CHAPTER V
THE LUMBER KING
Newly arrived in Ottawa one afternoon last summer, I was standing amid its noble buildings, chatting with a fat policeman; and the fat policeman, having identified me as a visitor from England, said I must certainly call on his friend J. R. Booth. My comment was directed to the necessity for an introduction and an appointment, whereupon a puzzled face revealed the friendly constable as wondering what I was talking about. Thus this incident epitomised the great difference between two peoples, otherwise identical, who are divided by three thousand miles of ocean.
I am British, and, consequently, a snob; the fat policeman was Canadian, and, therefore, unhampered by any sense of social distinctions. It would never occur to a fat policeman in the Old Country that he was everybody’s equal. If he happened to know a millionaire, he would talk of that person with awe, instead of with affectionate respect, as was the note sounded in my corpulent companion’s references to J. R. Booth. The untravelled English reader may find a difficulty in realising that it is not a natural law, by Providence ordained, which divides humanity into ladies and gentlemen on the one hand, and common people on the other. In this dear old country many excellent folk would be shocked at the idea of dining at the same table, or praying in the same pew, with a man who does useful manual work; but the people of Canada, while very much alive to the power of the dollar, are blind and deaf to the idea that personal wealth has anything to do with personal worth. The fact is that kid gloves and the silk hat are emblematical of a country that has reached a ripe, not to say rotten, stage of development. In a new and progressive country like Canada muscle commands, not emolument alone, but honour.
From the terrace of the Ottawa Parliament House—that majestic Gothic pile which crowns the architectural beauty of the capital—I looked out upon a far sweep of beautiful Canadian scenery. Down below, in the foreground of that living panorama, the eye noted, on the farther shore of the broad stretch of glistening river, a little town of workshops and factories clustering behind the white smudge that marked a waterfall. I was looking at the head-quarters of the industry out of which the city of Ottawa has grown. I was looking at the largest lumber-mill in the world. I was looking at a part of the property created, owned, and controlled by J. R. Booth, the friend of the fat policeman.
During my tour of the Dominion’s great cities—so full of light, racing tramcars, human enthusiasm, and other forms of electricity—Canada became typified in my mind as The Man Without a Waistcoat; for the energetic citizen permits himself that toilet modification during the brilliant summer months. But an abstract personification was destined to be superseded in my thoughts by a definite human example. In J. R. Booth I felt that I had met the spirit and genius of Canada in the flesh.
I went to him under the conditions which had the sanction of national usage—that is to say, I went without introduction or appointment.
An old man, thick-set and of medium height, with white beard and clean-shaven upper lip; an old man in a suit of dark grey homespun, with peaked cap to match; an old man standing by himself, thinking, in the lee of a wooden shed—that was the multi-millionaire as I happened to find him. It is not many persons who have found him thus.
A while ago Sir Robert Perks dropped in from the Old Country to discuss high finance with the Lumber King of Canada. Sir Robert was shown into an office, where he presently was much astonished by the entrance of an elderly individual in overalls, sprinkled with red dust and mortar. The old man on that occasion had been laying bricks. Visitors sometimes find him at the bottom of an excavation showing his men how to lay concrete.
There was someone with me who, when we saw him standing beside the wooden building, said that was J. R. Booth. I should not have known. At a casual glance he might, even in Canada, have been anybody; in England he could easily have been mistaken for nobody. But when I stepped forward and spoke to that upright, impassive old man, when I confronted his calm, strong countenance, with its wise, blue, penetrating eyes, I realised the presence of J. R. Booth. I cannot find the right word to reflect the impression he produces. The strength of simplicity; the oak pillar or marble column unadorned; a man content to lean on mind instead of manner—those are but imperfect suggestions.
I asked if I might go over his works, and he said “Yes.” I asked if I could have a chat with him afterwards, and again he said “Yes.” For he is a straightforward Aye-and-Nay talker—there is no polite pretending, no verbal embroidery, with J. R. Booth. He struck me as being the rare human marvel—a genius without vanity.
