A Logger's Life Provincial Museum
The long trestle table is set
with tin plates, the narrow
bunks are lined with fir boughs.
Long-johns and rough plaid shirts
hang from the rafters, and wooden
chairs are clustered around
the oil-drum stove. Visitors
to the Logger's Life Provincial
Museum (part of the Provincial
Museum of Newfoundland and Labrador),
at the entrance to Beothuk Provincial
Park in Grand Falls-Windsor,
may even be fortunate enough
to hear a spirited recitation
of "St. Peter at the Gate."
Life in a small-scale Exploits
River logging camp of the 1920's
has been recreated at this museum,
which includes a cookhouse-bunkhouse,
barn, filing shack and forge.
Displays and exhibits feature
samples of clothing, tools,
and utensils used by the loggers.
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Legacy of the Logging
Life
Black tea, beans and pork-and-molasses bangbelly
for supper, fir boughs for beds, vermin-infested
bunkhouses, sodden clothes draped above an
oil-drum stove and black bears pawing at the
lunch box - life was hard in the early 20th
century logging camps of the Exploits River
valley. In places like Badger, Millertown
and Bishop's Falls, loggers were expected
to find their way by train, and then by foot,
to the lumber camps, bringing with them their
own pulp hooks, axes, files and saw blades.
Once there, they shared a bunkhouse with up
to 40 men, sleeping side by side with only
boards between them. Camp food, haphazardly
prepared by rough-and-tumble cooks, was plentiful
but plain: boiled beans, soup, white bread,
potatoes, salt fish, salt beef, and dried
apple jam. Breakfast and supper were eaten
in the bunkhouse, with a noon-time dinner
of bread and "bully beef" carried
out to the woods by horse and wagon. On the
"roads," or timbering areas assigned
to them, the men cut an average of 2 cords
a day, sometimes doubling up to man the long,
cross-cut "Simon Saws." In the early
1930's, loggers' earnings amounted to about
$7 a month, but after a strike against the
Anglo-Newfoundland Development Company, wages
doubled. To the grateful delight of the loggers,
real mattresses appeared on bunkhouse beds.
Driving logs down the Exploits River was the
most dangerous work of all. Balancing precariously
on the floating mass, daredevil drivers freed
the log jams with their pick poles and signaled
for the men upriver to open the dams and send
more logs rushing to the sea.
During the long, winter nights in the isolated
camps, loggers played cards, pitched horseshoes,
and sang some of Newfoundland's most colourful
folk ballads. The men developed a language
all their own, contributing yet another unique
dimension to the province's distinctive culture.
Take a Cultural Tour
of the Exploits Valley
• Start your tour at Badger, an
historic logging community at the intersection
of the Trans Canada Highway and Route 370,
leading southwest to the heart of the Newfoundland
interior. Plan a stop amidst the silver birch
of Mary March Wilderness Park, situated
on a ridge overlooking Red Indian Lake.
The Park bears the anglicized name of Demasduit,
for a young Beothuk mother who was captured
near the Lake in 1819, and taken to St. John's.
When she died of tuberculosis in 1820, her
body was returned to the Beothuk encampment
near the Lake.
Celebrate
the Salmon!
Now recognized as one of the world's
great salmon rivers, the mighty
Exploits is celebrated each year
in mid-July, at the Grand Falls-Windsor
Exploits Valley Salmon Festival.
Five days of food, festivities
and big-name entertainers draw
crowds from far and wide, near
the site of one of the most impressive
Atlantic salmon enhancement projects
in North America. |
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• As you continue
southwest on Route 370, take a side trip to
Buchans Junction, where you will find
yourself in the geographic centre of Newfoundland.
Look for Laplanders' Bog, and the remnants
of a stone corral, all that remains of a failed
experiment in which Lapps and their reindeer
were brought to Newfoundland in the early
20th century in an attempt to introduce the
domesticated deer to the island.
• Just past Buchans Junction, take another
short detour to Millertown, a logging
community named for early 20th century lumber
entrepreneur Lewis Miller. Find out more about
Exploits Valley wildlife at the Wildlife
Exhibit Centre, and visit the Millertown
Heritage Museum.
