On leaving, Lewis made a last entry:"Never was any poor Creaturs is Such a Condition as we were in nor Ever was a Criminal maore glad by having made his Escape out of prison as we were to Get Rid of those Accursed Lorals."

Many early settlers felt the same way. A century later one wrote that the valley was "as perfect a wilderness as continent contained . . . a howling wilderness of some twenty or thirty miles' compass, begirt on all sides by civilization, yet unexplored."

The valley was a relic of the last glacial age. When the Wisconsin ice sheet had crept down from the North to within a hundred or so miles twenty thousand years before, Canaan became a frost pocket, high and cold--perfect for red spruce.

Nobody knows how the valley got its namem but in time, under the battering of West Virginia usage, the biblical "Cane-un," with its accent on the first syllable, "Kah-nane," with the accent hard on the last syllable.

As Late as the mid-1880s, on the eve of its destruction, the forest was virtually as Lewis had seen and hated it.

Henry Gassaway Davis changed that. In 1886 Davis, a railroad man and politician, convinced the West Virginia legislature to incorporate his Potomac and Piedmont Coal and Railroad Company with powers, rights, and franchises to do almost everything. By 1881 Davis, then a U.S. senator, had involved so many of his colleagues in his enterprises that the line working its way toward Canaan Valley came to be known as the "senatorial railroad." On November 1, 1884, the last spike was pounded into the stretch of the senatorial railroad that ran into the brand new town of Davis on the rim of Canaan Valley. Not long afterward a Pennsylvania lumberman named Jacob Leathers Rumbarger built a band-saw mill on the Blackwater River between Second and Third Street. The first of some thirty-one miles of logging railroadsbegan to push their twisting way into the once impenetrable valley. From a population of two in 1884, Davis swelled to four thousand--town that in time came to include seven churches, an equal number of saloons, a tannery, two banks, a second major sawmill, two butcher shops, two undertakers, five doctors, two dentists, five restaurants, and four hotels.

In the mid-nineties, a twelve-hundred-seat opera house went up on the corner of Henry Avenue and Second within easy hearing of the sawmill's exhaust engines. Under the illumination of that pale and flickering novelty, the electric light, audiences watched Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ten Nights in a Bar Room.

The short-lived lumber camps that fed the boom hung uncertainly to the slopes of plunging hillsides, and they lasted only as long as the lumber lasted. But while they did exist, they were microcosms of a special kind of life. Far from the reach of any recognizable police force, they were ordered by a code conduct all their own. The men worked from dawn until dark and were generally too tired to raise hell even if they wanted to.

The lumber jacks came in from all across the Eastern and Northern forests. When the Blackwater Boom and Lumber Company bought out Rumbarger in 1887, it imported French Canadians from the North, who were expert at riding the floating logs that sometimes filled the Blackwater River from bank to bank for twenty-five miles.