Androscoggin Archives - New England Historical Society

David Robbins was nobody’s idea of a good man. But he was a legend of the New Hampshire woods, made infamous by his own black-hearted deeds.

Robbins was a murderer, and 175 years ago he struck fear into the hearts of the people of Northern New Hampshire and Maine – few as they were.

In the fall of 1826, David Robbins, Abner Hinds of Milan and Hezekiah Cloutman ventured down along the Androscoggin River, which winds through Northern New Hampshire and Maine. They were trapping sable.

These were relatively early days for settlement in Coos County, N.H. Hinds was described as one of the wealthiest settlers in the area, well-liked and successful. Cloutman hailed from Rochester, N.H. He lived on his own in the North Country because his wife declined to join him. She preferred the comforts of civilization.

David Robbins

David Robbins, on the other hand, came from an established, if somewhat frightening, family. Originally from Beverly, Mass., one member of the family was long considered insane, and his neighbors up north would sometimes have to stay up nights watching for him out of fear that he would light fire to their property.

Robbins was a skilled hunter and trapper, but also the subject of unsavory rumors. One story holds that he had killed a child and used him as bait.

The three men proceeded along the Androscoggin River, deep into the north woods. There they laid out a line of traps 20 miles long and proceeded to have a successful summer.

As the first snow flew, Hezekiah Cloutman and Abner Hinds made one last trip to check their traps, leaving Robbins behind at their base camp to guard over the furs. When they returned, they would all proceed 60 miles back to civilization in Lancaster, N.H. But things didn’t go according to plan.

Dark Plans

When Cloutman and Hinds returned to the camp, they found it completely burned. Robbins had loaded up the furs and left them with no supplies in the freezing late autumn. Cloutman and Hinds, however, were tough characters in their own right and they didn’t perish in the woods. When they got back down to Lancaster, they sued Robbins and prevailed. Some accounts say Robbins owed them as much as $350 for what he had done.

In 1828, Robbins made a proposition. He would go trapping and hunting again with the men and use the proceeds of the trip to pay his debts. Abner Hinds took him up on the offer, and this time the two men headed into the woods accompanied by Hinds’ 15-year-old son. Hezekiah Cloutman did not join them. The journey met with early success. However, Robbins had darker plans this time.

The men had traveled roughly 50 miles up to Little Kennebago Lake in Maine when Robbins turned on Hinds and shot him. He then killed the boy with a hatchet. When the two bodies were found, it didn’t take long to put two and two together, and the local officials raised a party to go find Robbins, which wouldn’t be easy as he knew the woods well.

Arrest

But Sheriff Lewis Loomis was the man for the job. Described as strongly built and muscular, he had a reputation as a strongman. He would wrestle all comers at annual musters and fairs, and was undefeated. He recruited two men, Hezekiah Parsons, Jr., and Daniel G. Ellingwood to join him. (The town paid $15 for the work.)

They turned to Hezekiah Cloutman, who knew Robbins’ habits from their past trips, to assist as a guide. The men went in to the woods and for the next 30 days searched for Robbins. As autumn approached, they heard word that Robbins had surfaced at his home, but by the time they got there he had left. Then they heard he was travelling up the Magalloway River. They went after him, and the men found his belongings. They managed to get between Robbins and his rifle. Loomis jumped on Robbins’ back and the men tied up the prisoner.

Robbins fought furiously, and the men had to tie him in the floor of their boat as they returned via the river out of fear that he would try to tip the craft over and drown them all.

The arrest was celebrated and Robbins was locked in the jail in Lancaster to await trial. Robbins had friends and family that stood by him, however. They managed to slip him some tools, and he steadily picked away at the bars in his cell. As the day of his trial neared, one morning the jailer found the cell empty. Robbins had broken the bars out of his window and escaped.

Out of Jail

The jailer explained that Robbins had successfully hidden his work by hanging a blanket over the window, complaining of cold drafts. Few people believed the jailer wasn’t in on the escape.

No one else in the area ever saw David Robbins again, other than perhaps his confederates. People lived in fear of his returning for years. Some stories circulated that he had murdered someone in Canada and hanged there, but no official record turned up to support it.

His story was a popular tale for the newspapers of the era. It even appeared in fictionalized form in 1857’s Gaut Gurley: Or, The Trappers of Umbagog. A Tale of Border Life by David Thompson.

Tip of the hat for details of Robbins life goes to History of Coos County, New Hampshire. W. A. Fergusson & Co. This story was updated in 2021.

In the vanished days of log drives, the riverman was the most special of the special breed of men who logged the great north woods of New England.

Rivermen on the Mooselookmeguntic Lake in Maine during the spring 1943 pulpwood drive. Courtesy Library of Congress.

His work was hard and dangerous and it paid little, but he did it with a courage and a pride that were a vital part of his life. He worked 14-hour days in icy water, slept in wet blankets, ate plain food and constantly risked his life. Some blew a season’s pay on a long, wild bender after the river drives were over.

