I live in the woods. So do a lot of my relatives. Go back a few generations and you’ll find lots of us from the woods. So I could say, as do many of my kind, that I know all about the woods.
But I don’t. And neither do you.
No one alive fully understands the woods as they existed just over a century ago. Those old growth pine forests, and the men who cut them down, faded into ecological fairy tales passed down in family lore, cartoons and paper towel commercials. The truth about lumberjacks is less romantic than roadside Paul Bunyan statues, but every bit as significant.
Understanding that truth is the purpose of a new book called “Gentlemen of the Woods: Manhood, Myth, and the American Lumberjack” (University of Minnesota Press, 2025) by historian Willa Hammitt Brown (no relation). Her book comes out next Tuesday.
“The biggest thing I want people to know is the extent to which what you think you know is not what really happened,” said Brown when I spoke to her recently. “What [lumberjack history] really was like is more like today’s migrant workers, with similar attitudes.”
Newspapers referred to lumberjacks as “reprobates” while towns like Duluth confined them to housing far from main street or the austere mansions of their bosses. Jacks were often immigrants and young men from low status families. But they became the critical labor force that drove one of Minnesota’s first and most important industries.
“Perhaps the greatest driving force in the ramping up of the logging industry was not the technology that enabled greater numbers of logs to make it to market, but the demographic changes that created a market that simply could not be be oversupplied,” writes Brown in “Gentlemen of the Woods.”
That’s how logging companies clear cut all but a few of the mature pines in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan in just a couple decades. Founders built towns across this region not in the woods, but where the woods used to be. Most every forested area we see today descends from the haphazardly regrown woods of 100 years ago.
Modern forestry methods dramatically improve upon the past. Our ecological systems still produce timber and wildlife habitat alike. Nevertheless, it would take centuries of careful planting to regrow the natural, mature pine forests of the past. Even then, the reality of climate change would limit such possibilities
“People talk about the Northwoods today as pristine and untouched,” said Brown. “It’s beautiful, but not untouched.”
Brown says myths overlook the corporate nature of the largest late 19th and early 20th century logging camps. The first camps more closely resembled the romantic idea of a few small cabins and an owner who worked alongside his men. But this became rare as big companies scooped up forest land and river access. Some men might move up the ladder to success, but the vast majority could not and did not.
“There were clearly fortunes to be found in the trees,” writes Brown. “But as logging grew increasingly industrialized, it became clear that these fortunes would fall in the hands of the few and often into hands far removed from the Northwoods themselves.”
Some of the most harrowing and heartfelt sections of “Gentlemen of the Woods” describe the gallows humor and mournful songs of the lumberjacks. No job was more dangerous than theirs. Nevertheless, they sprung into action each day believing their skills could save them. Injury was practically an inevitability, and death was a frequent visitor. It’s a way of life that few in the United States today fully understand, something Brown hopes her research can help.
“A historian is a person who knows the past is not somewhere you want to live,” said Brown.
And yet, studying the past remains vitally important to understanding our world today and it how it might be improved.
I live in the woods. I own a lot of plaid. It’s true, I enjoy wearing my wool mackinaw coat every chance I get. But my life of relative comfort and stability bears no resemblance to the harsh conditions faced by lumberjacks. Nor do most in power understand the harsh judgement of social scorn. Like the miners of the early Iron Range, lumberjacks built a nation, suffering exploitation by corporate owners with as much dignity as they could muster.
We can be glad things are better today, but there is no guarantee they will stay that way. We may learn more from true stories, like those in “Gentlemen of the Woods,” about real people working through hard times.
Aaron J. Brown is an author and college instructor from northern Minnesota’s Iron Range. He writes the blog MinnesotaBrown.com. This piece first appeared in the Saturday, Feb. 15, 2025 edition of the Mesabi Tribune.
Early in the 20th century, both of my Finnish immigrant grandfathers worked in logging camps. So did my Finnish grandmother as as cook. It was hard but they survived and later thrived.
Good piece and a great resource I will order the book. Thank you. And yet we have examples of workers today still being being treated as disposable widgets. Life maybe better for some but certainly not for all. We are along way from that. Vast numbers of the people of the present still struggle or are made to struggle. Barbara Ehrenreich’s book and Dimed is hardly out of date. And we now see the politics of the present or maybe the politics of the past reborn if the current attitude ever went away prescribing management solutions to real human problems. The Amazon worker of today may not be exposed to the physical risks of a lumberjack but serious risks are present. Here is a link to at least one report. and since the information is from OSHA one has to wonder in Musk and company has already altered it…https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/osha/osha20230201-0