Driving Utah's Rivers: Working Water in the West

Abstract

On July 25, 1877, in four simple declarative sentences, the Deseret News summed up a man's life under a “Drowned” heading in the “Local and Other Matters” section of the paper, sandwiched in-between notices of a horse that had to be put down and a meeting of the Twenty-first Ward. “On June 20th,” it reported, “at Coe and Carter's tie camp, Weber Cañon, George Carter was accidentally drowned, in the Weber River. An inquest was held over the remains, by a jury, before Mr. James McCormick, Coroner of Summit County. The verdict was that deceased was accidentally drowned while attempting to wade the Weber. From papers found among his effects it appears that Carter was formerly of Montreal, Canada.”1George Carter was a “river hog” in territorial Utah's important but often overlooked tie and log driving industry, and on that day his life likely hinged on a single decision made instinctively and reflexively, drawn from his accumulated experience guiding timber to market on the interior West's rivers. Amid the grinding, crashing roar of thousands of raw logs and rough-cut ties boiling down the Weber River in northern Utah that June, Carter would have maneuvered himself through the adrenaline-fueling chaos for twelve to sixteen hours a day. But on that morning, Carter made a fatal miscalculation. Yet while Carter's life and final moments may be lost forever in the past, the significant and substantial economy that employed him should not be so ephemeral in the historical record.2In the arid West, water is the essential element. In addition to providing sustenance, the West's rivers were also important highways of timber commerce and trade—working water that facilitated territorial settlement and economic development. Yet in Utah's story, this fascinating aspect of water history has long remained obscured. Log driving originated in Europe, and immigrants to North America brought the practice with them.3 Wood was a vital, indispensable resource and early pioneers used it to build, roof, and heat their homes and cabins; fence livestock in (or out); construct furniture; raise barns; tie railroads; make charcoal in kilns and for smelters; timber mines and road tunnels; fabricate bridges; and erect temples and stores and buildings. It was the fabric of life. In the Central Rocky Mountain West, white settlement and the coming of the railroad expanded tie and log driving in part because rivers were a logical and inexpensive timber conduit in a region devoid of significant roads.4It should come as no surprise that tie- and log-driving enterprises—the business of acquiring this elemental commodity—were crucial to the personal and fiscal success of some early settlers. While historians have documented extensively the boom-and-bust economies of the West's other extractive industries such as mining, ranching, timber, and railroads, the centrality of the tie and log drive economy to the development of the interior West has garnered only passing mention, if at all.5 Yet as the history of the Weber River—as well as that of the Provo, Bear, Blacks Fork, Green, and numerous other rivers throughout Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, and Idaho—demonstrates, between the 1850s and 1900 especially, tie and log drives were fundamental to the settlement success of the region.6 This, then, is the story of the Intermountain West's other extractive economy. And a river runs through it.Although Brigham Young brought the Mormon pioneers to the Valley of the Great Salt Lake in 1847 in part to escape the United States and the persecution they had encountered at the hands of their fellow Americans to the east, the Saints were soon swept back into the national fold, and both those in and outside the LDS church began the earnest search for economic possibility. As part of his “land law,” Young and the church promoted communalism and governing policies that assured public access to and use of Utah's streams, rivers, wood, and timber.7 In 1852, this ideal was codified in territorial law, which proclaimed that the county courts had “control of all timber, water privileges, or any water course or creek, to grant mill sites and exercise such powers as in their judgment shall best preserve the timber, and subserve the interest of the settlements, in the distribution of water for irrigation, or for other purposes.”8 Indeed, as a later irrigation economist argued, that “no monopoly in either land or water developed in the early days was due to the fact that the church leaders were constantly on guard against it.”9In September 1852, armed with these ecclesiastical and legal blessings, Robert Gardner and his brother made the first recorded commercial survey and assessment of the “weaber [sic] for timber and floating purposes.” He “found the River good for floating” and also noted “some beautiful land and extensive range for stock” in the canyon. The men found similarly favorable conditions along the