The Northlander: An Autobiography, Sort Of

By Leo L. Schaut

You will read about how one family, despite extremely difficult
economic times, carved a living out of what was left of a great
timber industry, raised their family, and lived a difficult but
fulfilling life. Readers who lived during this period, particularly
Michigan Yoopers (a humorous nickname of people who lived
in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan) and folks from similar rural
communities, will find themselves reliving many memories of
their own lives in the chapters of this book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 20, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462856404

Leo L. Schaut

Leo Schaut was born on June 6, 1931 in the Michigan Upper Peninsula village (now ghost town) of Faunus, Michigan, the second child and first son in a family of 14 children. The chapters of this book and the following short stories trace 17 years of life growing up in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula during the great Depression, one of the most challenging periods in the history of our great country. These chapters also trace 15 years after leaving Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, to pursue his education and his Engineering career.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Early UP Days

THE FIRST FOUR Chapters of this work are intended to provide some insight into the life of a Yooper in Hiawathaland, in the land of the Gods, Nokomis and her lover, the Great Wind, in the early days of the 19th century! It could easily have been the 18th or 17th century! I hope you have as much fun reading it as I did writing it!

This tale begins for me on June 6, 1931 in the Upper Peninsula village (now ghost town) of Faunus. Faunus was a RR stop on the Chicago Northwestern Railroad that served the UP villages of Schaefer, LaBranch, Foster City plus a few other well known municipalities of Michigan’s UP. If you are curious, you can look them up in Michigan Ghost Towns.

Louie, my dad, who will be the recipient of numerous references in this tale, had moved from Milwaukee, back to his folk’s farm in LaBranch. I assume that he had lost his job. He brought with him his new wife, Edna, my mother. Edna grew up near Lena, Wisconsin on a farm. Her father was a lumber jack in the winters and a farmer in the summers. Edna was a very talented girl, having finished high school and graduated from Normal school, qualified to teach. She was very musically inclined and stories have it that she was active playing piano in the Lena area. Edna had her first baby, Patricia, in April of 1930 and around that time Louie moved to an old farmhouse in Faunus. The farmhouse was east about ¼ mile from the Schaut farm. The farmhouse was owned by the Stebbens family who lived in a new farmhouse closer to the road. Stebbens had a daughter named Libby. Libby’s actual name was Libby Elisabeth Alfleta Ball Stebbens. Apparently she was a very pretty girl who occasionally caught Louie’s eye, to Edna’s disapproval!

Edna was again pregnant. This time she delivered me! Right there in Stebben’s old farmhouse! The Doctor eventually arrived, held me up by the feet, looked to see if everything was there, and handed me back to my mother!

This event marked the beginning of Louie’s celebration of his first son. Stories have described how he acquired a bottle of Moon and walked out to the RR where the Section crew hung out at the RR station. Louie and the crew had a little celebration sharing the Moon, smoking cigarettes and trying to outdo each other with stories.

I checked with my older sister about this event and she said that I couldn’t possibly have gone to that celebration because I was still wearing a belly wrapper, apparently so my belly button wouldn’t turn out to be an outie, and I couldn’t be jostled too much because something might go wrong! Needless to say, nothing went wrong, and, I survived, although I remember nothing about life in Faunus.

Following their stay in Faunus, Louie and Edna moved their growing family to Spaulding. A little town about the same distance from nowhere as Faunus. Stories said that we lived in a house close to the Spaulding church. I have no memory of that place. Following that we moved to another house in Spaulding about which I do have some fleeting memories. I recall that I had to share a bed with my older sister! Must have been fun! We had some playmates named the Shutters who lived across the street from us. I have no idea whatever became of them. The single most memorable event from our stay at this house was an event involving Louie’s truck.

Louie had acquired a dump truck somehow and was working on road jobs for C. G. Bridges. Apparently he worked on road construction jobs near Iron River. I don’t remember how often he came home but parked his truck along side the house when he came home. Fascinated with driving a truck, I would sit in that truck and pretend that I was a truck driver. I could imagine all sorts of exciting events sitting behind the wheel! There was a hill that sloped from alongside the house down to the next street. At the bottom of the hill was a ditch but no houses. I managed to get that truck out of gear and it rolled down the hill to the next street! No damage was done to the truck, it ran into nothing, but I sure caught hell. The usual punishment for being bad was some time in the corner on your knees. I probably wore out a piece of floor that day!

