Woodsmen of the West Read online

  A year or two after this episode he was assistant timber-man in a mine somewhere in Montana. This was his account: “It was a good camp; there was a number of mines and quite a little town. Saloons and stores done a good business there, and many of the men had wives and families. I was getting good wages, and I useter blow ’em in regular in the saloons and dance-houses along with the boys, having a hot time. I never had a cent to my name, and most times I was in debt to the saloon-keepers.

  “One day I met a friend of mine on the street, and he was needing twenty dollars the worst way: he asked me for it. ‘Boy,’ sez I, ‘I ain’t got no money, but my credit’s as good as money. Just wait a minute while I go and get the twenty from Jim O’Halloran.’

  “Jim O’Halloran was a saloon man: many’s the cheque I had blown in at his bar. I opened the swing door of the saloon, and there was O’Halloran talking with one or two men. ‘Jim,’ sez I, ‘just lemme have a twenty, will you?’

  “You’ll hardly believe it, but that son of a began to excuse himself, pretending he was short of money himself. I was considerable put out, him doing that in front of them other fellers too; but I pulled meself together, seeing how it was, and I passed it off as if I hadn’t noticed nuthin’. That was a lesson to me. I saved my next month’s wages, and I had a hair-cut and shave, and bought a fine new suit of clothes and good boots and a new hat. Then I went and walked in the street, and hung around casual-like near O’Halloran’s saloon. I useter do this every evening, and everybody would see me there and mention it in talk, and O’Halloran would worry, knowing he’d lost a good few dollars a month from me. He spoke to me once or twice, asking me to come and drink with him, and I was soft and friendly with him and called him by his given name. But I made that blank-blank whisky shark feel sick and kick himself for what he’d done…. That gave me a start, and I quit drinking and went to live at a respectable boarding-house kept by a widow lady.

  “The women have a weakness for dark men – at least that’s my experience – and me being a younger man in them days, with me black beard and black eyes, and me good clothes, and spruced up, I tell you I got on all right. Now that I’d quit the drink I had nothing to do after working hours, and I had lots of spare time. There was three women. One was a waitress at the restaurant where I useter eat. Another was a woman who ran a laundry – a fat lady she was. Then there was the widow who kept the boarding-house. She didn’t want me to pay for my board, but I wouldn’t stand for that – I’m not the man to be beholden to a woman. It’s a fine woman she was, that widow. I don’t know but what I oughter have married that woman if I’d had any sense. It’s kind of cheerful for a man to come home from work and find the shack all tidied up, and a fire burning, and supper all ready cooked, and some one to wash his clothes and look after him. Here I am, working day in and day out, wearing my heart out getting out logs, and what am I doing it for? I tell you, boy, work sometimes seems a terrible old thing to me….

  “Well, the feller that was boss timberman over me got hurt, and the superintendent made me boss in his place. I began to quit spending my money on the women, and put me wages in the bank, saving them. Most of the men I knew was always short of money. I had money and I useter lend it, getting ten per cent. a month. The men was drawing regular wages, and I tell you I made money, and there was dam few ever made a bad debt with me or got ahead of me any way….

  “I kind of got tired of that town and the people, and when I had 2500 dollars saved up I left the place and came down to the coast. I’d heard an old fellow talk of the Cassiar country, and of how there was a big country that had never been prospected away up above the canyons on the Stickeen River. There’s fine gold on all the bars on the lower Stickeen….”

  That was a queer coincidence. I used to live up in Cassiar myself, and I remember talk of some man who came up to Telegraph Creek (where river navigation from the coast ceases) and hired Frank Calbraith and a mule train to pack his outfit away over the mountains to hell and gone up the Stickeen. The man stayed in there by himself, trapping and prospecting, and came out to Telegraph about nine months later with a few skins rolled up in his blankets and a great desire to talk to people. He had no gold, and the samples of rock he brought out proved to be valueless, on assay. The man was Carter!

