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Hayward, Hurley and Hell

In those roaring frontier years, the Wisconsin woods were full of men and women exploiting the easy lumberjacks

ARTICLE

E. E. ROBERTS

ALL ABOARD,” yelled a brakeman on the old Milwaukee

and Northern railroad, “for Hayward, Hurley and Hell!”

Without knowing it he coined an immortal phrase. Back in the eighties and nineties when lumber was King in Wisconsin, the “three H’s” were considered the toughest places anywhere, and the first two a little tougher than the third. But the number was purely arbitrary. Any clearing in the tall timber qualified in some degree for perdition. There was no monopoly on sin.

There was no quibbling about it, either. A notice in the paper read: “Let all the sinners of Hurley go to the Methodist Church on next Sunday evening and hear about ‘The Advantages of Being a Sinner.’ Christians are not excluded.”

A reporter at the meeting noted “a goodly sprinkling of sinners, and four especially, occupying one seat who have the reps of being particularly ‘deeply steeped in sin’ and its advantages.”

“Advantages” was the right word. Probably no purveyors of iniquitous pleasures on earth ever reaped a greater percentage of profit per capita than did those who preyed on the early populations of Hayward and Hurley.

Save? No one dreamed of it. “It’ll take two hundred years to saw all the pine in Wisconsin and Upper Michigan!” cried the early lumbermen. Such profusion on the part of Nature induced a corresponding prodigality in Man. And when Captain Nat Moore of Ashland discovered the fabulous iron deposits in the Gogebic Range, what had been mere prodigality turned into sheer profligacy.

It was in 1878 that the railroad came nosing its way up through Y isconsin’s wooded wilderness, so novel to the tawny Indian that he was apt to go trustingly to sleep on its very tracks. The obituary of one such unfortunate concluded: “But he will never do it again. Gone to be an angel.” Finally in 1884 the rails reached the place that was destined to become the No. 1 hot spot of the U.S.A. They dubbed it Hurley. But if there’s anything in a name, they might better have called it after its first settler, H. Surprise.

The next two settlers were Thos. Scott and Johnny Ankers. Scott put up a “hotel” where patrons, rich or poor, could get a strawfilled bunk and two blankets and the standard and unvarying menu, breakfast, dinner and supper, winter and summer, of baconand-eggs-potatoes-bread-andbutter-tea-or-coffee “and damned if you could tell which was which !”

But it was Johnny Ankers who really made history. For he opened the first saloon in Hurley circa December 1, 1884, thus beginning the lurid career of Silver Street. In a few months that first saloon had increased to six, and there had been four deaths in Hurley, two from natural causes, an average that they managed to maintain pretty well as time went by.

Saloons multiplied almost faster than the population. In came the gamblers with their fierce fighting dogs, and up from Washburn trekked handsome, cold-blooded, smiling Price Wade and built the famous “stockade,” and out of the deep woods poured the lumberjacks singing Shanty Boy and Doten on the Big Eau Claire with their winter’s “stake” burning their pockets, roaring for liquor and life.

There wasn’t standing room in the saloons, and the empty beer barrels were simply rolled out into Silver Street and left there. The gamblers staged dogfights regularly, and there were frequent prize fights with bare fists to the finish. There was cutthroat competition for the money earned so backbreakingly, and the nights were slashed with noise and punctuated with shots.

After a week in Hurley, a lumberjack’s boss once asked him what he thought of the place.

“Well,” he said, “if I owned Hurley and Hell, I guess I’d live in Hell and rent out Hurley.”

Down at Hayward on the Namekagon River, which was perpetually choked with logs, it was just as lively. The first mill had opened in 1883, and soon there were twenty-two saloons running twenty-four hours a day and several gaming houses, the most popular of which was inconveniently located a mile east of town at Shingle Mill Bridge. This fact spelled a small fortune to a certain enterprising liverystable owner known as “Sliver” Wells. For he trained a no-’count old grey mare to make the twomile round trip to Shingle Mill on her own, and used her for transporting inebriate lumberjacks. “I made more money off that old mare,” Sliver has often declared, “than all my other horses put together.”

And vouching for his story are old-timers liko Johnny Ivavanaugh, who at ninety-three has the reputation of being able to drink more liquor without getting drunk than any man who ever hit Hayward. And he has had a lot of competition. In the spring, thousands of lumberjacks would swarm into town rarin’ to go, but owing to the lumber companies’ custom of issuing checks payable the 15th of April and the 15th of September, they didn’t have so much as a cent to squander.

A couple of chaps named Warehouse!’ and McCormick soon sized up this sad situation. Announcing they didn’t have a safe, but that they had a ferocious bulldog, they set up a “bank” where they cashed those time checks at a mere twenty-five per cent discount. Thus the lumberjacks were able to slake their six-months’ thirst, and Messrs. McCormick and Warehouser soon owned the richest institution of its kind in the state.

