Marjorie Clarke, Harry Barrett’s mother, Clara Gorrie, and Dorothy Clarke enjoy a canoe ride on Head Lake, while, in the background, an Alligator tug feeds logs to Haliburton’s Malloy & Bryans sawmill.
Photo circa 1915. The mill burned in 1919.
Courtesy of Harry B. Barrett.
John Cockburn, an Englishman who came to Canada to do the carvings in the woodwork of the first Parliament buildings, was a recent immigrant to the Ottawa Valley. He also had outstanding boat-building skills. Booth persuaded Cockburn to design a boat that met the needs of the men engaged in the log drives, gathering stray logs, and forming the booms. As a result the now famous pointer boat was born. The first of these were built in Ottawa.2
Cockburn’s design met with instant success and soon he was building some two hundred boats a year in his shop he had established in Pembroke, on the Ottawa River. These were built of heavy pine to withstand the rough usage, with an upswept bow, and stern that allowed them to be pivoted with one tug of an oar. The largest were up to 50 feet in length, yet drew only a few inches of water and weighed more than half a ton. They ranged in size down to less than 15 feet in length. Pointer boats were still being built by John Cockburn’s grandson as late as 1968. For over a century this versatile craft had made the life of the riverman a little easier on the Ottawa and its tributaries. The pointer boats were immortalized in 1916 by Tom Thomson in his striking canvas, entitled Batteaux, which he painted on Grand Lake, on the east side of Algonquin Park.
Cockburn pointer-boat crews are working with a log boom in Algonquin Park.
Courtesy of Bud Doering.
Dave Lemkay3 has fond memories of seeking relief from summer heat at lunchtime in the cool, windowless, old Cockburn boat shop, with its plank floor, specialized tools, and the tantalizing fresh aromas of pine and cedar shavings and oakum. Here, too, he could relax and reminisce with Jack Cockburn, third-generation boat builder, about the great log drives on the Ottawa River watershed and the crucial part played by the pointer boats of Pembroke4 and the men who worked them. These were tough, agile men, many of them Irish immigrants who moved into the forest camps in the fall to harvest the timber. Many came from subsistence farms to work through the winter and early spring and then return to their farms. Some brought their horses with them. Others worked as lumberjacks year round in the forests, on river drives, and in the sawmills.
There was an urgent need, however, for an improved and economical method of moving logs from the remote timber limits now being harvested. A conventional steamboat could be used, but to place one on every lake where logging was taking place was too costly and the construction of railways for the purpose was out of the question.
A logging crew operate a cadge crib, with a horse-powered headworks, anchor, and manila anchor rope, as they enter a lock on the Trent Canal at Buckhorn. Note the shelter for the horses and the second crib for cooking and sleeping accommodations.
Courtesy of Library and Archives Canada, C-27216.
5 Joseph Jackson and the Warping Tug
Joseph Jackson was a native of Norfolk County, having been born in Houghton Township in 1831. By the age of thirty he was very much involved in lumbering operations in the county, an involvement that continued until 1880 when the sources of good pine timber were so depleted that it was no longer profitable for Jackson to operate there. Like many others he followed the big pine across the border into Michigan, or northward, where he continued his timber operations for a few more years.1
A formal photograph of Joseph Jackson (1831–1908), date not identified.
Courtesy of Library and Archives Canada, PA-33816.
In the 1882 federal election, Joseph Jackson ran as the Liberal candidate for South Norfolk and was successful. His political career was short-lived, however, as he lost his seat in the 1887 election and turned his energies back to his interests in lumbering. That same year, he purchased the Canadian timber holdings of William F. Whitney of Bay City, Michigan. These timber limits, covering over 41 square miles, cost Jackson $130,000, and were located 60 miles inland from Georgian Bay in the south part of Patterson Township in Nipissing District in the area of Restoule Lake. Jackson wasted no time; in 1888 he harvested 3 million cubic feet of long timber in rough country.
His plan to move these logs to Georgian Bay via the French River proved much more difficult than he first thought, as the river was in essence a chain of many small lakes separated by numerous hazardous rapids. The log drive to Georgian Bay, where the timber would be rafted and towed to Tonawanda on the Niagara River, proved to be very time-consuming and expensive. Fortunately, there was a great demand for long timber in the New York market, but the experience was a very frustrating one.
On his return to Simcoe, Joseph Jackson turned to his friend John West for help. Explaining the difficulties he had experienced in his new logging enterprise, Jackson suggested to West that what was needed was a steam-powered warping tug that was not only capable of warping booms of logs through the many lakes, but also of moving overland readily from lake to lake to do it. West was immediately interested, and not only agreed to design such a craft, but promised to have it ready for operation on the Jackson timber limits by spring, in time for the 1889 season.
John West first made a trip to the Mississippi River in the United States to study the use of steamboats in rafting barges and all manner of produce up and down the river. He returned with his head full of ideas for solving his client’s problem, and set to work in his drafting room in the attic of the West & Peachey foundry. With his firm already having built equipment for steam-powered boats, he had some expertise already in place. Although there is little in the way of records to mark their progress, it is known that in the winter of 1888–89, John West, James Peachey, and their chief engineer, Jonathan Awde, formerly of Cumberland, England, along with a small staff, designed and built their first steam warping tug.2
Already experienced in building boilers and steam engines, they had only to adapt the size of this machinery to the accommodation available in the scow, or tug. This was perhaps the least of their worries when one considers the many other technical and mechanical problems that had to be dealt with before a successful spring launch of the new vessel could be made. Since space was limited in the factory, the tug was assembled in the yard to the rear of the buildings in the late winter and early spring. The March 27, 1889, issue of Norfolk’s newspaper, the British Canadian, announced: “Messrs West and Peachey have on the stocks a rather novel steam tug, which they are making for Joseph Jackson, Esq. For use in the lumber woods. It will be completed in about ten days.”
Early reports of this novel West & Peachey tug referred to it as an amphibious craft, when it first appeared and crawled over the portages. Even before it left Simcoe for the north woods, it was being referred to as an “Alligator.” With this descriptive name being deemed so suitable, the name Alligator was applied to all that followed. The success of the first warping tug set the trend for the many more that were to be built by West & Peachey.
The hull of the tug was 32 feet long and 4 feet deep with a beam of 10 feet. The tug was scow-shaped with the bottom formed from 3-inch white-oak planking.3 A steel boiler plate protected part of the bottom of the craft and all of the bow. The chines, the reinforced sections where the sides of the vessel are joined to the bottom of the boat, were also protected by boiler