Nathan Dougan, the First Cowichan Chronicler
(First of 2 Parts)
Over the past two weeks, I introduced you to N.P. Nathan Dougan, Cobble Hill and area’s foremost historian, and his son, Bob, who carried the torch until his own death in the 1990’s.
Nathan Dougan, looking distinguished in Sunday suit and tie. —Family photo
Both Dougans contributed greatly to the saving of Cowichan Valley history, beginning with Nathan’s articles that appeared in the Cowichan Leader in the 1950’s and ‘60’s. Bob condensed and published many of these ‘narratives’ as the Leader called them in Cowichan My Valley, now a rare and costly book.
This week and next, I’m going to share with you a full-length example of Nathan’s writings from the Cowichan Leader. I’ll begin with “In the Days of Hand and Bull-Team Logger” which was originally published in December 1949.
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Foreword: I wish to express my indebtedness to Mr. Pat Barry and Mr. Owen Brown for reminiscent information and to Mr. Will Dobson, The [Cowichan] Leader, for lending me the 50th anniversary number of the Timberman magazine, Portland, Ore., which has been my inspirational guide. —N.P.D.
In offering this brief review, let me start first with the hand-logger and bull-team logger.
For this history one need go no farther afield than Shawnigan—in the early days there was no differential designation, from Mill Bay to the southern boundary of Chemainus, it was all Cowichan—and there was plenty, especially of the latter type of logging, carried on hereabouts right into the first decade of the century of this century.
My own background
But perhaps before going further, I should say a word about myself. My experience in power-logging has been desultory; but what knowledge I did not gain empirically, I gained from association with others whose life-work in one or another capacity has been in the logging industry.
In our own district, of course, I saw plenty of ox-team logging. I began to yoke and drive the oxen on the farm when I was just past 12; the early [1890’s] were hard times. It was in these years that a man known as Capt.Cox marched on Washington at the head of an army of unemployed; newspapers of the day called this Cox's army.
Sortie to Seattle
I wished to see the world; I imagined there were green fields far away, so when I was just past 17, in the summer of ‘95, I found myself standing on a wharf in Seattle, watching the belching smoke from a big sawmill across the bay in Port Blakely.
A policeman noticing, I suppose, that I was [a stranger] and appeared quite unsophisticated, accosted me thus: “Where are you from, young feller?”
“I came from Vancouver Island; I have a brother working in Port Blakely sawmill and I am going there for a job."
And then, more kindly, he said: " Well, you can't go over till tomorrow morning when the tug comes. Come with me and I will show you where you can get meals and a room."
The restaurant he took me to was Japanese; the meals cost 10 cents, and they were good and wholesome; and the room 50 cents.
Workless Days
Next morning I was in the village by the mill. My brother and many more, I found, were unemployed.
However, I said to Sim, my brother, “I will go and ask for a job anyway. Perhaps I shall get something to do."
“Well, if you are bound to try, then go to such and such a boss; if any will put you to work, he will."
“How am I to recognize him ?"
Fresh from the backwoods, the whirring machinery, the incessant crash and rumble of moving lumber daunted me.
“Look for a big dark man, always whittling a stick with his penknife as he walks around; that will be he. "
I found the whittler, and to my query he brusquely replied: " No, we can't use all the men we have now."
I had to pawn my watch to get back to Cowichan and then I walked from Victoria to Hillbank. Then to various jobs: cutting cordwood for from 75 to 80 cents per cord; telegraph operator for a few years; to the logging camps again, and finally, back to my first love, the land, for farming seemed to be in my bones.
Epic Yet Untold
Like the loggers, the oxen worked hard, too. Most first-growth trees were truly massive and required a lot of muscle to move them, often on greased 'skid roads.' —Author’s Collection
Has the epic story of logging on the Pacific North-West ever been written? I think not. Yet unborn, perhaps is the poet-philosopher who is to write it. He will find little de facto history to guide him; and mayhap will read it largely in his prophetic mind's-eye.
He was a hard-bitten, tough-fibered fellow, the hand-logger and skid-roader, but he was sound at heart and true, as a gold ingot is true. When he got a “jag” on he sang a ditty like this:—
“With hiyu clams and mucka-muck (grub, food)
And Klootchman by the way;
On the shores of Puget Sound we’ll keep our home
Until our dying day.
Hard, Lonely Life
Sometimes he works singly and sometimes in pairs. His equipment was of the simplest: an axe, crosscut saw, wooden maul, jack-screw and a boom-chain or two, and of course, bacon, beans, flower, tea and sugar.
Hard by the seabeach where he could find pretty timber, and it had to be pretty, there he located. A lonely life was his, but loneliness did not distress him; his days were full of work and his nights of peaceful slumber. He knew nothing of the jazzing radio, the motor car; and even the locomotive whistles did not break the stillness of the land; only at long intervals would the faraway churning rumble of the paddle-wheeledSteamboat reach his hearing.
After a drought, to stand under the roof of a thick-branched spruce or cedar in June; to listen to the susurrous* melody of the rain in the woods; on the beach-head wielding with sinewy arms, axe and saw, mind attuned to the plangent song of the sea—Nature's music, there is none sweeter under heaven. This was his life.
(*I warned you that you’d need to keep a dictionary handy when reading Nathan’s writings. But I’ll save you the bother—susurrous means a soft murmuring or rustling sound; whisper; even the humming of bees. Don’t feel badly; I had to look it up, too.—Ed.)
