Part Four - One Hundred Years of Michigan Work in Art: 1850 to 1950

The Michigan Worker on Land

“Logging,” David Fredenthal, 1941, oil on canvas, Manistique Post Office mural.

“Steady hard work,” says the narrator in Hewers of Wood (1903) “is a great preventative of trouble.”[i] For the men who worked in Michigan’s pineries from 1850 to the turn of the century, there was no shortage of hard work and no shortage of trouble. From moral tales to lusty ballads, the lumberjack has been variously characterized as vulnerable and dangerous, exemplary and cautionary, bulwarks against immorality and agents of it. They were romanticized as “cavaliers”[ii]  and decried as “utterly wild and sometimes bestial”[iii] as well as “cruel, coarse and unbridled.”[iv]

Author of Michigan’s unofficial state song, “Michigan, My Michigan,” Muskegon poet Douglas Malloch (1877-1938) found a balance point between these two extremes in his poem “The Lumberjack”:

An untamed creature of the forest wilds,
He lives to that wild place a soul akin—
A man whose days are often steeped in sin
And yet whose heart is tender as a child’s.
His strength is like the strength of mighty pines,
His outward form a bark of many scars;
His head he carries proudly in the stars,
The while his feet are meshed in tangled vines.[v]

“Lumberman’s poet,” Douglas Malloch.

Though Malloch was known as “the lumberman’s poet,” his poetry often expresses an unexpected and wistful ambivalence toward the industry that gave him fierce work then left his state in flames.[vi]

Spring log drives were “fierce work” that “killed the weakling”^[vii]  according to the narrator of William Chalmers Covert’s didactic novel Glory of the Pines (1914).  Such “fierce work” was the subject of Frederick Norman’s oil painting “High Rollaway” (ca. 1880s).  The depiction is blunt, with little attempt to make the river-hogs’ jobs look glamorous. If anything, the men look dwarfed and hopelessly outnumbered by the thousands of logs piled up along a high bank (or rollaway) along the White River. Norman (1846-1928) had been summoned to Whitehall by a local lumber baron who wanted the painter to “get this all down on canvas.”[viii] In the painting, six men are placed in the direct path of an unstable-looking mountain of logs, which takes up a good three quarters of the canvas. Two of the men are shown hitching a pair of oxen to a “key log”.[ix] Covert (1864-1942) describes a similar scene on an Ontonagon rollaway:

“We climbed the bank and walked up the stream to meet the shouting men…Here and there great heaps of logs were cob-piled…keyed by one mysterious log. The man who worked…around that tricky pile took chances as he probed and lifted with his pike pole and cant hook to loosen the key. The huge pile sometimes let go as though it had under it the trigger of a bear trap, and if the man got away with nothing more than a pinch or a heavy ducking, he was lucky[x]

Frontispiece, Glory of the Pines (artist unknown).

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Part Five of this series will continue “The Michigan Worker On Land.”

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[i] William G. Puddefoot and Issac Ogden Rankin, Hewers of Wood: A Story of the Michigan Pine Forests (Boston: The Pilgrim Press, 1903), 62.

[ii] William Chalmers Covert, Glory of the Pines: A Tale of the Ontonagon (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1914), 82-83.

[iii] Puddefoot, 62

[iv] Covert, 94.

[v] Douglas Malloch, In Forest Land (Chicago: American Lumberman, 1910), 59.

[vi] The lumber boom left not only a denuded landscape of stumps and slash but repeated fires that raged across Michigan from Manistee to the Thumb: “lumber barons sent their lumberjacks tearing through the pineries….The forest fires completed the havoc and destruction….It was like a saturation bombing raid over the Rhineland.” Harlan H. Hatcher, The Great Lakes, (New York, Oxford University Press, 1944), 271-72.  In October of 1871, fires “burned an estimated 2 million acres…and rendered 15,000 Michiganians homeless.” Ten years later, in September 1881, fired burned “over a million acres” causing “$2.5 million in losses.” Dave Dempsey, Ruin & Recovery: Michigan’s Rise as a Conservation Leader (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2001), 52.

[vii] Covert, 64-65.

[viii] Sadayochi Omoto and Eldon Van Liere, The Michigan Experience: A Traveling Exhibition of Paintings of Michigan Themes by Michigan Artists in Celebration of the State’s Sesquicentennial (East Lansing, MI: Kresge Art Museum, 1986), 62-63.

[ix] Key logs were placed to keep the gigantic piles of cut logs from tumbling into the rivers. Once these strategic logs were removed, the logs poured down the steep riverbanks and the wild river drive began. 

[x] Covert, 64-65.