and the monotony of life in the smelly and flea-ridden camps deep in the gloom of the wilderness. Once they were in the city, life smiled broadly for these men : the days passed quickly in the Lake Avenue saloons, the nights in the St. Croix Avenue boardinghouses.

To be sure not all the men who came out of the forests spent their money in the saloons. Many had been forced to become lumberjacks when they arrived from Finland and found no other work available. Most of the men who were lumberjacks during the 1900-1914 period saved their money, married and settled down along St. Croix Avenue or "on the hillside" and found themselves steady jobs on the docks, in building construction, as skilled or unskilled laborers in factories, etc. But another group formed that army of lumberjacks who remained just that, went back to the forests regularly, and emerged again just as regularly to spend their holidays and their earnings in the Finnish saloons and boardinghouses in Duluth, Virginia, Ely and International Falls.

With the end of World War I and the coming of Prohibition, the Finnish saloons on Lake Avenue and St. Croix Avenue of course had to close their doors, and the Finns gradually began to move away from "the Point." Finnish businesses now began to appear at the western end of Sixth Avenue and later on Superior Street in the block between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. The Finns called the latter "Sikst Avenue", but the Americans began to call it "the Bowery". The first Finnish business to open there was Alex Kyyhkynen's Dove Clothing Company, and it was soon followed by Finnish hotels, saunas, restaurants, barbershops, etc. After 1933, when Repeal came, Finnish saloons appeared on the Bowery, too, and the vacationing lumberjacks welcomed them again after the long and depressing "moonshine" period. Even in the 1950s it was still possible to see Finnish lumberjacks there, looking exactly as their counterparts of fifty years earlier had looked, but dressed now in brighter and better clothing. With new clothes bought and supplies purchased, the mandatory climax was still the same : dozing off in some Bowery cafe, after some barroom scuffle or before it.

The Finnish merchants on the Bowery knew what to stock for these woodsmen. They had well-padded coats to offer, and heavy trousers and warm mittens and shoepacks, and a woodsman dressed in them could well have looked just like any woodsman one could meet on some forest trail in Finland, except for one feature which would have seemed strange: the hat, which hinted the man to be much more Americanized than he could be in reality.

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