They often traveled in packs, spent virtually all their time outdoors, had their meals prepared for them by a traveling chuck wagon, and were the inspiration for folk ballads.ĭespite Hollywood’s depiction of cowboy life, however, the riverman’s was probably more dangerous.

Both types of men were known as hardworking and hard-drinking and quick to brawl. Whether it was herding cows or logs, both involved strength and courage, and an acceptance of danger. The job description might sound mundane, but a mystique developed around both types of work. Like cowboys, they transported goods to market. The rivermen of the North Country were the cowboys of the East. Shepherding these logs to mills in Massachusetts would be 500 of the toughest men the region had ever known. When the leading edge of the drive reached Bellows Falls, its back end was in Barnet, 80 miles upstream. Period photos show the logs filling some of the river’s widest parts from bank to bank. The 1915 drive choked the river with hundreds of thousands of 20-foot-long sections of trees. The Connecticut River was already the nation’s oldest log-driving route and the longest, and it regularly carried some of the largest drives in terms of the sheer volume of logs conveyed.ĭuring the winter of 1914-15, the company hired 2,000 men to cut trees and prepare the way for that final drive. The Connecticut River Lumber Company announced that it would end the tradition with the largest log drive the river had ever seen, which was saying something. The news shot through the North Country faster than whitewater in rapids: The age of the major log drives on the Connecticut River was coming to an end.īut there would be one last hurrah. Rivermen work on a log drive at Beecher Falls, Vt., at the north end of the Connecticut River in this photo, circa 1900.

The Drowing Day by Anne Cassidy