Big Drive

The kingpin of Allagash Plantation, the last Maine outpost on the St. John River before it disappears into Maine's forests, is 6-ft., 190-lb. John Gardner. He could ride a log through white water be fore he was ten. At 20 he could lick every man within 50 miles.

This week, now nearing 40, John Gardner was busy doing something important about the war-born lumber shortage. Helping push toward the 1944 U.S. goal of 34 billion board feet, which Government officials gloomily doubt that the nation can meet, he was bossing the St. John's first big log drive (45 million ft.) in five years. His goal was the whitewashed village of Keegan, Me. There the Van Buren Madawaska Lumber Corp. is preparing, with government assistance, to reopen the East's biggest sawmill.

Mackinaws and Black Beans. To help him, Gardner has hired 150 of the toughest woodsmen he could find. Most of them come from New Brunswick--hard-muscled, catfooted lumberjacks who like to wear the loudest mackinaw shirts that money can buy. They work in crews of six, travel in bateaux (oversized row-boats), sometimes wade chest-deep in icy water. They will seldom be dry until the logs reach Keegan late in June. They eat prodigiously and often (breakfast at dawn, first lunch at 10 a.m., second at 2 p.m., supper in the early evening). The river staples are meat, potatoes and pie, but there are always baked beans & molasses, black and dripping with pork fat.

Evenings they gather round a campfire and, to a jingly, woodsy brand of folk music, sing "come-all-yez" and tell tall tales of the timberland. Favorites are "The Breaking of the Northwest Boom" and "The Days of Paddy Gillis." Best line in "Paddy Gillis" runs: "They who spat upon their hands and pushed the forest back."

The Main John. The tradition of the river says that they will see ghosts along its bank. Of these by far the most familiar spirit is "The Main John," old John Glasier. He was so nearly drowned during a log drive that he lost his hair when he was 20 and ever afterward wore a bushy brown wig topped by a stovepipe hat. He never doffed either, even when pulling a key log in a bad jam. He seldom talked except to his fabulous horse, Bonnie Doone, who could travel 65 miles in six hours. Later he became one of Canada's first Senators, gave up lumbering for the steamboat business. His legend has been carried by his lumberjacks to lumber camps across the continent: all woods bosses are called "The Main John."

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