Timber
It's been my good fortune to have visited, more than once, several of the North American locations where Highland emigrants settled in large numbers: the Cape Fear River country of North Carolina; Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia; Glengarry County, Ontario. The last of these localities was to produce, in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, some of North America's most renowned lumberjacks. These men worked, first of all, in the Ottawa Valley; and later they would ply their highly skilled trade in Michigan, Wisconsin, Oregon, British Columbia and everywhere else where there were great forests to be felled.

Glengarry County's lumberjacks were exploited, of course, exploited ruthlessly on occasion. But they took a tremendous pride in their achievements all the same: in their ability to bring down the biggest of big trees; in working through the snows and sub-zero temperatures of winter; in taking time off only on Sundays and - for they were Highlanders after all - on New Year's Day. They levered, sledged and hauled their timber to the nearest riverbank and, with the spring break-up of the river ice, they floated that same timber many miles downstream. 

They risked their lives to clear the logjams which invariably developed at each river rapid. And they went on, finally, to guide their rafts of prime Canadian lumber towards tidal waters and the waiting cargo ships which would carry this same lumber, across the Atlantic, to Britain.

Although I've never seen this point made in print in Canada, it seems certain to me that Glengarry's lumberjacks - some of whom were of Badenoch and Strathspey extraction - simply applied, in North American circumstances, techniques that had originally been developed in the Highlands. All along the valley of the Spey, starting in the seventeenth century and maybe even earlier, people had been exploiting the huge timber resource represented by the area's forests of Scots Pine. And, as would happen later in North America, the resulting logs were frequently got to sawmills by the simple expedient of floating them down streams and rivers.

The timber industry gets due prominence at the Highland Folk Museum. The museum's Kingussie collection includes numerous objects associated with the business of felling trees and moving the resulting logs - such as axes, cross-cut saws and even the pike-like, metal-tipped poles (known as 'dogs') which were used to clear river logjams.

Much the most spectacular of the museum's timber-related exhibits, however, is the working sawmill which can be visited on the Highland Folk Museum's Newtonmore site. Powered by waterwheel which drives a circular saw, this mill was originally in operation on Ardverikie Estate beside Loch Laggan. Although known to have been installed there in the 1860s, the mill machinery may even then have been second-hand. If so, the mill's more than 150 years old. But it's easily survived its move from Ardverikie to Newtonmore - where it's been carefully rebuilt.

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