B A C K T H E N
River Driver
A river driver, peavey in hands, on the East Branch of the Penobscot, about 1901. Fred Sewall, a woodsman of the era, looked at this photo and declared that the driver’s woolen shirt was scarlet, his hat a Stetson. Dry socks nest in the back pockets of his heavy woolen pants; pant cuffs are gatored to keep them from catching on his sharp boot caulks. A generation earlier, C.W. Willis had already described this fellow perfectly:
The other day I fell in with one of those sunburnt, flannel-shirted young fellows who are so familiar to Bangorians—a river driver—and had a short chat with him. He was of a muscular build and carried with him that hearty manner peculiar to the Penobscot rivermen, and he talked quite intelligently, if unduly loud, as he punched the floor full of little holes with his caulked shoes. To one unused to such things a river driver’s costume looks very uncomfortable—the heavy trousers and shirt, woolen socks, and ponderous shoes or boots. He is always wet, apparently, even after he has been off the logs for days. It is his natural condition. “Oh, that’s to let the water out and keep my feet from scalding,” he replied. River driving he thought was a pretty tough job until one got used to it, but after initiation it was not so bad, and a man who had driven logs for a little while wants to do nothing else. The [Bangor] Industrial Journal, Aug. 7. 1885.
Gerald Averill’s description of drivers on the Penobscot a generation later took a different slant:
The younger men who followed the camps and rivers had just two thoughts in mind and just two topics of conversation—rum and women. You might hunt the world over and fail to find a breed to compare with them in sheer blasphemy, profanity, lechery and drunkenness ....
It was generally believed at this time that a youth could not rightly call himself a man until he had contracted a good case of gonorrhea, and there was no question as to the manly status of most of them. They were strong and they were tough and they had to be. A man must be practically indestructible in order to work up to his waist in icy water while suffering from an active venereal disease. They wrapped themselves in dirty rags and worked in the cold water all day, slept in their wet clothes all night on a thin padding of brush, and swore to God they would rather have it than a bad cold. They rolled her high wide and handsome until their late thirties when they would feel the first twinge of rheumatism. Their kidneys would begin to give difficulty, stomach trouble would make itself known and they would curse the cooks for putting saltpeter in the food.
In the early 1900s, Fred Sewall, a tall and strapping young woodsman from Island Falls, was returning home from Bangor when he mistakenly boarded one of two cars that had been reserved for drivers bound for Norcross. On the platform, standing in their stockings with their sharp-caulked boots slung around their necks, they looked as sweet as lambs. As soon as all were aboard, however, the wise old conductor locked the doors and the “river hogs” began to fight, destroying the interior of the car in the process. They battled the entire journey, swinging their caulked shoes like medieval maces. Blood flowed copiously from scalp wounds. Fred snagged a heavy bottle as it was sailing past his ear, backed into a corner, and held the fort. There was no way he could get out at Island Falls. At Norcross, when the doors were finally unlocked and the bloodied company tallied, one man was missing, having either exited or been ejected through a window of the moving train.
Certain rules of conduct were observed. While property—like railroad cars—might suffer incidentally from the rowdyism, there was no vandalism, per se. Butting, eye-gouging, kicking and stomping with caulks—the results of a caulking were termed a case of “loggers’ small pox”—were permitted, even encouraged. The use of knives was not. Although some injuries were indeed serious, most just looked that way. No fighting was allowed once the drive began.
William Sewall, Fred Sewall’s father and long a boss river driver on the Aroostook, recalled that among the best drivers he ever had were a crew of Indians from the Tobique River, New Brunswick. He was growing elderly at the time, and he recalled that “they looked out for me and favored me as my own sons would have done.”
Text by William H. Bunting from A Days Work, Part 1, A Sampler of Historic Maine Photographs, 1860–1920, Part II. Published by Tilbury House Publishers, 12 Starr St., Thomaston, Maine. 800-582-1899.