Genius is not an exaggerated definition. J. R. Booth gave the first clues to his future career at an early age by doing something that his relatives considered silly and something else that they considered insane. I should mention he came of a stock of seven brothers Booth who, over a century ago, emigrated from Ireland to Waterloo—a district within that vast stretch of Quebec territory known as the Eastern Townships. There they toiled, prospered, and multiplied; and it came to pass that J. R. Booth, of the rising generation, had to plough, chop wood, and tend stock. But homestead duties did not monopolise the young man’s attention. It was in his mind that the utmost power of a man’s body can accomplish but a minute fraction of the work waiting to be done in the world; and, undeterred by the titters of his intimates, he put in a lot of private time constructing amateur watermills on a rivulet that coursed through the paternal property. Those wheels were running in his mind when, at the age of twenty-one, he broke away from the traditions of his youth, and, with no more than nine dollars in his pocket, set forth to conquer the world in his own way, the good people of Waterloo shaking their heads over the departure of one whom they feared must be crazy.
We may jump a few years spent bridge-building in the States, and so come to the time, fifty-eight years ago, when J. R. Booth, a carpenter without capital, stood on the banks of the River Ottawa, bending an appreciative eye on the Chaudière Falls. There they were, rushing and roaring—a mighty volume of sustained force running to waste. J. R. Booth decided that they were what he was looking for.
Lower rungs of the ladder were quickly mounted—from factory hand to foreman, from foreman to tenant of a mill, from tenant to owner. A bank was willing to back such a man; and at a public auction J. R. Booth bought, for £9,000, a large territory endowed with timber wealth which—as he had taken the precaution to ascertain—was almost incalculable. Local lumbermen regarded the transaction as hopelessly vast and audacious. But with J. R. Booth it was just a beginning.
From having water-wheels on the brain, he now had them on the Ottawa, where they propelled powerful machinery that hauled and sliced his logs. The reader will not, of course, confound this time-honoured water-power, as used at the place of its occurrence, with modern “white coal,” which is water-power in a fluid, invisible form that lends itself to distribution. J. R. Booth had not introduced a new method. He merely introduced an old method into a new place. By the one plan you must bring your factory to the waterfall; by the other plan you send the waterfall, along a metal cable, to the factory.
If the Chaudière cataract illustrates the latent resources of Canada, J. R. Booth illustrates the qualities that go to make good Canadians—those men with daring imaginations, industrious brains and educated hands. But he is not the type—he is a supreme example. It is as though Nature had prepared a store of business capacity sufficient for a townful of merchants, and then, on second thoughts, had bestowed it all on one man.
So fully did J. R. Booth post himself on the practical details of logging and lumbering, so securely did he lay the foundations of every fresh extension of his enterprise, that, of all the forest properties in the world, his became the largest. Mr. Paul E. Bilkey put the case comprehensively when he wrote: “Rivers, streams big and little, snow-covered forest tracks, roads that are good and roads that are bad and roads that are no roads at all, lead ultimately to the coffers of J. R. Booth; veins and arteries stretching over two great provinces and an American State, parts of or tributaries to a great industrial system whose heart pulsates day and night at the Chaudière, to the uttermost agency devised and dominated by the genius of one man—Booth.” And again: “The river is bitted and broken to do the work that Booth requires it to do: turns the wheels of his mills, takes the logs and timbers down through his slides, floats his noisy tugs and carries his booms; and Booth, to keep it all going, draws upon a timber empire in the north which, if strung out in a line a mile wide, would stretch from Quebec to Victoria.”
Thus to measure the scope of this colossal enterprise your imagination must first roam over large areas of Ontario and Quebec, and then (J. R. Booth having felt cramped in a little place like Canada) take cognisance of great slices of the United States. But it is easier to find the limits of the business than of the brain that controls it. Of that brain, the more obvious feature is its organising power. For J. R. Booth is the sole and actual head of the vast concern. It is not run by a syndicate or a company. He easily and successfully carries a burden of mental responsibility, and exercises a volume of mental control, that would suffice to keep half a dozen boards of directors out of mischief.
But the most remarkable feature of this brain, I think, is its capacity for detail. It is not only a mental telescope that sees things too large for ordinary vision; it is a mental microscope that detects minutiæ invisible to most men. I will give two illustrations.
