Contest! And its a toughy. A loggers contribution.

[Jeff]

Contest,
Someone may get this right away or I'll bet it may hang here forever if ya''ll don't read much.  First person to properly credit this writing to the correct book and the author that wrote it wins. It was published in 1938. Yea, there is a prize. ;D

Two weeks to give me an answer or we call it.

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    No logging camp could operate without axes, and in time it came to be that no camp could operate without haywire.

This wire was the stuff with which hay for the oxen and horses was bound into bales, for compact toting into the distant camps. Teamsters shaking out a bale to feed the animals took to saving the wire strands, throwing them over an oxbow nailed to the side of the hovel. They would do to mend a busted hame strap, or to put a link in a broken chain. And loggers used the strands to strengthen an axe helve or to wind the split handle of a peavey.  Cooks strung haywire above the stove over which to dry clothes and to hang ladles; and often to bind the very stove together. In the zither era, so old-timers have vowed, a length of haywire came in handy to replace a broken string, and they say never was a more resonant G sounded, clear and deep as any harp.

    It was told, too, but is offered here only as a pocrypha, that a dentist of Greenville, Maine, once constructed a neat bridge of haywire and the molars of a fawn, which worked very well and lasted eleven years.
    What is more positive, though, is that logging camps gave a new and useful slang phrase to the American language. For in time a camp that was notoriously poor in its equipment came to be known as a "haywire camp"; and from this usage it spread to mean broken, busted, sick, crazy, and no-good, and score of other things, none of them praiseworthy. It is possibly the only authentic logger word the lay public has accepted.

[chet]

 Stewart Holbrook, Holy Old Mackinaw: A Natural History of the American Lumber-Jack     :P

[Bro. Noble]

Shoot-----I knew when it didn't have Spot and Dick and Jane in it,  I didn't have a chance.

Noble

[Ron Wenrich]

Wow, that lasted a whole 48 minutes.    I don't have a clue, since my library isn't that big or old.

[Jeff]

Chet wins. AGAIN!  Chet, I am not telling what the original prize was because it was going to be something that would give the winner a taste of the U.P.  I never figured a yooper was going to get the question right off but I shoulda  

You prize instead will be to get your hat early. Wish I had time to bring it to you but I'll drop it in the mail.
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Holy Old Mackinaw: A Natural History of the American Lumber-Jack is quite a book. If you get a chance grab a copy.

[Kevin]

But where did the saying ...Holy Old Mackinaw originate from?

[chet]

Yah-hey and youse guys taught us yoopers couldn't read.    
Original prize gave taste of UP, Gee was it a BEER.

[Ron Scott]

Dat Chet's one smart yooper with all dat book reading.

[Bro. Noble]

Chet,

Congratulations,  You sure lucked out on the hat deal.  Jeff gave me a small sample of the original prize but didn't tell me i was supposed to taste it.  Yoopers must have strange tastes if that was supposed to taste good.  Yuck!  It was funny to look at though.

Noble

[DanG]

Wayta go, Chet. I'm glad somebody got the answer. We can't have Jeff getting too uppity.

If that piece had been written a few years later, it would've been about duct tape.

[Frank_Pender]

My father would always ask me, " What sort of a haywire set up you got going now?"  Now I understand, "the rest of the story".   Thank you, one and all.

[Corley5]

"Held together with spit and bailing wire"  That's what my Grandpa used to say