Community Press, October 2002 

  

by H. H. "Hub" Brown

 Riding around the country with our son-in-law Fritz Rudin he hauls cattle to auctions and the slaughter houses, we see some pitiful sights, cornfields that in a normal year would be seven or eight-feet tall are about waist high. And many fields will have no grain. Some fields with gravel underlying soil have dried right up. One field that stands out like a sore thumb, Jim Robinson had planted a small field of corn right south of what used to be the old schoolhouse. They had put on a good coating of cow manure and though it wasn't planted until July, it started right out and grew right through the worst of the drought and now it with the help of this late rain no telling what it will do. Jim says all it lacks is two more months. This is the second year in a row that we've had crazy weather. Maybe they'll wish they hadn't covered all that beautiful Alfalfa producing land down at Lounsberry.

 Right now up in our neighborhood people are taking advantage of the ground being so dry and hard which helps in getting the logs and firewood knocked down by the tornado. Pat took some photos from the helicopter at Rudin Farm Days and it looks as though they had clear cut Jeanie Wagner's woods. Pat's and Fritz's wasn't quite as bad. They are using a little different machine there. They winch the logs to the machine and then the operator can pick up about half a truckload at a time. He piles them right behind Fritz's barn. When they come with a big truck he puts on a real load and they're off to the mill.

 How different logging is today from what it used to be. Two men would work together on the ends of a cross cut saw. After they had trimmed the branches and cut the top off the log, one man would drive the team and the other, called the swamper, would hitch the horses to a large ring which had two short chains with L-shaped hooks fastened to them. 
They would drive these hooks into the butt end of the log, one on each side. I've had old-timers tell me that if a teamster could get a swamper that would handle a cow manure chain, a yoke of oxen would be better than a team of horses because the oxen would wallow through down tops and brush that a team wouldn't go into. There was one kind of logging that was such hard work, both for the teams and the men that the camp cook would send meals for the men and grain for the horses out to the job at 10 in the morning. This was where they had built what was called a splashdam. This was where a fairly small stream could be dammed up with a log gate that could be removed quickly. All winter the teams would haul logs into the bed of this small stream but of course there wasn't enough water to float these huge logs. Then in the spring when there was lots of water and the splash dam was full, they would hook teams to the supports holding the gates of the dam and out would come the flood of water to carry the logs to a larger stream or the saw mill. Then was when the hard work come in. There was always some logs that caught in trees or became grounded and it was the nasty, muddy job of the teamsters to haul them back into the streambed ready for the next splash dam.