HOLY OLD MACKINAW—Stewart H. Holbrook—Macmillan ($3).
Big-scale U. S. logging goes back a little more than a century but covers a lot of ground. Last week Stewart Holbrook covered a lot of the ground in a breezy volume called Holy Old Mackinaw which placed most emphasis on the industry’s picturesque history and its hard-boiled camp followers. Subtitled A Natural History of the American Lumberjack, Holy Old Mackinaw has chapters on lumberjack songs and the changes in logging techniques, on river drives, log thieves, the I. W. W., forest fires, loggers’ slang and legends. Author Holbrook’s warmest passages are given over to descriptions of the red-light districts, skid roads and loggers’ saloons that have flourished from Bangor to Eureka, Calif. Result is that Holy Old Mackinaw is a puzzler, with solid bits of unfamiliar industrial history sandwiched between slightly sophomoric tributes to vanished vice. Author Holbrook’s loggers get into so many fights, frequent so many bawdy houses, sing so many logger songs and swear so many round oaths (of which Holy Old Mackinaw is one) that readers may wonder when they found time to cut down all those trees.
But if Author Holbrook’s romanticism seems artificial, his facts are interesting. Best section of his book is his account of forest fires. In Hinckley, Minn., at noon on Sept. 1, 1894, a forest fire that had been burning nearby swept into town as the wind changed, trapped most of its 1,200 inhabitants. As 475 of them climbed into a train at the station the engineer waited until the paint began to blister on the cars, then pulled out. Ninety waited in a cleared space beside the tracks, were burned to death. Two hundred others raced down the track in another direction, met another train. As they climbed aboard, flames broke out on both sides of the track. Fire chased the train so closely that the engineer and fireman fainted, and when the train finally stopped at a lake the coaches burst into flame. But passengers tumbled into mud, were among the survivors of a day that destroyed five towns, took 413 lives,
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