Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include early pioneer days in Bigfork; her mother dying and father remarrying; building houses; church services and traveling preachers; going to lumber camps as a young girl; social events with the lumberjacks; spring drives; summers on the farm; blueberries; Busticogan; mosquitoes and mosquito repellents; boarding school in Grand Rapids; going into town; comparing Craig to Bigfork; Lutheran Brotherhood; writing The Last Frontier; teaching; conservation; morals and morality; homesteading.

Interviewed by: John Esse.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include his early life; coming to Minnesota; early days of logging near Talmoon; Slash and burn State law; camps in the area; hunting; old time camp bosses; railroads; Craig and Effie; Chippewa National Forest; camps around the Marcell township; various camps and loggers; selling alcohol to Native Americans; Chief Moose Moo; Chief Busticogan; dairy cows; fox hides; hunting deer; his wife and family; the source of the Mississippi.

Interviewed by: John Esse.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include his early life; Rice River now known as Leander Lake; early community at Rice River; railroad coming through; parents emigrating from Sweden; working ore mines; timber and sawmill business; lumber camps; camp food; ethnicities of lumberjacks; mill work; loosing an eye working in a saw mill; getting material from other operations; timekeeper shack; buying goods in a lumberjack camp; getting to the camps.

Interviewed by: Robert Wheeler.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include early life; Elmer's father logging around Douglas County; having a Norwegian mother, Irish father; family life around logging camps; growing up helping in the camps; logging different types of wood; daily schedule; camp food; living in the bunk houses; bull cooks; lumberjack clothing; wannigans; going into town, and finding girls; driving a team of horses; ice roads and snow roads; various lumberjacks and their nicknames; washing clothes; Itasca Lumber Company; hauling loads to camps; taking care of the horses; the expansion of logging from 1900 onward; tote team hauling to various camps; selling lumber; equipment; seasonal work; getting married; sky pilots; playing poker; differences in culture between Wisconsin and Minnesota; living in Northern Minnesota.

Interviewed by: John Esse.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include early life; father coming to Grand Rapids to teach; working as a young boy; working in a saw mill; mill operations; burning slashings; horses; roads; the timber market after World War I; work schedule for lumberjacks; different cultures interacting around the lumber camps; Indians; the effect of railroads; various railroad lines and where they went; living near the railroad line; alcohol; Deer River area; railroad and mill operators.

Interviewed by: John Esse.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include Cloquet from the turn of the century on; Walter O'Meara; Carl's father moving to Cloquet to teach; growing up in Cloquet; church services; the 1918 Cloquet Fire; selling things from the wannigan; being Walter O'Meara's friend.

Interviewed by: John Esse.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include early life; family farm; World War I; thrashing grain; logging; meeting his wife; logging camps around Grand Rapids; logging sleighs and horses; lumberjack forms of entertainment; work schedule of a lumberjack; lumberjack equipment; working on Bigfork River, Deer River and various other rivers; growing up in Grand Rapids.

Interviewed by: John Esse.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include coming to Hill City with her husband; going to the factory; the mill burning down; living on a factory workers budget; gardening and canning; cows; her husband losing his job; Hill City; Indians and alcohol; losing friends.

Interviewed by: John Esse.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include being a Great Lakes sailor at 15; World War I; logging after the war; working for the forest service; starting his own logging business; over logging.

Interviewed by: John Esse.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include coming to the United States; Washkish camp; working as a craftsman; Bigfork around 1907; homesteading; the Rajala's; churches in Bigfork; hunting and fishing; ethnicities around Bigfork; family.

Interviewed by: John Esse.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include his early life; the Forest Reserve; farming; logging and different companies log marks; sorting logs at the mill; deadhead logs or logs submerged underwater; constructing ice roads; hauling logs; living in logging camps; medicine and remedies; the Frank S. Lane steamboat; various logging and milling operations around Cut Foot; types of lumber; living and working around Grand Rapids.

