The daily morning journal and courier., 1897-05-01
A TERRrRLE RIDE.

In these days of modern appliances and perfected means Of travel by steam and electricity, mutilating distance at the rate of @ mile g. minute, or even more, is considered nothing so startling, but the rapid transit and the modus operandi thereof participated in by John Sweetwood, g. lumberman in the wilds of the Allegheny Mountains, one day recently, corner the market on fast itraveling.
 Sweetwood is young man about twenty-two years of age. He Is the son of farmer from one of the most rural districts of this county, big, rawboned and fearless of anything on top of the earth. As with all farmers, Sd with
 this one; work during the winter sea- son is slack, and John, thinking to earn an extra penny for himself, deter
 mined late in the fall of 1896, and with the opening Of the numbering season, to go into the woods and spend the winter
 logging" In numbering, as in every other kind of employment, experience counts for a great deal, and the inexpe- rienced, or 'greenies," as they are
 termed in the Inducements camp, are
 not deemed capable of performing the work of an old hand at the business,
 and so are generally put at work on something more simple.
 Fifteen and twenty years ago lum- bering was vastly different in the Ale ghenies from what it Is to-day. Then virgin forests covered the entire range of mountains and the lumbermen had only to select the timber nearest to some stream, and the work. of getting the logs to water to float down to mar
 ket was a question of minor impor- tance. Now, owing to the fact that all the timber along the large streams has been cut, the getting of the logs to water is one of the gravest questions confronting the lumberman. Where practicable, what are termed Hog
 drives" are erected for this purpose. A
 ''log drive" is simply constructed by | laying hewed logs alongside each other in trail out from the camp to the nearest stream, sometimes five, eight or ] ten miles away. These drives are usu-
 
 when the first fall of snow comes they
 are put in condition for use by hauling a drag along between them, which
 packs down the snow. On this water is poured and allowed to freeze, the result being rude trough of ice, over which the logs glide down grade with startling
 swiftness. But these drives are not all down grade. Perhaps half the distance will be up grade, and to get the logs up the mountain teams of horses are used. After the logs are rolled into the drive team is hitched to a log with perhaps one hundred ahead of it, according to the steepness of the incline, and in this way the whole string is pushed to the 1 top. It was while working on one of these drives that Sweetwood met with | the following thrilling experience: With canthook he was to follow the first log as sort of steerer whose duty it was to see that all was we'll If the 1 log caught fast on any protruding ice snow or wood, with his hook he would 1 loosen 1t so that the trail would come on. When the drive is in bad condition | the steerer always finds plenty to do to | keep him busy, but if there is lots of l snow and cold weather the slide is usu- 1 ally all that can be desired, and the l steerer invariably has only the monoto- ny of tramping alongside and watching
 the logs glide along. This was the case