POSTING #93

Eating and Sleeping in the Dog River Bush Camp

A representative of Frontier College  sent me an email recently noting that since I had been a labourer-teacher with the College for three summers---while I was going to university---he wondered whether I would like to join the College's alumni association.

I said I would be pleased to join.

That exchange made me think of my first assignment with the College, in the summer of 1956, at Dog River, a pulp and paper bush camp north of what is now Thunder Bay.

I have written about Dog River before in this blog but usually about the work we were doing----about guiding the logs down the Dog River in a river drive, and then loading them onto trucks via something called a jack ladder.

I thought it might be interesting to tell some stories about living conditions in a bush camp half a century ago.

Let's start with the cookhouse, and eating.

Napoleon is supposed to have said that armies march on their stomachs. The same could have been said of workers in a bush camp. The work was heavy and hard and the workers had to have lots of plain but tasty food.

The first essential was a skilled cook.

At Dog River, we had a Finnish woman in her mid 50s. As was common at that time, her husband also worked at the camp, as what was called a 'bull cook'. He looked after  a whole host of jobs around the camp, including cleaning and maintaining the bunkhouses, the wash house, the outhouses and the sauna.

Working with the cook were several 'cookees', young women, also Finnish, who helped in the kitchen and brought plates and bowls of food to the tables.

It was a tough life for the cook and the cookees. They had to get up in the wee hours of the morning to bake bread, pies and buns, and to prepare vegetables and cuts of meat for the day's meals.

At mealtime, one of the cookees vigorously rattled a steel rod around the inside of a cast iron triangle that was hanging outside the cookhouse.

Men rushed in, found a seat on a bench at one of the tables, loaded up their plates and began to eat.

I committed a faux pas at my first meal in the cookhouse. I asked a co-worker a question about what we were going to be doing that day. He frowned at me and motioned with his head to the door, meaning that we should talk about that later on.

I learned that conversation was not permitted in the cookhouse. You could perhaps get away with asking for, 'salt', or 'pepper', but it was better to point.

A large sign in the cookhouse in another camp up the road from us made the point succinctly: "You came here to eat, eat."

The cook and the cookees wanted us out of the cookhouse as quickly as possible so they could clean up, and have a rest before the next meal.

After eating for 8 months in a university cafeteria with skimpy portions of bland food kept warm in a steam-table, I was overwhelmed by the amount and freshness of the food. It was 'all-you-can-eat'---so long as you could eat quickly!

When I talked with the men about the food (back in the bunkhouse, after the meal of course!) they agreed that it was pretty good at Dog River, better than in many camps they had worked in.

They said that it was tough, and expensive, to find a cook who knew how to cook and could stand the hours and hard work.

One old timer said that if he were running a camp, he would hire a so-so cook and spend some of the money he was saving to bring in attractive cookees. He would tell them to make sure they brushed their chests against the men as they leaned over the table to put plates of food on the table (I have sanitized his language somewhat).

"No one in the camp would ever complain about the food!"

The others disagreed, with one of them saying, "That would work for about a week!"

In the bush, apparently, stomachs trumped sex.

When we were working outside the camp, for example driving logs down the river, we would make our own lunches after breakfast (breakfast was usually fried eggs, bacon or ham, toast and coffee). We made sandwiches with thick slices of freshly-baked bread, sliced meat, or cheese, and shoved those into our backpacks with a few pieces of hard tack (especially popular with the Swedish and Finnish workers), and two or three slices of pie. With enough food for lunch plus the usual morning and afternoon snacks and a large Thermos of coffee, we were set for the day.

Let's move on to sleeping arrangements.

The bunkhouse I lived in had about 40 single beds, steel frame cots, twenty down each side of a long, narrow room. Each bed had a thin mattress, sheets, and gray, army-style blankets. At each end of the room, there was a stove made from a cut down 45 gallon barrel on its side that the bull cook kept fueled with hardwood logs.

Behind the bunkhouse there was a washhouse with barrels of hot water into which we dipped white enamel basins for daily washing and shaving. Behind that was a 6-hole privy at the end of a long path. For  a weekly 'all-over clean' we would use the sauna---on the bank of the river---sitting in the hot room until we were lobster-red, and then soaping and rinsing off in an outer room.

Discussions in the bunkhouse were usually friendly with younger workers sometimes teasing  older fellows who still cut trees in the old way with a two-person crosscut saw, and then trimmed them with a Swede saw and an axe. The young bucks praised the speed and ease of chainsaws while the older workers complained about the noise and smell of them. 

