WhenWoodsmen of the Westfirst appeared in 1908, most readers could not relate to its rendering of the rough edges of logging-camp life. M. Allerdale Grainger refused to sentimentalize the West he drew from life. While his dramatic and loosely structured tale is at heart a love story, it also tells of what happens when the novel's British narrator encounters a small-time logging operator whose obsession with lumber is matched by his lust for power over other men. Today the novel is recognized as marking a significant shift in fiction written in and about the Canadian West. The accuracy of its detail makes it one of the finest examples of local realism in Canadian writing. It is also a fascinating chronicle of conflicting personalities, and of the genius of British Columbia hand-loggers, the culture of camp life, and the intrigues and corruption of the lumber business at the turn of the century. The New Canadian Library edition is an unabridged reprint of the original text, complete with the original photographs.

Martin Allerdale Grainger was born in London, England, in 1874. When he was two years old, his family moved to Australia, where he spent his childhood. He returned to England following his early education abroad, eventually entering King’s College, Cambridge, in 1893.

After his graduation, Grainger set out for the Klondike, where he stayed briefly before volunteering to serve in the Boer War in 1899. After the war he fashioned a varied and colourful career which included logging and placer mining in the Canadian Northwest, tutoring students in England, and teaching mathematics on Vancouver Island.

Grainger began his career in the British Columbia forestry industry in 1909, first as chief of records, serving as a secretary of a royal commission on logging practices in the province, and writing most of the report that led to the Forestry Act of 1912 and the creation of the British Columbia Forest Service. In 1917 he was appointed chief forester, a position he held until he retired to his private lumber business in 1920.

Drawing extensively on his first-hand experience in the coastal forests, Grainger wrote his single literary work, Woodsmen of the West, in 1908, a highly original depiction of the frustrations and struggles of the West Coast logger at the turn of the century.

Martin Allerdale Grainger died in Victoria, British Columbia, in 1941.


From the Paperback edition.

1 In Vancouver
2 Going North
3 At Hanson Island Hotel
4 At Port Browning
5 At Carter’s Camp
6 Dave and Speculation
7 Carter’s Earlier Career
8 Carter as Railroad Foreman
9 Carter as Saloon Man
10 Carter the Hand-logger
11 From Working-man to Boss
12 The Employer of Men
13 Hazarding the Donk
14 Carter in Apotheosis
15 The Arrival of the New Gang
16 The Captain of the Sonora
17 The Grounding of the Sonora
18 The Spirit of the Thing
19 Steamboating on the Inlet
20 Steam and the Sonora
21 Hard Times Coming
22 Living on the Sonora at Port Browning
23 Voyaging Between Hotels
24 Dan Macdonnell
25 Last Voyage and Sinking of the Sonora
26 Christmas Day
27 A Ghost Story
28 Race Down the Inlet
29 Back to Carter
30 Nerves and Remorse
31 I Quit
32 To Oblivion – With Carter
 
Afterword

In Vancouver
 
As you walk down Cordova Street in the city of Vancouver you notice a gradual change in the appearance of the shop windows. The shoe stores, drug stores, clothing stores, phonograph stores cease to bother you with their blinding light. You see fewer goods fit for a bank clerk or man in business; you leave “high tone” behind you.
 
You come to shops that show faller’s axes, swamper’s axes – single-bitted, double-bitted; screw jacks and pump jacks, wedges, sledge-hammers, and great seven-foot saws with enormous shark teeth, and huge augers for boring boomsticks, looking like properties from a pantomime workshop.
 
Leckie calls attention to his logging boot, whose bristling spikes are guaranteed to stay in. Clarke exhibits his Wet Proof Peccary Hogskin gloves, that will save your hands when you work with wire ropes. Dungaree trousers are shown to be copper-riveted at the places where a man strains them in working. Then there are oilskins and blankets and rough suits of frieze for winter wear, and woollen mitts.
 
Outside the shop windows, on the pavement in the street, there is a change in the people too. You see few women. Men look into the windows; men drift up and down the street; men lounge in groups upon the curb. Your eye is struck at once by the unusual proportion of big men in the crowd, men that look powerful even in their town clothes.
 
Many of these fellows are faultlessly dressed: very new boots, new black clothes of quality, superfine black shirt, black felt hat. A few wear collars.
 
Others are in rumpled clothes that have been slept in; others, again, in old suits and sweaters; here and there one in dungarees and working boots. You are among loggers.
 
They are passing time, passing the hours of the days of their trip to town. They chew tobacco, and chew and chew and expectorate, and look across the street and watch any moving thing. At intervals they will exchange remarks impassively; or stand grouped, hands in pockets, two or three men together in gentle, long-drawn-out conversations. They seem to feel the day is passing slowly; they have the air of ocean passengers who watch the lagging clock from meal-time to meal-time with weary effort. For comfort it seems they have divided the long day into reasonable short periods; at the end of each ’tis “time to comeanava-drink.” You overhear the invitations as you pass.
 
Now, as you walk down street, you see how shops are giving place to saloons and restaurants, and the price of beer decorates each building’s front. And you pass the blackboards of employment offices and read chalked thereon: –
 
“50 axemen wanted at Alberni
5 rigging slingers $4
buckers $3½, swampers $3.”
 
And you look into the public rooms of hotels that are flush with the street as they were shop windows; and men sit there watching the passing crowd, chairs tipped back, feet on window-frame, spittoons handy.
 
You hear a shout or two and noisy laughter, and walk awhile outside the kerb, giving wide berth to a group of men scuffling with one another in alcohol-inspired play. They show activity.
 
Then your eye catches the name-board of a saloon, and you remember a paragraph in the morning’s paper –
 
“In a row last night at the Terminus Saloon several men . . .”
 
and it occurs to you that the chucker-out of a loggers’ saloon must be a man “highly qualified.”
 
 
TheCassiarsails from the wharf across the railway yard Mondays and Thursdays 8 p.m. It’s only a short step from the Gold House and the Terminus and the other hotels, and a big bunch of the boys generally comes down to see the boat off.
 
You attend a sort of social function. You make a pleasing break in t

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Excerpted from Woodsmen of the West by Martin Allerdale Grainger
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