“The log drive was really crazy! It was always a matter of life or death. The daughter of a lumberjack, Raymonde Beaudoin herself lived in logging camps with her family. “Logging and logging were two very different trades,” she explains in an interview.
In a logging camp of about fifty men, she says, there could be a dozen log drivers. “While there were loggers in several families, the same cannot be said of the log drivers. »
In Once upon a time there were log drivers, a book she devotes to these forgotten workers, Raymonde Beaudoin has collected documents and stories about these men. “Some were proud, but someone like my father told me that, to talk to girls in the summer, he always hid the job he was doing in the winter. »
The hard work of this little-known world has irrigated popular stories. “Often, I think it’s caricatural. We think of guys who drank! Surely there were. But what we see above all are people who work from one darkness to another, their clothes always wet, day after day, to send all their money to their parents or their family. They were very disciplined. »
Understanding the exploitation suffered by the loggers and the social world to which they belonged also means better understanding the consequences of forest exploitation.
Run the factories
To power paper mills and sawmills, rivers are used as a mode of transportation. During the winter, the logs cut by the loggers are piled up on the frozen water or piled up nearby. During the thaw, the wood follows the course of the water, to the places of transformation.
The character of Menaud master raftsman, created by Félix-Antoine Savard in 1937, retouched in multiple editions of this novel, constitutes the archetype of these workers of misery.
For the most skilled, “despite everything, it could be quite profitable. But the men didn’t have so many other job choices. They had no money. They had nothing. Several were returning from the United States, where life had been less happy than is said. The companies were kings and masters of the rivers and banks. The guys were arriving, at their service. The farmers, on the banks of the river, had nothing to say”.
Raymonde Beaudoin was able, among other things, to question Salomon Lépine. This man had thoroughly practiced this very risky profession of log driver on his return from exile in the United States. He still knew by heart the names of the 32 rapids of the Mattawin River. More than once, like others, he nearly lost his life. Everything was synonymous with danger in the log drive, starting with the rapids, the sills and the falls into the icy water. “Along the rivers, there have long been crosses that remind us of the dead, carried away by the rivers during the drive. Still, there were fewer than you might think. The guys held on to their lives. They went into the water, but as little as possible. The man who dances on the water, mounted on an unstable block, is not an everyday affair.
In the 1930s, log driver Octave Robert lost his life trying to clear a few pitounes in the liquid hell of the Mattawin. How many log drivers have died, like him, for the sole benefit of the industry?
A log drive boat made it possible to reach the accumulations of wood in the middle of the waterways. This boat could lead straight to the tomb. The raftsmen threw a hook to attach themselves to the mountains of wood that they had to clear with the waves. “The raftsmen told me that they heard a kind of hiss when everything threatened to give way. We had to leave quickly…”
At the Croche waterfall, Napoléon Marien, Ferdinand Boisvert and the young Blais entered a plough’s ear, as they called a counter-current that comes back to hit the pebbles. Their log boat overturned. Marien got away with it, narrowly. But the young Blais was found further away. Boisvert’s body never was. “These stories were reported in the newspapers,” explains Raymonde Beaudoin.
The men had to follow the driftwood, most often using gaffs, long poles fitted with a curved metal spike. The ice jams, created by the accumulation of 12-foot logs or 4-foot logs, required strong action. The log drivers were trying to give the wood back its freedom, in defiance of their own. A lever hook, usually known by its English name of cant hook. From there the cantouques, this poetry with the popular accents of the work that puts in shape Gérald Godin, native of Trois-Rivières, a long time an important center of the drive.
When nothing could be done to clear the wood jams, the blaster was called in as reinforcements. At a time when dynamite was readily sold to almost anyone, the blaster would place large loads of it underwater, hoping that the blast from the explosion would restore movement to the wood.
Even in the 1970s, 40% of the wood was transported by log drive to the paper mills. The bark of the wood was accumulating in the river bed. Mills also discharged their residues into the water. “In some places, we are talking about at least ten feet of sawdust at the bottom of the water. »
The log drive, despite the ecological disaster it represents, was widely practiced in Quebec until the 1980s. And in 1995, the Saint-Maurice River, a veritable liquid highway, was still in operation for the log drive.
Better now?
The memory of this world of the log drive has been partly erased from consciousness, in a repression of the cursed experiences of the exploitation of the working world. Logs continue to rot in the bottoms of several rivers, which consumes oxygen and makes it impossible for many fish to reproduce. Driftwood, now submerged for years, continues to pose risks for boaters and occupants of the shores of these waterways that have been abused for decades. Years of misuse of waterways for the benefit of the appetite of the forest industry have destroyed the fragile balance of several waterways, observes Ms. Beaudoin.
Have things changed for the better since the end of the log drive? “We just buried my father…He didn’t want me to talk about that!” Has it changed so much? My God, I sincerely think not. I see it well. The bottoms of rivers and lakes have been destroyed. We haven’t restored them. And there are still too few protected areas for the forest in Quebec. Do you see what the government has just done again by reducing them as much as possible? Honestly, no, I don’t see the difference with this past. Our children and grandchildren will inherit diseased waterways. »