On Mon. Mar. 18th, we went down to the camp 5 miles from Elma. Stayed all night at the bunkhouse with nothing to sleep on but some hay & nothing to cover with but our own coats. We worked in the camp.
Poor Jesse! They were roughing it for sure and probably very cold. They showed up not knowing they needed to bring their own bedding. One wonders what the difference was between Jesse’s and John’s expectations versus the reality.
On a side note that Jesse never brings up: This is their seventh day away from home. Their mother and maybe their sisters helped do the laundry all their lives. How are these men doing their laundry while they are away, and do they know how to do it?
Early logging camps were of two kinds: a string of railroad cars in which families lived with the men, and wooden shanties built near a donkey engine. Conditions in these camps were often deplorable. Ticks, lice and bedbugs were common. Eating and sleeping facilities were filthy. Not until a 1917 strike did American lumberjacks even obtain real beds in their bunkhouses. Loggers worked as much as fifteen hours a day for very low wages. Most were transients, rough and hard on the outside but full of compassion, especially when injury struck a fellow worker.
There is a lot of information online about turn-of-the-century lumberworks. A couple of the many images found online:
The University of Minnesota Duluth has a fantastic page with lots of pictures. Do check it out!
The absence of African-American loggers in a lot of these images is not from a lack of black employees. The bunkhouses were segregated, and while some black workers got to work in the mill and other skilled labor, they were mostly hired for support work such as cooking.
