Lumberjack Vocabulary

Lumber camps used a specialized vocabulary for work, food, tools, and jobs, including board foot, blackjack for coffee, cookee for the cook's helper, logging berries for stewed prunes, shoepack pie, boiling-up shack for bathing and laundry, pencil pusher for the camp clerk and accountant, wood butcher for the camp carpenter, misery whip for a two man crosscut saw, sawyers for pairs of loggers who felled trees with two-man saws, top loaders who loaded hauling sleds, water-tank crews who iced the roads, road monkeys who maintained roads and shoveled horse manure, notchers who cut wedges to guide a tree's fall, iron burner for the blacksmith, dentist for the man who filed saws, slash for the stumps and branches left after clear cutting, river pigs who kept logs floating to the mills, turkey sack for the seamless gunny sack that carried personal gear, and swamper for an unskilled helper who cut off branches and brush after a tree was cut. Camp rules required silence during meals except to ask for something to be passed, forbade fist fights though a camp manager might allow wrestling for a serious disagreement, and required that no traveler arriving after 4:00 p.m. be turned away because winter travel was too dangerous, with food and a place to sleep provided.

Anoka, Minnesota · United States