Provo River, which Gardner characterized as “nearly as large as the Weber,” and “as handsome a stream for floating purpose as could be desired.” Gardner's diary described the various types of timber available, their sizes, and stated that the rivers both had sufficient flows to sustain a saw mill, “plentiful” trees, and flows “large enough in times of high water to float timber from points many miles back in the mountains.”10 Although the archeologist James Ayres suggests that “1850s and early 1860s logging activity was sporadic and of a relatively minor nature” in the Uintas (e.g., the Upper Bear and Blacks Fork rivers), Gardner's reconnaissance presciently foretold the future uses of the Weber and other rivers of northern Utah as highways of timber commerce.11Of the four major rivers in northern Utah—Weber, Provo, Bear, and Blacks Fork—the Weber has both the largest drainage area and consequently the largest average flows.12 Like the other three, the Weber River's genesis lies high in Utah's Uinta Mountains, in the northwest section of the range in a drainage basin formed by snow-capped Mt. Watson, Notch Mountain, Reids Peak, Bald Mountain, the Notch Mountains, and the Hayden Peak Range. From its headwaters, the Weber River winds for 125 miles, west to Oakley, Utah, then northwesterly through Summit (seventy miles), Morgan (twenty-five miles), and Weber (thirty miles) counties to its final destination in the Great Salt Lake. Its major tributary is the Ogden River, which joins the Weber River approximately twelve miles upstream from the mouth. Other tributaries, such as the East Canyon, Lost, Chalk, Beaver, Echo, and Silver creeks, also augment the Weber's flow along its course so that it ultimately accounts for approximately one-quarter of the lake's total in-flow.13Significantly, by the 1850s, the United States began planning construction of a transcontinental railroad that could link raw materials in the West to factories and consumers in the East. Under the direction of the War Department, surveyors canvassed the West for suitable routes and passes for the Pacific Railroad, one of which was Lieutenant E. G. Beckwith's 1853–1854 exploration of the Wasatch Range, including the Weber, Bear, and Green rivers. His report indicated that both the Weber and Bear rivers offered passage through the range and that the monthly mail route from Independence, Missouri, already utilized mule-pack trails through Weber Canyon. In April 1854, Beckwith estimated that the “river at this season of the year (not yet swollen by the melting snows of the mountains) is thirty yards wide, by from one to three feet in depth, flowing with a rapid, powerful current.” Beckwith's party proceeded up the canyon along the treacherous trails perched on the “craggy” sides “so steep that a single mis-step would have precipitated both mule and rider into the foaming torrent, hundreds of feet below us.” Approximately eight miles upstream, near the conjunction with “Ben Simons Creek,” Beckwith marveled at “the finest grazing district we have seen in Utah,” while the ravines had “limited amounts of cedar, fir, and pine” but were “difficult of access.”14 Overall, Beckwith judged the Weber Canyon a suitable route for the railroad and, on April 9th, he made a similar reconnaissance of the Bear River.By the 1850s and 1860s, settlers along the lower course of the Weber, in places such as Uinta (or, Easton and East Weber), Morgan, and along the Provo River had established more than one hundred sawmills in various parts of Utah to process logs cut up in the canyons and floated down the rivers.15 Similar activities occurred on the Ogden River to the north.16 One biography of the Ogden pioneer Lorin Farr, for example, details how groups of men ascended Ogden Canyon in search of desirable timber. They would fell the trees, mark and cut them into logs, and then “float them down the Ogden River for retrieval”: a process “particularly effective during spring floods of the river.” Men then retrieved their logs for processing at Farr's sawmill—Farr received half of the logs as compensation for his work—and sold them for an estimated ten dollars per hundred feet.17 This use of the river was economical for a number of reasons, but it also allowed sawyers to avoid the rather steep tolls assessed on roads such as that through Ogden Canyon; there, during the 1860s, travelers paid one dollar for a loaded wagon, fifty cents for an unloaded wagon, and a quarter for mounted horseback passage18 In nearby Morgan County, on the Weber River, sawyers felled logs and hauled them by oxen or floated them down the river to the sawmills.19 On the Weber River, flows usually began rising in March with peak flows occurring in May and occasionally into June and then tapering off to consistent levels for the remainder of the year.20On July 1, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Pacific Railway Act into law, authorizing the expenditure of federal funds to build a transcontinental railroad