Travels with Captain Blight
Spring 2002 Issue

KANAWA's heritage specialist joins Captain Bill Blight for a voyage back in time, when magnificent pointer boats plied the Spanish River during spring logging drives. In those days, there were alligators on the Spanish River...
Story and Photos by Bob Henderson

"Daylight in the swamp. Breakfast on the tab." That's the way Bill Blight remembers those morning wake up calls on the Spanish River spring logging drives.

Bill Blight knows the Spanish River. Because he worked in the logging industry from 1945 to his retirement in 1992, Bill knew many of the great lumberjacks and river men and their stories. But mostly, Bill knows the boat: the pointer boat.
He was to be our captain for a three-day river trip on the lower Spanish River. We wanted to relive something of those bygone days of lumberjacks and river men. And yes, we would row, not paddle. We would all be together, side-by-side, in the exquisite Friends of the Spanish River replica 32-foot (10 metre) pointer, with Bill at the bow.

It promised to be a different trip for all of us. It would be Bill's first pointer boat camping trip in over three decades and would take him back in time, despite his greenhorn crew. We were keen, heritage-loving, travel-minded folks who knew what pointer boats looked like. That's about all. This trip would give us a fresh perspective on river travel and lifestyles that endured for more than a century. The last spring logging drive on the Spanish River was in 1967.

On the Spanish and Sable rivers, the first drives were in the 1860s. Drives in the Ottawa River watershed including Algonquin Park began a little earlier. The flat-bottomed, V-shaped pointers, also called batteaux or dories, were the river boat of choice from the 1850s. And by the 1870s, pointers were also being used in the Lake Huron region.

Alligators on the river

Today, signs of these spring log drives are everywhere: not only on the Spanish River, but also on the water and shorelines of the Dumoine, the St. Maurice, the Petawawa and the Sturgeon. There are still old jams at many rapids, iron rings in the shoreline rock for holding logging booms, and fields and tote roads that are now overgrown. In some places, you can even spot alligators – an amphibious tugboat used on the lakes, like the two on the Dumoine River and the one on Chiniguichi Lake on the Sturgeon River watershed.

Ruins of logging chutes still abound. It's said, for example, that there were as many as one thousand different logging chutes on Algonquin Park waterways. On our Spanish River trip we found an old crosscut saw, the type that replaced the axe in the 1870s as the primary felling tool. It was embedded in the shoreline mud.

Driving up to rendezvous in Espanola, Ontario, I realized how unlikely and marvellous this trip plan was. Here's the story.

An involving plan

The Friends of the Spanish River was formed in 1994 as a volunteer non-profit organization dedicated to restoring, preserving and celebrating this 200 kilometre (125 mile) river in northeastern Ontario. In 1995, Ed Tait, then secretary of the group, had an unusual idea: to build a replica pointer boat as a tour boat and something of a mascot. It would be built in public, primarily in the Espanola town mall with many hands involved. The Friends also produced a video of old footage of one of the last spring river drives (1965) and, thanks to Bill Blight's 1952 pictures, a calendar with logging era photographs, many involving pointer boats.

I had been a member of the Friends and had met Bill, but the idea to enquire about the use of the boat for a multi-day camping trip was more of a sudden, hey-why-not type of moment. Bill responded in kind and a novel trip plan was born.

In the end, the upper Spanish with many swifts and rapids proved to be too low for our early summer departure. (Remember, the log drives commenced as soon as the ice left the swollen rivers.) We opted for a lower section of the river with higher water levels from Espanola to the Spanish Marine on Lake Huron.
Bill, our guide, is the custodian of the pointer. My role was to put together the right sort of supporting cast to follow Bill's lead. The rowers would include canoe builders, biologists, archeologists and heritage buffs. All of us were story-tellers, happy to tell our own travel stories and discuss the old ways of the North.

We wanted variety in companions and in conditions, and we were lucky. We had rain, sun and strong headwinds a-plenty - enough variety to test the boat. We experienced the kind hospitality of folks who lived along the river, and allowed us to camp on their property, often joining in the evening campfires. And certainly, we learned what it was like to row these pointer boats on the lakes and rivers of the spring drive, although we did not tackle the wild rapids like the Graveyard.

Best of all, we had Bill there to share stories from his days on the river. After the trip, we would have a few more stories of our own.

The need to pry

We also had a few surprises. Bill had made the boat's two replica paddles, one each for the bow and the stern, from solid red oak. Each was about 7' (2 m) and weighed in at 25 to 30 pounds ( 11 - 14 kg) with a 3" (7.5 cm) shaft width. You don't paddle these paddles. You don't draw. You pry. That's it.
The oars we used were originals, used in the last river drive on the Sable River in 1938, and then stored in a barn in Massey. Only recently, they had narrowly escaped being turned into fence posts – and good fence posts they would have made - 10' (3 m) of solid spruce.

How else to put it? This was serious, sturdy equipment. The equally sturdy pointer boat was made from 8" spruce, 3/8 inch thick (20 cm X 1 cm) overlapped by two inches with epoxy. Our oar locks were two, four-inch spaced pegs.

You and me... we sweat and strain

We had wanted a different experience and we would have it. We each took a turn in the stern position aiding Bill who controlled the boat's direction from the bow. In calm water, however, we behaved more like coxswains, watching the rowers grimace with each stroke, while regaling them with stories and jokes. It was a strange role for we paddlers, and a treat to be together in one boat, but our load was heavy. We carried gear for eight, a table for campsites and pre-cut firewood, all of which Bill ensured was traditional. But these more modern traditions, common "these days," were not as interesting as Bill's stories about the use in those days - the days of the spring river drives.

