Loggers prayed as fervently as farmers

In the late 1800s, before narrow-gauge railroads crisscrossed the piney woods of southwest Louisiana, loggers prayed just as fervently as farmers for just the right amount of rain. It wasn’t because they wanted the trees to grow. It was so that they could get their logs to the sawmills.
In those days, logs were floated down the Calcasieu River to the dozen mills that ringed Lake Charles, and the river itself usually wasn’t much of a problem. But the loggers used dozens of little streams to get their timber from deep in the woods to the river. They’d put a big chain across the mouth of a little stream to corral the logs until they had enough to bind into a raft and haul to market.
But those little streams dried up if there wasn’t enough rain. If there was too much, the streams ran amok and the corralled logs were likely to stampede down the river on their own.
Either too little or too much presented a problem that reached beyond the men who cut the logs. Without logs to cut, the mills sat silent. When the mills sat silent, all of southwest Louisiana felt an economic pinch.
That’s why there was widespread interest in weather reports that showed up regularly in the newspapers of the day.
For example, the Lake Charles Commercial noted in January 1882, that “continuous rains” for two weeks had turned streets to mud, but they “caused a good rise in the River and … all the available logs are now afloat and our mill and lumber men may expect a full supply for the next ninety days at least.”
In another item a decade later, in the spring of 1893, the paper said “mill men are … jubilant” after “the hardest rain that has fallen in months.” They didn’t mind the damaging hail that came with the rain. They and the newspaper’s editors were “satisfied that it was sufficient to swell the creeks and river, so as to enable the log men to run logs to market, for some of our mills have already run short of saw-timber.”
The story was different in early 1884, when heavy rains “raised the creeks and brought out a great many logs, which jammed against the chain booms on the Hickory Branch and West Fork, letting logs into the main river,” apparently for the second time in two years.
“The Steam Tug Alert was put to work stretching booms at West Lake Charles [as Westlake was called then], where the jam of two years ago was stopped, but the current aided by the heavy north wind … broke the booms and the logs were adrift again.”
The Alert stretched another chain boom about a mile downstream, but it also broke after holding the logs for about a day.
“It is estimated that between 10,000 and 12,000 logs have gone down the river, and will be a total loss,” the Commercial said. “The actual loss in timber will hardly fall short of $18,000 to $20,000.”
That’s about a half-million dollars in today’s money, and the loss added impetus to long discussed plans to build little railroads to haul logs out of the woods.
The idea had been kicking around since right after the real railroad crossed south Louisiana in 1880, The Commercial reported as early as the summer of 1881 that “the mill owners and lumbermen of Calcasieu have at last realized the fact that they can no longer absolutely depend upon the uncertain rises of the river for their supply of logs.”
The demand for lumber, the newspaper said, “has been constantly increasing since the day that the first saw-mill was erected in Lake Charles, and this demand has … reached such proportions that our twelve sawmills are strained to their utmost capacity to fill one-half of the orders sent to them. Any interruption in the supply of logs is, therefore, a serious loss to them, and we are glad to see that serious steps are being taken by some of our citizens to prevent any such contingency in the future.”
At first, those little railways just carried lumber to the river; it was still floated downstream to the mills. But now the logs went directly to the river, and did not depend on the rise and fall of little streams or the weakest links of chains stretched across them.
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.