Interviewed by: John Esse.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include working in the Minnesota Forest Service; working and living around Deer River; controlled burns in the early days compared to now; retirement and family life.

Interviewed by: Bruce Sunbauer.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include growing up in Superior, Wisconsin; moving to Grand Rapids; interacting with the lumberjacks as a young girl; going to Central School in Grand Rapids; going to high school; teaching; marrying a logger; logging around Grand Rapids; large camps on Deer Lake; driving men up to camp; loggers coming into town; being married to a camp boss; ice roads; finding loggers to work in the camps; supplying ties and pulpwood for railroad companies; community of Little Fork; managing logging camps; unionization; owning a saw mill; relationships between Indians and white men; cooking in the logging camps; traveling to Port Arthur; Park Point amusement center.

Interviewed by: John Esse.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include traveling around Minnesota and Wisconsin as a child; going to school; homesteading; logging and lumber around Beltrami County; working odd jobs with her father at logging camps; working as a cookee; cooking in the camps; jammers, scalers, haulers, and various other jobs done in the camps; equipment; horses and oxen; looking at pictures; bed bugs.

Interviewed by: John Esse.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include the cost of food per logger; getting started in the logging business; building camps; revenue; equipment; personalities and nationalities of loggers; working in the Cloquet area; food in the camp; wannigans; lumber drives; kinds of timber; humorous stories from logging camps; building a camp; blacksmith shop; road construction; gypos; railroad construction; ice roads; swampers; scalers; the camp foreman; pests in and around camp; fishing; being the son of a Swedish immigrant; early life; a day in the life in a Swedish community; serving in the Navy in World War I; various stories from the war.

Interviewed by: Allen Nevins and Louis M. Starr.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include early life; mill work; selling hay and food to lumber camps; logging operations near Virginia Rainy Lake; clearing the land and types of trees; ice roads; driving a sled; replanting; expenses and accounting; family history; homesteading near International Falls; International Falls community; mill work; changes in culture.

Interviewed by: John Esse.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include coming to northern Minnesota; traveling in northern Minnesota around 1910; starting a homestead; flooding; families and others living in the Crane Lake area; wildlife and food; wannigans; not getting to see friends as much in the winter; driving a sleigh and riding an Indian pony; fishing.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include early life; forest fire of 1910 near Baudette; working for the Minnesota Forest Service; Working in a mill; scalers, boom haulers, and other jobs around the mill; companies involved in the mill business; working as a field buyer; moving to and living in Northome; the community of Little Fork; types of timber; land buying practices; business trips to Saskatchewan; doing business and drinking; price of lumber.

Interviewed by: John Esse.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include coming to the United States; early life; working in logging camps; the town of Bovey; working in mines and harvesting in North Dakota; working various jobs in logging camps; living in logging camps; camp food; getting hurt on the job; getting married and building a house; Idle Wild Resort.

Interviewed by: John Esse.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include early life; working as a cookee and odd jobs; whiskey; working in Michigan; a day's wages; teamsters wages; logging around the year 1900 in Bemidji and International Falls; lumber companies; lumber communities and camps; early Craigville, gambling and women; log driving; living in the wannigan; going out West to log; the Rajala's; caulking shoes; hook men, and sending logs up the river; types of lumber and uses.

Interviewed by: John Esse.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include early life in Minneapolis and Duluth; trapping and hunting; Indians near Bass Lake; working in a logging camp; Wilde Wood Lodge; homesteading and stories about various homesteaders; canning foods and freezing meat; building bridges; Grand Rapids; Cohasset; wannigan.

Interviewed by: John Esse.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include early life; moving north; fishing; school; wannigans; food; wages; unions; log drives; types of timber in the around International Falls; using sleighs and horses to haul logs; the International Lumber Company, subsidiaries and their owners; equipment for the horses; types of saws; differences between logging in 1900 and the 1930s; layout of the logging camp; stripping the bark off of a tree, stripping season; stories about old loggers; logistics of log drives; corked or caulked boots; the decision not to log around Lake of the Woods; price of lumber; getting into the log driving business; photographers coming up to take pictures of the log drives.

