After a whole month, working ten hours a day, the logger made only $20.25. But there were often even more deductions. If the weather was bad or a man was sick and could not work, he was not paid. There were also the logger's personal expenses called his "van": files for his saw, extra saw blades, tobacco, use of a mattress, clothes, stamps and medicine. The logger also had to pay to get to the woods camp from his home. Sometimes this cost as much as $20.00. It is also important to note that the amount of wood a man cut in a day depended on where he worked. Some stands of timber had more wood than others. Often the new men were given a "clean-up chance." This is an area that has already been cut by other loggers. It was very hard to cut 1.25 cords of wood when working a clean-up chance. Many of the 88 arrested men were given clean-up chances when they first came to the camps. Here is how one of the 88 men described the work:

Four days after we landed...we were sent about two miles from the camp and told to start there. Where we landed to cut wood was at the foot of a range of high land up which we had to climb. When we got to the top we found that there was very little wood on it. The whole place had been cut over before. What was left standing consisted of large, black spruce trees with heavy limbs almost from stump to top. Nearly every second tree cut was useless because of dry rot in the heart....We tackled them and did our very best....The trees were so scarce that if we felled a thirty or forty foot tree it would not strike another in falling.⁹

New men often did not know enough about the work to cut 1.25 cords of wood in a day even in a good chance. It took a lot of time to learn how to cut a stand of timber and use a bucksaw properly.

For all these reasons the loggers could not put any money aside. There seemed to be little point in working. This was even more true if the man had a wife and children to support. Family men thought they would be more useful at home. The work was also hard on their health. It was under these conditions that Captain William Courage and his fellow workers—the "Eighty-Eight Unfortunates"—decided to quit.