Scott Burton, Forester

by Edward G. Cheyney

“He took my number, and I thought for a while that he was going to have me fired, but he was not that kind. He was a Catholic priest. When he turned up at the office the next afternoon I was scared. He simply collared me and led me away. He took me to one of the big hotels and right up to the proprietor. ‘Here he is,’ he said. Then he turned to me. ‘You’re going to be bellhop here from four o’clock in the afternoon on, and in the daytime you’re going to school. I’ll come here in the morning with you and see that you get started.’

“Well, that suited me fine. I had always wanted to go to school. He started me in in the morning and kept tab on me as long as I stayed there. When my old man found that I had a good job he tried to get me back home, but the priest settled him and I have not been home since. By the time I had reached the eighth grade I had worked in about every job there was in Duluth. But it was in the bellhop job that I got my hunch. A couple of foresters stopped there one evening and sat talking where I could hear them. Their talk showed me what I wanted to do. I talked to one of them and found out something about it.

“That meant that I had to go to the University, and if I went to the University I had to have some money. Then I had heard those fellows say that what a man wanted was experience in the woods and with men. That summer my wanderings started. I learned at the employment agency that they needed men on a construction crew in North Dakota. They booked me and I went. I drove team on a slusher for two months. It was a tough outfit, but they did not have anything on me there, and I learned to handle a team. I had never had anything to do with one before. When the harvest started I skipped the crew and went to hauling water for a threshing crew. They paid twice as much.”

“Had to work about twenty hours a day, didn’t you?”

“Yes, but I did not mind that. That fall I entered the high school. When summer came times were pretty hard and work was scarce. I jumped a freight and beat my way to the Pacific Coast. The brakeman happened to kick me off in the apple region of Washington—I did not have any more money to tip him—and I got a job there packing apples. Paid pretty well, but the Chinks were a dirty lot to work with. When the apples were all packed I beat my way up to the Puget Sound district and got another job in a lumber camp cutting wood for a donkey engine. That was some hard work but I learned a lot about the logging. I had a fierce time trying to get home. I got kicked off so many times that I finally had to pay my fare back from Missoula. Got back a month late for school then.

“Back in school again I still held onto the bellhop job. I knew that if a man was going to get along well he had to be a good mixer. I learned that at the hotel. Gee, it was tough. I had such a poor start at home that every summer I lost nearly all I had gained in the winter. What little manners I have are only smeared on the outside and they keep cracking off.

“The next summer I shipped to Colorado to work in the mines. That did not last long. It paid pretty well, but I had to work on the graveyard shift from eleven at night till seven in the morning, and I could not stand being shut up all the time. So I wandered down into the southwest part of the state, and worked in a lumber camp there. Great sport working up on top of a mesa nine thousand feet above sea-level, trying to swing a five-pound ax when you hadn’t the breath to lift a paper weight. You could puff with all your might there but the air did not seem to be any good; the more you puffed the more you got winded. I got used to it after a while. There were some queer duffers in that camp, ‘lungers’ who had come out for their health. One fellow was a school teacher from Philadelphia. We worked together on a saw crew, and he undertook to teach me Spanish. Before the summer was over he had me chattering like a greaser. I managed to teach him a little Swedish. The combination was fierce.

“I beat my way home through Kansas City, and was a month late for school again. The old priest offered me a job as a sort of secretary. Said it would help to give me a little culture, and as that was what I was after I took it. It was great experience and he saw to it that I was not overworked. He was certainly a dandy. That spring he gave me a letter to some friends of his up north of Lake Superior and I worked on a summer logging job.”

“That was great luck, wasn’t it?” Scott commented.

“Yes, I thought so at first. Those people were very good about giving me a job, but I never came so near earning my money in my life. I was ‘bull cook’ and messenger boy. They had me up at daybreak, which is shortly after two o’clock in that country in the summertime, and kept me going till dark, about ten. I had to cut the wood for the kitchen stove and keep the whole camp supplied with water, sweep out all the buildings every day and do anything else that blamed cook could think of. He had the indigestion so badly he could not see straight—most of those camp cooks have from ‘lunching’ so much between meals—and it had ruined his disposition. The only rest I got was when he sent me out to the woods at noon with the men’s dinner. I usually stayed out most of the afternoon watching the logging. The boss was onto the game, but knew what the cook was and did not kick. The cook did, though. I used to be so sore sometimes when I had been out a little later than usual that I would eat supper standing up. But when fall came I knew something about summer logging, and more about the northern lumberjacks, especially cooks.