SOMERS, DAVID ALLAN (1864-1944)

SOMERS, DAVID ALLAN, stream driver; b. Lyttleton, 18 Nov 1864, s/o John Somers and Jane Holmes; m. 1884, Elizabeth Ann Payne, d/o William Payne and Mary McLean, of Little Southwest; d. Chatham, 8 Apr 1944.

David A. Somers had little education. Instead of attending school he went to work in the woods as a boy, and he continued to be engaged at one kind of hard labor or another until old age forced him into retirement. He differed from most of his rural contemporaries only in that he was one of the great river drivers of his day. Unlike most of the others, his existence came to the attention of a journalist, William J. McNulty, who published his story in the Boston Sunday Post.

When McNulty interviewed him, "Daredevil Dave" Somers was working as a lumber scaler in Penobscot Co., Maine. He was sixty-three years of age and was in his fiftieth season "with the woodlands and foam-surfaced driving waters." Five years earlier he had lost his right arm in a river driving accident near Houlton. "I was ground between the logs," he explained, "but I held to my senses....I waited my chance to get out of the tangle and swim to the bank of the stream. While among the logs I got hundreds of hard blows from the sides and ends of sticks. When I crawled up on the shore I was pretty woozy....They picked me up and put me in the Madigan Hospital at Houlton. There the doctors looked me over and found my right arm was crushed so badly that they would have to take it off right at the shoulder. Every bone in the right arm just below the shoulder into the fingertips was pulverized." This misfortune he described as "just one of the breaks of the game."

McNulty asked Somers where the roughest water was on which he had driven logs. "The roughest stream in my history," he replied, "is the Miramichi, Little Southwest Branch. The lumbermen had a hard time to get drivers for the Miramichi because of the risk. In those years, two dollars a day and found was good pay. I had no difficulty in getting four dollars, and the rougher the water the better I liked it. I guess I was born with a liking for adventure for I have been looking for it since I was a kid."

Somers's wife, E. Ann Payne, died in 1908, leaving five sons and six daughters. Most of the children settled permanently on the Miramichi, and David A. Somers returned there too in his old age. Among his sons was John ("Flying Jack") Somers of the Little Southwest, who was said to have been an even more spectacular stream driver than his father.