The Lumberjack Sky Pilot

by Thomas D. Whittles

Jack is not always a willing victim. Often by knockout drops he is reduced to insensibility and robbed. He may complain of the treatment, but he is helpless through lack of evidence, and is told to "go up river," or is hustled unfeelingly out of town. "He's only a lumberjack and is better off when all in." This is all the sympathy the Ishmaelite receives. No place is open to him except the one he should avoid. The churches are too weak to meet the large demands, and so no place of refuge opens its doors of hope to the prodigal. The balm of sympathy comes to him limitedly; humanity is as cold as the frozen streams of his winter's retreat. Civilization is viewed only as a place of unbridled license where the law favors the spoiler. God is dead. Christ is only a word of convenient profanity. The church has forgotten the prodigal while caring for the souls of the saved. Thus he views life. In his wretchedness he labors for the keepers of the gates of death and is satisfied, if, by the sweat of his brow, he can win an hour of forgetfulness in the place of riot and shame.

No picture was ever painted so dark as to exclude all light. God made it so. Even in the neglected sons of the lumber-camps is seen a hopeful ray—for their hearts are as rich in charity as their lives are dark with sin. Their sympathies can easily be touched. It is through the open freedom of their generous nature that the reforming power of the gospel can enter. The only remedy for the campmen is the sustaining power of the Man of Nazareth. When they shall learn to know the Christ of God as the Savior of men, the darkened lives of the foresters will be transformed, and the fruits they shall bring forth will be the wished for deeds of righteousness.

When the Rev. Francis Edmund Higgins, the Lumberjack Sky Pilot, began his work among these neglected Ishmaelites, no religious society was making an effort to raise the moral and spiritual condition of the campmen. The Catholic church, then as now, devoted itself to the hospital work in the nearby towns, but no denomination invaded the camps to lead the bunkmen to right living. At the time of this writing the Presbyterian church is the only religious organization having special missionaries in the lumbercamps.

Regardless of denominational prejudice, the work of Frank Higgins appeals to the whole Christian church, not only on account of its peculiar type, but also because of the interesting man conducting it. Fitted by nature and training for his work, he is striving with heart and hand in a large and lonely field. He is the pastor of a large and scattered flock which for long and weary years has known no shepherd. Depraved men are being reached, lifted and kept for God through him—men alone are his parishioners.

Seldom is a pastor more beloved by his people. The rough but kindly hearts of the lumberjacks go out to this fearless minister who self-sacrificingly breaks the bread of life to the husk-fed prodigals of the far north country. The lumberjacks will fight for their Sky Pilot; and even the ranks of the enemy—the saloonmen, the gamblers, the brothel keepers—are compelled to admire this earnest Christian minister who is valiantly fighting a hard battle for God and righteousness.

The Rev. Frank Higgins is a resolute character, full of zeal and undaunted courage. God gave him a strong body and he is using it for the Giver. That rare virtue we call tact, or sanctified common sense, shows itself in all his dealings with men. False dignity is absent from him, but the dignity of sterling purpose and determined endeavor is ever present. He is no slave to custom, but is a man who does things in his own way, and does them well. The title the loggers have conferred upon him is one of affection; he is the Lumberjack Sky Pilot, and if you heard his forest parishioners speak that name, you would realize that his ordination was threefold—ordained of God, by the presbytery and by the lumberjacks.

Frank E. Higgins was born in the Queen City of the West, Toronto, Ontario, on the nineteenth day of August, 1865. He was the seventh child to come into the home, but the only one to survive the vicissitudes of infancy. His parents were both Irish, but his father, Samuel Higgins, was born in the Dominion, and for some years prior to his death kept a hotel in Toronto on the site where the Walker House now stands. In this house Frank was born. Ann Higgins, the mother, first saw the sun in the Ulster settlement of Ireland, her parents bringing her to Canada when she was four years old. Samuel Higgins died when Frank was seven years of age.

Two years after the death of Frank's father, Ann Higgins married John Castle, an Englishman, who shortly afterwards moved the family to Shelburne, Dufferin County, Ontario. Here in the untouched wilderness the settlers began to force an opening for cabin and crops. The country was new. Few white families were near, but on the Higgins homestead were several camps of Sioux Indians. The land was forest covered, the towering cedar and hemlock stretched their graceful fingers heavenward, the spreading maples delighted the eye, and the white robes of the slender birch lent variety to the sylvan scene. With painful effort the sentinels were felled and squared for cabin and sheds, and fields of grain succeeded the fallen forest.

The companions of Frank Higgins were the children of the Sioux Indians, whose tepees were near the homestead. With the children of the Indians he took his lessons in woodcraft, learned to draw the bow, or childishly labored at the tasks of the growing braves. One of his early recollections is of secretly carrying a loaf of bread from his home to trade with an Indian youth for bow and arrows. Perhaps the subsequent strapping he received had something to do with the permanency and vividness of the recollection. For three years the Indians were his constant playmates. From the warlike Sioux, fearlessness was imbibed, their love of the forest became his, and an ineffaceable delight in tree and stream was stamped in the character of the growing boy. "I feel it now," he said to me, but recently when we were in the city together, "I want to get back to the solitudes where the trees have voices and every stream a story. I love the camps rather than the cities. I have never passed from my boyhood love—my first love—the trees, the hills, the brooks. In the pineries I feel as if I were a boy back in the old days again."