In the early days of interior commercial logging, passage by river was the sole means of moving timber from stump to sawmill. By the time Ruohomaa photographed this pulp log drive on the upper Kennebec River in Maine in the 1950s, logs were only driven on remote stretches of water where roads had not yet been built or improved for large trucks. Heavy machinery was used during winter to harvest, haul, and stack wood next to lakes and rivers and to “water the logs”. However, once they were afloat, crews of log drivers had to shepherd them downstream using hand tools; the work was grueling but did not require the special skills that driving saw logs did, and didn’t enjoy that same heroic status.