A certain amount of carting having to be done, there are some five hundred horses at the Booth lumber yards, and, one of them recently dying suddenly overnight, it was replaced within an hour or so by the responsible foreman. “Where did the new horse come from?” asked the eagle-eyed old man next morning, soon after arriving on the scene at seven o’clock, as is his daily custom. The other incident occurred one afternoon, when many hundreds of the hands were streaming homeward on the conclusion of their day’s work. The old man, standing by, called to one of the men by name. Said the venerable employer: “Are you satisfied with your wages?” “Yes,” was the reply. “Then why do you steal my property?” came the further inquiry. At first the man made faltering protestations of innocence, but when requested to raise the lid of his dinner-can—which, indeed, proved full of copper nails—he confessed his fault in an extremity of penitence and dismay. The old man—who, by the way, associated a reprimand and a warning with forgiveness—had not been blind to the fact that a dinner-can swings in one way if empty (which is its normal state at four o’clock in the afternoon), and in another way if it be full of metal.
And all this time I have been speaking of J. R. Booth merely in his capacity of Lumber King. He is other things as well. For example, he has long been a wood-pulp magnate. You get a tree, and pound it into a fibry mass which, with added water, resembles thick oatmeal porridge; and when you have spread that mess out and let it partly dry, it rolls up like a thick, coarse blanket, in which form you can ship it across the ocean to be the basis of the great reels of paper that feed the daily Press. The old man acquired the necessary knowledge and machinery for doing that class of business, and he does it on a grand scale.
Thus on my conducted tour of inspection there was much to see. First, I beheld a stretch of river where the water was hidden by wood—logs floating end to end and side by side, giving a ribbed surface to the vista, which suggested acres of a Brobdingnagian corduroy. They look flat and tame—those trees without roots or leaves or branches. Here one saw the forest suspended midway between the poles of its destiny—no longer an asylum for birds and beasts, nor yet house and furniture for man.
I knew something of the stages through which that floating timber had passed. For I have penetrated into Canada’s lofty jungle and visited the camps where companies of sturdy men fell the trees and saw them into logs, and haul those logs to the nearest river, along which they are borne by the current or drawn by tugs, until at last they join the dense congregation of their fellows massed within sight of the mill.
I now saw the places where, one by one, the logs were pushed within reach of mechanism that lifted them out of the water and bore them up an incline, thence to be delivered into the maw of complex, ingenious, deafening, ruthless machinery. You had some inkling of the force of the Chaudière Falls when you saw what that force was doing. Metal platforms went racing airily about with huge logs as though they were featherweights. Sometimes a great blundering log would roll off the platform, whereat a devilish iron arm arose out of the floor and pushed all that timber tonnage back into position. Always the heavily burdened platform was running forward; and, looking ahead, you saw an obstruction along the route—an obstruction of whirling, shrieking machinery. Still looking, you saw the logs, without any jarring or delay, melt miraculously through the obstruction as if they were no more substantial than cloud. And on the other side they were logs no longer, but merely clusters of planks—circular saws having sliced them like so much cheese.
In those vast chambers of clean, quick mechanism—fed at one end with tree-trunks, and elsewhere belching forth streams of boards, beams, laths, and shingles, with avalanches of chips and cascades of sawdust—in those vast chambers, I say, one’s ears are put out of service by the shrieking din, and the visitor has the more occasion for his eyes. He must walk circumspectly, lest peradventure he be hurled hence by an iron arm, and cut with swift precision into thin, wet slices.
From the lumber mills I passed into regions where J. R. Booth makes wood pulp. My guide began by introducing me to a grinder—a huge affair that swallows six tons of logs a day and files them to fibre. Twenty-two of these grinders were growling away at their mammoth meals, and there were others, I learnt, in process of construction. It was certainly a case of lost identity with the thick, grey stuff that went flowing on to the screens. That it had once been the solid part of a forest was a thought as unthinkable as that little boys would soon be running about with it in distant cities, shouting “’Orrible murder! Lytest special!”
