Daylight in the Swamp

by Robert W. Wells

Author has been interested in logging for many years and collected a great deal of information on it.

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1978

Reviews

[Deron · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very entertaining read while I was in the process of cutting down junk trees over the winter.

[Mary]

It was great. Very entertaining and enjoyable reading of the past. Enjoyed the characters in Michigan, Illinois and Wisconsin. Makes me want to read more books by this author on the logging industry.

[Misty Ely · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nonfiction, easy read about what life was like for a lumberjack in the late 1800s. Funny and heartbreaking at times.

[Mike Prochot · Rating 4 out of 5]

With a copywright date of 1978, I found the lack of political correctness in this book refreshing. As a lifelong outdoors person, spending most of my time in the northwoods of Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota, I have always been intrigued by the old photos and remaining (but quickly disappearing) artifacts of the logging days. To the untrained eye much of the northwoods today seem to be untouched by human hands. While one would have to argue that that in itself makes the efforts at reforestation somewhat of a success (without getting too detailed and picky), it is astonishing to think of the wholesale destruction created by clearcutting. It is also astonishing to think of the vast number of logs and lumber, in board-feet, produced during the years of the boom time using the low level technologies available - the axe, the saw, flowing water and gravity.

The descriptions in this book of the non-stop logging at feverish pitch remind me of the tales of the gold rush days in Californa - an event still covered in high school history books. A fact that causes me to wonder - how is it that we overlooked the deforestation of the great pine forests in our collective memory.

In any case, I found this to be a highly entertaining book, even with the fact that some of the stories about individual characters does seem to be a bit of tongue-in-cheek. The pictures alone are worth the price of a used copy on Amazon. Nevertheless, as noted above, books about the great logging times in the Midwest are scarce and I am unaware of any recent published works that try to tackle the subject.

While I am not a rabid ecologist and lean more toward the traditional definition of a conservationist, there is much to learn here in regard to our laws and governments role in allowing and even encouraging the massacre to take place. Right or wrong, there is no discussion of this in the book. It is simply a decent tale of the times and the individuals who did the cutting, driving and floating of the logs to the mills. An interesting bunch indeed.

[Aleya · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting book for anyone from the Northwoods: Minnesotans, Wisconsonians, and Michiganders. It takes you through all those dying rural towns and reveals a brighter, swarthier past. Walking in the woods, when ever you come upon a pine that hasn't been logged, you wonder what it would have been like before everything was felled. Well, this book takes you there and reveals the denuding of our heritage.

[Tammy Downing · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting book detailing the history of logging in the Great Lakes states. I really enjoyed it.