid maybe 15 a month and his job is to clean up after the horses so you don't get horses in the ice or manure in the ice roads but when that sled's coming down a hill on two ribbons of ice on cast iron she picks up speed and the teamster hollers for uh hey he means put some hay in there and get her slowed down especially that first run in the morning those that frosty ice gets pretty greasy so and if your horses stumble you lose a team it's called sluice in the team let's loosen your horses over the top you um came in the fall you knew approximately where the river was you knew where your cut was you positioned your camp because you're drawing water from the river so you're not going to be digging well for one season so you've got your river within distance so you can go down and get water for the cook shack you can take the horses down water them all the things that that you need so that's kind of how the the camp would be positioned and you'd use what available logs tar paper these this is probably a pretty deluxe camp in the big scheme of things home sweet home this one here is set up for i believe 76 lumberjacks two more to a bunk and you're looking for a bunk mate you want somebody with warm toes because his head's that way your head is this way so heated by a barrel stove she gets when she gets really cold out there the stove will be glowing red when they come in at night and the men are working daylight till dark in the wintertime up here in the north woods it probably doesn't get light till about seven o'clock in the morning but now we're ahead at that time the uh bullco could come in you know there's daylight in the swamp roll out boys well the teamsters are probably already down in the barn getting horses ready the cookies and cooker up in the in the cook shop already making breakfast everybody gets out gets themselves ready and gets up to the to the cook camp so that they can get something to eat and but when they're done with that they come back put on their winter clothes and head down to the to the cut where they're going all before daybreak come dark start to the sun's fading the dust is setting in the man horses come back from the woods the teamsters put away their horses the men come in everything's wet you can imagine the smell of wets steaming like crazy yeah yeah and the bulk bull cookies this is his domain he's kind of like the camp janitor he's keeping keeping the stoves fired and you know making sure there's water in for the cook shack and all of that so because i'm guessing they don't bathe a lot they don't wash their clothes a lot of heaven's snowing right it's got to be maybe on sunday you might you might boil your clothes and you do that because there's little critters in there called gray backs and they once you get started they just multiply and you know you're you're always scratching something so but you kind of have some fun with the gray backs take a on sunday it gets a little tedious you get your grey back racetrack you take this and you layer out on the floor and you drop your gray backs and you see who's gonna get to the edge when they get to the edge get them you're not gambling for money you might do it too tobacco or something like that but the foreman you didn't like don't allow any gambling and you don't like any women in camp and he doesn't like any alcohol in camp all three of those things cause people fight lumberjacks don't fight fair when you wear cork boots you use everything you got and here they sharpen their tools yep that was a sawyer or a swamper and an axe and that was his driving joy and they say it's a dull axe that'll cut you on a sharp axe sharp axe will bite in the dull axe will uh come back and bite you so there'd be there'd be water in here if maybe have somebody helping them out turning it grinding it to a fine edge and do that every day but sanitation was important wash your hands because there are cases where you got flu diphtheria smallpox in the camp could wipe out a whole camp and this type of living situation um kept your hands clean and you were fed nutritious food when we go to the cook shack you'll see what they're what they're eating but the men needed to have um good food that's what held camp together if you had a bad cook they go to camp down the road so um you paid your cook pretty good money about dollars a month wow that's all and this is what they call the dingle for storing the for the cook the cooks they have um supplies stored here it's called a dingle dingle yep hi miss rebecca hello i can't meet our cook this is wonderful how do you do it good how are you the good food we have here oh my goodness yes and lots of it probably close to 350 pounds of food you'll consume somewhere around four to five thousand calories a day you must be a celebrity in camp oh very popular well my cooking is okay not necessarily me on your bad side i'm sure well i do have rules first when you arrive in the camp and you've told me that you are going to sign up i'm going to ask you what your job is and then i assign you a place to sit so you can see in here there's room for 76 we're just about to set up some of the tables now but everybody will have their spot to sit so as soon as we blow this gabriel horn here hanging on the wall that will tell the men that it's time to come in and eat and they will come in like a pack of wild grizzlies that haven't eaten all winter when it comes to breakfast so we blow the horn they come in they sit down they shut up they eat and they get out and they're here about 15 minutes or so the only time they are allowed to talk is if one of the dishes that's loaded up with food in the middle of the table goes empty and then they raise us up in the air and they yell for what it is that they want refilled in here and then i get one cookie for every 25 men and my cookies are my helpers and i have a couple of lady cookies this year miss abigail you might see her wandering around crazy mary as well as hank and us ladies this is where we bunk back over here oh okay yeah it's not real warm back there in fact this time of the season if you put your boots too far underneath the bunks there they may be frosted right to the floor by morning you don't have a stove in here to keep you warm no the only stove that goes throughout the night now is this barrel stove over here not even my cook stoves will go through the night because it takes such amount of small firewood to keep them going and the bowl cook will keep that one going however for us so we don't have to get up but chances are we're going to be sleeping next to it anyways it's a little warmer there so then your breakfast is going to be the largest meal of the day it will consume of uh about 500 pancakes sourdough pancakes we call them sweat pads so i should start there the men are going to call everything different than what you're used to hearing so they will have 500 sweat pads they'll have saw belly fried in the oven uh oatmeal wind timber at every meal spuds at every meal logging berries at every meal blackjack and swamp water to wash down cold