FOREST LIFE
AND
FOREST TREES:
COMPRISING
WINTER CAMP-LIFE AMONG THE
LOGGERS, AND WILD-WOOD
ADVENTURE.
WITH
DESCRIPTIONS OF LUMBERING OPERATIONS ON
THE VARIOUS RIVERS OF MAINE AND
NEW BRUNSWICK.
BY JOHN S. SPRINGER.
NEW YORK:
HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS,
82 CLIFF STREET.
1851.
Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year one thousandeight hundred and fifty-one, by
Harper & Brothers,
in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the Southern Districtof New York.
PREFACE.
The writer of the following pages was reared among the Pine forests ofMaine, and has spent several of the most pleasant years of his life inactive participation in many of the scenes here delineated.
The incidents he has related are real, and in no case is the truthsacrificed to fancy or embellishment.
When the author commenced writing, his motive was to indulge somewhatin pleasant reminiscences of the past, and to live over again thatportion of his life which, in general, was so pleasantly spent amongthe wild mountains, forests, lakes, and rivers of Maine. It was duringthis retrospective exercise with his pen that the idea of writing abook, embracing his own experience and observations during the time inwhich he participated in the lumberman's life, suggested itself.
Recollecting that, while the life, habits, and adventures of manyclasses of men had engaged the attention of the reading community, andthat, among the multitude of narratives issued from the press, nothingof interest or importance had been put forth exemplifying the life andadventures of a very large class of persons known as lumbermen, henaturally became possessed with a desire to entertain others with somerelation of what appeared to him to afford sufficient material for abook of some interest, and chiefly because the matter it might embracehad never been presented in a connected detail.
Suggesting the substance of what has already been said to severalintelligent lumbermen, an interest was at once awakened in theirfeelings upon the subject, accompanied with an urgent request that theplan should be prosecuted, and that a work should be prepared whichmight make their pursuits, adventures, and hardships more generallyknown. To many of these friends the author is also indebted for someassistance in furnishing statistical matter.
In incorporating the somewhat lengthy notice of Forest Trees, formingthe first part of this volume, the author has ventured to make his owntaste and feelings the criterion by which he has been guided in hisselections and observations for the reader, and although they may nothold a strict relation to the narrative, he hopes that they may not bedeemed inappropriate or uninteresting.
This volume makes no pretensions to literary merit; sooner would it,indeed, claim kindred with the wild and uncultivated scenes of whichit is but a simple relation.
In justice to the gentlemen whom he has quoted in arranging thestatistical portion of this volume, as well as to himself, the authorwould state that the material was procured some four years ago. Thes