Interviewed by: John Esse.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include early life; watching the murder of his father; moving to North Dakota and working on a binder; getting married; working on irrigation projects for the WPA during the Great Depression; death of his wife; driving trucks, tractors, horses and thrashers.

Interviewed by: John Esse.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include his grandparents immigrating from Norway; moving up to Cass County to homestead; working as a cook's helper in the logging camps; Weyerhaeuser camps in the area; horses; daily schedule of a cook's assistant; log buildings; cooking equipment; lice; bunk beds; roads, making ice roads; river drives; drying off during the river drives; fishing; World War I; meeting his wife.

Interviewed by: John Esse.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include her early life; teaching in South Dakota; Bigfork; meeting her husband; singing at funerals; married life; homesteading.

Interviewed by: John Esse.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include his early life; homesteading; early logging in the area; sourdough Joe; splash dam; stories about injuries while logging; teamsters and their horses; blacksmithing and wages; rut cutter; Hungry Mike; various other logging characters; hospital tickets; Busticogan; burial mounds; violence between Indians and white men over disturbing burial grounds; home life; children.

Interviewed by: John Esse.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include early life in Canada; getting into logging; types of lumber in Canada; living in logging camps; working as a teamster on ice roads; coming to Minnesota; logging around Virginia; living and eating off a wannigan; looking at pictures and telling stories; camp breakfast foods.

Interviewed by: John Esse.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include her early life, and commuting 4 miles each way to school every day; getting married and farming in Deer Creek; Horse Thief Society; shucking corn, butchering animals.

Interviewed by: John Esse.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include early life in Grand Rapids; her father's harness shop; Grand Rapids around the turn of the 20th century; Indians interacting with white people; going out to Portland and Oakland; new people coming to Grand Rapids; married life.

Interviewed by: John Esse.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include types of timber around Loman; farming and logging in the area throughout his life; going to work in the logging camps at 16; driving logs to Baudette; describes a boom chain; describes a jammer; prostitution near logging camps; types of saws; types of sleighs and their equipment; working as a cook; types of food in logging camps; wannigans and types of boats used in log drives; starving homesteaders; horses and horse barns; teamsters and their horses; cows and dairy produce; types of bunk houses; working in cold weather; stories about interesting loggers; making money as a logger.

Interviewed by: John Esse.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include Louis' brothers; the timber near Loman; how his father had to walk 600 miles from Hibbing to their homestead; wolves and farming; childhood friends; the French Addition in Hibbing; married life, divorce, and TV ruining children; trying logging but deciding to farm instead; going back and forth from Canada and meeting his wife; the toughness of making a living; his children; bad roads and driving conditions; history of the town of Loman.

Interviewed by: John Esse.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include brief comments on early life and working in a Twin Cities emporium; moving to Craigville and working in a bar; when lumberjacks would come into town; prostitution; all of the money being spent when lumberjacks come to town; myths about the rough and tumble lumberjack towns; breaking the law; why the girls got into prostitution; stories about running a bar in Craigville; the slow decline of the city of Craigville; the types of lumberjacks that came into town; lumberjacks who marry the girls; getting the girls to Craigville; the town of Virginia, Minnesota; buying and selling alcohol during prohibition; her relationship with Baby Face Nelson; other small towns around Craigville.

Interviewed by: John Esse.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include their early lives and traveling around the surrounding area of Hill City; Roads, railroads, and river transportation; how the community of Hill City changed from being very tight to being much less so; Jack's father being a lumberjack; Jack's responsibility with the family farm; cows and cattle Tuberculosis; Christmas as a child; coming to Hill City because of the land boom in the 1920s; raising a family; mill work; working for the Heath brothers in Swatara; the struggles of finding full time employment and paying for food; loggers who came to the area in the 1880s and 1890s; eloping because Jack was a Catholic and Hazel a Methodist; the history of the town of Swatara.

