The cable sang as it came free of the stump, a sound like a plucked wire stretched across half a mile of swamp. Theodore Brown was twenty feet away, wading back toward solid ground with the chain still coiled over his shoulder. He had finished the hook. He had given the signal.
The pull boat operator, who could not see him from the deck, kept the engine running. The steel cable, under a load it had taken a moment to find, snapped through the air in a horizontal arc. It hit Theodore Brown across the chest and the throat. The rest of the crew found him an hour later, ten feet from where he had been standing, in two feet of water.
He was twenty-six years old. In the Joseph Rathborne Lumber Company ledger for August 1905, the entry beside his name reads, “Brown, T. Hookman. Killed by cable, swamp number four.
Wages owed, $14. ” The company sent his mother fifteen dollars and a letter, one that Joseph Rathborne wrote himself. It said that Theodore had been a good man, that he had died at his work, and that the company was sorry. His widow remarried in 1909.
Their daughter, Sarah, born in February 1904, lived to be ninety-one. She died in Baton Rouge in 1995. She never met her father. The industry that killed Theodore Brown was built on a tree the Romans called lignum vitae, the wood of life.
Bald cypress did not rot. It did not warp. It did not split when you drove a nail through it. It held paint and bolts, survived salt water and fresh water and standing rain.
A cypress shingle on a Mississippi roof could outlast the family that bought the house. A cypress water tank could sit in the sun for sixty years and not leak. By 1880, the country had used up most of its eastern hardwoods. The white pine of Maine was largely gone, the yellow pine of Georgia thinning.
New Orleans was rebuilding after the war. Chicago was rebuilding after the fire of 1871. Every Gulf city wanted lumber that would not rot in its wet, hot climate, and the federal government wanted cypress for naval shipyard pilings. The biggest stand in the country was the Atchafalaya Basin, two thousand square miles of standing water and bald cypress, some of the trees a thousand years old, some taller than a ten-story building.
A single mature cypress could yield ten thousand board feet of lumber, a really big one twenty thousand. At New Orleans wholesale prices in 1900, that was a year’s wages for a working family, and there were millions of those trees in the basin. But the cypress had a defense the loggers had never met before. It grew in water.
The ground around it was not ground. It was a soup of decayed leaves, standing water, roots, snakes, and alligators. A man could step on a cypress knee and twist his knee, step into a hole beside one and disappear up to his armpits. A mule could go in and not come out.
No wagon could reach the tree, and the tree, when cut, weighed eighty tons, sometimes a hundred. The man who first figured out how to do it at scale was named Joseph Rathborne. Born in 1845 in County Wicklow, Ireland, he came to New Orleans as a teenager just before the Civil War. He carried bales of cotton and barrels of sugar and crates of imported tools, and he learned the way wood moved on water, which timbers floated and which ones sank, which men could be trusted with a load and which ones would steal.
By 1881 he had bought his first stand of cypress, eight thousand acres in the Lake Maurepas country northwest of New Orleans, paid for in cash and notes in a partnership with an older Mississippi-born sugar merchant named Henry McCall, who put up most of the money. Rathborne ran the operation. He was not an engineer. He had never been to a school for any of it, but he could do arithmetic in his head faster than most men could do it on paper.
He was tall, thin, and quiet. The men who worked for him said he never raised his voice. He paid in cash on the last day of every month, when the practice in the rest of the industry was to pay in company script that could only be spent at the company store. If a man was killed in the swamp, Rathborne wrote the family a letter and sent ten dollars in the envelope.
The letter was always the same. He was a good man. He died at his work. We are sorry.
In 1882 he built his first pull boat. In 1885 he built three more. By 1890 the Joseph Rathborne Lumber Company was the second largest cypress operation in Louisiana, and by 1900 it was the largest, with over forty thousand acres and a payroll of nine hundred men. By 1910 the company owned its own railroad, its own sawmills at Harvey and Edgard, and a fleet of barges that ran cypress lumber from the swamps to the New Orleans docks every day of the dry season.
What Rathborne understood, and what other operators had failed to understand, was that you could not bring the road to the tree. You had to bring the water to the road, or the road to the water, or you had to invent a third thing entirely. He chose the third thing, and he spent the rest of his career inventing it. Between 1880 and 1925, there were four methods used to get an eighty-ton cypress out of a Louisiana swamp.
Every one of them was crude. Every one of them killed men. None of them looked anything like what we would call logging today. The first method was the simplest.
You waited. Cypress loggers cut the trees during the dry season, between September and February, when the swamp drained down to the lowest level it would reach all year. A crew would go in with a single bucksaw, two men to the saw, six feet between them. They would notch the cypress with axes on the side they wanted it to fall, then walk to the backside and saw.