However, one evening there was a tense argument--- about the living conditions in the camp. The younger workers wanted to press the union to fight in the next contract for bedrooms with not more than 2 workers per room, and with indoor toilets and showers. They argued that the union should be prepared to strike on the issue.

Some older workers argued that the young were demanding too much, they were too impatient. The young people didn't realize how much better conditions were than those that the older workers had faced in the 1920s and 30s.

One of the older workers said that when he started in the bush in the 1920s, they had rough, two-tier wooden bunk beds. There were no mattresses so the workers had to go into the bush and cut pine and spruce boughs. The workers also had to supply their own blankets, one on top of the boughs and several more to go over them while they slept. Apparently, most men didn't bother with sheets, they slept in their long-john underwear, between the blankets.

As the discussion ran on, there was increasing bitterness. The younger workers wanted change while the older ones were afraid of a long strike and the loss of income it would mean.

Finally, the young fellows went off for a walk to cool down.

I don't know what happened in the next union negotiations with management, but within a decade mechanization totally changed life and work in the bush, and made the issue moot.

The cutting of trees had always taken place in the winter so that logs could be skidded by horses onto the ice of a lake, to be carried down stream in the spring to a jack ladder that would  pull them out of the river and load them onto trucks.

A number of the logs, on each of which the company had to pay a royalty to the provincial government, always ended up on the bottom of rivers and lakes.

For that and other reasons, the company decided to abandon the river drive and to truck the logs right from the bush to the pulp and paper mill. This meant that there was no need to cut the trees in the winter, they could be cut anytime when machines could get to them.

Machines were introduced that could fell, de-limb and cut trees into logs, clear access roads and load logs onto trucks.

A few skilled forestry 'harvesters'---some of them women---could operate the machines. They didn't have to stay in camps---they could commute from home just like workers going to a factory.

Having machines harvest trees had many obvious economic benefits, for example, in keeping Canada competitive with other pulp and paper producing nations.

But there were social costs.

Many of the workers I met had their lives 'together'. They could have found other jobs but they chose to work in the bush, and that work gave them a good income that let them marry, buy a house, raise children and live a comfortable life.

But a good number of the workers had personal problems that made it tough for them to deal with the 'outside world'.

For example, there were men who couldn't cope with alcohol. There was an absolute ban on alcohol  in the camp---to have booze of any kind was a firing offense--- so they were not tempted to drink.

When they left the camp they usually went on a binge.

I have already told the story about a man like this who slept in the bed next to me. He left the camp for a holiday in the city, and came back two weeks later with the DTs. He woke me out of a deep sleep one night, shouting, "There's a bear!"

He pointed at the window, but there was, of course, no bear.

After he had dried out, he was fine.

Then there was a friendly man in his early 40s who had been a policeman in Port Arthur, now part of Thunder Bay. Something had happened, I don't know what, and he had left or been pushed out of the police force---you never asked co-workers personal questions. Whatever the problem was, it was serious enough to prevent him from finding a job in the city, and he ended up working in the bush.

He was a good worker and that earned him the respect of the other men.

As an aside, one weekend he took a few of us on a car tour of Port Arthur's red light district, which he used to patrol as a policeman. As we drove slowly down narrow back alleys, women sitting on porches would recognize him and wave. (I have to emphasize that it was a CAR tour---we did not stop.)

The citizens and police of Port Arthur and Fort William apparently tolerated prostitution at that time, recognizing that single men who had been cooped up in bush camps for weeks had needs.

And there were other workers in the camp with an array of psychological issues who needed the order, support and direction that a bush camp environment gave.

In the camp, these workers pulled their weight---or they would have been fired.

Today, as I walk along the downtown streets of Hamilton or Toronto I see 'street people', many of whom I think could have found satisfying employment in the bush camps of yesterday.

I feel badly that we, as a society, haven't been able to come up with some better, more humane alternatives for them---instead of just the street, jail or a hospital.

Frontier College, which in the beginning, more than a century ago, focused on helping workers in bush, mining and railway construction camps, is now one of the organizations that is trying to find some alternatives---through, for example, literacy camps and various other learning programs.

Norman Bethune, Dr. Benjamin Spock and Peter Gzowski, who were all labourer-teachers, would I am sure be very supportive of their College's new focus.

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On a personal note, I feel very fortunate that I was able to experience the centuries-old bush camp, with its river drive, before it slipped into history.

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See you on November 7th for Posting #94 with more stories from our family’s universe! If you have comments or suggestions, please leave a comment at the bottom of this posting,  or email me at johnpathunter@gmail.com.