from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean. Because of the Civil War (1861–1865), southern states were not in the Union and so the transcontinental railroad followed a more northerly route. The Union Pacific (UP) expanded westward from Omaha, while the Central Pacific built eastward out of San Francisco, ultimately joining together at Promontory, Utah, on May 10, 1869. As part of their incentive to build, the railroads received alternating sections of land alongside the tracks. Their exclusive rights to prime timber lands complemented their position as monopolistic buyers for ties on the North Slope of the Uintas.21To penetrate the Wasatch Range, the railroad passed through Weber Canyon, and the entire construction process brought income and jobs into the territory. The utility of proximal forests was immediately evident. The 1864 UP survey and report by Samuel B. Reed described the mouth of the Weber River as “120 feet wide, and from four to six feet deep, being swollen at the time of the survey [June] by melting of snow on the mountains.” Reed also suggested that “a limited supply of timber can be obtained in the [lower] cañons for cross ties and bridge purposes” and stated that the grade from Devils Gate to the mouth (just under thirty miles) is “2296/100 feet per mile.” Above Devils Gate, the river's grade steepens, and Reed noted that “there is a large tract of pine timber, suitable for railroad purposes, accessible from this point.” Reed also explored and surveyed the Bear and Green river drainages and reported that the headwaters of the Bear contained “large tracts of [timber], suitable for railroad purposes, that can be rafted down Bear River to the line.” The Green River also boasted “a large tract of pine timber,” from which “cross ties can be obtained . . . and rafted down Green River to the line, to build the road between Green and Bear Rivers.”22The high costs for and large number of ties required to build the railroads inspired entrepreneurial companies and tie hacks to find the most economical means to deliver the greatest number of ties at the best possible prices, both for the men who performed the hard and dangerous work and for the railroad companies eager to keep their profits high.23 The solution that readily emerged was to eliminate the most costly aspect of tie-supply—overland transport—and replace it with the free labor of the region's rivers. One Wyoming timberman compellingly demonstrated to UP contractors the feasibility of floating logs from Chambers Lake down the Laramie River: “you have merely to drag to this side and float them down to the railroad line.” It worked. Crews of tie hewers (or tie hacks) cut and sled-hauled ties during the winter of 1867–1868 and piled them on the ice of the Laramie, waiting for the spring thaw to flush them downstream in what would become, according to the historian William H. Wroten Jr., one “of the many scores [of tie drives] that were to run the Laramie and other rivers of the Central Rocky Mountain region in years to come.” These drives could be profitable, indeed. Gilman and Carter, for example, paid their suppliers thirty-five to sixty cents per tie and then received one dollar to $1.30 for those same ties from the UP's financing arm, Credit Mobilier. In his research, Wroten discovered that as the demand for ties escalated, they poured in “from the forests along the Little and Big Laramie Rivers, the North Platte, the Green, Black's [sic] Fork and Bear Rivers.” During the 1868 season, six hundred men were working in the Green River forests and “over 200,000 ties were floated down the Green River alone.” The myriad workers, businessmen, sawmill owners, tie hacks, and others associated with timber harvests and tie trade infused a positive money flow into local economies. As Wroten concludes, “the tie was considered to be the most important product of the Rocky Mountain forests until after the turn of the century.”24In 1868, Brigham Young contracted with the UP to grade the route from Echo Canyon to the Great Salt Lake, and numerous subcontractors and entrepreneurs began logging intensively along the Wasatch Range to supply the railroad with ties and timber.25 The demand was significant; the UP, for example, laid between 2,300 and 2,640 eight-foot ties per mile.26 At the end of 1868, the Union Pacific line was complete to Evanston, Wyoming, and by November, ties valued at more than $3,000 were arriving at Echo City to build the tracks through Weber Canyon, and the railroad was consuming thousands of board feet of timber each month.27 One estimate compiled in July 1869, stated that just at the mouth of Weber Canyon, “planks furnished for bridges” amounted to 23,000 board feet “at 4 cts. per foot at the mill or 6 cts at the bridges.”28 Advertisements for “Choppers and Hewers” appeared in local papers, and the Deseret News reported in August 1868, “Ties are being got out in the vicinity of the Bear river, and other places.”29 One of those “other