- 375 pages
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
Lumberjacks: the men, the myth, and the making of an American legend
The folk hero Paul Bunyan, burly, bearded, wielding his big ax, stands astride the story of the upper Midwest—a manly symbol of the labor that cleared the vast north woods for the march of industrialization while somehow also maintaining an aura of pristine nature. This idea, celebrated in popular culture with songs and folktales, receives a long overdue and thoroughly revealing correction in Gentlemen of the Woods, a cultural history of the life and lore of the real lumberjack and his true place in American history.
Now recalled as heroes of wilderness and masculinity, lumberjacks in their own time were despised as amoral transients. Willa Hammitt Brown shows that nineteenth-century jacks defined their communities of itinerant workers by metrics of manhood that were abhorrent to the residents of the nearby Northwoods boomtowns, valuing risk-taking and skill rather than restraint and control. Reviewing songs, stories, and firsthand accounts from loggers, Brown brings to life the activities and experiences of the lumberjacks as they moved from camp to camp. She contrasts this view with the popular image cultivated by retreating lumber companies that had to sell off utterly barren land. This mythologized image glorified the lumberjack and evoked a kindly, flannel-wearing, naturalist hero.
Along with its portrait of lumberjack life and its analysis of the creation of lumberjack myth, Gentlemen of the Woods offers new insight into the intersections of race and social class in the logging enterprise, considering the actual and perceived roles of outsider lumberjacks and Native inhabitants of the northern forests. Anchored in the dual forces of capitalism and colonization, this lively and compulsively readable account offers a new way to understand a myth and history that has long captured our collective imagination.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover Page
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Contents
- Introduction: The Cost of Cheap Nature
- A Note on Sources
- Part I: In the Woods
- 1. Bull Cooks and Walking Bosses: Camp Life in a Booming Industry
- 2. “His Flesh Hung in Tatters and Strings”: The Violence of Nature
- 3. On Greenhorns and White Men: Skill and the Boundaries of Race
- Part II: In Town
- 4. That Restless, Roving Spirit: Itinerancy and Resistance
- 5. “Such People May Invade the City”: Tramp Scares and Skid Rows
- 6. Five Hundred Drunks in the Street: Snake Rooms, Sprees, and Saloons
- Part III: In Memory
- Plates
- 7. The Only American Hero: Reinventing the Lumberjack
- 8. Papering over a Wasteland: Creating a Corporate Myth
- 9. The Passing of the Pines: Buying and Selling Legends
- Conclusion: The Stories We Still Buy
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- Index