(Editor’s note: This is part three detailing the arrive of the first sawmill on the Big Piney River).
TROUBLE OVER A HORSE
In March 1816, William Harle had a bay colored mare that he turned out to graze. Later he went looking for it and discovered it was missing.
A few months later, Harle had walked downstream along the banks of the Big Piney River. He was surprised to find the horse tied up in the hunter’s camp of a man named James Burnam.
Harle confronted the man letting him know that the horse was his.
Burnam claimed he had found the horse in the wilderness, abandoned on free range and believed it was free for the taking.
After a short confrontation, Harle untied the horse and led it back home. He thought that was the end of the matter, but it was actually trouble that would come back to bite him a couple of years later.
MCDONALD’S MILLS
James McDonald of the St. Charles area and his three sons, John, James A. and Archibald, had been involved in several ventures in the Gasconade region since 1810. They had mined more than 3,000 pounds of saltpeter from caves around modern day Waynesville and floated it down river to St. Louis. Brothers John and James A. McDonald were also surveyors. They were awarded early contracts to survey some of the first township lines in the St. Louis area.
James McDonald build two of the first water-powered sawmills on the Gasconade and Piney Rivers. The first of these mills was constructed on Big Piney River in 1816, only three miles upstream, south of the Pattie Mill. It was constructed on the banks of Big Piney River where a large spring branch emerged. This spring was later known as the Hazelton Spring. James operated this mill with his sons, John and Archibald. Historians are not certain who built the first mill on the Big Piney River. Sylvester Pattie arrived in the area in the fall of 1815 and according to local tradition, his sawmill was the first.
A second McDonald sawmill was constructed on the Gasconade River in 1818, at the mouth of Little Piney Creek. It was a partnership between James McDonald and his brother-in-law, Alexander Willard. The next year, Willard’s investment was bought out by Morgan Boone.
RAFTING THE LUMBER
Sylvester Pattie had to get the lumber to market in St. Louis or St. Charles. In 1816, there were no wagon roads in the Big Piney area. The only way to get the lumber to market was to float it down the Big Piney River, then down the Gasconade River, down the Missouri River to St. Charles, or on down the Mississippi to the docks in St. Louis.
The rafters often talked about the dangers they faced on the journey. They were afraid of being attacked by Indians or wild animals, such as the wolves, bears or mountain lions. The rafters were constantly afraid of snakes, fearing that one would drop down upon them from overhanging limbs or that they might fall into the dark water of an old slue swarming with cottonmouths, blind during dog days of late summer. The threat from wild animal attack was in reality less dangerous than other factors.
The threat from Indian attack had decreased after the War of 1812. The warring tribes, such as Fox, Sac (or Sauk), and Shawnee had been moved to reservations in the West. The Osage were believed to be peaceable, and they tried hard to avoid any trouble with the white settlers. Still, there were incidents in the Gasconade region.
About the same time that Pattie built his sawmill, three men by the names of Johnson, Cullen and Dulle came to the Missouri Territory from Mississippi. They traveled with their families up the Gasconade River to a large cave, about five miles west of present day Waynesville. They mined bat guano from the cave, produced saltpeter and manufactured black gun powder. Some of the powder was traded to local hunters and trappers but most was transported down the river. In 1817, Cullen set off down the Gasconade to deliver a boatload of black powder to St. Louis. He never arrived — completely disappeared without a trace. No one ever knew if he had been killed by Indians or suffered some other disaster.
Sylvester Pattie and a few workers probably took the first lumber raft down the Big Piney Fork in late 1816 or early 1817. The sawn timbers were placed on the bottom and bound together in a square, known as a crib. The one-inch planks were layered on top of the timbers. After all the layers were stacked, everything was sandwiched together with binding planks on the top and bottom edges, and down the middle. Large wooden pegs called grubs were driven through all the layers. The rafts were usually assembled on a tilting platform on a river bank. The raft could be slid down into the water when it was ready to launch.
The cribs were 16 feet wide by 16 feet long and contained about 8,000 board feet. More than one crib could be connected together with chains connected to iron eye-hooks, or raft dogs, to allow the them to flex when negotiating the river bends. Several cribs connected were called a string.
It was rough work, taking a raft down the river the first time. The river was unknown to the rafters and there were a lot of places to hang up the raft or run it aground. They used long poles to stick down into the river bottom and pry the cribs in the direction they wanted them to go. In some places they used grapevines hanging down over the water to guide the raft around the river bends. Sometimes in long holes of still water, it was necessary for men to walk along the riverbank towing the raft with a rope or a grapevine, a process known as cordelling.