  “Say, boy, but I was glad to see that blank-blank collection of saloons. For a day or two Telegraph seemed to me the finest place on earth. Then I got a Siwash to take me down the river to Fort Wrangell in Alaska. Wrangell is not much of a place; mostly storekeepers competing for the Indian trade; they fair deafen a man with the row their phonographs make. I had to wait some days for the steamer, meaning to go down to Seattle and stay on the American side awhile. That’s how I got acquainted with a fellow that was thinking of buying a sloop and going prospecting among the coast islands, down the mainland southwards: only he had no money. I had some money, and the sloop looked pretty good to me; she had been built for a real-estate man in Vancouver, a monied man who wanted to go out cruising on his holidays. That was a long time ago, and she was pretty old. We got her for 350 dollars; that was a big price. That’s how me and the other fellow, Campbell his name was, came to go slooping. We was nigh a year on that sloop. There’s not a channel nor an inlet nor an island on that coast that I ain’t visited. We prospected some, and fished some (for a cannery near the Skeena), and we kept ourselves in meat, hunting, and got a little fur, trapping. Yes. I’ll tell you this talk about a man thinking himself above selling whisky to the Siwashes is just hot air. Give a man a chance and see what he’ll do if he thinks it safe. Of course I know it’s a pretty dam risky proposition most places when there’s a policeman within a hundred miles of you: but there’s places on this coast that are pretty far away from the police.

  “Well, at last we anchored in Vancouver harbour. Holy, suffering Moses, but I was sick and tired of that blank-blank sloop!

  “I packed up my stuff and threw it out on the wharf, and went up town to Billy Jones’s hotel. Campbell went to a dealer and sold the fur that we had; he met me in the street and give me half the money. ‘What you going to do about the sloop?’ sez he. ‘The sloop!’ sez I, ‘to h—ll with the sloop!! You can take that blank-blank birdcage and stuff it up a drain-pipe for what I care. No more sloop for me this life.’ I never seed Campbell again; I heard he sold the sloop to some Japanese….”

  CARTER AS RAILROAD FOREMAN

  The sloop trip and the subsequent drunk he went on in Vancouver left Carter bare to the world. I think it was then that he got a job as foreman of a pick-and-shovel gang on railroad construction. Carter in his time has held various jobs as foreman. But as a railroad foreman, a very despot, his ruthless energy and callous disregard of others must have made him immense.

  I have never done labouring work on a railroad myself, but they tell me these railroad foremen treat their men like dogs, as the saying is; the men being, for the most part, Galicians and Polacks and Dagoes and such-like that cannot stand up for themselves. I do not suppose there is much physical violence; but I should imagine a railroad labourer is liable to treatment like that a private of the line may sometimes get from an evil-minded sergeant who finds vent for bad temper amid the opportunities of oppression that active service gives.

  I remember Bob Doherty telling me of an experience of his. He had become “broke” in San Francisco. “The railroads was advertising for men at the time,” said Bob, “so me and two other fellows went to the employment office and hired on. They gave us the usual free passes to the camp out on the line where we was to work. At least these here passes are not quite free. You have to hand over your bundle, and you don’t see it again till you reach the camp you’re booked for. The railroad people take your bundle as a sort of security to prevent you from running a bluff on them for a free ride to some other place you may be wanting to get to. If that’s what you’re after you can buy an imitation bundle specially made for the purpose at some of them little stores that’s always to be found near a railway depot
. The usual price is about a dollar.

