Log Driver

Every spring, when the ice broke and the rivers ran high with snowmelt, the log drivers went to work. Through the winter, lumber crews had felled timber and stacked it on frozen riverbanks and lake ice; at ice-out, that winter’s cut was tumbled into the swollen current and sent downstream to the sawmills. The drivers, known across the trade as river drivers, river pigs or log drivers, rode and herded the moving timber, balancing on rolling logs in spiked boots, prodding strays back into the current, and breaking up the jams that could halt a whole river’s worth of wood.

It was the cheapest way to move timber in a country with more rivers than roads. From the great pineries of Maine to the Great Lakes states and the Pacific Northwest, and along Canadian rivers such as the Ottawa, the spring drive was the link between the winter woods and the mill. Drivers worked with the peavey, the hinged cant hook with a spike that a Maine blacksmith named Joseph Peavey perfected in the 1850s, and with pike poles and flat-bottomed bateaux, building and blowing splash dams to flush logs down streams too small to float them otherwise.

The work was beautiful to watch and lethal to do. Breaking a key log in a jam could release thousands of tons of timber in an instant, and a man who slipped between the logs was crushed or drowned before he could be reached. More rivermen died in capsized bateaux than any other way, and those who drowned were sometimes remembered by their hobnailed boots hung on a tree by the river where they were lost. Around this danger grew a whole folklore, from the tall tales of Paul Bunyan to Canada’s beloved animated short “The Log Driver’s Waltz.”

The drives ended when something better came along: first logging railroads, then, decisively, trucks and improved roads, which moved timber year-round on a controllable schedule instead of waiting on the spring freshet. Mounting evidence of environmental damage, scoured riverbeds, bark and sawdust smothering the bottom, and fish kills, turned public and legal opinion against the practice. The last major log drive in the United States ran down Maine’s Kennebec River in 1976, the year a state ban took effect, and with it the river driver passed out of working life into legend.