One man known as the tailman (or snubber) would be assigned to the tail end of the raft. Not only was it his job to steer the back end, but he could also control the speed. Someone from the front of the raft would yell, “Snubber ‘er down,” and the snubber plunged a long pole to the river bottom and pried down, using it as a brake.
The rafters brought along food for the trip which usually included dried fruit, dried or cured meat, and coffee if they had it. Their food stores would be supplemented during the trip by fishing or shooting game along the river with their flintlock rifles. Bear and deer would often be sighted on the river banks. They accumulated the skins and sold those too when they reached St. Louis.
In fact, the raft was used to transport a number of products that could be turned in to cash in the city. They often carried animal skins, dried fruit and meat, corn meal, bear grease, turpentine made from the pine pitch and a few years later — cotton and tobacco.
Some of the first rafters on the Gasconade and Missouri Rivers reported hearing large catfish grunting and sticking their heads out of the water. Some of the fish caught weighted more than 100 pounds.
They had strange names for some of their food items. Coffee was called stud, cured bacon was boar, and bread baked on top of a board was johnnycake bread. Dough could also be wound around a stick and held over a fire. That was know as mare’s tail.
Matches had not been invented yet in the early 19th century. The rafters carried fire starting kits in a tin box to keep the contents dry. The kits contained a small steel striker, pieces of flint, and some dry spunk obtained from rotted stumps. The piece of steel was stuck against the flint to produce sparks flung into the spunk and the process usually included a lot of blowing. On a damp or windy day, it was not easy to get a fire going. Sometimes a little black powder was sprinkled into the spunk to facilitate the process.
The raft was tied up to the riverbank at night and the men often slept on the ground. In rainy weather they would usually look for a dry place under a bluff. Sometimes small structures called doghouses where built on the deck of the raft. These were about 3 foot x 8 foot and barely big enough for a man to sleep in.
The rafters had to learn the river well and know where every hazard was hidden. They gave names to every shoal, slue, bluff and hidden rock on the river. They had names like “Cracker Bluff” for a bluff that looked like a big cracker; “The Sugar Bowl” for a round bluff formation that looked like a big sugar bowl; “Devil’s Elbow” for a sharp bend in the river; “Pike’s Defeat” where a rafter named Pike busted up a raft, or “Blind Horse Bluff” where a blind horse fell over a bluff to its death.
There was a legend among the later rafters that Pattie busted up his lumber raft on a rock that was somewhere near Slabtown. The big rock lay just beneath the surface of the water or poked out above, depending on how much water was flowing. According to the legend, Pattie drowned when the raft busted apart. That part of the legend was not true but for many years that particular rock was known to rafters as Pattie’s Rock. The old timers said that for a 100 years, you could see a pile of lumber half-buried in mud at the bottom of the river near the rock.
Early visitors that came upon Sylvester Pattie’s mill settlement were stunned at the sight of what looked like a small town. Huge piles of slabs were piled near the river and some of the sheds were built of slabs. The settlement was aptly named, Slabtown. It was a name that has stuck to this day.
When the rafters finally arrived in St. Louis, they sold the lumber at the docks on the Mississippi. The prices were very good as the city was growing fast and plank was in demand. In 1816, oak was selling at $2 per 100 board feet, ash was $3 and pine was $4. In 1817, the price of pine shot up to $6 per 100.
The residents of St. Louis and St. Charles had only a vague idea of where their lumber came from. There were articles in the newspaper about the frontier sawmills on the “Big Piney Fork of the Gasconade River.” That was a mouthful and eventually the sawmill settlements of Pattie and the McDonalds on the Big Piney were simply referred to as the “Gasconade Mills.”
One of the new buildings going up at that time in the St. Louis area was a home and barn for the territorial governor, Frederic Bates. It was a large two-story house built of Piney River pine, inside and out. The boards used in the construction were up to 23 inches wide.
In later years, experienced rafters could make a trip to St. Louis and back again in about 35 days. Pattie’s very first trip down the river probably took much longer. After selling the lumber, the rafters bought a few supplies in St. Louis and then returned to the Big Piney Fork. They walked all the way back down the Indian trace through the wilderness.
THE BALDRIDGES
John and Alexander Baldridge, along with Hiram Scott, came down to the Big Piney Fork to hire themselves out as rafters. They were rafting for the McDonald sawmill as early as the spring of 1817.
The Baldridges may have worked for Pattie and Harle as well. Evidently they had a good relationship with Sylvester Pattie as he once loaned them $128. The only terms were that they pay the money back at the end of the rafting season.
John Baldridge would soon become another big player in the sawmill industry. He would later build one of the biggest sawmill settlements on Big Piney, where the White River Trace crossed the river near Boiling Springs.