The riverman’s job was to guide the logs from piles along the river to the sawmills of northern New England. He rolled and pried and dragged the heavy, slippery logs over rocks and ledges and away from the riverbanks into the current. He heaved and poked with pike pole and peavey to dislodge log jams sometimes so vast they lasted two years.

Log drive on the Kennebec River, 1922. Courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

The Riverman

Rivermen had to start early learning the specialized skills required of the job: to ride a log; to move quickly; to anticipate the logs’ behavior. They had to handle a bateau, a heavy, flat-bottomed boat with flared sides men used to carry gear and to clean out snagged logs.

More rivermen died in capsized bateaux than any other way, but they could also get crushed in an avalanche of loose logs. Or they could get sucked into the river through an open sluice gate. They wore boots with 63 spikes from a quarter inch to three-quarters inch long. If a riverman was killed on the river, his friends would nail his boots to a tree where they found his body.

According to an old logging story, a Hollywood movie outfit came to Maine to film an epic about logging. They heard the rivermen would ride logs through sluiceways along the Kennebec River. Spider Ellis was offered $5 to risk his life to ride a log through the sluiceway. He did it without falling off.

Then the movie outfit offered Ellis $10 — four days’ pay — to ride through and fall off in the white water. He took the dangerous ride, but didn’t fall off. When asked why, he said, “I’ve never fallen off in my life. I find I just can’t fall off one for less than $25.”

Bangor Tigers

The best of the rivermen worked the Penobscot River. They knew they were the best. Known as the Bangor Tigers, they earned top wages throughout New England and later out west.

Until they died out in the mid-20th century, log drives on New England’s spring freshets were a popular spectator sport. Crowds gathered at bridges and dams to watch downed forests of logs quietly float down the river. The local newspapers reported the drives, especially when the rivermen finished the spring drives and got into trouble carousing around the towns.

Woodsville, N.H., was a favorite haven for the rivermen. On May 12, 1899, the Woodsville News reported:

Judge Dow is doing a very good business at his stand. Two more cases of drunkenness and one of assault were brought before him Saturday. But this is the unusually busy season anyway.

In colonial times, men floated logs down the rivers of Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont for shipments back to England for the king’s masts. Over the centuries many millions of spruce logs were driven from the remote north woods to sawmills along the the Kennebec, the White River, the Androscoggin, the Penobscot, the Saco, the St. John, the Ammonoosuc and the Wild Ammonoosuc.

Long Log Drives

From 1870 to 1915, rivermen drove logs 300 miles down the Connecticut River to Massachusetts sawmills. As the longest, toughest drive in New England, it earned the name ‘the Long Drive.’

Logs on a rollway, ready for the drive. Courtesy Boston Public Library.

Long log drives disappeared, but the paper companies continued to drive four-foot pulpwood logs down the rivers. The Machias River ran log drives longer than any other river, until 1965. In 1976, the Maine Legislature banned drives because they polluted the rivers.

Robert Pike, the pre-eminent authority on New England logging, recalled watching a log drive on the Fifteen-Mile Falls on the Connecticut River as a boy.

Generally, wagons drawn by eight horses each arrived to select a campsite for the rivermen and to buy milk, eggs, food and hay. The kids from the village would help dig the beanhole and then hang around the cook tent, where the cook gave them immense sugar cookies and gingersnaps. “They would fairly worship him,” wrote Pike.

One spring the logs came before the wagon. A man who happened to drive past the schoolhouse told the children about the coming log drive. The teacher knew there’d be no more work done that day, and dismissed the students. Wrote Pike:

…we went racing down to the bridge. Sure enough, the logs were coming, not many yet, but steadily growing thicker and thicker, rubbing and nosing softly against each other as the swift current urged them on.

Watching the Drive

The boys watched until supper, fascinated by the army of wood. After supper they returned with their parents. They all lined the bridge with people who had come to see.

Presently, as we stood there leaning on the plank railing, with the cool breeze rising from the river and the sun setting behind us, from upstream around a bend a solitary riverman came straight into the red beams of the dying sun. His peavey point was stuck into the big log on which he rode, and both his hands were clasped around the top of the heavy handle. Seemingly oblivious to the slippery, unstable quality of his steed, poised in a splendid attitude of indifference to the many admiring eyes he knew were fixed upon him, he came whirling down the river, the twenty-foot spruce surging and lunging through the white water. By a miracle of good luck the log avoided all the rocks and the upright riverman swept grandly beneath us, so that we got a good view of him.

The Vanguard

Pike described the sweaty suspenders crossed over a red woolen shirt. He had heavy black trousers ‘stagged off about the tops of his spiked boots.’ He wore a torn, gray felt hat that revealed his eyes

…watchful as any cat’s, and by the look in his eyes and by the little bend in his knees we knew that while he appeared so nonchalant as he leaned there upon his peavey-handle, he was tensely alert. We almost wished that his log would strike a rock, so we might see what he would do, but really we were glad that it did not. So he went on, the vanguard of the drive, and disappeared in the fading light.

With thanks to Tall Trees, Tough Men, by Robert Pike. This story was updated in 2022.

Androscoggin

Murder in the North Woods: Coos County’s Treacherous David Robbins