After a short stay in the second Spaulding house, we moved to Powers. Powers was a suburb of Spaulding, or maybe Spaulding was a suburb of Powers, anyway, Fasers lived on a farm in Powers in a relatively new home. They owned an old farmhouse across US 2 from their farm. It was a typical old farmhouse likely built around the turn of the century, which century I’m not sure, but it had lots of room, cold and drafty, but every place in the UP was cold and drafty. It had a garage that had the outhouse in one end of it which served those constant needs. I don’t recall anyone ever using the garage except one time when one of Louie’s cronies was running away from a Game Warden and hid his car in that garage until the Game Warden gave up. He apparently had run all the way from Northland to avoid getting caught!

Louie’s thoughts were moving to Northland, The logging village that his dad had worked in before homesteading his farm in LaBranch. Louie had acquired the stumpage on a logging site located about 2 miles south of Northland, along an old logging road that had been used by loggers’ years before. I have no idea how he pulled this off but he had arranged with George Patient to market the timber. George had been Wells Township Supervisor, which contained Northland. He subsequently had moved to Arnold, about 6 miles down the road, and operated a garage, grocery store and post office. He was a timber broker and had contracts to deliver pulpwood, cedar posts, cedar telephone poles, mine timbers, both stulls and lagging. He contracted with Jobbers, of which Louie was one.

Louie and Uncle Frank, mothers’ brother in law, set themselves up in a partnership to cut the timber from the Northland site. Piecemakers were hired and paid simply with a note indicating how many sticks the man had cut. I think each stick was worth about half a cent. A good peacemaker could cut 200 sticks a day using nothing but an axe and a Finlander buck saw! The piecemakers notes were his script from which his board was deducted. Periodically he could go to Patients store and trade his credits for what he needed. Mostly tobacco, sometimes a new pair of gloves or socks, or even a pair of boots! He could also get a couple bucks for some beers!

The first thing that needed to be done was to build camps to live in. So, Louie and his crew built a double set of camps separated by sort of a breezeway. The camps were about 20 feet wide by 24 feet long. The breezeway was about 8 ft wide with an entry door on each side, one door opening from the road, and the other opening to the back yard. About 20 ft. out back, they build the outhouse. The camps were built of cedar logs, cut, fitted and put in place by hand. The roof was inch thick boards supported by smooth balsam poles. These camps were typical of the logging camp construction. Fairly solid but not meant to last too many years.

One of the camps was divided with a curtain separating the sleeping area from the living area. The living area was arranged for a school. Home schooling we would call it today. The beds were metal frames with metal springs and relatively thin mattresses. Heat was provided by a pot bellied wood stove and light from kerosene lamps. This camp was occupied by Louie and Edna and their growing family sometime during the summer of 1937.

The other camp was similarly set up for sleeping but the living area was equipped with a dining table and a wood burning kitchen stove. Heat was provided by a pot bellied wood burning stove. Light source was from kerosene lamps.

This camp was also occupied sometime during the summer of 1937 by Uncle Frank and Aunt Leona and their son Warren and daughter, Janice. Leona was the cook, and a good cook she was!

A men’s camp was also built in which 8 men could sleep on two double bunks. They also had a small table to hold a lamp and heat was provided by a pot bellied stove. They had to worry about getting in their own stovewood, water, fill their own lamp and do their own laundry. I doubt they changed their underwear more than once or twice a year!

A bit of excitement was provided one day in the men’s camp. Patsy had somehow acquired a set of taps for her dancing shoes. This day she tap danced on top of the table for the men. She was applauded mightily and everyone had a great time!

Medical service was self administered. Aunt Leona and Momma seemed to know a cure for everything! There was one exception! One lumberjack, part of a two man crosscut team was struck by a tree after it had been cut down and took an unexpected bounce. It hit him on the knee. He or his partner fashioned a crutch from a short tree branch that was curved in such a way that he could use it for support. He hobbled in to the camp on his crutch and was loaded in to a truck. His pain was severe, almost nauseating just to watch! He was taken somewhere and I never saw him again!

A barn was built to hold a team of horses and space for hay. A Teamster was hired whose sole job was driving and taking care of the horses. He had to make sure they were given plenty of water and hay and the right amount of oats. Oats was their energy bar! It was candy to the horses! They would eat as much oats as they could get at! If they ate too much it would give them gas! Horses cannot pass gas! I never saw it happen but the story was that the horse would get bloated with gas and if he or she couldn’t walk it off, its abdomen would have to be pierced to relieve the gas. Resulting infections were said to frequently kill the horse.