Interviewed by: John Esse.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include early life in Bigfork; being some of the earliest homesteaders to the area; other early settlers; comparing Bigfork to Deer River or Bemidji; Native Americans in the area and Busticogan; how farming took awhile to get started, and how that affected them growing up; canning and root cellars; Itinerant preachers; different settlements around Bigfork, including those from the Red River Valley and those who came straight to Bigfork from Norway; the Rajala family; the school being the center of the community; Rahier family and their dances; camping in the 1920s and 30s; dealing with mosquitoes; Bergit Anderson's life.

Interviewed by: John Esse.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include why Otto came to the United States and specifically Minnesota, and his experience immigrating; running a saloon; the history of Deer River.

Interviewed by: John Esse.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include early life in Ely, Minnesota. Being a third generation to live in Ely and his father and grandfather living in Ely before the railroad to mine; working in the resort business and the timber business; sporting houses in the early days of Ely; nationalities of the men around Ely; Chandler Mines; transportation with sleighs, cars, and railroads; lumber camps; logging rates from the 1910s on; various families and loggers from the area; owning and running camps; horses; U.S. Canada border.

Interviewed by: John Esse.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include early life; living in Warroad; going to school; local fisheries; the International Lumber Company; logging camps; logging railroads; pulpwood; bunk beds and bed bugs; camp food; camp horses; building a camp; various jobs in a logging camp; sky pilots visiting the camps; the town of Craigville being a rough city; wannigans; the changes to logging that unionization caused; Timber Producers Association; family.

Interviewed by: John Esse.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include family; homesteading near Bigfork; his father's mining career and surviving a cave in; townships and communities nearby; farming and logging in the area; impressions of Grand Rapids; fishing; having to walk everywhere before the roads came in; logging pine near Bigfork after World War II; other early homesteaders near Bigfork; going to the sauna was the main source of entertainment early on in Bigfork; family; logging camps; loneliness of log driving; mosquitoes and dealing with them; dealing with expenses such as groceries.

Interviewed by: John Esse.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include her early life; the frame house her father build on their claim; speaking Swedish at home growing up; building roads and telephone lines; dealing the Spanish flu and small pox epidemics being so far away from doctors and medical services; attitudes towards Indians; relationships between Swedish and Norwegian families in the area; going to school; memories of Blackduck, Minnesota; the life her parents left in Sweden; moving from Dunbar Lake to Grand Rapids; working as a maid and later as a teacher; meeting and marrying Art Rajala; how the Rajala family got into the logging business; setting up logging camps in Minnesota and in other states.

Interviewed by: John Esse.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include the origin of the "Buzz" nickname; early life; moving north when his father took a job at the Cass Lake saw mill; living in the Bemidji area; lumber companies and railroad companies; getting into the Forestry Department; burning slashings; forest fires; camp clerks their role and importance in logging camps; buildings in a logging camp; camp equipment; describing various camp jobs such as bull cook, cookee, teamsters, walking boss, blacksmith; camp food; bedbugs; sky pilots; houses of prostitution in the towns around Bigfork; sexually transmitted diseases in camps and their remedies; Buzz's book Early Loggers of Minnesota; logging roads; log drives; scaling logs; bark marks on the logs from the separate logging companies.

Interviewed by: John Esse.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include his early life and coming up to northern Minnesota in 1920; working in a bank and owning a saw mill; Finnish boys being "the real loggers"; running a business; the town of Rabey, Minnesota; family life in northern Minnesota; running logging camps; "cruising" the land for timber to buy and log drives; various stories about people in the area of Rabey.

Interviewed by: John Esse.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include early life and going to school; the early days of International Falls; Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918 in Minnesota; living around timber wolves; getting married; day to day living in International Falls in the 1920s; nearby logging operations; cooking in a camp; Indians living in the area; churches in International Falls; dealing with mosquitoes with smudge pails and cheesecloth; picking blueberries and canning; suicides in the Black River area and loneliness that goes along with homesteading.

