The young Jigger soon worked his way up the ranks in the woods—swamping roads, tending landing, and chopping, to eventually emerge at the age of 20 as head chopper in charge of a
logging camp somewhere on the
Androscoggin River. Old loggers who worked for him, such as
Stewart Holbrook, claimed that Johnson had few equals as a woodsman at a time when a man working in the woods was judged by the smoothness of the scarf of his axe’s undercut. They said that the Jigger was an unusually good logger and that he could fell a tree uphill, downhill, with or against the wind, even so that upon falling it would drive a stake previously set in the ground. Johnson worked for many years as a logging foreman in the woods of
Coös County, New Hampshire, for the Connecticut Valley Lumber Company (C.V.L.) in the winter, and as a
river boss on the
Connecticut River in the spring. Robert E. Pike claimed in his 1967 book
Tall Trees, Tough Men that whenever Jigger entered the camp of a new logging operation, for his resume he would exclaim, "I can jump higher, squat lower, turn sideways quicker, and spit further than any son-of-a-bitch in a camp." As a foreman, Jigger was known to have kicked off the knots of a frozen
hemlock log barefooted, and supposedly wouldn't hire anyone else who couldn't do the same. He was well known to be an honest, hardworking boss, who would pay his men high wages to work for him. He would walk into saloons at
Berlin, New Hampshire, and
Sherbrooke, Quebec, and could convince drunken loggers to work for him driving logs down the most dangerous parts of the Connecticut River. Although he paid his men handsomely, he expected a lot from them. On one occasion during a river drive, Jigger told his men to wait at camp while he went to recruit more log drivers in
West Stewartstown, New Hampshire. Some of his workers disobeyed his orders and went down to the
Line House on the
Beecher Falls–East Hereford Border Crossing. Once he returned to camp, Jigger realized at once where the missing men had gone and immediately left for the Line House. Upon entering the Line House, the Jigger grabbed a
peavey that was hung on the wall, and ran into the crowd swinging. The bouncer, a bulky
French-Canadian by the name of Lapointe, then knocked Johnson to the ground and began stomping him with his
cork boots. Jigger managed to grab a hold of Lapointe's feet and lifted him up and placed him onto a hot wood stove and held him there for a few minutes, all the while Lapointe bellowed. When Jigger finally let up, he proceeded to jump into the air and grabbed a hold of a kerosene lamp from the ceiling and smashed it over the bouncer's head. The kerosene met the heat and ignited Lapointe's clothes. Lapointe ran outside, still ablaze, and had to be put out by bystanders, while Jigger's frightened men returned to camp. In his younger years, Jigger Johnson boasted that he would not leave any tree standing from
Bangor to
Seattle, nor any virgins. He trekked from
New England all the way to the
Great Lakes States and then to the great pine forests of the
Southeast, before deciding to turn back to New England due to a sprained ankle and stomach problems. Johnson worked on the Connecticut River for the C.V.L. until 1915, when the last long-log drive occurred. He then continued to work for the remainder of his logging career on the Androscoggin River. Sensing that the long-log drives were coming to an end, Jigger retired from working in the woods in the early 1920s. == Fire warden and the Civilian Conservation Corps==