No doubt he often longed for the companionship of the gentler sex; and in some Indian rancherie he would find a...maiden...who would share his fate. There was no priest or clergyman to solemnize the marriage, but what mattered that; marriages were made before there was priest or formal law.
He worked until he made a “grubstake," then hied him to the city’s bright lights; and in some saloon with sawdust-strewn floor, he got on a great big “jag;” and when his money was all gone, back to the forest-girt beach again.
It may be that his end was depicted by the poet thus:-
“The hunter’s whistle hummed in my ear
As the city men tried to move me,
And I died in my boots like a pioneer
With the whole wide sky above me. "
But not all were improvident; there were others who saved their money, bought a yoke or two of oxen and logged in a bigger and better way.
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From the shores of Puget Sound (Washington) to Vancouver island, the ox-team logger richly deserves an important place in the annals of logging; for he was in his time and place the veritable life-blood of the nascent lumbering industry.
Here the use of oxen in logging proceeded contemporaneously with their use in Puget Sound. Towards the end of the '80s, horses began to come into use; the oxen drawing the logs from the bush to the skid-road, and the horses getting them to the water.
The smaller operations, however, continued to use oxen entirely till sometime after the turn of the century in both regions.
The early hand-loggers also employed horses. Note the amount of timber used in construction of the ‘corduroy’ road over marshy ground. —Photo from a 1970’s Duncan Pictorial.
Mill Bay First
Towards the close of the '80s, Jay Alloway with several yolk of oxen cleared the left bank of Millstream, from the bridge westward putting the logs into Mill Bay a little below the bridge.
‘Gyppo’ sawmills such as this one were small, crude operations. —Robert Dougan
In 1889 he logged timber off land [owned by] James Dougan and Peter McLennan, about one and one-half miles north of Cobble Hill Station; logging only the most excellent timber, barking the logs clean and getting them to the railroad, where he loaded them on flat cars in a ‘cutting’ right on the main line. The first train coming through would move the loaded cars to the nearest siding, where they would be carried to destination by the first freight train.
This is perhaps the only instance of loading logs on flat cars on the E&N Mainline; but the loading of mine props and cordwood in this manner was common practice in the early days of the railroad. Alloway, after several months of logging here, skipped to the American side, leaving men and even oxen hire unpaid.
Millar Brothers
Then we have the two brothers Jim and Henry Millar, eastern Canadians, who all their lives had been ox-team loggers. On the Pacific coast, on Puget Sound, they were first heard of; on the Island they first logged at Oyster Bay (near Ladysmith).
About the turn of the century they moved to Mill Bay and logged for three or four years on Cedar Creek on the right bank of Millstream, using five yoke of oxen; and skidding the logs one and one-half miles into Mill Bay. The average price was $5 per M. in boom's ready for tug; stumpage prices ranged around 75 cents per M., and they skidded about 10,000 board feet per diem.
The Millar Brothers were old men when they reached Mill Bay; and I think this operation wound up their logging as Jim who had farming interests in Strawberry Vale in Saanich died there about this time.
The price Miller Brothers (or others0 were receiving hereabouts may be compared with the following: - Simon Benson, in 1891, logging with [a] bull-team on the Elokomin River, Washington—he discarded bulll-teams for steam-power in ‘91—received $5 per M. for magnificent fir logs in the water; and in the height of the depression of 1893-95, the price fell to $4. ($5.00 in 1900 equals $179.66 today.--Ed.)
Oxen Disappear
We are coming now to a time when logging with oxen was about to see the last days, when indeed, using oxen here on the Coast appeared anachronistic; still one or two interesting examples might be mentioned.
In the late winter of 1896, and American name Harry Kallock came to Cherry Point with a yoke of two of oxen. The timber available to him was poor and scattered; in the early winter of ‘03 he shared his outfit with Mr. Don Chapman, the man who has these many years so well served North Cowichan Municipality as reeve—and whose brother Paul was then a mere lad. The partnership continued into the early spring of ‘09 when the bottom dropped out of the market. It is recalled that Kallock was a good logger with a Paul Bunyan imagination.
Logs Hauled on Snow
A unique method of getting logs into the water might be mentioned here.
The weather in December, 1906, turned bitterly cold—so cold that a crosscut saw would hardly cut the frozen wood; and snow fell to the depth of a foot or more. The cold weather continued well along into January, 1907, and in this month Mr. Pat Barry with some associates using a two-horse team, cut and hauled piling (dimensions 45 feet lineal by 12-inch diameter tops) from the locality of Mill Bay schoolhouse.
This timber was drawn along the old Trunk Road on the packed and frozen surface of the snow. There was no permission asked nor required for this; there was no vehicular traffic—the countryside was as quiet as the Arctic. The price received for this heavy piling was 36 cents per lineal foot in the boom in Mill Bay.
Oxen, Horses, Steam
And now as the prolixity (you’ll have to look it up, readers—I had to!) of this article might debar it from seeing the light of day in print, I must conclude the story of ox-team logging; but of the numbers of them, one more example should be mentioned, and that leaves time to say nothing of the original Shawnigan Lake Lumber Company (Munson-Elford), a concern of considerable importance in its day.
In mentioning the late Mr. Elford's name, memory would fain recall that he was a man very highly regarded in this district. They first used oxen entirely, then keeping oxen for the bush and using horses on the skid-road, finally adopting steam power throughout.
And there was Franklin Copley, logging with horses whose epic exploits hereabouts, bring to mind the legendary Paul Bunyan; but his brief drama must be left for a future day.
(Conclusion next week)