Barkskins (69 page)

“I cannot tell you,” she said for the fourth time when he asked for a list of Amsterdam relatives and all ancestors, their current addresses and business interests. “I suppose they all may be dead. It is for you to discover.” She was tired of him.

“Yes, but names will lead me to
today's
generations. That is how we do it. I must have a place to start,” he said, jutting his chin out. She pointed at the wad of copied family papers in his hands. In the end Tetrazinni read aloud for two hours, culling dozens of names from Vogel's Dutch correspondence. A month later he sailed with his list and Lavinia's letter of introduction to whom it might concern for information on any living connection to Charles Duquet and Cornelia Roos.

Tetrazinni made an inner note to particularly examine the history of Charles Duquet's son Outger, who had been something of a learned authority on American Indians. Scholar or no, he likely had cohabited with someone in Leiden and his other haunts. And had he not lived in America for some years? Where that might have been he had no idea. Although in the papers Lavinia had supplied there was frequent mention of a “large pine table” that Duquet possessed and Duke & Sons claimed, there was no mention of the location of either table or man. Tetrazinni assumed both had once been somewhere in Boston, but the old city directories had no Outger Duquet listed. As he read again through the meager family history on three faded pages held together with a tailor's pin and signed Bernard Duke, two short sentences on the ancestor's voyages to China caught Tetrazinni's attention. “Well, well,” he said to himself, “if no one turns up in Amsterdam there may be Duquets in Peking, though perhaps rather difficult to sort out from Yees and Yongs.” He imagined the risible possibility of telling Miss Duke that her only living relative and heir was a Chinese noodle seller.

•  •  •

For the Dukes and the Breitsprechers and lesser timbermen business was good. Insatiable markets along the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers squalling for lumber unmade Albany and Buffalo. A tide of agricultural-minded immigrants—sinewy men, their swollen wives and bruised children—streamed onto the prairies, all needing houses and barns, silos and stables, needing furniture and shingles, lathes and pickets, rails and posts. New railroads to and from the prairies delivered them lumber and brought beef cattle and hogs back to Chicago, where the war and fulfillment of the Indian treaties guaranteeing annual livestock distributions meant acres of stockyards. There was a fierce need for planks and poles, fencing and pens. And if it all burned down every two or three years, there were more trees in the woods—endless trees.

•  •  •

During the war with the south the Duke Board of Directors included Lawyer Flense; Accountant Mr. Pye; David Neale, owner of the newspaper
Chicago Progress;
Annag Duncan, the office manager; Noah Ludlum, who oversaw the logging sites and sawmills; another Maine man, Glafford Jones, responsible for log and lumber transport; two wealthy logging kings, Theodore Jinks and Axel Cowes, both large shareholders in Duke Logging. Jinks and Cowes built mansions on properties adjoining Lavinia's grounds. The three shared a park—thirty acres of woodland area on the lakeside of their abutting properties. It was Lavinia's habit to walk on the silent paths in early evening, when she sometimes met Axel Cowes and his spaniels.

“Evening, Lavinia,” Cowes would say, half-bowing. “A fine day.”

“Yes, very fine, Axel.”

Cowes was in his sixties, white-haired and with a soft rosy face. It was he who had suggested the park. He collected paintings and had an artistic bent. He saw beauty in the forest as well as wealth, something Lavinia found as inexplicable as her pleasure walking the shadowed paths. As for art, he liked pictures that showed stags drinking from forest pools, lone Indians paddling canoes across mirrored lakes. Lavinia favored large canvases showing the triumph of the hunt and engravings with panoramic city views and lines of statistics enclosed in ornate scrolls. Cowes, despite his years and differing ways, had suggested marriage to Lavinia as some men did. They wanted her money and holdings, she knew this. Theodore Jinks, who was a rougher type and slightly tainted with gossip of a gambling habit, had done the same. Yet she did not hold the proposals against them. She liked both men, both were dependable Board members with solid knowledge of the logging business. When Cowes suggested the park it was easy to agree, though she noticed Jinks's expression when Cowes talked of “sequestering” the valuable pines.

“Those pines would bring a good dollar,” Jinks said.