shut sticky buns or skid roads what's wind timber the beans okay not the green ones uh-huh that's the name and logan berries those are prunes okay now just a fancy name for prunes the blackjack in swamp water is coffee or tea we don't take the time to dig a well out here so our our uh my cookies are gonna run down to the river and haul water up using this yolk and a couple of buckets here and this is for washing dishes this one takes about 10 trips to load that up and that'll go empty every time they do two hours worth of dishes after each meal but that pipes right through my stove here okay it's a little bigger than a reservoir would be on cook stoves right and so i also have to boil the water on the stove about five gallons a meal for the blackjack that's what the coffee is and uh about three gallons get boiled up on the stove for the swamp water which is the tea so you'll get that at every meal the desserts however those are going to be what the men might even start with first to dish up for breakfast you're going to have a choice of cold shots those are temporary chain links that the men carry in their pockets so it's round with the hole in the middle just like donuts now because i need to make sure that you have a certain amount of prunes throughout the day for breakfast it's a good place to disguise them into the sticky buns you know caramel rolls you can put thick layers of that caramel throughout those sticky buns and hide a lot of prunes right inside of there same with the well the skid roads those are cinnamon rolls put a nice thick layer of frosting right on top of that an icing and they never look under there to see how many prones are in there as well let's get it pretty early in the morning about three hours before daylight and then we go to bed somewhere around two three hours after suntowned wow and it's a not a lot different than some it might be a little earlier in the morning when you live on the farm but chances are two three hours after sundown in the middle of winter people are still awake your day doesn't end just because it went dark so this here is the oven [Music] these are the size of my bread pans i can fit uh six loaves in each one of these i have four of these and that all four fit right into one oven and then this is the fire box here sure and that's where you take the ashes out beneath it yeah and the blacksmith made me one of these for my pies pie lifter i can put the plate right on top here and i can reach clear to the back and i can fit 10 pies in each of it wow so they're constantly getting rotated around so because there's hot spots and cool spots yes yes they are yeah yeah thank you so much you're welcome really appreciate it you're welcome good to meet you glad you're here today me too what is the mission of the center well we are an environmental history and learning center the living history that you're experiencing today has been a core experience particularly in the summer for 40 years here but we also do naturalist programs we do folk school programs we do wildlife engagement programs we're prototyping currently a kayaking and fat tire bike sort of naturalist program that we that we're experimenting with and so our mission is really to connect people to forests and to share the history of of the importance of forests to cultures here in minnesota particularly that's what we focus on timber or forest in minnesota have been a major resource um of course we had wheat you know and iron ore and fur you know those were big resources historically but the forests today are still very very important to the economy but also to you know our lives in terms of recreation we have forested communities all over northern minnesota which are very special so it's a complex story but it's a it's a really neat one people um are are really getting into the ecology and naturalist aspects i see a lot more people working on bird counts and bird banding a lot of photography these days people are really getting into kayaks and canoeing and and fat tire biking is really coming into its own and we have a new tioga trail system that they've been raising money for here over in the cohasset area a new park for mountain bikes and fat tire bikes they they raised the money to build that some 3 million dollars just like that because it was such a popular idea and they're going to take an old mining site and and turn it into a recreation site for for bikers and so that's a really neat thing and we have the wasabi trail system here which is fabulous and so in the winter we all enjoy snowmobiling and ice fishing and skiing we ski here on this site we groom the trails for skiing and fat tire bikes we do snow shoeing dog sledding you know and so we love winter as much as we do the summer months but you kind of have to you do yeah it's a really special place to live up here though and some years past we've had smaller numbers of horses here um thanks to dwayne barrow and ed nelson and others they've sort of reinvigorated the program and and added a lot to it this year we brought in a upm blandin generously donated a truckload of logs and the fellows spent yesterday dispersing the logs all over the woods to create more of a realistic and we haven't done that in years past and so they're actually working in two different places here in camp unloading logs from a wagon and up in a meadow and next to a plantation forest actually loading logs onto the wagon so people get to see kind of it isn't exactly how it would have been historically because you would have been working with slaves but it gives you a sense of what it was like even though you're using a different piece of equipment to transport the logs so all right [Music] you can find us actually by going to um just googling the minnesota historical society and that will take you to um the society's website and then there are links to us there we're a part of the minnesota historical society we're one of 26 sites owned by the society they're one of the largest organization or historical societies in the country and so you can link up and get to our page very easily by doing that so back back back back oh okay major matt step step step step oh now those horses could pull more than these odds right through that i think the wagon was the limit [Applause] [Music] good [Music] this program is available for purchase to order your copy please call 319 360 [Music] or visit www.ruralheritage.com rural heritage is a bi-monthly magazine dedicated to draft animal farming and logging as well as other aspects of our rich rural heritage it is published by mishka press which also offers a complete line of back to the land books dvds and calendars call or write for a catalog or subscription information or visit our website at [Music] www.ruralheritage.com

Channel: Rural Heritage

Views: 43,650

Rating: 4.8909712 out of 5

Keywords: Rural Heritage, logging with horses, forest history center, living history, reenactments, minnesota logging

Id: yfhlpyyWb2A

Length: 23min 30sec (1410 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 24 2021