  “Well, I was telling you about our trip from ’Frisco. Me and the other two fellows reached a railroad camp; in good faith, for we wanted work of any kind. We went and spoke to a big foreman there, and he fetched out some shovels for us, and handed us each one. Holy Mackinaw! you just ought to have seen the way he gave us them shovels. He shoved them at us, rough-like, giving us a look same as if he was kicking us. Then he poked his face forward. ‘Now then, you men,’ he said, threatening, ‘I’ll have you understand that you’re here to work, and work good; and I’m going to see you do. Get a move on right now, and move lively or there’ll be trouble.’ Gee! it fairly took our breath away. We looked at that foreman, stupid-like; and then we looked at each other. Then we took a tumble to the way things was in that camp, and we dropped our shovels where we stood and walked away. The foreman stood and stared at us and watched us go. He must have done some quick thinking, for he never opened his head to say a single word. I guess he didn’t like the look of us; maybe he hadn’t come across no loggers not before.”

  From his work as railroad foreman, most probably, Carter got that manner and tone of voice of his – the manner and voice that have caused him so much trouble in this logging country and helped to make him so hated. I do not think he means it to happen, but once in a while, when he forgets himself in extra bad temper, he will show a trace of the old manner, and a tone will creep into his voice that will cause the man he speaks to to drop his tools and quit right there, and burn with a blind hatred for days after.

  It is the tone that does it; the words he uses are altogether void of offence – there is nothing much to take hold of in what he says: nothing to provoke a fight. For Carter does not take the least interest in fighting; he has not the physical instinct – or else perhaps it is his morbid vanity that makes him shy of violence. I think he feels (what is the truth) that in this country it is an awful chancy business to expose his god – his quivering-sensitive picture of himself – to any risk by battle. You never know, if you are rash in quarrel, among loggers, but that your ordinary-looking adversary may not prove a sudden nasty thing in fighting-men, and be your better. It would nigh break Carter’s heart should any one lick him – and the fact be known.

  Of course, out West, as elsewhere in the world, men do not readily come to blows. You will not see a fight from one year’s end to another – among sober men; except those conjured up in mind by the short-story writer and the West-describing novelist. Why, for example, should sober loggers fight? Most loggers are easy-going; easy to get on with; men who have knocked about the Western world and have been taught, by experience, to be tolerant and passively considerate for others. They are not irritable and querulous; they put up with disagreeable things, that seem difficult to avoid, with philosophic common-sense.

  So in Western camps there are a most peaceable class of men. You may have many a dispute, “chewing the rag” about something, or even have a personal quarrel (though such are rare), without the affair going beyond words and noise.

  Carter can go farther than most men in rough and insult-conveying quarrel talk which yet avoids the point where blows become inevitable. Outpointing a man in talk, however, is no great matter. Carter longs to wreak spite on a man with unseen hands. He would be soft and cat-like, and let the hated man realise of himself, when too late, that Carter had contrived to “serve him dirt.”

  The spice of revenge is to make men feel your power. Carter is not very clever in carrying out these ideas: but he does his best….

  Well, Carter was a railroad foreman and he made money. About that time there was a mining boom breaking out somewhere in the Kootenay country. Things looked pretty good there, and the newspapers were full of it. Carter figured that a boom is generally worth following; so he quit railroading, collected his savings, and started a hotel in one of the mushroom “towns” with which the very rumour of a boom will spot a country.

  CARTER AS SALOON MAN

  The saloon-keeper of the West, in places where more than one saloon exists, must work at an art that is no easy one. He must advertise, compete against the other whisky men; and yet there are no simple business means for doing this.

  To begin with, there is practically nothing that he can do with the liquor supply except, of course, by varying the adulterants. All saloons have the same stock – the same whiskies and rums and port-wines and beers. There is absolutely no demand or support for anything new in the liquor line.

  Again, it would be utterly useless to try cutting prices; for the standard price of drinks is two for the quarter-dollar – except in far-away districts like Cassiar or the Yukon. In the careless West, where, outside the towns and settled districts, the change for a quarter is a thing few men are conscious of, no one would care were the saloon man to charge a little less for drinks – playing games with such dust of currency as five or ten cent pieces. So it comes to this, that the pushful saloon man must try to increase his profits by making himself, his own person, popular. He must “make up” a little in the generous emotions, and pose just a little in the public sight; and yet show his transfigured personality in such wise that you would swear there was no limelight turned on it. I hate to mention these stage directions, because the saloon man when you meet him is usually so calmly and transparently himself – easy and yet professional.