“Oh yes, but it is good to leave a few to remind us of our early days of fortune. No one wishes to live next to a stump field.” Cowes had an elevated way of saying such things that made Jinks shuffle his feet and curse under his breath. “Except agriculturists,” he said lamely. It was no use; Lavinia and Cowes only tolerated him. He found ease in the knowledge that one day those pines would come down as all pines must.

Pye, Flense and Lavinia made up the inner circle of Duke Logging and Lumber. None of them had any small talk; conversation was always business. The arrival of the telegraph some years earlier had been like a kettle of water dashed into a cauldron of boiling oil for the business world and the railroads. Giveaway Congress guaranteed the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads sixteen thousand dollars for every mile of track laid on level ground, and double that through mountainous terrain and included a forty-mile-wide corridor across the entire continent. Now
there
was real money, great
great
fortunes of which the Dukes could not even dream. But there were consolations. The center of the country exploded in hysterical expansion. Duke's lumber shipments quadrupled as the Union Army hammered up forts and prison camps. Chicago businessmen joyously mulcted the government with shoddy war goods from canned beef to forage caps at high prices, and not Lavinia, Cowes nor Jinks scrupled to hold back warped and knotty lumber billed at the price of clear.

“Why pay more when you can get it for less?” said Flense, who cared little for archaic idealism and who despised James Duke's timberland purchases when he could have got the same land for nothing. “The government can't prove land claims weren't made in good faith.” They used the General Land Office's preemption acts, which allowed settlers to take up and then purchase land at the giveaway price of $1.25 for a quarter section—180 acres. Duke sent out its landlookers, chose the best woods tracts and used dummy men who went through the motions of settling and then handed over the deeds to Flense. An army of preemption brokers greased the nefarious skids. Nor was it any great feat to bribe the federal land agents. The Homestead Acts of the 1860s were sweet gifts to Duke, which hired perjurous “settlers,” who camped on the land for a few days, nailed up a feeble shack of a few boards—the “house”—shoved two empty whiskey bottles between the boards for windows, ground a heel in the dirt to indicate a well and claimed a homestead. Others toted around a dollhouse with windows, roof and floors, put it on the site and at the Land Office declared a house “fourteen by sixteen,” not mentioning that the measurements were in inches rather than feet. Still others had the smallest allowable “house” on skids that was hauled around to the various claims and designated a livable shanty. Duke bought up huge blocks of land in these ways, rushed in, cut the timber and then gave up the homestead rights. No one objected; they were smart American businessmen going ahead, doing what businessmen did. No one got rich by walking seven miles to return a penny. And there were hundreds of small loggers anxious to sell out to Duke after a few hard lessons—being shot at by unknown persons, suffering frequent sawmill fires and large-scale log stealage that made the game not worth the candle.

None of these affairs were discussed at Board meetings—it was business. Tappan's Mercantile report had called James Duke “A-one. Wealthy family, sound business practices. Good as gold.” Duke's Board was more concerned with such nagging subjects as continuing to outfit all their mills with steam-powered circular saws and what to do with encroaching piles of sawdust. Noah Ludlum, smooth-shaven except for a pointy little goatee, said, “Them big circle saws cut damn fast—beg pardon—but they don't stay firm. There is a wobble. You can't hardly see it but that jeezly wobble costs the comp'ny money as it makes a big wide kerf. I know for a fact every thousand board feet cut we lose more than three hundred in sawdust. Thing is, the steel in them saws is not good. So much steel goes into rails and guns we can't git good saws. And you got sawdust piles higher than Katahdin. Course we burn it to power the boilers but—”

Lavinia interrupted. “Lose no sleep over the sawdust, Mr. Ludlum. There is nothing we can do about it at the moment except burn it or throw it in the rivers. The trees of Michigan are so plentiful we need not be frugal.”

“Wal,” said Mr. Ludlum, who was determined to have the last word, “we have to leave the biggest trees out in the woods. Them saws can't cut nothin a hair more than half their diameter. Bigger saws needed, but the bigger they are the more they wobble.”