Shanty boys in the caboose

Throughout the Great Lakes watershed, the great pines were cut in winter. The lumberjacks, also called shanty-boys, were housed in the practical caboose camp: one-room shelters for fifty men with a central, open fireplace. Donald MacKay's quintessential historical treatment of the logging era, The Lumberjacks, claims that by 1880, 234 eastern Canadian rivers were being driven, and that the drives employed over half of the male workforce in Canada. These men developed their own lingo. Some say there were upwards of 4000 expressions in use in the logging trade. "In a jam" is one of the most enduring.

Logs would be stacked by the water's edge to await the spring thaw. With the ice gone and the river swollen, the men who had signed on for the spring drive began the process of watering the wood. With peaveys and pike poles, they worked logs into the current and cleared them from shorelines. Most often, dams and chutes were created to adjust water levels to suit the downstream flow of logs.

Generally, the early square timbers were rafted down the Ottawa River to Ottawa and Quebec City, then on to Europe. In the 1870s, Lake Huron timber had a ready market in Michigan, and the Chicago fire of 1870 created an intense demand for timber from the Spanish River region. During the drives, pointer boats of various sizes worked as support boats. Half pointers 20 feet long (6 m) helped clear log jams and sweep bays for renegade logs. These pointers saw intense action in rapids, where they maneuvered into tricky places for the equally tricky work of freeing jams. Imagine if your daily job involved rescuing pinned canoes, piled high during the river's spring run. Get the idea? The boats were controlled at the bow and stern with what a whitewater racer might call a power pry.

Toting a half-ton boat

Larger pointers 40 to 50 feet long (12-15 m) were used in many ways. Blanket pointers, for example, carried bed rolls and supplies, and there were also cookery pointers. Portaging was heavy work. When portaged around the most difficult rapids, the boats were rolled on logs with many hands pushing and pulling. But to lead these 40-footers into the V of a large rapid certainly must have been one of the most exhilarating jobs of the river drive. Bill tells the story of one unfortunate logger who, in 1965, was swept overboard from the bow. The moment is caught on an early video, but it took Bill twenty years to learn the identity of the logger, Isaac Toulousse. Isaac identified himself as Bill showed the video at the Massey Fair.

The original pointer boats were made of pine and the larger 50-footers weighed more than half a ton, yet they could easily pivot with a tug on the oars and they had a remarkably shallow draw. At one time the Cockburn family advertised their famous pointer design with the slogan, It's a boat that will float on a heavy dew.

The pointer was actually a combined initiative of Pembroke boatbuilder John Cockburn and the renowned logging entrepreneur, J.R. Booth. Booth asked Cockburn to design a boat specifically for the spring drive. It had to carry lots of gear, have a shallow draw, and be maneuverable and able to work at levering logs from a high flared bow and stern.

In the pointer's heyday in the 1880s, Cockburn turned out some 200 boats a year from his shop in downtown Pembroke. John's grandson, John Junior, was still making pointers until his retirement in 1969. In his last year of operation, he had 17 orders. In the previous 22 years during which records were kept, 1,700 pointers of various sizes were manufactured. The Cockburns were in business for 104 years: not bad.

A boat with a history

Beyond the pivotal spring logging drives, the pointers also saw service up north on the DEW line installation. They were used as harbour control craft from Saint John to Vancouver, and to conduct survey work on the St. Lawrence Seaway. Some summer camps and schools still use pointers and even in the 1980s, pointer races in the Ottawa Valley were a big draw. Even our little trip attracted attention. You just don't see pointers now, one observer noted.

It was a shock for me to learn that while I was cutting my teeth on Algonquin waterways, men were still running the rapids north of me in pointers. As mentioned, the last drive on the Spanish was 1967. The last major log drive in Algonquin was in 1945 from the Nipissing River into the Petawawa River.

In all, we got what we had asked for: an experiential glimpse into a time when these quiet eastern rivers were brimming with human activity. Bill told us about men like Fred Commanda, Leo Restoule and Ernie Marion, all great men of the spring river drive. He pulled out his photo album of logging scenes from the 1950s, and painted graphic portraits of the nature of the work. In the logging era, for example, it is estimated that there were upwards of 10,000 horses in the Sudbury basin. Other days, he told us about the the prisoner of war camp on the Spanish, and when we needed to laugh, he recalled the practical jokes of the day.

Once, at the mouth of the Sable where it meets the Spanish, Bill recalled a spring day in the 1930s, when school was let out so the students could stand on the Sable River bridge to watch the spring drive pointers row by. All our travel stories along the river that morning seemed to pale in comparison.

Shanty songs like The Jam on Gerry's Rocks and Wade Hemsworth's Log Drivers Waltz began to take on new meaning. Tom Thomson's 1916 painting, Batteaux depicting a chain of pointers on Grand Lake, Algonquin now seems alive in detail. And as for the crew of Captain Blight's pointer boat - I suppose we all agree with the words of Donald MacKay, who said that lumberjacks, like cowboys and sailors, did not simply do a job. "They spawned traditions and legends larger than life."

Bob Henderson, the KANAWA heritage specialist, teaches Outdoor Education at McMaster University. Email him at bhender@mcmaster.ca