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Patrick Lumber
Company
Patrick Sawmill
Crescent Valley
Booming logs was a
risky occupation, not for the faint of heart. The Patrick family,
owners of the Patrick Lumber Company in Crescent Valley, learned
this firsthand.
Their lumber company
was one of the largest in the Interior, with a hundred men working
at the mill and another hundred in the woods. The winter of
1908-1909 had been a busy one. Lumberjacks up the valley had
skidded thousands of logs out of the woods down to the Slocan
River. By late spring of 1909, the bumper crop of logs had been
floated downriver to Crescent Valley and assembled into booms in a
holding pond adjacent to the mill.
Early in the morning
of June 8, ominous noises were heard and the men rushed out to see
the dam below the holding pond breaking up, and the whole boom
starting to move. The pilings the boom had been lashed to were
ripped out and tossed aside, and nine million board feet of logs
began sliding downriver, moving majestically, relentlessly. Wire
cables holding the boom together snapped like twine, and the
fast-moving Slocan became a chaos of floating logs. In no time the
logs reached the Kootenay at Slocan Pool, then thundered down to
the Columbia at Brilliant, and by the 9th they had entered the
State of Washington. Joe Patrick and his sons Frank and Lester
acted immediately, travelling to Washington to alert authorities
and attempt to salvage the timber, which was valued at $75,000, a
king’s ransom in 1909.
The
next few weeks saw heated wrangling, legal actions and even
fistfights as Patrick tried to assert his ownership of the lost
logs, and individual Americans took the frontier approach, claiming
the logs as if they were spoils of war. It was an ugly chapter in
Canada/US relations, ending with the Patricks returning home
empty-handed.
The
Patricks of Crescent Valley went on to become the Royal Family of
Canadian hockey. Frank and Lester grew up in Quebec, where they
learned their hockey and played in various leagues. After moving to
Nelson both boys played on the local team. The family sold the
sawmill shortly after the log debacle, and Frank and Lester used
their share to establish the first artificial ice surfaces in
Vancouver and Victoria. Frank played in Vancouver, managed the
Pacific Coast League, and was responsible for several game
innovations, including the blue line. Brother Lester played in
Victoria and went on to become coach and GM of the New York
Rangers. Lester’s son Lynn Patrick played for the Rangers and
coached the Boston Bruins; grandson Craig Patrick played briefly in
the NHL before going on to become GM of the New York
Rangers.
Source:
http://www.for.gov.bc.ca/rsi/proudtraditionpart2.pdf |