“Daylight in the swamp. Time to go to work! . . .
“At three o’clock in the morning, our bold cook loudly shouts,
Roll out, roll out, you teamsters, it’s time that you were out.
The teamsters, they get up in a fright and manful wail,
Where’s my boots, oh where’s my packs, my rubbers have gone astray
The other men, they then get up, their packs they cannot find
And they lay it to the teamsters, and they curse them till they’re blind.”
The folk song is from a program we produced many years ago THE ROMANCE OF THE LUMBERJACK. The song speaks to the romance. The reality was another matter. The lumber companies in the 19th century cut the top off of Minnesota, Michigan and Wisconsin. On the one hand their work furnished the lumber that built America. On the other hand it was responsible for probably the greatest environmental disaster in American history, eclipsing the recent oil leak by powers of ten.
Much the same could be said for two other industries that helped build America, iron mining and whaling. For this school year we have resurrected three video programs and converted them into DVDs — THE ROMANCE OF THE LUMBERJACK, IRON MINES AND MEN and THERE SHE BLOWS. The trio offers insight into what work was like, both the romance and the reality, in three key 19th century American industries.
Author Robert Gard begins the ROMANCE OF THE LUMBERJACK this way:
“The great American woods! Six hundred million board feet of lumber in Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota–the Comstock lode of silver, the gold of California, the iron of the huge Mesabi Range, or the oil of Texas–none of these was as great an asset as the white pine of the great American woods.”
That Mesabi Range may not have been quite as big an asset but it was pretty big. And it was pretty important. As a folk song in IRON MINES AND MEN puts it,
“Gold is for the mistress, silver for the maid
Copper for the craftsman, cunning at his trade
‘Good’ cried the Baron, sitting in his hall
‘But iron, cold iron is master of them all.’”
And whale oil to early 19th century America was what petroleum is to 20th and 21st century America. It was the all purpose liquid that lit homes, lubricated sewing machines, provided the base for medicine and cosmetics and the flexible plastic-like material (whale bone) for many of the same purposes our modern plastics satisfy today.
People today, however, especially young people, have little idea what work was like a two hundred years ago. Basic industries like lumbering, mining, agriculture and fishing are sometimes under fire today because of their environmental problems. We white-collar service workers (and that includes most people in the U.S. and Canada today) don’t exactly look down on miners, lumbermen and fishermen but most of us have little experience with the kind of essential work many of them still perform.
In the 19th century our country, our continent, was economically booming as never before in human history. It was the century of the Industrial Revolution. As late as 1850, however, over 80 percent of the population were still farmers. In their spare time many of these “farmers” also became lumbermen, fishermen and miners. Like many people today, workers then often worked more than one job. But white-collar service jobs were few and far between.
Another big change in work is the change from the still earlier 10,000 year-long agricultural ages in which all of our ancestors lived. African-American activists remind us that most of their ancestors were enslaved by white people in the deep south some two hundred years ago. Not everyone recognizes that if you go back a few hundred more years the ancestors of practically everyone in America today were slaves, serfs or peasants.
In 1750 for instance, just before the U.S. came into being, over 95% of the people in France, Germany, Switzerland, England, Russia, Poland and the Scandinavian countries were not slaves, but they were peasants or serfs. This meant that they were, like slaves, permanently bound to the land, heavily-taxed, exploited and held captive for life. Thomas Jefferson objected: “the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs.” But before the U.S. was founded almost all of our ancestors were to all intents and purposes enslaved by aristocratic lords and clergy left-over from earlier medieval times and still ruling from the saddle.
With the founding of the United States in 1776 as the world’s first modern republic things began to change. Not everyone today recognizes that this was a truly exceptional change.
If you move your attention to other continents like Asia, Africa and the South Pacific the exploitation and the outright slavery gets worse. Much worse.
What does this mean for us today?
For one it means we should be thankful for our blessings. Our ancestors worked hard. They had fun too. But not much. To work as a slave, serf or peasant was not only demeaning, it was nasty. As Thomas Hobbes put it in 1651 the life of man everywhere is “nasty, brutish and short.”
And people did not live very long. On average people lived less than forty years before the Industrial Revolution of the 19th and 20th centuries. Nor did they travel much. On average not more than twenty or thirty miles from where they were born before railroads, steamships brought some of the bravest and most adventurous to America.
Health care, what there was of it, was cheaper. In the 19th century lumberjacks could buy for $2 to $10 an insurance coupon that gave them treatment in a lumberjack hospital if they got injured or sick. More often than not they died, either in the woods or in the hospital.
Wages were minimal. Whalers would be out on the ocean for three or four years at a time. When they arrived back in New England one deckhand got ten cents as his share of the profits from the whale oil captured in a four-year voyage. As the script of THERE SHE BLOWS notes, the owners of the vessel were humanitarians and they gave him a ten dollar bonus for his faithful work.
The lumberjacks got paid at the end of a winter’s work and the dangerous spring log drive. Most of them blew their small pay at riverside taverns before returning to their farms to get ready for the spring planting season.
Miners were often lucky to survive much less get well paid. As a reporter for the Marquette Mining Journal wrote in 1890 “we peered down the yawning pits 180 feet deep, walked through two thousand feet of tunnels with soot begrimed miners picking away by candle light.”
Yes, we can thank our lucky stars we live in this post-industrial age. But we can also thank our hard-working ancestors not only for the genes that gave us our very lives but also for supplying the raw-boned base that made our 21st century world of plenty possible.
What will our great-great-grandchildren say about us?
Bill Stonebarger, Owner/President Hawkhill
P.S. You can access and buy many Hawkhill programs now on Amazon.com, including the three new DVDs mentioned in this article. ROMANCE OF THE LUMBERJACK, IRON MINES AND MEN and THERE SHE BLOWS. To see these and other Hawkhill productions type in the search button: Bill Stonebarger or Hawkhill. See also www.hawkhill.com for complete descriptions including scripts and reviews for many of our programs.