Log Jam

I come from a family of lumberjacks.

Edward Bagley and his ten sons (he also had two daughters) lived in New Brunswick, Canada in 1842, and ran a lumber business on the St Johns River. During the freezing winter months, they chopped trees and sawed logs.



The snow made it easier to slide loaded sleighs and pile the logs along the shoreline while they waited for the ice to melt.

When the ice was gone and the rivers were flowing, the logs were sent down flumes (wooden troughs with a stream of water flowing down them) and chutes (troughs that were greased) which were built on the mountainsides. Then they were dumped in the river to be taken to sawmills downstream.



Almost every year the logs would pile up and jam in a sharp bend of the river, forming dams so thick they stopped the flow of water and created floods. The Bagley men walked across the slick, rolling logs, prying them apart with tools called peevees. Recognized by their red wool flannel undershirts, the lumberjacks scurried from log to log over the cold water, even eating lunch while they worked to turn them in the right direction.



If a man fell in the water, but didn't lose his hat, it was not counted as a fall; a drowned man's peevee was considered jinxed so they just let it float away.



River driving was dangerous work and men who fell were often drowned or crushed between logs. Edward's son David was 25 when he "came by his death driving logs in the narrows on Gibson Mill Stream, May 4, 1865."

Edward and his family joined the Mormon church in 1844. Ten years later his son John (who was just 18) set off from New Brunswick on his own, joined a group of pioneers and crossed the plains to Utah. When he arrived, he continued working as a lumberjack in Big Cottonwood Canyon, near Brighton. This story is told in a local history:

"Many Draperville residents were among 3,000 Saints celebrating the tenth anniversary of the arrival of the pioneers in the Salt Lake Valley. It was at Silver Lake in Big Cottonwood Canyon.

"On July 24th, 1857, the flag was unfurled from the summit of the highest peak. Prayer was offered and the singing and cannon roared. The juvenile rifle corps performed an excellent drill. Governor Brigham Young asked John Bagley to climb to the top of a tall pine tree and top it to mount a flag. So John climbed the tree, cut it off flat, and stood on his head on the top of the tree to show his courage and agility. In New Brunswick, where John Bagley was from, when a pine tree was cut down, the lumberjacks would top it for a log. Then if you were especially skilled, you would stand on your head on top of the topped tree. And, that is what John Bagley did."

—From: A HISTORY OF SIVOGAH TO DRAPER CITY 1849—1977
Volume Two of History of Draper, Utah

My brain has a log jam. Over the past few months I've crammed it full of random information for my novel: the flora and fauna of Texas, how you load a Colt .44, western towns in 1872, roasting a venison steak, grasshopper bounties, prairie fires and soiled doves. Now I need it to flow down the flume and out of my fingertips, but it's all dammed up. Dammed, I say!

I'm digging deep into my roots to find the lumberjack genes. Maybe if I put on a red shirt I'll be able to get things unjammed and flowing in the right direction.


*Homework:
~Write about a log jam in your life. Now make a list of five ways to get things going in the right direction. Make plans to do the first one.