The tree took an hour, sometimes two. When it came down, it came down with a sound the men remembered for the rest of their lives. A twelve-foot cypress hitting wet ground sounded like a building collapsing in slow motion. The water it displaced washed over the boots of the crew thirty feet away.
Birds left the canopy in every direction, and the crew did not move for a full minute afterward. Then they left the tree where it lay through February, March, and into spring. When the snow melt and the rains came in April and May, the swamp filled again. The water rose four feet, five, six, sometimes ten, and the cypress logs that had been lying on dry ground for months began to float.
Not all of them. The dense ones, the heart pine cypress from old trees, would sit on the bottom. But the younger trees and the lighter ends of the older ones would lift. A crew with poles and hooks could nudge them toward a channel.
A single man with a pipe pole, working from a flat-bottomed pirogue, could move a six-thousand-pound log half a mile in a day on the right water. That was method one. It worked for maybe a third of the wood. The rest had to come out a different way, and it was the heart pine cypress that was the problem.
The dense centers of the oldest trees sank. And those were the trees that paid. A heart pine cypress section, sawn into clear lumber and shipped to New Orleans, sold for nearly twice the price of an outer ring cut from a younger tree. The whole industry was built on getting those dense centers out of the water.
The other methods existed because the floating method failed for the part of the tree that was worth the most. Method two was the corduroy road. A corduroy road was a road built of logs laid crosswise, side by side, on top of the wet ground. You would cut smaller cypress, six to eight inches in diameter, and lay them perpendicular to the direction of travel, hundreds of them, miles of them.
A crew could build a quarter mile of corduroy road in a day if the ground was firm enough to support the men laying the logs. Often it was not. Crews would build twenty feet of road, walk back, and discover that what they had built that morning had sunk eight inches into the muck overnight. The roads required maintenance every day.
A crew of four men did nothing but follow the wagons, replacing logs that had broken or sunk or floated out of position. A corduroy road bounced. A wagon driving over one rattled the teeth of the men on it. The logs shifted, and the road came apart at every junction.
Where the corduroy crossed standing water, the logs would float and roll, and a wagon coming the other way could find the road moving under its wheels. Mules hated it. Many mules died on it. The records of the Louisiana lumber companies are full of dead mules, broken legs, drownings in deep water at the side of the road, exhaustion past recovery from pulling against shifting logs for ten hours a day.
The Lyon Cypress Lumber Company recorded the death of 346 mules between 1898 and 1908. The average working life of a swamp mule was two and a half years. A mule named Sweet Jesus, owned by the Lyon Company and worked out of the Garyville yard, lived for nine. The records do not say what made him last so long.
He was put out to a pasture in 1907 when his teeth went, and lived another four years on grass. The man who drove him for most of his working life was a foreman named Charles Vivian, who wrote about Sweet Jesus in a letter to his daughter in 1916, eight years after the mule had died. He said he still thought about him. The corduroy road, for all its bouncing and rolling and sinking, worked.
A road, once built, could move a logging team and a wagon five or six miles into a swamp that would otherwise have been impassable. The road would last one season. Then the swamp ate it. Method three was Silas Overpack’s invention.
Overpack was a wheelwright in Manistee, Michigan. In 1875, the Michigan loggers were dealing with a related problem, trying to move giant white pine logs across ground that was alternately frozen, muddy, and rutted. They had been using sleds in the winter when the ground was hard. In the summer, they were stuck.
They could not pull a six-thousand-pound log across a soft road on a wheeled cart because the cart sank. Overpack built a pair of wheels ten feet tall, just two of them, two big iron-rimmed wheels set on a single axle. He chained the log underneath the axle between the wheels. The chain lifted the front of the log off the ground, and the back end dragged.
The wheels were so tall that the log cleared all but the deepest stumps and ruts. One pair of horses could pull six tons of log on Overpack’s wheels through ground that would have stopped a normal wagon a mile back. Overpack patented the design in 1875. The first pair sold for fifty dollars.
By 1880 he was selling them by the hundred. He never advertised. The wheels sold themselves. The big wheels reached the cypress country by 1886, and for thirty years they were the most important tool in the southern logging industry.
A pair of Overpack wheels in good order, paired with a strong team of mules and a driver who knew how to balance the load, could pull a six-thousand-pound cypress section out of country no other tool could touch. The wheels lasted decades. They got rebuilt, re-rimmed, repainted. The patent ran out in 1892, and Overpack’s competitors copied the design.
By 1900 there were probably ten thousand pairs of big wheels working in the South. In some logging camps the wheels acquired names. The largest one in the Goodyear operation on Bayou Teche was called Old Annie. A photograph from 1909 shows Old Annie with a single cypress section under her axle, eight men standing beside her for scale.
