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Understandable for Reader readers to wonder, beyond casual curiosity, why they (or I) would bother about an obscure and to this day remote little piece of our North Country. I did not understand what I was seeing, either, when first encountering the Cascades.

I returned there for years both the feel the spectacle and try to get a better glimpse of what went on in the century-past phase when loggers used water to transport timber.   It seems so simple. There was a dam here, flume there to move logs. So what?

For the instances you may be aware of there are numerous others, each a separate example based on local characteristics. How far did logs have to go? Was there a mill nearby? Did the logging company put in a rail line? Was a dam built, and what kind? Saying “logs were largely moved by water” is as helpfully accurate as saying “milk comes in bottles.” The other concern (as I returned many times to the Cascades) came in trying to grasp what was no longer present and somewhat understand the larger process. How many buildings once stood on the approximate acre (or more) of opened land? Were there bunkhouses, horse shelters or workshops?

Built of wood, they could have burned leaving ash and a scatter of nails or (as likely) some lumber could have been salvaged or wasted by casual visitors deciding “let’s throw this in the river” or “over the falls.”

It was obvious much took place at the Cascades, but what was missing? How many had worked here, in what season and for how long? I didn’t know what I was missing.  

The obvious attention getter (dam and falls) proved distracting. And why not? The work involved was monumentally impressive. More than a generation earlier people using horse-horsepower and hand tools dammed a river with a structure standing to that day. Not only that, but they’d shaped the corner at the bottom of the falls with iron plating and smoothed over several rapids (that work visible in low water periods).

Quite honestly, I never went into the gorge to measure the iron, but even then there was quite a lot. Not only had ordinary laborers swung those sheets down, but they’d anchored them to withstand the forces of tons of water, ice and saw logs. I could page through dad’s Handbook of Rigging to find gin poles and block systems where each fall added (at the expense of lots more rope) a given amount of burden. Back near the turn of the century when this work was going on there were (as I realized much-much later) a workforce with members familiar with rigging. One year as a lad on a sail ship taught a person “the ropes” and how they were used. But yes, in any case I doted on the main attraction a long time before I saw some of the missing pieces.  

The rest of the Cascades story was right there, but not impressively attention getting as roaring water and a broad wooden dam spanning a river on an international boundary. Truth is, I saw the answer but dismissed it as never completed. That’s certainly how it looked. Undone. That’s because so much of what had been there was no more. To defeat the 90 and the log gabbing hairpin a bypass was constructed.

Laboriously using hammer and star drill followed by explosives a crew blasted through stubborn rock a channel tall as a person. Its use meant there had to be more height or head of water. Decades of spring flood and ice removed the increased dam height. With that gone I was looking without knowing its purpose at what amounted to the root of a tooth. I’ll cover, in pitiful, puny fashion, more of the dam and water story as the Cascades story expands out, but what follows is how the picture began to form.   In spring’s high-water flood enough water (four feet, but maybe more) of Pigeon River water was held back to form a pool exiting through the rock-cut ditch to carry saw logs past the obstruction of the falls. This same practice was done other places on the river, but nowhere as serious and spectacular as the Cascades.

My early guess of the rock-cut ditch not being used was wrong. I should have known because, hold the pit of your stomach, the ditch ended with a drop that, once again, was paved with iron hanging out and over in a perilous drip to guide the logs down to fall into a relatively straight shot away. Part (a big chunk, really) of my blunder about the ditch was the scariness of the wood and iron projection where it ended in freefall. Yikes, weren’t getting me near that death trip. But also, and somewhat realistically, I felt the drop would have been damaging to the timber and prone to piling up. But who knows? I never got to the bottom of that one to find out for myself.

My errors and failures, again, somewhat understandable given that in some seasons the river was a roar of rushing water and foam obscuring almost all. Then in drier season I could hop dry-foot across the dam, no trouble, to the Canadian side.  

Much as I’d like to know more of the Cascades story, where to go, where to look? Just how much of a Canadian/US enterprise was this? Were the company offices in Port Arthur, Duluth or maybe Bayfield? If records existed in any of those places would they include names and information on workers who did the dizzying accomplishment of damming rivers and transforming rapids?

I’ll guarantee one thing. No company bigwig had much clue about the skills and dangers involved in moving large volumes of timber from inland to Lake Superior. Some will fault me for bringing light to the Cascades, but I think it’s a story worth considering for what it tells of largely forgotten times. Now begun, I’ll continue going east and west for whatever clues and lore are out there. Keep following.