Badger Drive, The

DESCRIPTION: A song of praise to logdrivers. It mentions the hardships of the job. It praises manager Bill Dorothy, and points out that drivers supply the pulpwood for paper. The drive on Badger is described. The singer hopes that the company will continue to succeed
AUTHOR: Words: John V. Devine
EARLIEST DATE: 1927 (Doyle-OldTimeSongsAndPoetryOfNewfoundland, 2nd edition); Wikipedia clams a composition date of 1912
KEYWORDS: logger river work
FOUND IN: Canada(Newf)
REFERENCES (6 citations):
Fowke/Johnston-FolkSongsOfCanada, pp. 84-86, "The Badger Drive" (1 text, 1 tune)
Greenleaf/Mansfield-BalladsAndSeaSongsOfNewfoundland 160, "The Badger Drive" (1 text, 1 tune)
Doyle-OldTimeSongsAndPoetryOfNewfoundland, "The Badger Drive" (1 text, 1 tune): p. 29 in the 2nd edition; p. 13 in the 3rd; p. 18 in the 4th; p. 39 in the 5th
Blondahl-NewfoundlandersSing, pp. 49-50, "The Badger Drive" (1 text, 1 tune)
Bennett/Downey-JeromeJustOneMoreSong 2, pp. 61-66, "The Badger Drive" (1 text)
Mills-FavoriteSongsOfNewfoundland, pp. 24-26, "The Badger Drive" (1 text, 1 tune)
ST FJ084 (Partial)
Roud #4542
RECORDINGS:
Omar Blondahl, "The Badger Drive" (on NFOBlondahl01)
Jerome Downey, "The Badger Drive" (on NFJDowney01)
Maudie Sullivan, "The Badger Drive" (on MUNFLA/Leach)
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "The Drive" (theme)
NOTES [633 words]: Also see a text and hear an excerpt of "The Badger Drive" among Newfoundland songs as sung by Maude Sullivan on the "MacEdward Leach and the Songs of Atlantic Canada" site at http://www.mun.ca/folklore/leach/songs/NFLD1/11A-06.htm, accessed February 17, 2015. - BS
Although this is a pretty generic song in praise of loggers, it seems to have become widely known in the early 1930s, which perhaps gives it a political backdrop in that period. Cadigan, pp. 209-210, tells us that the depression was very hard on the Newfoundland lumber industry; demand for pulp naturally fell drastically, and Newfoundland's two biggest wood products company, AND and IPP, cut back hard on spending -- and rejected government demands for better treatment of workers. "In 1933, for example, the IPP Company hired loggers directly at 22 cents per hour [instead of employing subcontractors] and later asked the government to waive the legal minimum wage of 35 cents per hour. A two-week strike against the IPP action resulted in the government suspending the minimum wage law" (Cadigan, p. 210). So this song might have been intended to promote knowledge of the problem.
AND is the Anglo-Newfoundland Development Company, one of the two major logging companies in Newfoundland. Other songs that mention AND are "Twin Lakes" and "The Business of Makin' the Paper."
According to O'Flaherty, p. 230, the government of Robert Bond set up a death under which "[Alfred] Harmsworth's Anglo-Newfoundland Development Co. leased timber, water, and mineral rights for ninety-nine years, following which the lease was renewable, on 2,300 square miles of land in the watershed of the Exploits River. They acquires much of the land from the Reids [owners of the Newfoundland Railroad] and other holders; 834 square miles were from the Crown. They were to pay an annual rent of $2 per square mile with a royalty of 5% of net profits on minerals. [A. B.] Morine calculated, from figures provided by Bond, that the rent would amount to about $3,800 a year." This was one of several deals Bond worked out in the early 1900s (O'Flaherty, p. 231); unlike many of the others, it cost the Dominion very little and, although it didn't bring in much revenue, it provided a lot of jobs for many years.
AND, founded in 1905, built a paper mill at Grand Falls in that year, with a branch rail line to support it; a rail opened to the coast in 1909 (Lingard, p. 7). The mill was down the Exploits River from Badger, so this song describes the logging situation after 1905.
Badger itself, in fact, was a creation of the railroad, "first settled in the 1890s by John Paul, a Micmac trapper, and a few railroad workers who came with the construction of the railway in 1894. Two sawmills employed 200 men from this area in 1901, and the population of the community was then 23. The A.N.D. Company bought out the H.J. Crowe Company in 1909, and soon Badger became the headquarters of a large part of the paper company's wood operation" (Lingard, p. 18).
By 1914, AND was the largest employer in Newfoundland other than the Newfoundland Railway (Lingard, p. 17), although there were of course many more people involved in fishing. Logging in the area was still going strong in 1977 when they closed down the rail line (Lingard, p. 12).
The "Mr. Cole" of the song is, I believe, Hugh Henry Wilding Cole (1883-1960). Born in Farnham, England, he came to Newfoundland in 1903, and became a surveyor for AND in 1905, and in 1912 he "became woods superintendent for the AND Co, with headquarters at Badger." He was a major force in the Newfoundland lumber industry until his retirement 35 years later (DictNewfLabrador, p. 63).
According to Mills-FavoriteSongsOfNewfoundland, author John V. Devine was an uncle of Gerald F. Doyle, of the Doyle songsters. - RBW
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File: FJ084

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