The Minute Man on the Frontier

by William George Puddefoot

The one great difficulty of the problem is the transitory character of the work—like Count Rumford's stoves, if they could only have been patented and money made out of them, every house would use them; so if the lumber village had come to stay, many a church would have gone in and built. But more than once a man in authority has said, "Oh, I have looked that field over, and it won't amount to much." No one who has not had experience in the field can form any adequate idea of its vastness or its crying needs. The one great trouble of the whole question is the massing of so many men away from the softening influence of wife and mother. It is unnatural; and nature's laws, as sacred as the Decalogue, are broken in unnatural crimes, and sins unknown to the common run of men.

The lumber business may be divided into three distinct classes of workers,—the mill-men, the camp-men, and the river-men. The last are the smallest company, but the hardest to reach. They flit from stream to river, from the river to the lake, from scenes of sylvan beauty to the low groggery—and worse. Their temporary home is often made of blackened logs papered with Police Gazettes, which come in vast numbers, and form the largest part of their not very select reading. Books of the Zola type, but without their literary excellence, are legion. Good books and good literature would be a boon in these camps.

To give you an idea of the rapid march of the lumber-camp, come with me into the primeval forest. It is a winter day. The snow is deep, and the lordly pines are dressed like brides in purest white; one would think, to look at their pendent branches, that Praxiteles and all his pupils had worked for a century in sculpturing these lovely forms. Not a sound is heard save our sleigh-bells, or some chattering squirrel that leaps lightly over the powdery snow; a gun fired would bring down a harmless avalanche. It is a sight of unsurpassed beauty in nature's privacy; but alas, how soon the change!

An army of brawny men invade the lovely scene. Rude houses of logs are quickly erected; and men with axe and saw soon change the view, and with peavey and cant-hook the logs are loaded and off for the rollway. Inside the largest house are bunks, one above another; two huge stoves with great iron cylinders, one at each end, give warmth; while in picturesque confusion, socks and red mackinaws and shirts hang steaming by the dozens. There is a cockloft, where the men write their letters, and rude benches, where they sit and smoke and tell yarns till bedtime. In a few weeks at the farthest the grand old forest is a wreck; a few scrubby oaks or dwindling beech-trees are all that are left. The buildings rot down, the roofs tumble in, and a few camp-stragglers trying to get a living out of the stumpy ground are all that are left; and solitude reigns supreme.

On stormy days hundreds of the men go into the nearest village, and sin revels in excess. In many a small town, mothers call their little ones in from the streets, which are soon full of men drunken and swearing, ready for fight or worse. At such times they hold the village in a reign of terror, and often commit crimes of a shocking nature, and no officer dares molest them. A stranger coming at such a time would need to conduct himself very discreetly or he would get into trouble. A volume might be filled with the outrageous things done in these small lumber-towns. Ireland is not the only place that suffers from absentee landlords.

The condition of the children is pitiable, brought up in an atmosphere of drunkenness and debauchery; swearing as natural as breathing; houses packed so closely that you can reach across from one window to another. The refuse is often emptied between the houses; diseases of all kinds flourish, and death is ever busy. Eight or ten nationalities are often found in these towns,—men who cannot spell their names, and men who went to St. Paul's and admired Canon Liddon, or New York men that went to Beecher's church.

Here a house which cost less than a hundred dollars, and inside of it an organ costing one hundred and twenty-five dollars, and a forty-dollar encyclopædia. The next house is divided by stalls like a stable, with bed in one, stove in another, and kitchen in the third. With a population as mixed as this, and in constant flux, what, you ask, can the church do? I answer, much, very much, if you can only get a church there; but when the church which gives much more than any other gives but a quarter of a cent per day per member, is it any wonder that hundreds of churchless lumber-towns call in vain for help from the sanctuary? Some small villages can be found where every family is living in unlawful relations.

Now, remember this, the lumberman is made of the same clay that we are, and it is his environment that brings to the front the worst that is in him. He is reached by practical Christianity as easily as any other man. The shame and reproach belong to us for neglecting him, and there is no other way that we so dishonor him whom we call Master as to say his commands are not practicable. Is it asking too much from the rich men who get their money by the toil of these men, that out of their millions they should spend thousands for the moral welfare of those who make them rich? And yet too often they do not even know their own foremen, and in many cases have never visited the property they own.

I once asked a rich lumber-man for a subscription for missions, saying I was sorry he was not at the church when I took up my collection. "Jinks! I am glad I was not there," he said; "I gave away ten dollars Saturday night."

Now, this man had been cutting off from his land for thirty years, and had just sold a quarter of a million dollars' worth of it, and still had land left. But on the other hand, be it known that the men in these villages who make no profession of religion actually give dollar for dollar with the Christian church-members to sustain the frontier churches. Saloon-keepers, and often Roman Catholics, help to support the missionary church.