From the stockade I went to a lumber camp where some officials had been found guilty of peonage.
Irvine Punching Logs in the Gulf of Mexico, 1907[ToList]
I got a job as a teamster and took my place in the camp among the labourers as if I had spent my life at it.
In this way I got at the facts of how and why men had been decoyed from New York and imprisoned in the forests.
I was so much at home in my work and so disguised that no one ever for a moment suspected me. I obtained photographs of the bosses, the bloodhounds and the camp box cars in which the lumber Jacks lived.
Several times around a bonfire of pine knots I entertained the men of the camp with stories of travel, history and romance.
If I had been discovered, if the purpose of my presence had been known I would have been shot like a dog; for life is as cheap in a Southern lumber field as in any part of the world.
From the lumber camp I went to one of the big turpentine camps where conditions are as primitive and as inhuman as in the stockades.