World War II changed the tie drives. Many of the 20 and 30-year-old workers, the prime men of the Wyoming Tie and Timber Company headed off to the Pacific, North Africa, and Europe to fight. Younger men, especially 16 to 18-year-olds from Riverton and Lander began to fill in the gaps.
In 1942, Bob Peck, future publisher of the Riverton Ranger, worked the drive as an 18-year Riverton High School graduate before heading off to Europe in World War II. A cottonwood tree blocked several hundred ties above the dam. Peck went into the water, paddling on a couple of ties to break up the jam. He fell into the river and was left clinging to a log.
Nearing exhaustion and almost out of breath, Peck was rescued by Victor Montoya who saw his plight. Montoyo used his pole hook to snag Peck’s belt and pulled him from the water.
There were injuries over the years on the drive, but no fatalities.
Eventually, the Wyoming Tie and Timber Company had a permanent workforce of 250 men, with a hundred more seasonal workers like Peck hired each summer to guide the ties down the river.
The mass of timber floating on the Big Wind was an impressive sight. Families brought picnic lunches out to stretches overlooking the river from Lander, Shoshoni, and Riverton on Sunday afternoons. Tourists, just off the train at one of the six stations in Fremont County altered their trips to Yellowstone to watch the men work this massive floating mountain of wood.
At Riverton, McLaughlin installed a pair of electric, chain conveyors that pulled the logs up the bank to the treatment plant. Men would wade into the water, hook the floating ties with a pike, and guide them into the lift.
At the upper end of the lifts, other crews grabbed the wet ties, pulled them off the conveyor onto a string of smaller conveyors, and stacked them in open arrays 14 ties high, so they would dry in the arid Wyoming wind. A crew of two men were expected to stack 360 ties an hour, one tie every 10 seconds.
When dry, the ties were treated with creosote, extending their usefulness from just a few years to decades. The creosote was brought in from Casper in tank cars on the Chicago Northwestern and heated with coal. It was a foul-smelling process, but with the prevailing winds out of the Northwest, most of the fumes blew away from settled areas.
The dried, treated ties were loaded onto flatbed railcars and shipped east.
At times, bridge ties were also brought down from Dubois. A bridge tie was 10 feet long with side dimensions of eight and nine inches. They had to be longer to work with the many trestles and bridges across the Great Plains.
Martin Olson was hired as Wyoming Tie and Timber’s superintendent early in the project. The big Swede as he was often called was a perfect fit for the job. He handled men well, knew the business, and was respected by both workers and management.
Perhaps the best thing Olson ever did was hire Otto Wickstrom as the cook for the drive. Wickstrom’s first drive was in 1919.
The logistics of cooking three meals a day first in a high-altitude camp in the mountains and then on the banks of a sagebrush-lined river for up to 75 days is staggering. Wickstrom had to feed as many as 140 men breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Breakfast was a big meal for men who were about to expend 7,000 or more calories in a nine-hour workday swinging axes, sawing logs, and carrying heavy ties. Pancakes, or flapjacks as many of the hacks called them were started by Wickstrom and his crew the evening before and the wet pancake mix was stored in 50-gallon barrels.
The grills were set on blocks with wood burning below. On any given morning, Wickstrom used over 50 pounds of flour, sometimes 15 dozen or more eggs, and dozens of pounds of sausage or bacon cooked in Dutch Ovens. On special occasions, dozens of hams just to feed the army of tie hacks.
Otto Wickstrom baked bread in dozens of Dutch ovens spread around the camp.
Dinner often meant stew, a favorite of the hacks, at least for a while. Thousands of pounds of potatoes and onions arrived each week, along with more hundred-pound sacks of flour for biscuits. It’s estimated that two or three steers a week went into the stew Wickstrom and his cooking staff made.
Bosses working with men in the wilderness looked for ways to improve morale among the workers and nothing was better than a good meal. The cooks on cattle drives were paid much more than the cowboys and were in high demand. Many times, competing lumber, cattle, and mining companies listed the cook in their advertisements as a way to get more qualified workers to apply.
Wickstrom had that appeal for Martin Olson and the Wyoming Tie and Timber Company.
In the lumber camps, a mess hall was built at each site, with a camp cook. If there were more than 14 men at the camp, they hired an assistant, that everyone called a flunky to help the cook.
Fred Erickson, a big man, was typical of the camp cooks. He made pies, bread and served breakfast and dinner at his mess hall. Erickson was a character, one afternoon he was kneading dough and a fly landed on it. He flicked most of the fly away but parts remained. A shocked observer pointed to the wings and legs of the departed bug and Fred winked and said, “Raisins.”
Throughout prohibition, the men knew the location of local stills to pick up a snoot once in a while.