The team that was used at Northland came from Grandpa John’s farm in LaBranch. They were a beautiful pair of buckskin colored Belgian horses named Patty and Dan. The picture below came from a day when Patsy and I along with cousins Janice and Warren had an opportunity for a ride on Patty and Dan! They were a matched pair that worked beautifully together. Louie tried other horses with each of this pair but with little success. When one horse or the other decides to pull in a different direction, or slack off and let his partner do all the hauling, they couldn’t be used together. Fortunately, for skidding logs out of the woods, most of the time only one horse was used. However, for pulling logging sleds, two horses were needed. Patty and Dan worked perfectly together! It was quite a thrill to ride on top of a sled loaded with logs! The horses provided the power to move the load of logs, they also provided the brakes! Going downhill, the teamster barked out a continuous stream of commands to his team of horses. He had to judge just when his team could no longer hold the load back! At that point he had to relax the lines and apply a slight whipping action. With that sign those horses knew it was time to move! Patty and Dan worked perfectly together! They would obey the teamster precisely! They must have had a great vocabulary to understand both his verbal commands and his instructions via the lines. That teamster had quite a colorful vocabulary for them to learn! They could break into a trot almost simultaneously. Sometimes that sled would get moving pretty fast, depending on the grade! These two were a treasure!

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PATTY & DAN

Winter view at first Northland jobsite 1937

Water for drinking, both for the people and animals initially came from a nearby creek but a little later that summer a well was hand dug right across the road from the camps. This well was about 25 feet deep and about four feet square. A Jammer had to be set up to lift the soil out of the well as well as lifting the men out and lowering them back down the well. Horses Patty and Dan were used in the cross haul. The work was uneventful until the excavation got down into the ground water where it began to cave in. The soil was sandy clay, which was pretty hard and stood up well until the excavation reached the water table. At that depth, the sides would slough off and the bottom began to be covered with water. Usually there was only room for one man to work in the hole at a time, so only one man was at risk! Anyway no one was lost! A wood platform was built over the top of the well and a hand pump installed on top. That well produced a lot of good water, probably is still producing water. You needed to remember that you had to have some water to prime the pump!

What a great year for 6 year old! Dad bought me a saw! Just a key hole saw, but now I could be one of the guys! During the winter, I used that saw to cut all the trees growing in back of the camps. Those trees were only about 1 inch in diameter. When the snow melted in the spring there was a small field of stumps behind the camps, all about 2 ft high and 1 inch+/—in diameter. I also got to bring water out to the men where they were cutting and could watch the cross-cut crews sawing down the trees big enough for saw logs.

During the summer, Louie had acquired a sawmill and it was set up in a field about 100 yards up the road. The logs were cut there into lumber that was hauled to a box factory in Menominee.

Louie would hunt the woodlands for veneer grade logs. These logs were treated as though they were made of gold. The sections without limbs would be cut out and hauled to the Birds Eye Veneer plant in Escanaba where they were cut into veneer on machines similar to a lathe. This wood was used mostly for furniture.

Pulpwood, mining timbers, and anything else that was to be trucked out had to be hauled out before the spring thaw because the road would turn to mud in the spring.

It always has been amazing to me how much those people accomplished in that one year in those camps. Edna teaching school every day! Leona cooking for that whole crew and provide three hearty meals every day. Both those gals working at preparing the food, setting up the table, serving the meals, washing dishes, looking after the children, washing clothes for the whole crew. No washing machine or dryer, all clothes had to be hang on clothes lines outside. Hot water for everything heated in the tank on the wood kitchen stove. Diapers all had to be boiled, dishes all washed in hot water. And still time to teach Patsy how to tap dance!

Well, guess what! The Board of Education found out that those kids were not going to school! Home schooling was just not permitted, at least not in Marquette County! What to do? No problem, just move out to Northland where there was a school! But, both families again needed a place to live.

Frank and Leona moved to an old farmhouse about a quarter mile east of Northland. From there, Janice and Warren could walk to school, about half a mile each way. Louie got to work and along with Hank Deyot and Frank Victorson, built another camp alongside Viau’s tavern in Northland.

This marks the end of the story of life in the first set of camps in the woods south of Northland and begins the story of life in the little town of Northland itself!

CHAPTER 2

THE VILLAGE OF NORTHLAND

The family of Louie and Edna Schaut in front of their home in Northland, Michigan

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Phil Richard Patsy Tom Leo Dan Mary

A birthday celebration at our Northland home!

Life in Northland would be incredible! You could walk to a grocery store, the ice cream truck showed up every couple of weeks; we could go to a real school, with a real teacher and other kids, read books in the school and play baseball in the school yard. Wow!

Our new home was another log cabin. Dad brought me with him as much as possible, so I got to see the new cabin go up. Log by log, Louie on one end, Frank or Hank on the other, lifting the logs over their heads, chinking them in with cedar shims. Lots of swearing at each other, laughing at each other, smoking, chewing snuff, spitting, usually at some critter crawling on the ground. Work always stopped in mid morning for a lunch and cigarettes, again at noon and mid afternoon. In fact, that was the pattern for workmen in Northland. Apparently they could only hold enough food to last about two hours.

The