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I first “met” author and WCCO radio personality Darragh Aldrich when friend Tom Haeg gave me his father Larry’s book, Lady in Law: A Biography of Mabeth Hurd Paige. (Find out more about Paige, a feminist, reformer, and state legislator until 1945, at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mabeth_Hurd_Paige.)
I write about Darragh Aldrich because she and her husband Chilsen Darragh Aldrich had a cabin on the North Shore and because of her novel, Peter Good for Nothing. Chilson was an architect and leader of the back to the land movement in the early 20th century. His book, The Real Log Cabin, 1928, 1994, is a DIY to help people build their own log cabins. It remains available at Amazon and altlib.org/item/the-real-log-cabin/.
Born Clara Chapline Thomas Aldrich, 1884-1867, Darragh adopted her husband’s middle name for her pen and public name. She became a radio commentator and head of Women’s Activities for WCCO radio in Minneapolis from 1941-56. Why Peter Good for Nothing?
The novel is a romance wrapped in lumber camp troubles and is part of McMillan’s Modern Reader Series. Pierre Bon-a-rien is the son that Peter Harrington, a rich lumberman in Port Greysolon, Minnesota, didn’t know he had. Pierre speaks a Frenchified English that may reflect Darragh’s good ear for voices and appears in Port Greysolon to deliver his dead mother’s message to Harrington, “I forgive you.”
Love triangles, plots, and the lumber business intersect to provide a pulsing story. Along the way we learn much about Northern Minnesota lumber camp life. This camp unusually has two women in it, the wife of the Camp Boss and Peggy, the daughter of Harrington’s business partner, Jim Truman. The attitudes of the lumbermen and their working conditions call out to our nature natures. The language, both broken French and somewhat dated English, keeps us awake and appreciative. Here are a few passages that caught my eye.
“Margaret Truman stood still and stretched out her arms to the sudden transcendence of beauty the rosy light provided. Great, shaggy birches like columns of a lofty cathedral nave met in a gold-fretted roof above her head. Scattered with gold, too, was the rough brown earth beneath her feet. There was a dark splash of white pine atop a hill silhouetted against the distant glory. Prim little balsams marched gravely up the slope hand in hand—luring her onward. Sturdier spruce formed walls of green about her. Flaming scarlet of brush maple called to her like the blowing of bugles.”
In the tradition of the Voyageurs, Pierre says that bored and serious people” … is because dey do not sing. It is good to sing always. When black t’ings come, sing. Long time I drive much horse in France. I am Joyeux. I sing. De shells dey fall a out me. Bang! Smash! I sing yet more.”
“[Pierre} often discovered her chatting with Sandy and drawing out from the old man tales of the ‘old days’ in the camps. … Of the vast Spring drives that were as unlike the paltry booming of today as Paul Bunyan was unlike the modern jack. For Sandy had been a riverman. He loved riding the logs…. Many a time, he told her, he would mount a log but little more than carried his weight. … Would start it revolving and cuff it with his feet until it was all awhirl. Then, amid the cheers of the onlookers he would stop it almost instantly, holding it stationary. …
But best of all was riding a log through the sluiceway….”
Peggy’s aunt tells her of the Port Greysolon social calendar. “‘Oh, I’ll be present,’ yawned Peggy, glancing at her wristwatch. … ‘My only regret is that I have only one life to give to my country club.’”
I read The Real Log Cabin with the aid of our local library. The Arrowhead Library System found Peter Good for Nothing for me in the Normandale Community College Library. I hope our local library gets a copy because of the author’s local ties and the lumber camp tales. In the meantime, you can read it through Goodreads and Amazon Kindle.
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Steve Aldrich is a retired Hennepin County lawyer, mediator, and Judge, serving from 1997-2010. He and his wife moved here in 2016. He likes to remember that he was a Minnesota Super Lawyer before being elected to the bench. Steve really enjoys doing weddings, He writes this column to learn about his new home area—and to indulge our curiosities and stir our thinking.
Copyright Stephen C. Aldrich and News Herald, 2023
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