Interviewed by: John Esse.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include early life, leaving North Slovak and coming to the United States; the difficulty of learning English in Minneapolis; moving to northern Minnesota and becoming a logger and sawyer; living in logging camps; clothing, and shaving in camp; camp food; entertainment in the camps; lumberjacks taking breaks to go into various towns in northern Minnesota; ice roads, horses, and log runs; "Jew Employment Agencies" finding jobs for lumberjacks; difference in pay working manual labor jobs in Minneapolis versus working in the woods; getting married and starting a dairy farm in Itasca county; logging in North Dakota.

Interviewed by: John Esse.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include her early life and Norwegian heritage; growing up on the family homestead and going to school in Fairland, Minnesota; entertainment in small communities; churches in the area of Loman, Minnesota; families, farms and logging operations in the Fairland area; wannigans; marrying Ray Skov, his life; visiting International Falls.

Interviewed by: John Esse.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include early life growing up on a farm; working as a foreman in factories in Hill City and Little Falls; working for the WPA; hauling logs; living and eating in logging camps; working with horses in logging camps; World War I; farming; career and retiring to Leisure Hills in Grand Rapids.

Interviewed by: John Esse.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include early life, and her father's logging career in Canada and near Beefslew, Wisconsin; helping her mother while her father was away; Cloquet in the 1890s; lumberjacks coming into town; the Weyerhaeuser's’ and early logging camps in the Cloquet area; Cloquet fire of 1918; local lumberjacks; kinds of entertainment in small towns; reminisces on the changes in the world during her life.

Interviewed by: John Esse.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include early life with his father who worked as a lumberjack; early log drives; moving up to Balsam, Minnesota to homestead; his father's inn; log drives and building ice roads; living and eating in logging camps; building logging camps; various camps, and camp stories about loggers; river log drives.

Interviewed by: John Esse.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include early life, living in Wisconsin, near Iowa, North Dakota, and Canada; homesteading in northern Minnesota; cooking in a logging camp; how her husband built their home; being friends with Indians in the area; her children going to school and then to the military during World War II; organizing activities for the town, dances, 4-H, etc; farming and gardening; raising her children, grand children and great grand children.

Interviewed by: John Esse.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include early life, and coming with her family to northern Minnesota to homestead; getting married and having a family during World War I and II; her husband being gone for 5 month stretches logging; farming and gardening; dealing with mosquitoes; thoughts on living a hard life.

Interviewed by: John Esse.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include early life in Iowa and coming north to Grand Rapids, Minnesota to farm; getting married and having a family; working as a cook for the lumber camps; life in the logging camps; the improvements made to the community made after World War II; logging around Grand Rapids.

Interviewed by: John Esse.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include early life and moving to Iowa, and then to Hill City, Minnesota; early days of Hill City; Indians in the area; early logging camps in the area such as Miller Brothers Logging Camp and Weyerhaeuser camps; people of interest in the early Hill City community and the evolution of the city; the saw mill in Hill City; being a dry community and having houses of prostitutions; marriage, her parents and her own; high school dances; going to college and then teaching; World War I; life in the 1920s and 30s; the mill closing; forest fires.

Interviewed by: John Esse.

Scope and Content: Subjects discussed include early life, logging and homesteading around Green Bay, Wisconsin; moving to Minnesota, and eventually to Bigfork; logging and homesteading in Minnesota, compared to Wisconsin; water barrels and water tanks; hauling logs; hunting; first homesteaders in the Bigfork area; Indians in the Bigfork area, and Busticoggins and the Bustiecoggin Township; CC camps; logging wages and daily schedule; logging camp layout, and living in a bunkhouse; tobacco use amongst Lumberjacks; wolves interactions with loggers and camp; becoming a rancher, growing oats and barely.

Interviewed by: John Esse and William Rajala.