Bulls of the Woods

By Norman Kainz

Bulls of the Woods is a personal memoir about logging in northeast Minnesota from the early 1940s to the present. It offers a glimpse into a unique lifestyle that has disappeared from the American landscape. Bulls of the Woods documents the migration from horse to machine-powered logging, the wheeling and dealing of timber procurement, and the free-spirited social life of lumberjacks and their families, told in the voice of one who lived it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 6, 2011
• ISBN: 9781257406548

Book preview

Woods

INTRODUCTION

This book is about logging in Northeast Minnesota from the early 1940s to the present. It describes what is involved in cutting down trees and moving them to market.

Some of the area has been logged since the late 1800s, but a good portion was never logged because of the difficult terrain. Only after big bulldozers were developed and a number of paper mills became hungry for millions of cords of Jack pine and spruce pulpwood did it become feasible to open the area up for logging.

It’s a special breed of people who work in the woods, mostly because only a small percentage of men are capable of being lumberjacks. It takes great skills that are sharpened over the years. Without skill, the average guy would kill himself working in the woods.

There were, and still are, some truly memorable characters working in the woods.

In all my 40 years working in the woods, I knew only one woman lumberjack. She was the mother of 12 children, each of whom became good, solid citizens.

This book covers how families lived, worked and played while in the woods. It also tells of the wheeling and dealing of timber procurement -- how timber was bought, how forest rangers were bought -- and how things really worked.

A note about names:

All names have been changed to protect the innocent and the guilty. Relatives were not afforded this courtesy.

BULLS OF THE WOODS

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Otto Moen with horse, Dolly, in 1944

Bulls are the people that do the actual cutting down and skidding out to truck roads. One would have to be as stubborn as a bull and have the stamina of a bull to take the terrible punishment being dealt to him by the users of that wood.

There aren’t any new bulls in the woods today. All the wood being cut in Minnesota is cut by old-time bulls and their kids.

Even with modern equipment it’s still a mean, dirty job. Equipment currently in use is big and heavy like skidders, trucks, feller/bunchers, etc. Of course, here in Minnesota, just about all of the big virgin timber is gone. The bulk of the timber left is a mixture of poplar and balsam birch, balsam spruce, balsam pine and balsam. In other words, remaining timber is a mixture of short, limb-y, second-growth junk. The only good thing that can be said about the timber is that there is lots of it. Where the ground is suitable, most of this timber can be cut with feller/bunchers. The trick here is to keep the old, worn-out equipment running since no one can afford to replace it with new equipment.

Here’s where the bull part comes in. Suppose the final drive goes out on a feller/buncher. No matter where it happens, it has to be fixed on the spot since the bull is too broke to haul the thing into a garage so it could be fixed out of the weather. Don’t even waste time thinking about hauling it into a garage that has professional mechanics. Shop costs are at least $45 an hour. The poor old bull isn’t sure if he’s making minimum wage. If he isn’t, no on really gives a damn since the bull is strictly on his own. Over time, he has been totally forgotten when it comes to labor laws.

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Load of slabs from Sawbill Landing

The Story of Kainz Logging

The year was 1945. My dad had just come home from sawing lumber for Park Region Timber Company near Brainerd, Minnesota. He’d only been gone for a few days but he’d made a deal that changed my life.

He made a deal with Brown Timber Company of Crosby to move his mill to Isabella, Minnesota, set it up, and saw lumber for a guy named Lester Sharp. Sharp had bought a patch of Jack pine stumpage from the federal government in the Superior National Forest. The stand was located about 15 miles east of Isabella at the very end of a new Forest Service road.

Pa was all set to go. He talked it over with my Ma, and they decided Pa should take a trip up and look over the deal. So Pa, Ed Brown (who provided some financing to Sharp for the venture) and Sharp took off to Isabella to work out the details. About three days later, Pa was back home, even more excited. He made the Isabella timber sound like paradise on earth. I always liked the woods, too, and became caught up with the excitement.

During this time, World War II had just come to a close and lumber was in great demand. Pa, with his portable sawmill, was very popular with people who had stumpage and wanted to turn it into lumber.

After Pa saw the thick, tall pines there was no way he could have been kept out of Isabella.

That’s how it began. The chance meeting of Pa and Ed Brown changed the course of many people’s lives, especially mine. Up until that time, I had planned on raising beef cattle in North Dakota where I had worked in the