Captain Mugford: Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors

by William Henry Giles Kingston

Chapter Sixteen.

Mr Clare’s Story.

The year before I left Canada, in the fall, as the autumn is called there, I started with a number of other young men in our neighbourhood, the county town of C—, to go about seventy-five miles up the Ottawa, what is called lumbering. The winter work is cutting down the trees and getting them to the riverbank ready for the spring thaw, when they are gathered in rafts and floated down to a seaport. We went provided for six months’ severe life in the snowbound forests. Almost every man, too, took his gun or rifle. The journey to the site of our winter’s encampment was made on foot; our clothes, provision, stoves, and cooking utensils being loaded on an ox-cart that accompanied us, the oxen being necessary to haul the timber to the river, as our work extended back.

After a week’s journey, we came to the spot selected for our winter’s work, on a bend of the river, ten miles above where the M— joins the Ottawa. Of course it is an utterly wild region there, never trodden except by hunters, and away beyond the usual search of lumbermen. I do not know why my uncle, the lumber-boss of our expedition, went sixty miles beyond ordinary timber-cuttings. Perhaps it was to procure, on a special order, a remarkably fine choice of oak and pine, and that that spot had been marked by him in some hunting trip or Indian survey as producing the finest timber in the colony. It was grandly beautiful there, where a valley, running at a right angle to the river’s course, spread out at the bank to a semicircle, containing a hundred acres and more of most magnificent trees—a vast forest city, inhabited by immense patriarchs, grey-bearded with moss. Their dignity and stateliness and venerable air were most impressive; and when they sang to the strong wind, chanting like the Druids of old, even I, who had so long lived in a country of forests, was filled with awe. And we, pigmies of twenty and thirty years, had invaded this sanctuary to slay its lords, who counted age by centuries, and had lived and reigned here before our forefathers first trode the continent. The quietude and hazy light of Indian summer floated through the aisles and arches of the solemn forest city as we first saw it—a leaf falling lazily now and then across the slanting beams of the setting sun—a startled caribou, on the discovery of our approach, hurrying from his favourite haunt with lofty strides. All else in the picture before us was silent and motionless. Our winter’s home! Those lofty coverts to be levelled to a bare, stump-marked plane! The old vikings of the primeval forests, to be fashioned by the axe, to battle with the fury of the ocean, and reverberate with reports of hostile broadsides—to bear the flag of their country in peace and commerce, too, to far-distant lands—all as triumphantly as they had for ages wrestled only with the winds!

You laugh, Drake; and you are right, for I doubt if many of us thought then in that strain. No, there is not much sentiment among lumbermen, and as we regarded those mighty oaks and pines, it was principally with speculative calculation as to how many solid feet of prime timber “that ’ar thicket would yield.”

The first task was that of building log-houses—two for our twenty hands. In each was an immense chimney-piece, a cooking-stove, and a bed stretching the width of the house on the floor, with a mattress of hemlock boughs. The rifles and shotguns hanging over the wide fireplace, and a long pine table and rustic benches, completed the furniture of our houses. The oxen and a company of hounds and mongrels had their quarters in a low log barn between the houses. Our supplies of fresh meat for the winter depended upon the good use of the firearms, and each week some one man of our number was detailed as hunter.

That winter of 1824 proved the coldest ever remembered in America, but the long mild autumn gave no threats of the season that was to succeed it. Before the first snow—which was, I remember, on November 20—our little forest colony was comfortably established, and a score of big trees laid stretched in the leaves.

In our company were many fine, intelligent young men—all taught somewhat, some tolerably well educated. None had been to college. I little thought at that time of becoming a scholar and a clergyman. They were frank, generous, honourable fellows—honest and brave, but perfectly ungodly and reckless of Heaven’s displeasure or the life hereafter. After the day’s labour, the evening was dissipated in card-playing, swearing, and hard drinking. Many a scene of riot and orgies did those log-walls witness. Such is generally the life in a lumber-camp: hard, wholesome labour in the day, loud revelling at night. The rough, adventurous life, with no home charm or female influence to refine or restrain, is probably the principal reason of such low practice of life in the lumberman’s camp.

The worst character in our company—and he happened to be in the same house with me—was a man of twenty-eight years of age, the son of a French father and American mother, and whose mother’s grandfather had been an Indian warrior of some renown in the early history of our province. In him were united the savageness of the red man, the gaiety of the Frenchman, and the shrewdness of the Yankee. He was a large, handsome, and immensely muscular man, with dark complexion, small straight features, quick black eyes, and long raven-coloured beard and hair that hung down to his shoulders. Utterly wicked and unprincipled as he was, his merriment, off-hand and daring, lent him a certain fascination and popularity among us. He was very witty, his laugh was rich and constant, he sang well, and played in a dashing way the violin. Every night he found some one to gamble with him. Every night he drank a pint of whisky, and kept the cabin in an uproar.

I greatly disliked this Guyon Vidocq; because he exerted a most baneful influence in our company, all of whom except the boss were younger than himself.