There was a social scale, its top rung held by the Hayward Fire Department and its bottom rung by the house out by Shingle Mill Bridge. The firemen drilled regularly in smart uniforms, and the elite event of tne year was their New Year’s Ball. At Shingle Mill and Fiddler’s Creek there was ceaseless revelry, and it is said an average of two men a week were killed, yet not a single killer was ever convicted owing to a one hundred per cent lack of witnesses.

But tough as times were, a crude ethics prevailed.

“The front door of a saloon was always closed,” recalls old-timer Jim Williams, “and you never saw young fellers under twentytwo going in—or if they did, they sneaked in the back door and were mighty ashamed of themselves. Women never stood at the bar like nowadays, and no drunks were allowed out on the Sabbath when everybody was supposed to go to Sunday School. Fact of it is,” concludes Jim, “you can talk about Hayward, Hurley and Hell, but to my mind there’s a lot more hell right today.”

The Ashland mine, sunk at Hurley in 1885, yielded sixty-nine per cent iron, and everyone went crazy. Hurley swarmed with fortune hunters. Lumber and miner’s supplies could bo bought for prices “so low as to draw tears of gratitude.” Beef sold for eight cents a pound and potatoes for thirty-five cents a bushel.

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The thing moved like a snowball down a steep-grade. In 1885 there were only three incorporated mines in Hurley with an aggregate stock of 1,500,000 dollars. By the following year there were eighty-seven corporations with stock up to 105,000,000 dollars organized to exploit the Gogebic range.

John S. Burton built the elegant Burton House, and visitors poured in to see the famous boom town. The lumberjacks and miners stayed in the saloons as long ás there was space left to flop on the floor with packsack for pillow. And in a few months, without anyone ever knowing quite why, Hurley became a center of iniquity.

There were a few God-fearing persons who claimed that the two disastrous fires which wiped out Silver Street in 1887 were divine retribution. But ye editor of the Montreal River Miner took a more realistic view. “Some of the saloons,” he wrote “saved a portion of their stock, as was evidenced by the condition of numerous individuals before the morning

after.” A month later twentyeight new buildings had already sprung from the ashes.

It was a ribald frontier lifo where an exuberant female might solicit matrimony with a public advertisement, as follows:

“Any man wanting a wife can have me by plunging to the bottom of the reservoir opposite the engine house and bringing forth the water pitcher I dropped there a few nights ago. K. R.”

Killings among brawling lumberjacks and miners were so common as to cause little interest. But on April 10, 1890, even jaded Silver Street was stirred to learn that Lottie Morgan, the most popular showgirl in the Alcazar Theatre was lying out behind Crocker’s saloon, her fair head split open by an axe.

“She carried herself,” wrote one careful eulogist, “with all the propriety possible for her class, was vivacious, sprightly, well-informed, and was universally known here, at Iron wood and Bessemer.” Lottie’s funeral was held fittingly in the opera house, and she played her final role to a record crowd.

It seemed as though the iniquities of these Wisconsin frontier towns finally caught up with them. Hell became something more than the joke at the end of a catch phrase in that awful Summer of 1894 when its very gates seemed to yawn on the cut-over north country.

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There had been no rain for weeks and on June 14 tlie temperature rose to over a hundred in the shade. In the next month a number of fires broke out in Hayward and were suppressed only by the great vigilance of the fire brigade. By the 19th fires were raging on every side of the little town, burning thousands of cords of wood, the crossties of the railroad, telegraph poles, fields of grain and garnered harvests, farms and cattle, lumber camps and mills, and even whole towns which did not have a zealous fire department to “wet them down” as Hayward had..

People were forced to be on the alert day and night till everyone was drooping from fatigue. Saturday and Sunday, September 1 and 2, 1894, marked “two of the most un welcomed days ever experienced in northern Wisconsin.” All day the Fire Company poured water on terrified Hayward . . . on Labor Day no one had the heart to celebrate, death had come too near... on the Oth the terror started again ... on the 8th it blew a gale, and when at times the sky was clear of smoke there

was a glittering brightness in the upper air that meant pure flame in the high heavens carried by the wind miles beyond the fire, and the people prayed and were afraid to go to bed. On the 12th finally came rain many neighboring towns In been totally

destroyed. And all the beauty of the land was gone. There was nothing but a charred countryside above which rose bare, black snags, mute exclamation marks against what man had wrought.

It seemed Hayward would become one of those ghost towns occasionally encountered among the scrub. But in 1911 it had a respite when the national spotlight was turned on it during the far-famed Dietz trial.

John Dietz was a burly backwoodsman who buffaloed and terrorized the north country for years. Ever since 1902 he had been trying to collect (others said extort) money from the Chippewa Lumber and Boom Company which once had employed him. His incredible story, which includes the wanton wounding of many men, warrants torn up by the score, sheriff after sheriff and all their posses defied and driven off, finally ended in what is known as the Battle of Cameron Dam. There in the remote woods, Dietz and his son and wife and two small children held out against a posse of sixty of Wisconsin’s crack shots, a newspaper battery of forty men, and 1500 spectators, most of them unofficially armed. Twenty-five hundred rounds were exchanged before Dietz was shot in the hand and surrendered at

sight of his own blood.