The log is taller than the men. The wheels are taller than the log. A driver who worked Old Annie for fifteen years was a black freedman named Ezekiel Carter. He was sixty-two when the photograph was taken.
He had been driving teams since before the war. He could load and unload a pair of big wheels alone in twenty minutes, and he could read the camber of a corduroy road by looking at it and tell you within a foot where it was going to fail. The Goodyear company paid him a dollar fifty a day, more than any other driver on the place. He died of pneumonia in the winter of 1916, and the company paid for his funeral.
But the big wheels could only do so much. They could move a section. They could not move a whole tree. An eighty-ton cypress had to be cut into pieces first, and the cutting itself was a problem, because the heart pine cypress at the center of an old tree was so dense and so hard that a hand saw might take three hours to cross it.
And once you had it in pieces, you still had to get the pieces out of the worst of the swamp, where even Overpack’s wheels could not go. For that, you needed method four. Method four was the pull boat. A pull boat was a steam engine and a winch mounted on a flat barge anchored in a channel of open water at the edge of the cutting area.
The engine drove a drum. The drum wound a steel cable. The cable ran out into the swamp, sometimes a thousand feet, sometimes more, ending in a hook. A crew at the cutting site would hook a section of cypress, signal the boat, and the engine would haul the section through the swamp on its side, gouging a furrow in the muck, driving through standing water, sometimes underwater for whole stretches, until it reached the channel and the boat.
A typical Rathborne pull boat carried a thirty-horsepower steam engine, a six-foot drum, and twelve hundred feet of one-and-a-quarter-inch steel cable. The barge underneath was sixty feet long and twenty-eight feet wide. It drew three feet of water loaded. It could be pulled or towed into position by a smaller skiff.
Once anchored, it could pull from a fixed point until the cable’s reach was exhausted, then be repositioned. A pull boat could move thirty thousand pounds of wet cypress in a single haul. It could pull from a thousand feet, then be repositioned on another anchor, and pull from a different angle. A good pull boat operator could clear a five-acre cypress stand in three weeks, where a wagon and mule operation would have taken three months.
The boats were dangerous in their own ways. A pull boat fire in 1908 on the Lutcher and Moore operation killed four men in twelve minutes. The engine’s firebox cracked, dumped coals onto the deck planking, which had been soaked in axle grease and pine pitch for years, and the entire barge was ablaze by the time the crew could reach the water. Three of the men jumped.
Two of those drowned in waders that filled too fast. The fourth, the engineer, was found at his post with his hand still on the throttle. The pull boats also destroyed the swamp. A cable dragging an eighty-thousand-pound log gouged a trench six feet wide and four feet deep across the ground.
Multiplied across hundreds of pulls per season, across thousands of acres, the trenches added up. They redirected the water. They killed the cypress seedlings that depended on the swamp’s natural drainage. The Atchafalaya Basin still bears the scars.
Aerial photographs of the swamp taken with high-resolution lidar show the pull boat trenches running like rake marks across forty thousand acres of wetland that has not held a working logging operation in seventy years. The water still finds them. The trees do not grow back where the cables pulled. The pull boat was the most destructive tool the cypress industry ever used.
It was also the most efficient. Between 1900 and 1925, pull boats accounted for an estimated sixty percent of all commercial cypress removed from Louisiana wetlands. There were many ways to die in the cypress. Henry Gauthier, age forty-one, fell from the deck of a pull boat into deep water in 1911 while moving a coil of cable.
He could not swim. The crew dragged the channel for two days before they found his body. His widow received twenty dollars from the company. A man called only Big Jim in the Letcher Company records was killed by a falling cypress in 1899.
The tree fell the wrong way. Witnesses said he had time to look up, and that was all. He was buried at the company’s expense. Marcus Doucet, age nineteen, was bitten by a water moccasin in the spring of 1903 while wading toward a chain that had hung up on a knee.
He walked back to camp. He died eight hours later. The company doctor recorded the cause as snake bite complicated by exhaustion and dehydration. A foreman named Pierre Antoine was crushed by a rolling cypress section in 1907.
The log shifted on the bank. He was caught between it and a stump. The crew worked for forty minutes with peavies and crowbars to free him. He was alive when they got the log off.
He died on the way back to camp. There was a man whose name does not appear in any record who was found drowned in a flooded ditch on the William Cypress Company property in 1894. The cause of death was listed as unknown, likely fell at night while returning from town. He was buried in the company plot at Donner.
There is no headstone. There is a cypress board with the year carved into it, nothing else. The company hospital at Garyville recorded 312 deaths between 1898 and 1925. Forty-one were direct logging accidents.
