Goose Eye No. 2 (2022)
The Enduring Legacy of Jigger Johnson
Trail Work and Lumberjack Mythology
Sam Norton
The first time I heard of Jigger Johnson was in Pinkham Notch of New Hampshire’s White Mountains. I was sitting on a filthy couch in the common room of the Appalachian Mountain Club’s Hutton Lodge, where the AMC’s trail crew, of which I was a new member, dwelled at the time. At a moment of relative quiet, in an otherwise wild summer of work, our leader (the “Trailmaster”) read from Holy Old Mackinaw, a popular history book written in 1938. The first chapter, “Saga of The Jigger,” is a biography of sorts about a lumberjack named “Jigger Jones,” his rise to fame, and his ultimate demise. We all listened intently, if loudly, with our legs perched on tables, faces beaming, and drinks in hand. Many of us were dressed in plaid wool work shirts and suspenders and sporting weathered leather boots. The Trailmaster described the physical feats and absurd stories of a laborer who lived the better part of a century before us. We heard of a lumberjack who spent a life of work chopping and skidding trees in Northern New Hampshire and Maine.