The screens are discriminating. The bulk of the fibre passes through a one-hundredth-of-an-inch aperture, and is good for paper. Then the residue runs on a screen having apertures of about a sixtieth of an inch; and while that which penetrates the interstices is available for fine cardboard, that which remains above is suitable for coarse cardboard. Now the several streams of porridge are pumped upstairs to wet-presses that contain revolving cylinders. You next see the stuff clinging to a hurrying felt band that transfers it to wooden rollers. When several thicknesses have wound round a roller, they are cut with a pointed stick, removed, and folded; and there you have your mechanical ground pulp, which is nothing but washed wood fibre loosely matted by water. That mechanical ground pulp constitutes about three-fourths, in bulk, of paper used by the daily and weekly Press. I was conducted to the range of buildings where J. R. Booth makes the constituent which, with certain small accessories, completes the substance of our news-sheets. Again logs are the raw material. But this time they are not ground. They are first despoiled of their bark by one piece of mechanism; then by another piece of mechanism they are cut into chips. It seems ungracious to criticise a machine; but I observed that the “chipper” is apt to be a little remiss. Some of the chips it turns out are rather larger than J. R. Booth requires them to be. So all are subjected to a screening test, those of excessive size being dealt with in an auxiliary apparatus called a “re-chipper.” The little nuggets of wood are now sent upstairs in a carrier, and shot into big bins, each of which holds nearly two hundred tons. Thence they pass through funnels into great steel digesters, in which they are packed down close with long iron rods. The digesters have an acid-proof lining of bricks and cement; and, to be informed of the reason for this, I was taken downstairs again. We visited a part of the premises which, by reason of certain fumes, suggested “Paradise Lost.” I am not a chemist, and I cannot describe what the agents of J. R. Booth were doing with their immense supplies of lime and sulphur. It must suffice to say that they produced sulphurous acid and a horrid smell.
The former is conveyed to the upper story, and pumped into the digesters, previously packed with chips. “Digester” is the technical and literal description, for the acid-saturated wood is now cooked with steam for ten or twelve hours, at the end of which time it is reduced to white fluff. After being washed in cold water it is called sulphite, and is ready to be mixed with mechanical ground pulp to form paper, small quantities of china clay, size, soda-ash, resin, and blue and red earth being added as a kind of seasoning.
Such, at least, is J. R. Booth’s recipe; for I found that, by a recent addition to his manifold activities, he now makes paper. They took me through the mill, a long building containing several machines stretched out in a perspective of great cylinders, suggesting the segments of a huge iron caterpillar.
It seemed that the mixture of pulp, sulphite, and accessories has to pass through a refining engine on its way from one receptacle to another. Afterwards I saw it pouring like gruel on to each caterpillar’s tail. Under a shower-bath of water sprays—necessary for breaking bubbles—the liquid paper ran on to rotating screens, and was received on moving belts of wire gauze. The endless web of grey liquid soon became a web of white substance.
My companion bade me note the “suction box.” This was a gap in a metal cylinder, and as the material ran over that gap it was sucked inward, with consequent loss of moisture. Now watch its gliding, serpentine course over thirty cylinders, heated by steam, until, finally—as dry, warm, immaculate paper—it is wound into rolls of from four to five miles. Its journey has been to and fro, back and turn, for the cylinders are ranged in double and treble tiers; yet but a minute or so elapses between the fluid state and the finished stage, each caterpillar reeling off paper at the pace of 525 feet per minute.
I have forgotten how many tons of J. R. Booth’s paper are now absorbed by England, what quantity goes to the States, and the proportion consumed in Canada; but I remember that thirty-nine rolls make a car-load, and that those destined for an ocean voyage are furnished with an extra wrapper and have their edges protected by burlap hessian.
To be talking with the Lumber King is to find yourself in the presence of a man unlike anyone you have ever met before, the reason being that J. R. Booth is content to be J. R. Booth. As a matter of fact, everybody is unlike everybody else; but the average mortal disguises his personality with conventionalities of manner, so that only after a while, and from chance clues, do you “get to know him.” J. R. Booth is natural and genuine even at a first acquaintance; in this respect, as in others, being a conspicuous example of a national virtue. For, whereas the island-bred Briton loves to present a surface of polished veneer, the Canadian is satisfied to be solid oak.
To have briskly opened the door, to have entered the office graciously smiling, to have uttered a few formal words of welcome—that is how it would have been with most people. That is not how it was with J. R. Booth. Sitting sideways at the corner of the table, I did not know he had arrived until, on turning, I found him, with head thoughtfully bent, quietly seated at right angles to me. A bearing so devoid of pretence wins instant confidence and respect, if at first it be a little disconcerting.
