athletes at work
Adirondack river drive, photograph by Ferris Jacob Meigs, courtesy the Adirondack Experience.
By Robert Engel
Great Camp Sagamore’s Historian
I know, sports are on hold during the coronavirus, but we can still dream. So, let’s name some great athletic achievements. I think of a downhill skier holding her form through the turns at 90 mph, or an outfielder gunning out the runner at home plate.
Here’s another: Years ago, I was visiting the Adirondack Museum (now the Adirondack Experience.) In the logging exhibit I saw a scratchy old black-and-white film of loggers wearing cleated boots and holding long “pike” poles. These guys were dancing from log to log, surrounded by thousands of logs, all tumbling down a raging river. Wow.
A lot of logging was done in the Adirondacks in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Men would cut the trees in the winter and use horses to skid the logs over the frozen ground. They would arrange them in enormous piles along a riverbank.
At the full flood of the spring runoff, the men would roll thousands of logs into the fast-moving water. The river would carry them on a wild ride down to the sawmills, where the logs would be captured by a “boom,” a chain of logs stretched across the river. Once pulled from the water, they would be turned into lumber or paper. This was big business in the North Country.
But on their way down the river, logs would often get stuck behind rocks and pile up in the raging rapids. This is called a log jam.
That’s when these guys would run out onto the jam, sometimes from small wooden boats and sometimes by jumping log to log from the shore. They would use the pike poles to pry the stuck logs loose. Then, suddenly, everything would start to move, and the men would have to get back to the boat or the riverbank by dancing across the tumbling logs.
Each log weighed hundreds of pounds and the water beneath them was just above freezing. If you fell, you were in trouble. Every year men died on these river drives.
The last drive on the Moose River in the Adirondacks was in 1948. The Big Boom on the Hudson River near the sawmills at Glens Falls closed in 1952. In Maine, the last river drive was in 1976.
I loved watching Lebron score 41 points in game six of the finals. But he’d be as amazed as I am at what these loggers could do.
The Big Boom at Glens Falls, ca.1890, courtesy the Adirondack Experience.
Learn more . . .
How are logs delivered to sawmills today?
In the river drive days, how would sawmills determine which logging company owned which log?
Can you find a picture online of a pike pole?
In the winter when the trees were cut, the men lived in big logging camps. What were they like?