Erickson came on the scene a bit later and frequented a bar called the Snake Farm. Occasionally Fred would have a few days off and usually spent it (and all of his money) at the Snake Farm on women and booze.
One day he came back from a bender and called Martin Olson to ask for an advance.
“Could I have a little more money?” Erickson asked.
“No,” yelled Olson, “You can’t have any more money. You’re in the hole.”
Fred went back to work.
Adolf Solan cooked in the late 30s and 40s and his Dutch Oven bacon was remembered fondly by many young men on the drive. They’d line up, plates in hand, and take as much as they wanted directly from the Dutch Ovens then find a seat in the shade. Solan scrambled hundreds of eggs each morning.
Breakfast was the delight of the day and had to last from starting time at 7 am until lunch was served each day on the river at noon.
In 1928, the company picked up new timber leases on Union Pass. Warm Springs was a tributary of the Wind River, but the terrain wasn’t suited for piling up ties and floating them down the steep walls of the Warm Springs Canyon to the river below.
Martin Olson designed a series of flumes that would float the ties off the mountain one at a time in the long V-shaped troughs of wood, with water from streams further up the mountain running through them.
Detractors claimed it was impossible, but by the end of 1928 and with the help of an engineering firm from Spokane, Washington, ties began sliding down the flume. A popular trick for younger tie hacks was to ride the logs down the flume. The ties were gathered at a boom about a mile east of the Union Pass Road where it crosses Warm Springs.
When the water levels were right, ties from Warm Springs came tumbling down in a huge torrent of water and wood. It was also a popular tourist attraction.
Log of the 1939 Drive – One of the Fastest Drives – Thanks to Leneigh Schrinar
July 11 – Started fluming Canyon Creek.
July 12 – Canyon Creek fluming finished at 10 a.m.
July 13 – Started fluming Main flume
July 19 – All ties in flume at 4 p.m.
July 20 – Started down Wind River. Camped at Stringer bridge.
July 21-22 Camped at old Medill place. (Hanscums?)
July 23 – Camped at Pease’s place
July 24 – Camped at Beck’s bridge
July 25 – Camped at Dooley bridge
July 26 – Red Grade
July 27 – Miller’s headgate
July 28 – Lenigans’
July 29 – Lenore Store
July 30 – Hannans’ place
July 31 – Boat lunch. Old Harry Mills place
Aug. 1 – 2 Diverson Dam
Aug. 2 – Morton Lake
August 4 -5 Kinnear bridge
August 6 – Truck lunch. Gillilands’
August 7 – Below Riverview School House
August 8 – 10 No. 1 Headgate
August 11 – Rear into jam at 2:45 p.m.
32 days for complete drive. 23 days on the river. Average crew working: 56 men.
When the ties were all out of the river, stacked in the tie yard, and drying before being processed it was time to celebrate.
Riverton’s bars, restaurants, and a house of ill repute, named the Yellow House were all ready for the arriving tie hacks, jacking up prices to double the rates during the rest of the year. In a scene reminiscent of cowboys coming into Abilene or Cheyenne at the end of a long cattle drive, the tie hacks cut loose for a long week of celebration.
In the early tie drives, bar fights were common between the tie hacks and cowboys coming into town to prove themselves. It wasn’t much of a match with the giant Swedes and Norwegians routinely knocking out the smaller, wiry cowboys, often with a single punch.
The Fremont County Sheriff and the local Riverton Police solved the problem by banishing cowboys from town when the ties arrived. Violators were thrown in jail or escorted back to the ranches that hired them.
Many tie hacks spent their entire year’s earnings in that week before hopping onto a company truck and returning to Dubois to start the entire process again.
After World War II the industry changed. Roads improved across Wyoming and surplus US Army trucks were available at low cost.
Mills producing ties replaced the hand-hewn ties and these new plants didn’t like either ties or raw logs that had been floated down rivers. The wood was impregnated with sand and small rocks. It wore down planing equipment and dulled saw blades.
The Warm Springs flume was abandoned in 1942. Sawmills took over the work of the tie hacks at the same time and the end of an era was in sight.
The last tie drive brought 150,000 ties, all milled at sawmills near Dubois down the river a final time in 1946.
Wyoming Tie and Timber was sold to a Wisconsin firm and went out of business in 1947.
A total of 10,000,000 ties were taken out of the national forest in that third of a century between 1914 and 1947.
Many of those ties are still in use on farms and ranches around Fremont County as fence posts.
The flumes on Warm Springs and the blockhouses that connected the boom across the creek are still in place, though each passing winter destroys a little bit of history.
A Tie Hack Monument is set 18 miles west of Dubois to honor the work of the men of the Wyoming Tie and Timber Company.