It was left to me to start the conversation, and I plunged into some unpremeditated talk about trees. What was the best sort for paper-making? Hemlock, he explained, was good, but any kind of hard timber would do if it hadn’t gum in it. Gum prevented the acid penetrating the fibre. Couldn’t they extract the gum? Yes; they were learning how to do that, and paper had been made from pitch pine after the turpentine and gum were extracted. Did his own processes yield any by-products? Well, a good deal of gummy substance came out of spruce during the cooking process, but it was mixed with the acid, and a market for it had not been found. “Except for the acid,” said J. R. Booth thoughtfully, “it would make good chewing-gum.”
In an interrogatory spirit, I mentioned the great trees of British Columbia. But the old man shook his head. There was, it seemed, a great deal of pitch in them. “I don’t know of any place in the world,” he added, “where, for softness and lightness and durability, you would get anything to match our white pines.”
But all this time—as the keen blue eyes seemed fully aware—my questions were unrelated to the matter uppermost in my mind. I really did not feel curious about the trees. It was not my intention to start a rival pulp and paper mill. I was not even proposing to write a treatise on the subject. My desire was to gain some clues to the working of an abnormal business brain. I sought to lead the conversation in that direction.
How much paper did he make? One hundred tons a day, and about forty tons of cardboard. How many hands did he employ? In summer, 2,400 at the mills, and very nearly as many more in the woods. Then I gave tongue to my thoughts.
“Paper-making is obviously a very delicate and complex matter,” I said. “How came you to strike out in that new direction at the age of eighty, and when you already had such vast undertakings to engage your attention?”
Had I asked him the time, he could not have replied with greater readiness or in a tone more matter of fact.
“Yes,” he said, “paper requires a great deal of care. When I took it up I didn’t know anything about it, and that was a little disadvantage for a while. You ask why I took it up. Well, I had a railroad—four hundred miles—and I sold it. I felt rather lost without my railroad. So I took up paper.”
Could any explanation be more complete or more simple? J. R. Booth hadn’t enough to occupy him, so he “took up paper.”
Before going further with our conversation, I ought to explain what lay behind that other simple sentence: “I had a railroad.”
From an admirable biographical sketch in _Collier’s_ I take the following interesting facts: “Booth had no idea of becoming a railway owner till Governor Smith, of Vermont, came along one day and told a hard-luck story. Smith and his associates had started the Canada Atlantic as a feeder to the Central Vermont, and the enterprise was costing money. They asked for the co-operation of Booth. They got it; and one day J. R. Booth woke up to the realisation that he must take the work over and carry it on himself if it was to be done at all. It might be throwing good money after bad, and it might not. Booth plunged again. He built the Canada Atlantic from Couteau Junction to Depôt Harbour, and he built the Ottawa, Arnprior and Parry Sound Railway, four hundred miles of main line and a hundred miles of sidings. He bought engines and cars and he built shops. There being no terminus on the Georgian Bay, he created a terminus. When the line was nearly completed to the bay, he invited the Premier of Canada, Sir Wilfrid Laurier—then in his first year of office—to go over it with him. They went to the end of the steel, and from there walked half a mile to the shores of the bay, described by Sir Wilfrid as ‘a bleak shore, without a building upon it.’ ‘This,’ said J. R. Booth, ‘is the terminus of my railway.’ The Prime Minister asked: ‘Where is your trade to come from?’ Booth answered: ‘I shall have to create it. I shall have to collect it from Port Arthur, from Duluth, from Chicago, and from both sides of the lakes. I shall have to build elevators. I shall, perhaps, have to buy wheat in order to furnish trade for my railway.’
“All that the one-time bridge carpenter told the Prime Minister he would do he did. He made Depôt Harbour. He built elevators. He put a line of steamers upon the lakes, and he forced so much of the Western trade into a new channel down through Ontario that the Canada Atlantic was carrying yearly two hundred thousand tons of flour and package freight and twenty million bushels of grain. The man who built it had seen to it that the railway was a good one. Other people saw that it was a good one. The Canadian Northern hankered after it. Seward Webb, of New York, went so far as to get an option on it—an option which is said to have left the New York financier poorer and J. R. Booth richer by a quarter of a million. The Conservative Opposition in the Canadian Parliament wanted the country to buy the Canada Atlantic, and join it to the Inter-Colonial as an alternative to the Grand Trunk Pacific project. The Government refused to do it, because they said that they could not do what J. R. Booth had done. Then along came the Grand Trunk and took the Canada Atlantic, and John R. Booth put fourteen million dollars down into his clothes.”
