St. Croix Riverway Time and the River: A History of the Saint Croix

CHAPTER 2:
River of Pine (continued)

A River Jammed With Logs

Every spring the newspapers of towns along the lower St. Croix River and in the various trade journals of the lumber industry all fixated on a single question, "whether or not the logs will come out." Most lumbermen entered the months of May and June heavily mortgaged to pay for the costs of a winter of cutting and hauling logs and preparing their mills for sawing. All chance for profit was hostage to the delivery of the logs by the drive. All news concerning the status of the drives was eagerly grasped at and widely repeated. Lumbermen fretted when a low snow fall over the winter inhibited hauling to the river bank because it directly impacted the amount of logs harvested and indirectly made the task of driving all the more difficult due to less snow melt and lower water levels. Speculation concerning the status of the drive on a major river like the St. Croix or the Chippewa had a direct effect on the price of lumber in St. Louis and Chicago. Among the most discouraging and dismaying reports that could be received in Stillwater, Hudson, and other mill towns was the news that there was a logjam on the St. Croix. [55]

There were many locations throughout the St. Croix valley that were notorious among the river drivers as likely spots for a logjam. The Big Falls on the Apple River and the Kettle River Sloughs were regularly anticipated to hang up logs and men were stationed there to try and keep the pine moving. The most troublesome location in the valley, however, was on the St. Croix itself at its dramatic rock walled Dalles. Some of the most spectacular and untractable jams in logging history occurred in the St. Croix Dalles located below St. Croix Falls. The Dalles are a very narrow stretch of river where fast water confined by the sheer walls of trap rock created the conditions for a tremendous bottleneck. Frequently jams resulted at a spot known as Angle Rock -- a large promontory that juts out from the Minnesota shore into the channel and forces the river makes a sharp right angle turn. During high water years when the river pigs were able to quickly and with relative ease bring down the harvest from the upper river; jams were more likely to occur. Under such conditions the river was crowded with more logs and it pushed them with greater than usual power. Small jams could occur more quickly and each had the potential to become a massive pile-up as millions of board feet of pine flowed relentlessly toward the blocked channel. [56]

The first great jam on the river occurred at Angle Rock in 1865. It was a high water year and the river below the promontory became clogged. The current kept trying to force sixteen-foot long pine logs forward. With the full force of the spring freshets pushing the pine, logs were sent shooting upward piling high atop the jam. Others were driven below the surface of the churning water, abutting the bottom of the streambed, and all but damming the river. Behind the tumult of Angle Rock millions of feet of logs accumulated. The Clam River Drive crashed into the Kettle River logs, while the Snake River Drive and all other logs on the river were borne relentlessly toward the jam, which with each day became larger and larger. The 1865 jam extended from Angle Rock to the falls of the St. Croix, a distance of one and a quarter miles. [57]

The 1865 jam attracted attention throughout the region. Excursion boats were run up the river from Hudson, Prescott, and St. Paul to allow town folk to gawk at the mighty river of logs frozen in suspended animation. Photographers set up their cumbersome box cameras on the shore and the more adventurous of the tourists clambered out to the middle of the river to have their pictures taken amid expanse of timber piled pall-mall. Unfortunately for the lumbermen of the Upper Mississippi the 1865 jam was not a freak occurrence. It was rather the warning of what would become an annual danger as more and more logs were forced into the narrow river and more and more dams, all opened at the same time, forced a greater flow down the stream. During the 1870s the St. Croix Lumbermen's Board of Trade pooled their resources and dispatched crews of lumberjacks to choke points like Angle Rock. These men usually broke up jams before they could blockade the entire river. Although in 1877 and 1883 two greater jams occurred, closing the St. Croix for several weeks and backing the river up to the falls. [58]

The mother of all jams occurred in 1886, after the lumbermen had nearly a half-century of experience driving the river. Angle Rock was again the culprit, although in 1886 more than 150 million feet of pine were pent-up behind the jam. The masses of logs extend all the way to falls and two miles beyond. The great clog in the lumbermen's main artery sent a panic through the valley. Apoplectic mill owners hurried to the scene and shouted themselves horse. A babble of instructions rained down on the rivermen desperately trying to break the jam, and echoed through the St. Croix country, repeated by every small-town newspaper. A journalist for the Stillwater Gazette described the mess as "the jammedest jam he had ever saw." From the humblest mill worker laid off by the dearth of pine to the banker holding lumbermen's past-due notes the entire valley fixated on the mammoth jam, their lives, like the river, held motionless by the impasse. This threat to the livelihood of most, however, was a boon for the village of Taylor's Falls. It had never been much of a mill town and during the 1880s its commercial significance as a local farm service center was rapidly eclipsed as new villages sprung up in the interior, along railroad lines. Jams like that in 1886 gave the village a foretaste of what life could be like as a tourist destination. Special railroad excursion trains brought as many as a thousand people per day to view the site. "Give us each year our yearly jam," became an innkeeper's irreverent prayer. The boarding houses of the town were jammed with overnight guests and their dining rooms were crowded for three luncheon seatings. [59]

Sharing center stage with the miles of log-clogged river was the sight of hundreds of men laboring to break the jam. Six weeks of work went into the effort. No technology was spared to open the river. The head of the jam was repeatedly dynamited to no avail. Steamboats were brought up river to try and pull the logs free. Overhead wires were installed to lift logs up out of the chaos. Teams of horses as well as two steam donkey engines supplied the necessary power while large electric lights, the first many country people had ever seen, shined down from the overhanging rock ledges, allowing the men in the gorge to work in twenty-four hour shifts. All the while the weekend excursionists opined loftily on how the men where missing the mythical "key log," the single strategically located straw in the haystack that would release the jam. Few river pigs believed in the key log myth and it was doubtful that there were any believers among the weary crews who sought to break the 1886 jam. They cleared the river through the consistent application of ingenuity and determined labor, gradually pulling logs off of the pile at an accelerating rate until the mass once more began to move. [60]

Figure 19. During the heyday of logging in the valley in the 1880s Harper's Magazine saluted the lumberjacks and rivermen with this illustration titled: "Wisconsin—On the Lumber Drive in the St. Croix."