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OPINION

‘Breakfast in Hell’ the penalty for flaunting loggers’ taboo

Huntsville Forester
Wednesday, February 1, 2012

When I started collecting the memories of former lumberjacks, over 50 years ago,
my first subject was 90-year-old Jim Canning, of Dunchurch. One of Jim’s stories
recalled the time he turned down a bribe of a new suit of clothes in return for calling
his men from their Sunday rest in order to help another river drive boss out of a fix.
That’s an example of how deeply ingrained was the logger’s taboo against labouring
on the Lord’s Day.
I now pick up the thread of my previous column, which noted parallels between two
folklore figures from the pine-logging days. These were “our foreman Young
Monroe,” hero of the folksong, “The Jam on Jerry’s Rock,” and a second river drive
boss, Sandy Gray, whose memory is perpetuated both on the map of Muskoka and in
the song “Breakfast in Hell” by modern balladeer Slaid Cleaves.
Find the words to these songs on the Web and you’ll see striking similarities in that
the two foremen died identical deaths after defying the logger’s rule against
working on a Sunday.
That previous column mentioned an account of Sandy Gray’s demise found in the
story The Ghost of Sandy Gray, by Cameron McLeod, that appeared in a 1922 issue
of Mer Douce, The Algonquin Historical Society Magazine. Here’s more from that
piece.
McLeod says that it happened following a winter of extra deep snow, which swelled
the Musquash River with meltwater and flushed the logs downstream faster than
they could be properly controlled. Drive crews were divided into two groups, a “bow
gang” at the head who shepherded logs through rapids and dams, and a “tail gang”
who “swept” the rear by rolling stranded logs back into the current. On a Saturday
night the bow gang camped beside the rapids that was destined to bear Gray’s name,
lulled to sleep by the thunder of logs tumbling in the torrent. Before Sunday morning
dawned, “there was a change in the sound, and these experienced foresters knew
the reason why: a jam was being formed at the foot of the rapids.”
Gray leaped from his blankets to assess the situation, then sent his men to work,
ignoring their protests that they wanted first to be served breakfast.
“Before the pork and bread, the beans and molasses, the Johnnie cake and dried
apple sauce would be ready…[Gray] would have the logs moving, or he would
breakfast with Eve’s tempter in a land which no righteous person aspires to reach.”
Or so wrote McLeod in his magazine story, evidently quoting the leader of the
canoeing expedition. “In the mind of our guide,” he said, Gray’s “degeneracy in
departing from the faith of his ancestors” ordained his fate.
Seemingly the jam started when one log got wedged against a ledge of rock at the
foot of the rapids. Others piled up behind it until “a jam thirty or forty feet high…like
a huge crow’s nest or a beaver dam” plugged the stream. Gray and a chosen few of
his men armed with peaveys and pike poles rowed a bateau to the foot of the jam
and climbed onto the pile. When the key log was identified, Gray and another man
loosened it with their peaveys, setting “the whole mass in quivering motion.”
In the ensuing scramble for safety, all but Sandy Gray got ashore. A tumbling log
landed on his legs, trapping him in the churning mass of timber. His “broken and
 mangled body” was pulled from the river some distance downstream, and buried in a
grave “scooped in the shallow ground between two stately pines.”
At this point, the stories of “our foreman young Monroe” and Sandy Gray diverge.
“The Jam on Jerry’s Rock” invariably places Monroe’s grave under sheltering
hemlocks, not pines. And while Monroe left a sweetheart, “Fair Clara,” mourning at
his graveside, only a lone chickadee lent voice to the occasion as Gray’s body was
committed to the ground. Or so wrote Cameron McLeod.
When McLeod’s party passed the gravesite, they saw markings on a wooden slab
indicating that Sandy Gray died in 1867, quite early in Muskoka’s logging days. A few
years ago, someone, likely a Go Home Lake cottager, contacted me saying that he
wanted to erect a permanent monument — at the gravesite or at Gray’s Rapids, I’m
not sure, — and was seeking certain additional information. I wasn’t able to help, and
I never heard whether the marker was planted.
Correction: A photograph of a man identified as Sandy Gray accompanied my
previous column. In fact, the individual shown was life-long lumberjack Jim
McIntosh of South River, photographed as he sang “The Jam on Jerry’s Rock” for my
tape recorder.

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Tags: Columns, Opinion

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