places” was the Green River, where J. W. Davis and Associates recorded the delivery to the UP of more than 24,000 board feet of “clap ties in and on the banks of Green River.”30 Another was the Logan River where, beginning in 1868, logs were floated into the town of Logan and then hauled to local sawmills.31By the late 1860s, as a result of the transcontinental railroad, timber harvesting intensified on the Bear River as well. Independent contractors cut on both railroad-owned and federal lands and sold directly to the UP.32 Ayres states that “moving timber products to the railroad was ordinarily by floating, 30 miles or so, either down the Bear or Blacks Fork Rivers. This method was routine until about 1930, when trucks came into use.”33 The historian L. J. Colton corroborates the use of this mode of transportation, concluding that “most of the timber in the form of saw logs, ties, props, and cordwood was floated to the market or point of manufacture down the Bear River or in a flume. Large numbers of men were employed, and there were, of course, brawls, injuries, drownings, and other activities that would be associated with this type of operation.”34Tie and log driving, whether on the Weber, Bear, or other rivers, could be a dangerous and deadly enterprise, as George Carter's tragic 1877 story demonstrates, but it also offered a kind of heroic celebrity, taking on the tenor of a modern sporting event as “crowds thronged the banks to see the drivers ‘ride the boom.”35 The practice was common throughout the Rocky Mountains and typically thirty to one hundred men like Carter worked the larger drives, which commenced when the rivers began to rise in late spring. One Wyoming cowboy colorfully described the “tie-punchers” as “never dry from the time drive starts till the last tie reaches the boom.”36 During the drives, the “river hogs” waded in the water for hours at a time, since boats were often too treacherous amid the thousands of ties or logs, and others waited along the shore to deal with log jams.37 Downstream booms, often at the conjunction of the river and the railroad, captured the drive, which was then loaded onto wagons or railroad cars. Although some men lost their lives in this dangerous occupation, this aspect of the timber industry provided many jobs and was an important element of the economies of Wyoming and Utah during this period.38 Similar drives were also taking place in Colorado, where during the winter of 1868–1869, for example, “over 200,000 ties were cut and floated down the Poudre.”39 In 1872, the Colorado territorial legislature went so far as to legally protect the rights of log drivers to use the rivers, stating that it was “lawful for any person or persons to float any and all kinds of timber, such as saw logs, ties, fencing poles or posts, and firewood, down any of the streams of this Territory” so long as they posted a bond sufficient to cover any damages.40In Utah, the Morgan County sawmills were also important employers and drivers of the territorial economy as key suppliers of transcontinental railroad ties; a wagon-load of ties delivered to Echo, for example, earned a respectable ten dollars a day. Many of these mills were operating in Hardscrabble Canyon, a tributary of East Canyon whose confluence lies about five miles up from Morgan.41 Tie hacks could typically produce around twenty ties during an eight-hour period.42 In Morgan, the Weber River floated some logs to the mill pond of Abiah Wadsworth. Indeed, it wasn't until the turn of the twentieth century that a wagon road was finally cut through the perilous Narrows section of Weber Canyon, where the UP hit its one thousand milestone from Omaha, Nebraska.43The transcontinental railroad emerged from Weber Canyon in March 1869 and joined with the Central Pacific at Promontory on May 10th.44 Timber harvest and river driving throughout the region continued, however. That same year, for example, leaders of the LDS church organized the Coalville and Echo Railroad to transport coal from mines above Coalville to Echo, then to Ogden via the UP and on to Salt Lake City via the Utah Central.45 In his study of the railroad tie industry in the central Rocky Mountains between 1867 and 1900, Wroten argues that “the money spent by railroads, tie contractors, and tie hacks meant much to the business men of the tie cutting centers.” One of the major concerns early on in the building of the railroad was the excessively high cost of ties, primarily due to transportation costs. The vice-president of the Central Pacific lamented that team-hauled ties in the Wasatch were costing “more than $6” per load. Once the railroad reached Cheyenne in November 1867, though, the areas around Henry's Fork, Blacks Fork, Bear, and Weber rivers became sources for railroad ties and telegraph poles, and camps filled with thousands of lumberjacks mushroomed up in the mountains. By the fall of 1867, the UP was paying oxen teams up to nine dollars a day.46One of the challenges of