I think he must, at first, have been glad to be rid of his railroad responsibilities. At any rate, that was one of the occasions when, as though in festive mood, he played the part of Santa Claus in the family circle, presenting each of his two sons and each of his two daughters with one million dollars—a little attention certainly calculated to fortify a parent in the esteem of his children.
But, as we have learnt, any temporary feeling of relief was followed by a sense of not having enough to do; and so he set in to assist feeding the newspaper Press and the cardboard users of Europe and North America.
And now to resume the report of our conversation.
“But,” I said, when he confessed to having felt lost without his railway, “you still had your enormous timber business to occupy you?”
“Oh,” he replied, “I’ve been in lumber so long that the exciting part of it has got worn off.”
The “exciting part!” Here was a clue, and I eagerly probed further.
“Then the interest lies in the doing, not in the results?” I asked, speaking from the depths of my ignorance of what it feels like to be a millionaire.
“Yes,” said J. R. Booth, “to build up and afterwards to improve—that occupies the mind, and is a great pleasure; but he is a miserable man who gets to the end of it.”
His words carried a note of pathos to the ear. There was no mistaking the implication—a great organising capitalist, a millionaire many times over, was suggested as a case for compassion.
I did not speak. The earnest expression of those blue eyes told me there was more to come.
“The advantage,” J. R. Booth went on, “is certainly with the manual worker, as distinguished from the man who does the mental part. If he is healthy, and sleeps well, and eats well, no man enjoys life more than the working man. Only,” he added ruefully, “you can’t make him believe it. I have been in both places, and I prefer the heavy end of it.”
Those words were ringing in my memory when, later in the afternoon, I was talking with one of J. R. Booth’s lieutenants. He was telling me something that I scarcely needed to be told, namely, that the entire staff felt, not merely respect, but personal affection for the old man—the wonderful old man whose knowledge, patience and industry seemed without limit; the old man who was never known to be beaten by a difficulty.
And even while we were talking I chanced to look through the glass panel of a door that gave entrance to an inner office. In that office I again saw J. R. Booth. But it was J. R. Booth in a new aspect—an aspect that held my eyes enthralled. The Lumber King was leaning over a desk studying some document, his face alight with interest, yet immovable as marble.
Only once before in my life had I seen that absorbed expression on a human countenance. I was being conducted over the library of the late William Ewart Gladstone, while the venerable statesman sat there writing at his table near the window. A member of the family accompanied me, and began to explain, in a loud voice, the space-saving arrangement of the books. “Hush!” I whispered, “we must not disturb Mr. Gladstone.” “He will not hear,” came the hearty reply. “I had no idea,” was my comment, “that his deafness was so serious.” “Neither is it,” I was informed; “but when Mr. Gladstone is absorbed in mental work a pistol-shot would not disturb him.”
The unmoving face I saw last year in the Ottawa office, like that other unmoving face I saw years ago in the Hawarden library, seemed mesmerised, and to have the power of mesmerising me.
I was paying but scant attention to my companion’s explanations about some knotty business problem that had arisen to engage the attention of J. R. Booth. It was a matter, he mentioned, that must be settled before the mail went out.
At this I pricked up my ears, realising, with a curious sense of regret, that the old man’s present ecstasy would be short-lived. This thought brought in its train a further reflection: obviously the paper enterprise was now running on a smooth and perfected basis. Therefore it must have lost its efficacy as a substitute for the railroad.
“When does Mr. Booth start his new venture?” I asked.
“But,” exclaimed my astonished companion, “you surely have not heard——”
I hastened to explain that I spoke from the merest abstract conjecture.
“Strange!” he rejoined. “As a matter of fact, a new departure is in contemplation. Come back here in two years’ time, and—well, I think you will be interested in what you see.”