Reports of the death of Bangor’s lumber port a century ago were greatly exaggerated. “The last days of Bangor’s lumber trade are a long way off. The Panama Canal will be in need of repairs several times before those ‘last days,'” wrote an exasperated Bangor Daily News reporter on May 16, 1906. He had just read the city’s most recent obituary in a Boston newspaper, written by “someone who apparently hasn’t much idea of what he is talking about.”

Just because less lumber was passing through Bangor, a fact nobody denied, didn’t mean the Queen City’s profitable connection to lumbering had evaporated. New pulp mills, most notably Great Northern in Millinocket, were eating up enough logs to keep “a dozen of the old fashioned sawmills going,” noted the reporter. Then there were the “railroad mills away up north” where logs were sawed at the edge of the forest and shipped to market by rail, or possibly to the Bangor & Aroostook’s new port at Searsport. No matter where the lumber was sawed in eastern Maine or how it was shipped, the Queen City stood to benefit one way or another from related mercantile opportunities.

Bangor’s lumbering days had peaked in 1872 when more than 246 million feet had been shipped through the port. Back then, Bangor was briefly “the lumber capital of the world.” The amount had been declining ever since, yet just two years ago it had stood at 187 million feet.

A major problem was getting enough men to cut the trees and float them downriver. Woods workers were always in demand. Advertisements ran in the Bangor newspapers for weeks in late fall seeking thousands of men to be choppers, teamsters and sled tenders. New ads appeared in the spring seeking river drivers to get the product to market.

About 20,000 men were needed to gather Maine’s total annual harvest of 800 million feet of logs, said the Bangor Daily News in a piece explaining the labor problem on Feb. 14, 1907. About 6,000 were employed in Penobscot waters, many of them contributing their paychecks to the Bangor economy when they came out of the woods.

In former times there were enough resident woodsmen to do the work. Then many of them went west. They were replaced by men from the Maritime Provinces of Canada. In recent years, however, many of them had found other work in the Canadian West, leaving Maine lumbermen “at their wits ends to get crews.”

The employment agencies “raked over the large cities” with the result that men of all nationalities, many of them recent immigrants, were sent into Maine by the train load. The writer complained, “Many of these had never had a cant dog in their hands, nor seen a tree felled. … It is calculated that after a few weeks experience, three of these newly arrived foreigners are about equal to one good woodsman.”

Some logging crews were filled out with some “queer specimens of humanity,” claimed the Bangor Daily Commercial on Dec. 14, 1906. Some of these men were toughs from the city slums who headed into the Maine woods in December clothed in patent leather shoes and derby hats thinking they could escape quickly by train if the job was not to their liking.

By April 1907, the search was under way for enough river drivers to retrieve the logs that had been dragged to landings all along the Penobscot and its various tributaries. Just as with the ax-men, good river drivers were scarce. Indeed, S.H. Golden’s employment agency on Exchange Street ran an advertisement in the Bangor Daily News day after day promising “Klondike Wages for River Drivers.” They got paid more than loggers – anywhere from $1.75 to $2.75 a day. But the job was more dangerous and demanding. They were the “knights of the cant-dog” according to the “Around Town” column in the Bangor Daily News. Some of these knights died an unsung death each year.

“The professional river driver is a great institution. Almost any strong healthy man can go into the woods in the winter and chop trees down, but when it comes to navigating those same trees through shoal and rapid waters, over tumbling cascades and across wind-swept lakes, a particularly hardy, expert and daring class of men is needed,” the anonymous columnist wrote on April 24, 1907. “To be a good log driver, in fact, one must be active as a gymnast, able to pole through quick water on a single stick, not particular about the regularity of his meals and entirely at home in the wilderness.”

Bangor and vicinity was the source of some of the best drivers. It was home to “the gilt-edged riverman, so to speak.” A Bangor boy was more apt to sign up for the drive, than to cut trees in the harvest. “In the spring, even now, when times are flush and many kinds of employment plentiful, a considerable number join the log navigators, although few engage in woods work,” said the columnist.

He concluded his paean to the “knights of the cant-dog” with reckless optimism: “This river doesn’t cut so much lumber now as in its palmy days; but there is plenty of timber left, and probably no one now living will see the time when woodsmen and drivers, with their picturesque ways, are strangers here, or when Bangor will not await with interest the days ‘when the logs come down.'”

So it seemed a century ago. But the logs stopped coming down the river, and the red-shirted woodsmen disappeared into the mists sooner than expected. Today, to “see” these “knights of the cant-dog,” if only in your imagination, you have to pay a visit to The Peirce Memorial next to the Bangor Public Library or read “The Penobscot Man” by Fannie Hardy Eckstorm.

Wayne E. Reilly can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net