They ate healthier more natural food back then. No preservatives, home cooked everything. Plus all the hard work. Also I think they went thru the same thing we went thru, (younger generation is lazy) old timers always told me my generation was lazy. Now me getting older, I say the same thing. Its cause we want a better life for the next generation. We don't want them to suffer what we went thru. So we work more and they work less.
I"ve got a picture of my wifes grand dad shaving with the double bit axe, i have that axe in my shop, i believe its a old double bit Swedish axe. If i can find it i'll post that one too. Life magazine sent a photographer on the the log drive with them one time. Some of the stories that poor photographer was told were crazy. One time they had a big log jam on the river, the photographer asked what was happening. Wife's grand dad explained about the logs jamming up and they had to find the ''key log'' and then place dynamite under the water and blow the logs apart. By this time they guy was ''hooked'' asked how did they find the ''key log''. The wife's grand dad looked the photographer right in the face and said. "See the Swede over there, he's got a glass eye, we wire his eye on the pike pole, put it under the water, he looks around till he can see the key log and we blow it apart with dynamite''. This is what i was told, lol. and supposedly the guy from life magazine swallowed it hook line and sinker. lol.
Samoa is west of me about 3hours. Growing up we went on our summer vacation there and ate many times at the cookhouse. Sucha cool place. The whole town was for sale about 10-15 years ago. Thanks for the post! Really cool!
Here is a pic of Tahquamenon Falls in the U.P. It is a state park. There is a set of the upper falls and the lower falls. (Upper) (lower) The reason I'm telling you all of this is that back in the logging days, there were actually three sets of falls. The river was used for log drives and the third set of falls was causing way too much of a log jam all the time............. so ..............they blasted the hell out of them! No more falls!
The "mosquitoes in these parts used to get so bad" that this story was related to me some years ago during the early days of logging virgin timber by hand. The camp cook and his wife were going into a new logging site to set up a kitchen for the workers who would show up shortly. Can you imagine lugging all that cast iron cookware, foodstuffs, plates, etc through the woods without any roads? They were passing a swamp that just had a fresh hatch of hungry skeeters. They were swarmed in an instant and the only recourse of action was to hid under the cast iron cauldron which were plenty large enough until the sun came out and alleviated some of the attack. Well, the story goes those damm mosquitoes were so damm hungry and big, that they just bit right through the cast iron! The only way to reduce their numbers were for the cook and his wife to use a hammer and bend over the "stingers" once they pushed through the cast iron!