tracing the business records of these companies and individual tie hacks and drivers is the convoluted and interwoven connections between contractors and subcontractors. Even for the most prominent of tie operations, that of Coe and Carter (at first called Gilman and Carter), whose main routes were between Nebraska and Salt Lake City, little information exists beyond generalities. Coe and Carter continued to supply ties well after the completion of the transcontinental railroad, however; in 1881, for example, they furnished somewhere in the range of 500,000 and 700,000 ties to the Oregon Short Line and the Utah and Northern roads. Surveyor Samuel Reed later estimated that it had taken 4.2 million ties to build the 1,900 miles of transcontinental railroad track from Omaha to California.47 Thus, while it is impossible to quantify the exact economic contribution that tie and log drives made to the Weber River specifically and to the northern Utah region in general, the extensive use of rivers as highways of timber commerce establishes them as substantial influences.Track replacement programs and new spur lines continued to create a steady demand for ties throughout the region, allowing outfits like Coe and Carter to function as profitable tie suppliers until the turn of the century. During the 1870s, for example, the Laramie River experienced yearly drives “of from 35,000 to 250,000 ties,” according to Wroten, and in 1877, the Bear River had a three-mile drive that was valued at $250,000. These timber needs continued into the 1880s, when, in 1885, the UP placed an order for 100,000 ties to be delivered along the line between Cheyenne and Ogden. In 1888, the Denver, Rio Grande Western purchased 100,000 ties, “which were floated down the Green River to a point where the railroad crossed that stream.” “In 1895,” Wroten notes, “Coe and Company started a tie drive on its journey from the Uinta Mountains to Church Buttes [Wyoming], a distance of about one hundred miles down the Black Fork.”48 And archeologist Ayres argues that although logging in the northern Uintas slowed considerably after 1869, “a minor, local boom occurred between 1912 and about 1930 when the Standard Timber Company of Omaha, Nebraska, entered the area.”49For northern Utah, the 1870s saw the beginning of the Park City mining boom, the construction of the Summit County narrow-gauge railroad between Echo and Coalville, the expansion of the Utah Southern Railroad, and a proposed Utah Eastern Railroad from Coalville to Salt Lake City.50 The UP spur and a narrow gauge track built by the Utah Central both passed through Wanship on their way to Park City, acting as a conduit of coal, timber, and silver. Park City fortuitously boomed as a mining town at precisely the same time that the transcontinental railroad became connected. All of these endeavors required large infusions of timber, which the Weber Canyon and its river provided.51 In her autobiography, Olive Emily Somsen Sharp described her father Henry J. Somsen's work in the 1870s “getting timber from the high mountains east of Coalville and Kamas, Utah”: “the men worked from the Provo River, north to the Weber River, where they floated the ties down the Weber to Echo.”52 The Deseret Evening News corroborated this description in mid-1877, reporting that “railroad ties that have been cut in East Weber Mountains are being floated down the Weber River in large numbers to Echo.”53Robert E. Strahorn's colorful 1877 travel narrative of his passage along the UP also detailed that “over 1,000,000 feet of timber, and some 200,000 railroad ties were cut from the neighboring mountains in 1878. Ties are floated down the Bear river, thence down to the Pacific Railway.”54 Strahorn's travelogue describes tie drives throughout the region, indicating the commonality of the practice. The evidence from local newspapers substantiates this. The following year, in 1879, in addition to the Weber and other tie drives, the Provo City Semi-Weekly Enquirer reported that “the railroad tie business is assuming massive proportions here. Thousands are being floated down the Provo river,” and the Logan Leader estimated that “between 100,000 and 200,000 ties have been floated down Logan river this season.”55 The Logan Leader estimated that “Coe and Carter have spent about $60,000 here this season.”56Echoes of Yesterday, a Summit County centennial history, also describes the Weber Canyon tie drives of 1879 and beyond, noting that both ties and lumber were floated “down the river” and “taken out at Wanship.”57Yet the toll from this tie and timber trade was high. In the 1870s, for example, residents of Woodland, located approximately five miles south of Kamas, were actively engaged in “mining timber” to fill Park City's insatiable demands for wood. “In two or three years,” however, “all of the mining timber was cleared out of this district,” forcing the men either to “seek another line of work,” get out even larger timbers, or relocate their focus