Book recovers the lost world of river drivers

“MADISON, May 2 – James McGillery of this town, 25 years old, a river driver, was drowned in Spencer Gap or Hell’s Gate on Spencer stream on Saturday. His body has not been found.”

So began a short and all too common type of story in the Bangor Daily News of May 3, 1904.

McGillery, whose story I will tell at the end of this column, was one of hundreds of river drivers who left Bangor or some other town every spring for the headwaters of the Penobscot, the Kennebec or other rivers to shepherd huge masses of logs to market. That was back when Maine was one of the biggest lumber-producing states in the nation.

“There are always some among them who never come back, for ‘drowned on the river’ is a message that comes to Bangor as regularly as ‘lost on the Banks’ comes to Gloucester,” commented a Bangor Daily News story a few months previously. “These fatalities excite no particular comment outside the circle of relatives and friends of the deceased.”

McGillery probably has a small granite headstone somewhere, and his family most likely wept by his grave. A Brewer woman, however, about this time had just completed a memorial to McGillery and all river drivers, whether they lived or died, in a book that would become one of Maine’s enduring classics. “The Penobscot Man,” a series of true stories by Fannie Hardy Eckstorm, was published 100 years ago.

Eckstorm, who was already known for having written two books about birds, had done the research for this book by visiting lumber camps on the West Branch Drive with her father, Manly Hardy, a fur trader, naturalist and journalist. She would go on to write other Maine classics, including “Old John Neptune and Other Maine Indian Shamans,” all based on her personal research and friendships with some of her sources.

The reputation of the river drivers today is tarnished by all the Bangor tales about the notorious Devil’s Half Acre, the infamous Fan Jones’ and the other shady places some of them frequented after the drive. “The wisdom of Bangor about woodsmen is largely the fruit plucked from the tree of police court knowledge,” wrote Eckstorm in one of her stories.

The man Eckstorm wished to portray, however, was a more Olympian figure. He was “a man who is capable of emotions higher than those attributed to him, whose life is governed by a steadfast devotion to duty, and who takes great pride in his skills,” wrote Jeanne Patten Whitten in her bibliography of Eckstorm’s work published by The Northeast Folklore Society. “These virtues lead him on to feats of daring, sometimes foolhardy, but often courageous. Each chapter illustrates a typical trait of the river driver’s character: His respect for women, his bravado, his courage, his philosophy of life and his equanimity in the face of death.”

Of course, Eckstorm admired and even romanticized her subjects, but she vehemently denied her stories were fiction. And her best stories are the dark ones, about men such as Joe Attien, Thoreau’s guide, who died doing his duty, or Larry Connors, who vowed he would break a logjam or go to hell trying.

Even in 1904, Eckstorm was writing of a lost world where “a log used to be a thing of romance; now it is only a tree cut down, and with a saw.” She abhorred the huge corporate interests such as Great Northern Paper Co. that were taking over the rivers.

In a story called “Working Nights,” she wrote contemptuously of the infamous log drive of 1901 that arrived in Bangor late in a snowstorm with the loss of much of the timber. She attributed the disaster to the desertion of experienced, devoted river drivers from their profession. “It has been demonstrated that Money cannot drive logs,” she chided.

If you should check this book out at the Bangor Public Library, take a long look at the Peirce Memorial, unveiled in 1926 in the little park next to the library. Look at the rugged faces and brawny wariness of the three river drivers sculpted in bronze by yet another artist with Brewer connections, Charles Tefft. You can imagine them as the characters in Eckstorm’s book.

Now back to McGillery. The anonymous Bangor Daily News writer related the end of the young man’s life as succinctly and graphically as anyone could, so I will simply quote him. The story sounds worthy of “The Penobscot Man,” if only Eckstorm had been present to ferret out the necessary character elements on which her tales depend.

“McGillery was one of the driving crew at work on Spencer pond [which was connected to Moosehead Lake at Spencer Bay by way of Spencer Stream]. The crew was in two sections. He and five others had lost their boat and hastily making a raft started toward the outlet. When well down the pond their raft struck a strong current and began to turn and come apart. Soon they were sweeping toward the Spencer Gap, one of the most dangerous stretches of ‘white water’ in Northern Maine.

“The men realized their peril and called to the other men on shore who ran to the rescue and quickly formed a human boom swinging logs out across the current, a man upon each holding them together with his cant dog. The drifting logs came sweeping down and fortunately swung close enough to the improvised boom so that five of the men were rescued. McGillery who was the last, jumped just as his log swung out, fell short and went into the water. In a moment he was swept into the current and into the Gap. No one could hope to go through the terrible chasm lined with jagged rocks and if not drowned he was soon killed. It is doubtful if his body is ever recovered.”

Wayne E. Reilly has edited two books of Civil War era diaries and letters, including “The Diaries of Sarah Jane and Emma Ann Foster: A Year in Maine During the Civil War.” He can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net.