Log driving was no easy profession, and making such navigation possible was a formidable challenge. To aid the passage of lumber on the water, timber firms built dams and sluices, blasted out rocks, cut overhanging branches, and cleared driftwood. “Log slides”—literally, slides for logs—were built along hillslopes to take advantage of gravity to transport timber to the water’s edge. From there, logs accumulated at a landing (also called a “spar tree site,” or “rollway”). Logs then had to be manually “marked” with a timber firm’s details—sort of like a cattle-brand—before they made their way downstream. Typically, this happened with a “stamp hammer” details Elizabeth M. Bachmann in an article about Minnesota log marks, with the hammer weighing about four or five pounds. Since timber companies shared rivers and waterways, altering these marks was a punishable offense.
From there, these free-floating logs were “driven” by log drivers along the river. Unlike timber rafters—who nearly chained together multiple logs to make rafts, which they themselves floated downstream—for log drivers, the aim was to keep the lumber moving, following along where needed and heroically pulling out logs that held up traffic.
“It was a more labor-efficient means of getting out logs than was rafting and yielded them in numbers that raftsmen could never hope to match,” notes Cox. (It’s perhaps worthwhile noting that timber rafting still exists today.)
There were no bounds to danger, however. Since log driving was largely carried out in the spring, when rivers thawed (and after a long winter harvest of wood), accidents in treacherous currents were frequent. In an as-told-to article titled “The Life of a Lumberman” published in The Wisconsin Magazine of History, lumberman John E. Nelligan recounts an 1878 incident during which he saw a colleague carried into the current and down the Oconto Falls along with the logs. Miraculously, the fellow survived.
For all their work, log drivers “received two and one-half dollars and four meals per day,” according to Nelligan. That’s about 76 in today’s dollars. By comparison, he notes, a farm worker would’ve earned “sixteen or eighteen dollars per month.”
All the while, the US rail network was under enormous expansion. Between 1866 and 1916, it had grown to 254,000 miles from 35,000. With better-connected roads and railways, rivers were no longer the best way to transport wood, and log driving became obsolete. In parts of the US, log driving endured under the guise of “tradition.” Eventually, environmental concerns about log-related impacts pushed a law through the Maine legislature that ended all log driving in Maine by October 1976. The last one reportedly took place in Maine on the Kennebec River in 1976.