to the Provo River and its canyons.58 In the long run, this level of timber harvest was unsustainable and would cause the tie drives to diminish in economic significance.Nevertheless, in the succeeding decade, tie and log drives continued to utilize the Weber and other rivers of northern Utah.59 In the summer of 1880, the Salt Lake Herald ran UP “wanted” advertisements for ties to complete the eagerly awaited Summit County Line between Coalville and Park City.60 By that October, fuel wood was “getting scarce,” prompting the Salt Lake Weekly Tribune to suggest that “there are vast forests along the Weber river, from which the wood can be floated down to the depot at Wanship.”61 One tie provider, Alva A. Tanner, wrote in his autobiography that “in the spring of 1880, a narrow gauge Railroad was begun from the mouth of Echo Canyon to Park City” and he and three other companions “went to the head of Weber river that spring to make ties. They were to be floated down the river. We was to put them on the bank ready to dump in the river. We found timber quite handy and made good wages.” Tanner estimated that “a hundred men were in the timber”; he specifically mentioned “Alexander Canyon,” a tributary of Silver Creek, “to the South West of Wanship,” and noted that the ties “had to be made earley, not later than July 20th, so as to float them in high water.”62In January 1881, once the railroad was finally completed, the prospects for supplying the mines with timbers and tunnel props seemed bright; the Salt Lake Weekly Tribune reported Park City's optimism: “at the head of the Weber river are forests from which we expect to draw our supply for years to come, at a moderate cost. The hardy woodman will repair thither, and having cut a few thousand feet will float it down the river to the depot at Wanship.”63 One of those suppliers was Samuel Liddiard, who wrote in his journal, dated 1881: “I went to Wanship there we built a boom across the river to hold the ties as they was driven down the river . . . there was 42000 ties.”64 That summer, “wanted” advertisements for tens of thousands of ties and telegraph poles appeared in Provo's Territorial Enquirer, and in November the Salt Lake Daily Herald noted that “Dan Jones & Co. have quite a large contract to furnish ties. . . . They commenced putting these ties in the [Provo] river, near Heber, about a week ago.”65 The thirty-mile float numbered in excess of 13,000 ties, and Jones continued his operations into December of that year, given the mild weather and high flows in the Provo.66 Advertisements for “100 wood choppers to cut ties on Weber River” for the UP also appeared at that same time in the Deseret News and the Logan Leader.67 Jones was also working in the Weber River drainage where, according to the July 27, 1881, Territorial Enquirer, he was “already favorably known to tie cutters and haulers, having for the past two years employed men and teams for the same purpose in the vicinity of Weber river and given entire satisfaction, not only to the railroad companies, but to those whom he employed.” He advertised wages from two dollars to $2.50 per day.68 Jones's impressive efforts on the Provo River continued into the spring of 1882, and advertisements for tie cutters continued to attract applicants throughout the Wasatch and Uintas.69One of the men who worked the tie business for the UP on the Weber and Provo rivers in 1882 was Henry Goddard. Summarizing his words, the historian Lyndia Carter writes that “the ties were run down the Weber River to Wanship for the line from Coalville to Park City.”70 Olive Somsen corroborated this kind of activity in the region when she stated that her father, Henry, was “the agent of Coe and Carter who had the contract for tieing the Oregon Short Line for its entire length and during the years of 1881 and 1882 he delivered for the company to the railroad ties sufficient, from the mountains of Bear River valley, for one half of the entire route, including that part between Granger and American Falls.”71 One newspaper reported in early spring of 1882, that “‘Sam’ Hamilton, manager of Coe and Carter's tie camp up on Black's Fork . . . expects to begin the drive in June, and will run 80,000 broad-gauge ties, 18,000 narrow-gauge ties, 60,000 mining props and 25,000 mining ties—all of which will be landed at Granger.”72 These tie drives operated throughout the decade; the largest drive, in either 1886 or 1887, saw 350,000 ties going down the Provo River.73Ambitious railroad boosters also continued to view the forests and rivers of the Wasatch and Uintas as prime sources of ties; in September of 1887, J. B. Rosborough of Salt Lake argued for a new railroad line connecting the Central Pacific and the Utah Southern with the Pacific Coast and suggested that “ties could be had from the forests on Bear River, floated down that stream, and delivered on the line of the road on the lake shore by water.”74 Moreover, in its 1887 end of the year accounting, the Park (City)