Forty-six were drownings. Twenty-three were snake bites or animal injuries. The remaining 202 were diseases of poverty and water and exhaustion. Many simply read, “Found in cabin, dead.
” A man who survived ten years in the cypress had earned every dollar twice. A man who survived twenty was rare. There were perhaps fifteen thousand men working in the Louisiana cypress industry at its peak, most of them living in company towns with names like Lutcher, Donner, Garyville, Edgard, Ponchatoula. The houses were rented from the company.
The food was bought from the company store. The doctor, when there was a doctor, was paid by the company. The wages were paid in script that could only be spent at the company store, which charged whatever the company decided to charge. The work was seasonal.
The dry months, September through February, were the cutting and hauling season. The wet months were spent maintaining equipment, repairing pull boats, splicing cable, shoeing mules, and waiting. A man with a family could not save enough during the dry season to carry through the wet, so most families ended each year deeper in debt to the company store than they had started. In 1907, the swamp hands at the Lutcher and Moore operation went on strike.
They wanted to be paid in cash instead of script. They wanted the company store to charge market rates instead of marked-up rates. They wanted a dollar a day for ordinary labor, up from sixty cents. The strike lasted three weeks.
The company brought in replacement workers from Mississippi. The strike collapsed when the original workers ran out of food. Six of the strike leaders were blacklisted from every cypress operation in the state. Two of them ended up working as longshoremen on the New Orleans docks.
The other four are not in any subsequent record. In 1912 there was a second strike, this one at the Goodyear operation. It also failed. The conditions did not change.
The men did the work because there was no other work. The cypress paid the rent in the company store and a little extra in good months. The bad months were the rest of them. A skilled axman or a competent hookman could clear three or four hundred dollars a year above his living costs.
An unskilled hand cleared nothing. The diseases were malaria, yellow fever, dysentery, and pneumonia. The injuries were crushed feet, broken backs, snake bites, infected cuts that turned to gangrene in the heat, and every variety of wound a man could take from a misjudged saw stroke or a falling tree. The hospital at Garyville had eight beds.
A nurse named Bertha Keylou ran it for nineteen years. She kept the records that became the basis for most of what we know about cypress logging deaths today. She wrote in a clean schoolteacher’s hand. She did not editorialize.
She wrote the dates, the names, the causes, and the dispositions. She did this for nineteen years, and she never published a word about any of it. The records sat in a metal cabinet in Garyville until 1962, when the parish historical society moved them to the LSU archive. By 1925, the easily reachable cypress was nearly all cut.
The pull boats had taken everything within a thousand feet of every navigable channel. The big wheels had taken everything within reach of a corduroy road. The overhead skidders, steel cables strung between two tall trees like a giant clothesline with logs hung from them and pulled to a central point, had taken everything that was left between. What remained was the deep swamp where even the most aggressive operators could no longer turn a profit on the haul.
The companies began to shut down. The Joseph Rathborne Lumber Company sold the last of its Louisiana holdings in 1928 and moved its operations to British Honduras, where there was still mahogany. Joseph Rathborne died in 1931 in a hotel room in Belize City. He was eighty-six.
He left an estate of three million dollars, most of it in mahogany futures. He had no children. The fortune went to his sister’s family in County Wicklow. The William Cypress Company filed for receivership in 1931.
The Lyon Cypress Lumber Company continued operating on a reduced scale until 1956, by which time it was cutting third-growth pine and shipping it to Texas paper mills. The last cypress had been cut decades earlier. The towns emptied. The houses came down.
The pull boat barges were sold for scrap. The big wheels were left in barns to rot. A few are in museums today, a pair at the Louisiana State Museum in Baton Rouge, another restored to working condition at the Manistee County Historical Museum in Michigan. The cypress themselves did not come back.
The drained swamps, drained by the pull boat trenches and the corduroy ditches, did not refill in their old patterns. The seedlings could not get a foothold in the changed water. What had taken a thousand years to grow was cut in fifty, and the conditions that had grown it were destroyed in the process. There are still cypress in Louisiana, second-growth and third-growth stands in places where the operators ran out of money before they got the last of the trees.
There are a handful of old-growth specimens in protected reserves, mostly in the Atchafalaya Basin. The largest of them was over a thousand years old. It is also missing. A photograph from a US Forest Service survey in 1991 shows the tree intact, sixteen feet across at the base.
A return survey in 2003 found the trunk on the ground, sawn cleanly at three feet from the soil. No one was ever charged. The water is still there. It still runs in the grooves the cables cut.
And if you go far enough into the basin, you can stand on the edge of one of those grooves and see how a man with a steel rope, eighty years dead, is still telling the swamp where to drain.
