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Excerpts from

"A White Pine Empire"

By: John Emmett Nelligan

     John Emmett Nelligan (1850-1937), was a pioneer in lumbering in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.  We are grateful to John N. Dwyer, publisher of the North Star Press of St. Cloud, Minnesota, for permitting us to reprint portions of  "A White Pine Empire" where Nelligan wrote of areas, events and people in Breen Township in the earliest days of its settlement.  Anyone who has ever lived in Breen Township or in any part of the north country of Michigan, or anyone who has children or grandchildren connected with any family that ever resided here, is urged to read and may purchase a copy of "A White Pine Empire".  It may be ordered from The North Star Press, P.O. Box 451, St. Cloud, MN  56301

     In the spring of 1884, I hired out to C.T. Pendleton and Son as boss of a crew of men on the east branch of the Sturgeon River, a tributary of the Menominee.  I worked for them through the following winter and in the spring of 1885 I entered the employ of the A.M. Harmon Lumber Company as foreman.  The Harmon Company was then operating on the east branch of the Sturgeon, and the White-Friant Lumber Company of Grand Rapids, Michigan, commenced operations on the same stream that spring.  The Harmon Company had about ten million feet of logs in the river ahead of the White-Friant Company and the latter demanded that river be opened, contending that it was a navigable stream.  The Harmon firm then served an injunction to prevent the White-Friant Company from action.  The injunction was sustained by the court and tied them up for that season.

     The White-Friant Lumber Company was owned by Thomas Friant and T. Stewart White and was about the finest lumbering organization in that region.  White and Friant were noted for having the best of lumbermen in their employ; for paying the best wages and supplying the best food and sleeping quarters; for the fine logging horses they had and the great pride they took in their work.  The lumber they manufactured was railed to Escanaba, Michigan on the Northwestern line and there loaded on boats which carried it down the lakes to the eastern markets.

     When Flannigan and I commenced logging on the east branch of the Sturgeon, a few years after I left the Harmon Company, White and Friant were still operating there.  During the spring drive out logs, which had to be driven into Menominee, got all mixed up with White-Friant company's timber, which was to be sawed at their mill at Hardwood.  They generously offered to help us out of the mess, so I gave them full charge of our timber and our crew.  White and Friant had a river foreman named John Boyd, one of the best logging generals in Michigan, and it didn't take him long to thoroughly straighten out the situation.  He placed our men wherever he could use them to the best advantage and soon had our logs separated from those of his own company and our drive ahead of the White-Friant drive.  Everything worked beautifully.  It was a typical example of the splendid sportsmanship and cooperation of the White-Friant Company and we appreciated it greatly.

     T. Stewart White was the father of Stewart Edward White, the noted author, whose works, "The Blazed Trail" and "The Riverman" have done much to make immortal the American Lumberjack.  When I was logging on the Pine, Brule, and Paint Rivers, all tributaries of the Menominee, Stewart Edward White spent about forty days in the woods with me.  He hired out as a regular hand and did his work capably and conscientiously.  When I offered him his check at the end of his stay with us, he smilingly refused it, saying he had been working for his health.  At the time I thought he was a bit light-headed.  I wasn't used to having men turn down checks.  But later I found out that he had been absorbing atmosphere and gathering material for the books which were to make him famous.  He was a fine-looking, quiet lad and intimated to none of us that he was a write, cannily realizing that such a revelation would defeat his own ends and render him a stranger among the jacks.  Your American lumberjack is not an easy man to understand.  But young White studied him and understood him and made him live in his books.  He was very popular among the men, for he was a great story teller and such a man, if he is not too forward, is always well-liked by the men in a logging camp.  In addition to a first-class education he had, as is shown by his books, an extensive knowledge of practical lumbering, which he had gained, I suppose, from his father, who was a skillful and experienced lumberman.

     My first job as foreman for the Harmon Company was to clear off the ground on which Foster City was to stand.  This completed, we built some shacks for the men and cooks, constructed a dam, and began clearing ground for the mill and lumber yard.  The Harmon Lumber Company's new superintendent, whom I shall call Gorman here, although that was not his name, arrived on the scene early in the summer.  He was a life insurance man from Cleveland, Ohio, who held a small block of stock, about ten thousand dollars, in the Harmon Company, and his ignorance of logging and lumbering was immense and amazing.  He couldn't tell a pine log from a hemlock log and, what was worse, his word wasn't worth, to put it politely, the explosive necessary to project it to Hades.  He got in bad from the first by building dams on land which belonged neither to him nor to the Harmon Company.  The White-Friant Lumber Company then bought the land on which the dams were built and raised "merry heck" with Gorman.  But in spite of such a boss, we worried along somehow and by fall Foster City had become reality.

     We went into the woods for the winter and drove our winter's cut on the Sturgeon next spring.  During the summer the mill at Foster City had to close down for lack of logs to cut.  I had a crew of men on the river getting logs down to the mill and the work was very difficult due to the low water in the stream.  The wild raspberries were luscious and plentiful along the river banks and Gorman wanted me to take part of my log driving crew off the river and put them at work picking raspberries.  Think of it!  Here was a lumberman, or at least one who claimed to be a lumberman, with his mill closed down for lack of logs, who wanted to take his driving crew off the river and indefinitely postpone the re-opening of his mill for the sake of a few raspberries.  It was almost incredible.  The absurdity of such a proposal should be greatly appreciated by anyone with the slightest knowledge of logging and of the importance of taking down the drive.  Of course, I paid no attention to the nit-wit and went on with the logs.

     We completed the drive about the last of October and the driving crew, about seventy five in number, was paid off at Foster City.  There were no saloons there, so the first thing the men did was to go to Metropolitan, where plenty of beer and whiskey was available.  They stormed into Mike Horigan's place and by the time darkness fell everyone was pleasantly drunk and it was a merry part indeed.  In order to liven things up a bit more, the man who had been my cook on the river, a French-Canadian named Joseph Gousaw or something of the sort, who was as good a fiddler as he as a whiskey drinker, brought out his violin and began to play, finding his audience very appreciative.  Everything was going along very sweetly when a fellow named William Knox piped up and said: "Let's hear 'The Protestant Boys', Joe!"

     It was an unhappy suggestion.  "The Protestant Boys" is a song of Orangemen and there were several good Irish Catholics in the crowd.  Hell broke loose automatically.  Two brothers named John and James Enright swore by all the powers of Heaven and earth that there would be no "Protestant Boys" played that night and they commenced to clean out the place.  A good many of those present including the poor fiddler didn't know what it was all about, but that didn't prevent them all from participating in a good fight.  In a short time the place looked like a cross between a hospital and a morgue.  The Enright boys were the victors for no strain of "The Protestant Boys" was heard on the evening air that night.