In the late nineteenth century, visitors to Maine observed something strange: French-Canadian lumberjacks who, at the slightest stimulus, seemed to jump, strike out with their limbs, or mimic languages they could not speak. Ross Bullen introduces us to these so-called “Jumping Frenchmen” and to their greatest investigator, George M. Beard, who saw a link in their behavior between religious frenzy and neurasthenia.
Scroll through the whole page to download all images before printing. Moosehead Lake in Northwest Maine is lumberjack country. The largest body of water in the state, its contoured shoreline ostensibly resembles the head of an antlered moose.
In his posthumous book _The Maine Woods_ (1864), Henry David Thoreau describes Moosehead as “a suitably wild-looking sheet of water, sprinkled with small, low islands, which were covered with shaggy spruce and other wild wood.”1 Moosehead Lake is also the source of the Kennebec River, once a major waterway for the logging industry, where trees from the North Maine Woods were felled by lumberjacks and floated downriver to paper mills and sawmills. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many of the lumberjacks near Moosehead Lake were French Canadians from the nearby provinces of Quebec and New Brunswick. Most of them lived in rural areas, but they were not an uncommon sight in the small towns and resorts that dotted the lakeshore.
The French-Canadian lumberjacks were close-knit, private, mysterious, and, according to one contemporary journalist, “reported to have more than the conventional number of both . . . wives and children.”2 A later writer added that some families would even “run out of names and use numbers instead (I recall a Vingt-Six Gagnon).”3 In addition to its role in the lumber industry, Moosehead was a popular vacation destination for Mainers, other New Englanders, and even the occasional New Yorker, seeking hunting, fishing, and relaxation by the water. Some of these travelers, though, were on the hunt for lumberjacks. Postcard of logs being sluiced on Moosehead Lake, Maine, ca. 1915 — Source.
One such visitor was the anonymous author of an article titled “Men with Queer Nerves”, which was published in the _New York Sun_ on July 7, 1878. The author’s story begins by recounting a February sleigh ride from Shirley, Maine, to nearby Greenville on the southern end of Moosehead Lake. He is in town on business and hosted by Mr.
Long, “an old schoolmate from New York, now a sawmill owner.” Long and the author are being trailed by two of Long’s French-Canadian employees riding in a “rude pung”. When the author steps out of his sleigh to warm his feet by walking around, he inadvertently knocks Mr. Long off his seat and into a snow pile.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