  There are two problems always before the perfect saloon man – in the logging country, anyway. One is to convince men that he is a good fellow and a good friend to each of them; the other, to make them feel that he is a hard-headed business man whose shrewdness cannot be imposed upon. To be a good fellow you must be seen to have fine stock of generous feelings (that is your stock-in-trade); you must be open and free, with a touch of the magnificent. Such qualities show up wonderfully fine under the bar lamps, against a gleaming background of plate-glass and bottles. They inspire men on the other side of the bar to be chivalrous and free with their money.

  Your reputation with the boys will cost you money to keep up. You must at times be prodigal, ladle out free liquor suddenly, and make episodes in men’s memories. Your bartender, of course, attends to the ordinary free drink that is part hospitality, part ground-bait. But the serious expense lies in the credit that you must give and in the many bad debts that you must incur. You will have to lend some of the boys money when they are broke, and help some of them out of awkward situations – and this sort of thing demands a lot of judgment and a great knowledge of your men. The finance of it, too, is difficult, especially as you have to carry so much in your memory. Keeping accounts on paper is a dreadful strain upon your capacity.

  Life of worry! To know when to be generous and when to refuse! And you must not show too generous, you must not show too shrewd. You must walk a narrow, difficult path….

  To educated persons glancing into the saloon world, the quiet-eyed, blue-jowled, genial-shrewd brotherhood of bar-keeps and proprietors may have a sinister air; sinister as a solicitor at his desk – at your service, or as a surgeon just about to name his operation fee. I make the comparisons deliberately, flicking at your respect for the financial positions of prosperous lawyers and surgeons; for it annoys me to feel your easy, educated contempt for saloon-keeping men who have but slight control over the system under which they earn their living. Lawyers and surgeons must sometimes steel their hearts and take money from people in necessity and, like the saloon man, strip a fellow-being bare; fortifying themselves with common-sense and coming down to reality from sentimental heights. I can remember the utter logic with which a surgeon once took my last borrowed dollar. There were, he pointed out, the running expenses of his position, the pressure of competition, the need to achieve a certain standard of comfort that he had set himself. And then, of course, there was the necessity of regaining the capital that he had sunk in his education, in gaining experience. The hotel man has the same need to use steel tentacles.

  On the whole, the good-fellowship atmosphere of a loggers’ saloon seems
to supply some of the same sentimental food as the music, books, and stage-plays and other emotional influences with which the educated man nourishes (and too often satisfies) his sentimental nature. Here and there a bar-keep, as here and there (let us say) an Oxford man, will prove capable of active kindliness.

  What a fine flavour of the Tammany ward-politician there must have been about Carter in his saloon! Suave and easy, blarneying and intimate, lounging in white shirtsleeves, decently clothed in black! This I imagine would be his style when in good temper from success. But I do not think Carter would have proved himself, in the long run, a successful saloon man. He is always so earnest, so thorough, in his work, that he would never have been satisfied to make moderate efforts. He would have been too impatient to get men’s money. The fell purpose of the whisky seller would have shown through too plainly; the boys would have became too conscious of it. And any little check to his plans, or disagreement with any one, would have brought to light that desperate, drive-her-under pig-headedness and that bitter philosophy of life that Carter hugs to his soul. And no popularity could have survived that exposure.

  Carter’s career as a hotel man was, however, put an end to by other things. The bottom fell out of the mining boom, the towns decayed as fast as they had grown, and the day came when Carter rolled his blankets and walked out of his hotel, leaving all standing – for the weather and Time to dispose of. He was broke again, but Fate could not take away the past; and Carter had for ever the memory of “the time when I was running a hotel.”