Lavinia looked down at her papers, glanced at Annag Duncan, who had compiled the figures, and said, “All the same, our Avery Mill alone will cut three million board feet this year, well ahead of last year. We still have a few old water-powered mills with up-and-down saws and the sooner we get circular saws and steam engines into them the better. That is our goal right now, whatever the wobble. And I would suggest we look at the new double circular saws that can accommodate larger logs.”

“Good work, Annag,” said Lawyer Flense in his stage whisper voice, smiling at the office manager.

There was no wobble in the government's need for lumber and Duke Logging profited through the rich years of the war. Mr. Pye seemed almost sad when it ended in the spring, followed by Lincoln's assassination. But the south needed to rebuild, and the cry for lumber had never been louder.

“There are rich forests in the south,” said Theodore Jinks, “closer to the need. I suggest we buy up some southern woodland and get our cutting crews to work. If the Board agrees, I can make a reconnaissance.” The idea was good and Jinks and Mr. Ludlum, their clothes neatly packed in carpetbags, left a week later to assess the southern trees.

Fires of invention blazed through the country; new ideas and opportunities for innovation crammed the mail basket that Annag Duncan lugged in every morning. There were so many of them and it took so long to understand the complex explanations and diagrams that Mr. Pye suggested that Duke hire an educated man to assess the proposals and even that the Board arrange a meeting of these inventors. At such a meeting men who had worked out logging industry improvements or new machines might show scale models or drawings and diagrams. The Board would talk with the inventors.

“This could be promising,” said Lavinia. “If something of value emerges Duke Logging can offer a fair price for the rights and then patent it. Let us set a date for the summer, when travel is less onerous. The company will put the inventors up, gratis, in the Hotel Great Lakes—a limit of twenty men. I believe it has a ballroom that may be ideal for exhibits. We will certainly find it interesting.”

•  •  •

The next spring in Detroit, more than 250 miles east, Dieter Breitsprecher scissored out the half-page ad in the
Chicago Progress
calling for inventors to apply for Duke Logging's summer exhibit. The chance to mix with a collection of men whose brains buzzed with mechanics and machines was irresistible. Inventors did not write to Breitsprechers. He had a certain respect for Lavinia and remembered how quickly in the long-ago years she had learned the basics of scaling; he doubted she had ever used the knowledge—why should she?—she had competent employees, several lured away from the Breitsprechers. He wrote, asking if he might attend the exhibit, not as an inventor, not as a competitor, but as an interested friend. He offered to help defray the expenses of the gathering. He did not think she would refuse him; indeed, she wrote back cordially, refused his monetary offer and asked him to dine with her the Friday evening before the meeting.

This was their chance, she thought, to enfold Breitsprecher into Duke Logging. After their longest and most passionate meeting Duke's Board had suggested making Breitsprecher a buyout offer. The Breitsprecher logging concern was worth ten of the little independent cutters who cleared fifty acres and retired. But Lavinia sensed it might be more diplomatic to offer a partnership. Despite their peculiar ideas on clear-cutting and replanting stumpland, Breitsprechers had the reputation of a highly reputable business that dealt fairly with loggers and dealers. And while Armenius was alive they had been successful. They also had the reputation of being honest, and while too much honesty could hold a company back, there were many people who still believed it a virtue. A partnership would add luster to Duke Logging, considered ruthless and devious by other timbermen. Lavinia was still grateful to Dieter for his help in teaching her how to read and apply the Scribner and Doyle scale rules to raw logs; and she was curious to know the details of Armenius's rumor-tainted death two years past. But would Dieter agree? He had always seemed rather aloof. So his request to attend the inventors' gathering seemed fortunate.

•  •  •

Two Civil War veterans, Parker Brace and Hudson Van Dipp, both from Cherokee County, Georgia, both house carpenters who had been friends before secession, fought for the south until they were captured at Shiloh and stuffed into Chicago's notorious Camp Douglas. They survived in the squalid pen where there was no medical treatment, no hygienic tubs or basins, where scurvied prisoners sat in apathy. Brace and Van Dipp did their best to survive by constructing a complicated trap from a piece of wire and a crushed tin cup and lived on rats. To stay sane they made a carpenter's game for themselves: through talk and scratched diagrams in the dirt they built an imaginary house from the foundation to the weather vane.