cfrw.us Blog

From the December 13 Raleigh News and Observer http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local_state/story/238382.html

ELIZABETHTOWN Like the river that filled so much of his life, Horace W. Butler Jr. is moving slow.

More than 88 years, a few bouts with arthritis and an 8-foot tree limb that “cracked my head like a coconut” will do that to a man.

But Butler, the last of the river men of the Cape Fear, still has every snag, every bend and bow in that grand, muddy waterway locked in his memory. And more than 50 years after he steered the last raft of logs from Fayetteville downriver, he could talk you all the way to Wilmington – if you had the time.

“It took a bit of time,” Butler said. “About five days, coming from Fayetteville. When the water was low and the wind was calm, we were moving at about a half-mile an hour.

“These days, that seems kind of slow, I guess. Back then, it seemed to move along just fine.”

There are no more loggers on the Cape Fear. Nobody’s seen one of the mammoth rafts skirting places like Pinch Gut Creek, Bullfrog Cut and Pull and Be Damned Landing since about Thanksgiving 1957.

Nearly all the landings are gone, too. Decades devoid of commerce allowed the woods and brambles to reclaim spots that once held thriving little businesses. Raccoons and possums, and the occasional alligator, are the only customers now.

“The river is slow, but it doesn’t stand still,” Butler mused. “It’s all grown back.”

Schooled on the river

Born in 1921 near the Bladen County town of Dublin, Butler’s playground, his church and home was the Cape Fear River. His bedtime stories were tales of the river, shared by his father and other rafters. In the summer, his lullaby was the soft slapping of water as each raft rolled toward Wilmington, pierced by the steam whistle of ships like the City of Fayetteville.

A trip to Wilmington on the ship cost $3, including meals.

It didn’t cost anything to ride the rafts, other than a lot of sweat.

“I was on the rafts early in life,” Butler said. “I never knew nothing but hard work. I didn’t get but a fifth-grade education in school, but I learned a lot on the river.”

Butler grew up short and wiry, with quick reflexes. He learned how to swing a broadax, and was soon helping his dad lash together hundreds of trees with nails the size of railroad spikes for their rides downriver.

“They’d roll the logs down the bank into the water,” Butler said. “Our job was to take care of them once they got there. There was all sorts of logs in a raft. It didn’t have to be one kind of wood.”

His dad taught him the basics of making each raft, how to judge timber and how to keep the raft from smashing into the riverbank, splintering a week’s worth of work in minutes.

“I guess it would be a boy’s dream, but I can tell you it was a lot of work,” Butler said. “You think about floating along on a raft, and it seems like the easiest thing in the world. But that’s your livelihood you’re riding on. You had to stay on top of things.”

When he turned 16, Butler says, his dad let him “fall heir” to rafting. His dad took care of the business end. All Butler had to do was get the logs downstream.

“We’d have a 16-foot-long gig pole with a hook on the end,” he said. “You’d use it to get the logs lined up, then use clamps to hold them together.”

Trees were almost uniformly cut to lengths of 10 feet to 16 feet – perfect for the lumber mills in Wilmington. Rafts could be no wider than 40 feet, about the width of a tennis court, but some stretched up to a mile or more long.

“They couldn’t be any wider because of the locks,” Butler said, referring to a series of structures that helped boats navigate the river. “But they could be long. You’d just unclamp the logs at the lock, then reclamp them as you went through.

“There were crooks in the river where you’d be on one end of a raft and couldn’t even see the other end. And all of it being pushed by the river. You have a 40-foot oar to steer, and beyond that it was all river.”

A small crew

Usually the rafts were large enough to hold a couple of small john boats, in case anyone needed to go ashore for supplies. The small crew pitched pup tents on deck and built fires for cooking and warmth in the winter.

The crew carried provisions, occasionally augmenting the menu with fish or hunted raccoon, possum and squirrel.

A string of small stores lined the river, each with its own landing. Most were at ferry crossings.

“You could get what you needed from Waddell’s Ferry or Cain Tuck Landing,” he said. “From there on, you’d better have what you needed to Wilmington. You were on your own.”

Butler says he never lost a raft, though he found a few that other rafters had lost. “Made a little extra money on those runs,” he said with a laugh.

There were winters on the river so cold that the raft crunched ice as it floated. Some summers were so dry the rafts would scrape the river bottom.

Gators were occasional companions, floating along like stray logs. And one time, a rattlesnake decided to hitch a ride with the crew.

“We had to get a big ol’ stick and take care of him,” Butler recalled. On other occasions, confused mullet would leap onto the deck, becoming a suppertime stew. One time a huge sturgeon stranded itself on the raft.

“You never knew what would happen,” he said. “That was life on the river.”

After a time, Butler met and married Lucille, a girl from Elizabethtown.

Eventually, they settled in town.

By then, life along the river was changing.

Improved roads and transportation had taken many of the lucrative rafting jobs. River traffic all but vanished.

In November 1957, Butler made his final run down the river.

He lashed a load of lumber near the bluffs behind the Veterans’ Administration Hospital in Fayetteville.

It was a big load, one that took about two weeks to prepare – a fitting farewell for the last of the river men.

After that, Butler continued to work in timber and worked on the last two tugs that pushed cargo up the river.

“The march of life brings changes,” he said. “We all just flow with it.”