By now Dietz was a murderer, having killed a deputy, and he got life. But after all his shenanigans, he went into prison on a wave of popular sentimentalism created by a national press in fecarch of an angle.

John Dietz was played up as an underdog fighting singlehanded against the evils of capitalism em-

bodied in the huge, heartless lumber company.

But a town can’t live long on mere notoriety. And so now it was that they began to realize the possibilities of the climate and the many lakes. The tourist industry was born, an industry that raises the normal 11,000 population of the Hayward Lakes region

to 100,000 in summer. Fishing is the prime sport. And Hayward boasts that its own Louie Spray got one of the biggest muskies ever caught on hook and line, weighing 01 pounds and 13 ounces.

Out by the Namekagon where billions of feet of timber were floated down, there is now a huge

State nursery with a replanting program of millions of tiny trees. The jangle of the juke box, and the clatter of the slot machines and the expensive mixed drinks served across a gleaming plastic bar at the height of the “season” scarcely invoke those inimitable times when the 1 u m b e r j a cks came out of the woods and down along the old Chippewa Tote

Road singing, “I wonder if they'll know me now, if I go home again.”

Yes, Hayward gradually got “civilized,” but Hurley never wholly did. During Prohibition the big-time bad men like AÍ Capone, “Whittling John” Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, John Hamilton, Homer Van Meter and Company, discovered it and made it their rendezvous, and ever sinco it has been a “must” for tourists.

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Well, it’s only fair to Hurley to say that Hurley isn’t proud of it. The homefolks claim that the town couldn’t support four taverns on its own thirst. Can they help it if people come there looking for synthetic sin based on an outdated reputation? Their sincere deploring, notwithstanding, the fact remains that 75 of Hurley’s 115 business establishments arc taverns, that is roughly one tavern to every 40 inhabitants.

The Hurleyites turn your attention to the long ore trains leaving constantly with iron for the war effort. They take you to Mt. Zion from where you can see the tall superstructures of the enormously deep shafts—for these are some of the deepest mines in existence. In the old days they didn’t have to do much more than scratch the surface to get the ore, and they dug shallow veins every which way without a thought of future consequences.

Then one day peoplo noticed that the earth beneath their very feet was caving in, sometimes with perilous suddenness. The result is that today Hurley stands on a kind of plateau encircled with deep pits known as “caves,” and when you consider that the shafts

of the old Ashland mino are there under the town itself . . .

But the good folk of Hurley just laugh at such a notion. It couldn’t happen to them. And they point with pride, too, to the trainloads of logs there on the siding by the ore trains. For there is still logging in scattered spots and a few miles away two big camps cutting the very last stand of virgin timber in all that vast region. A visit ileetingly invokes the past. . . here is the workshop where they are cutting sledge runners in the old-time manner out of naturally curving birch roots, the sauna—Finnish steam bath, produced by pouring water on redhot stones, and the cookhouse with the long, tables literally loaded with the good food demanded by lumberjacks and eaten amid the total silence imposed long ago to avoid mealtime quarrels.

And the lumberjacks still gravitate to Hurley and, not trusting themselves, deposit their stake with their favorite bartender who doles it out to them lest they gamble it away in a single night. Jack Forslund says he had eightyseven of them sleeping on the floor of his place last Christmas.

Driving in after supper from the logging camp, between the purple and gold hedges of asters and goldenrod, we reach Hurley just as night falls and Silver Street springs to life. There is a tantalizing aroma in the crisp air—“pasties” baking in Daoust’s restaurant. These meat and potato pics are Hurley’s heritage from the “cousinjacks” — Cornish miners who came to take out the first

ore. Nowadays over half the miners are Italians, but they all make pasties in their homes—it’s become a Hurley custom. In the Turf Exchange a bunch of lumberjacks are doing some steady drinking, and down the street jn one of the modern night clubs gambling gets under way, with the traditional silver dollars used as chips piled in stacks

a foot high before the dealer.

But the favorite rendezvous of those “in the know” is the “club” established in the cellars of the ruinous old Burton House. We take our way up there under one of Wisconsin’s inimitable harvest moons. Drinks are served at an ancient mahogany bar, the games are going on quietly in an adjoin-

ing room. It is eerie to think of the deserted old building overhead, only a half dozen of its 250 rooms now being used as a place to flop b}*decrepit lumberjacks. We go up to the musty lobby. Gone is all the elegance of those incredible nineties. There is no clerk now, and we ourselves take

0 u t a n d p o u r over the yellowed registers filled with the flo uris lies of a day gone forever.

There is an odd hollow sound from the echoing depths of t hc building. We listen fearfully. Finally therehea ves

1 n t o vie w a strange, legless, fingerless wreck of a man. As this p i t i a b 1 e lí u 1 k makes its way across the lobby, pushing a broom before it, t he face

turns to us and the lips move, but no sound comes. The half-man disappears into the darkness. Someone explains lie is an old Finnish lumberjack who got drunk one night and fell asleep in the snow and froze off His legs and fingers and has never been able to speak since—a fitting caretaker for a ghost hotel. 4H-