• Continue on Route 370 to the town of
Buchans, a mining town that dates from
the 1920's. The mine is no longer in operation,
but the Buchans Miners Museum traces
the colourful history of one of Newfoundland's
most famous mining operations.
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Mary March Regional Museum
Trace 5,000 years of central
Newfoundland history at the
Mary March Regional Museum,
named for the young Beothuk
captive of the early 19th century.
The Museum shares the story
of the first inhabitants of
the island's interior, including
the Maritime Archaic, the Paleoeskimo
and the Beothuk. It also chronicles
the history of the area's first
European settlers, and the development
of the mining, logging, railway
and pulp and paper industries.
Visitors can view 10,000-year-old
fossils, samples of copper slag
from nearby mines, the field
journal of a logger, rolls of
newsprint produced at the Grand
Falls paper plant, and displays
of Mi'Kmaq quillwork, handmade
wooden toys, and intricately-designed
hooked rugs. Along the trails
of the Museum's Beothuk Village,
to see a burial site and to
view reconstructed summer and
winter "mamateek"
dwellings, an underground refrigeration
storage pit lined with birch
bark. |
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• Head back along Route
370 to Beothuk Provincial Park, located
2 kilometres west of Grand Falls-Windsor.
The Park offers overnight camping and trailer
sites, and ample opportunity to swim, water
ski, boat, wind surf and fish. Visit the Logger's
Life Provincial Museum, at the Park's
entrance, or following a hiking trail in search
of the carnivorous Pitcher Plant, the
provincial flower of Newfoundland and Labrador.
• Continue to follow the scenic course
of the Exploits River to the town of Grand
Falls-Windsor (population, 20,000), home
of Newfoundland's first pulp and paper mill.
At the Salmonid Interpretation Centre,
view the Atlantic salmon fish ladder that
forms part of the ambitious Exploits River
salmon enhancement program. Tour a recreated
Beothuk village at the Mary March Regional
Museum, where archeological findings,
artifacts of the logging, mining and railway
eras, and exhibits of local arts and crafts
are on display.
• Finish your tour
at Bishop's Falls, an historic logging,
sawmilling and railway town (once the location
of the maintenance depot for the legendary
"Newfie Bullet"). For a great view
of the Falls, head to Fallsview Municipal
Park, on the north bank of the Exploits
River.
A Beothuk Primer
• Red Ochre - No other aboriginal
tribe used red paint as extensively as the
Beothuk. Using a mixture of powdered ochre
and fish oil or animal grease, they painted
their bodies, faces, hair, clothing, personal
possessions and tools.
• Birch Bark Canoe- While still
able to access the resources of the coast,
the Beothuk built supremely seaworthy curved-bottom
canoes, using rock ballast, covered with
moss, to settle the craft in the water.
• Mamateek - Beothuk dwellings
were built into shallow depressions dug
into the ground, over which was placed a
conical framework of poles covered with
sheets of bark insulated with layers of
moss. Excavated earth was mounded around
the mamateek for extra warmth and dryness.
• Mokoshan - In specially-constructed
oval-shaped houses, about 9 -10 metres in
length and 4 -5 metres wide, and featuring
a long hearth, the feast of the "mokoshan"
honoured the master of the caribou. Caribou
leg bones were boiled and the marrow skimmed
off, to be pressed into cakes and solemnly
consumed.
• Deer Fence - Long, continuous
rows of felled trees, left hanging from
their stumps, or lines of wooden poles tied
with fluttering scraps of skin or cloth
were used to funnel herds of caribou into
the water, as they migrated from the Northern
Peninsula across the Exploits River and
Red Indian Lake.
• Amina - Specifically designed
for hunting caribou, the "amina"
consisted of a 3-metre wooden shaft tipped
with an iron point.
• A-a-duth - The indispensable
sealing harpoon was composed of a 3.7-metre
shaft equipped with a detachable head tied
to a long line.
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