The methods used during the winter cutting season did not change very much until the replacement of horses and axes with tractors and chainsaws. For over a hundred years, the techniques used in the bush were fairly constant. Now the logging season lasts year round, as it‘s no longer necessary to deliver all the logs by creek and river. The end of the log drive on the Gatineau means that now all the wood is delivered to pulp mills by truck. No longer do logs get marked and piled at river banks or beside creeks waiting for the spring surge to be driven down to the mills. Things were quite different in the bush 150 years ago.

Excerpt from: Hurling Down the Pine, by John W. Hughson and Courtney C. J. Bond

In those days, the first upon the scene were the bush-rangers. They were a special breed of expert woodsmen, skilled especially in estimating timber volumes. Oddly enough, many of them were not formally educated, but they were entrusted with establishing the quantities and the quality of the wood, suitable campsites, suitable tote roads for the transportation of supplies and equipment, and main roads for the delivery of the logs to the nearest water route.

After the cutting areas were blazed out they were assigned to cutting gangs. Each gang was usually made up of ten men and two teams of horses. There were two sawyers who felled the trees; four “swampers”—axemen who cut the trails for the horses; two “teamsters” who skidded the logs to the branch roads; and two “rollers”—cant-hook men who end-stamped the logs and decked them onto the skidways.

Teamsters skidded the logs through trails, cut by the swampers, to the nearest branch road, where they were decked onto skidways and stamped with a log hammer. A good log cutter could make eighty or ninety logs a day, and a good skidding team could pile (skid) about two hundred in that time. Usually a winter‘s cut for a company camp was fifty to sixty thousand pine logs, depending on the size of the logs. With the first appearance of zero Fahrenheit weather, “tanking”, or sprinkling of the main road with water, began. It was necessary to build up a substantial ice bottom to carry the loads of nine to ten thousand board feet. These roads were to the company camp operator what a main street is to a city.

From: My Life and Times in the Bush, by J. E. Boyl

Feverish activity began with the start of the sleigh haul, as all logs had to be transported to the water (lake or river) before the spring thaw. Using side loading “jammers,” the men with cant hooks were out before dawn loading log sleighs by torchlight. So were the “bull rope” men and the “road monkeys” or “chickadees” who cleaned the roadways or sanded any slight down-grades. During the hauling season, the original cutting crews were transferred to either loading the log sleighs or unloading them at the log dump. The extended working hours were essential: the winter days were short and it would be disastrous to leave logs in the bush from one season to another, as they would be destroyed by boring beetles. Upon delivery of all the logs to the dump, the camps were all closed until open water in the spring. The operators tried to schedule their winter work to finish about the middle of March. Very often, their wishes regarding the log haul were not granted, as the vagaries of an ordinary Canadian winter are well known to all of us.

Besides axes, the tools used were crosscut saws, steel wedges, canthooks, peaveys, skidding tongs, draught chains and decking lines. Ownership of the logs was established in either of two ways: one was a hammer mark, often a letter stamped on both ends of each log; the other was an axe mark such as “lXl” cut into the surface of each log. This marking not only established the ownership, but also assisted in sorting on the rivers where more than one company was driving. Later, “bark-marking” was discontinued in favour of daubs of coloured paint on both ends of every log, These marks were registered and each belonged to one company. Some continued to use the hammer mark

Cross cutting the trunk of the tree was called "bucking. Standard lengths were 16 feet and 6 inches. The additional six inches of wood was allowed by the government to compensate for damage in the river drive and was referred to as “broomage”. Logs were also cut in fourteen, twelve and ten foot lengths, but it was the desire of the sawmill operators to have as many of sixteen feet as possible. The minimum diameter at the top, in those days, was eight inches, so that a good-sized forest remained after the first cut.