One of Atlantic Canada’s most famous folk songs tells the story of a 16-year-old boy who ran away from his home in PEI to work in a logging camp. Not long after he arrived, he met a tragic end.
But the tough woodsmen he’d once worked with believed that he had never really left them.
My name is Peter Emberley,
As you may understand,
I was born on Prince Edward Island,
Near the ocean strand.
In eighteen hundred and eighty,
When the flowers were a brilliant hue,
I sailed away from my native isle,
My fortune to pursue.
So begins one of the most well-known folk songs to come out of New Brunswick’s logging camps: Peter Emberley.
Though often mistaken for just another fictional campfire ballad, this one tells the true story of a very real young man. It was written by his friend John Calhoun, who was there in his final moments. The song’s lyrics are composed from Peter’s dying words.
He’s remembered as a Prince Edward Islander, but Peter Emberley’s roots may lie further east. A brief, scribbled note by a census taker made only a week after his death listed his father as James Amberley, a Newfoundlander.
Peter’s father died when he was only six years old. Shortly after, his mother, Mary Ann, moved the family to Prince Edward Island to live with James’ brother, Ambrose Amberley.
Ambrose had a farm on the Dock Road in West Prince — then a remote frontier where settlers were still carving farmland out of the forest. News reports from the time describe bears attacking livestock as a common threat.
Ambrose had done well for himself. Land records show that he was prosperous enough to purchase more property and donate generously to the local church.
In 1870, Mary married her brother-in-law, Ambrose.
Years later, when he was at a logging camp in New Brunswick, Peter briefly mentioned to his friend John Calhoun that he hadn’t gotten along with his stepfather. He didn’t elaborate.
“Conflict between father and son is common. Conflict between a boy and the uncle who married his widowed mother is almost inevitable,” wrote PEI schoolteacher and historian John Cousins in Island Magazine. “Did Peter, like Hamlet, bear deep enmity towards the man who replaced his ‘real’ father? Was Mary Ann caught between the two men? We do not know. All we have is a tradition that Peter was treated badly by his stepfather.”
The uneasy home life may have been made worse by financial troubles. In the mid-1870s, Prince Edward Island was hit hard by a global economic depression, triggered by stock market manipulation in far-off New York City. The family, like many others, suffered. In 1877, Ambrose was sued for unpaid debt.
Stories passed down through Island families tell of a boy quietly planning his escape.
“Peter laid careful plans to run away. Some of the neighbours saw him hiding clothes in the woods the night before he left,” Cousins recorded.
In the autumn of 1880, at just 16 years old, Peter Emberley left home, slipping away in the night. He likely walked to Big Miminegash and boarded a schooner bound for Miramichi.
Thanks to the meticulous research of New Brunswick’s finest folklorist, Louise Manny, we can trace Peter’s steps after he disembarked from that ship in remarkable detail. Enamoured by the song she called “above all Miramichi woods ballads the most beloved,” Manny tracked down and interviewed elderly woodsmen who still remembered Peter Emberley. They described him as “a pleasant, heavy-set young man with a light complexion.”
After arriving in New Brunswick, Peter approached a Newcastle woods boss named Dave McMillan. He was hired on the spot. It was late in the season, but McMillan needed someone to drive a team of oxen to a camp at English Brook, near Boiestown, pretty much in the centre of the province. Peter went to work right away.
After successfully delivering the team of oxen, he began working in the camp as an “alder grabber” — a not-so-flattering bit of logging camp slang for a new woodsman.
Only a month into the job, Peter injured his hand. Dave McMillan sent him out of the woods to recuperate, letting Peter stay in his family’s own home. Manny spoke to them, and they fondly remembered Peter as friendly, outgoing, and well-liked.
A month later, as the year drew to a close, Peter returned to the woods. The folk song continues:
I landed in New Brunswick,
In a lumbering country there,
I was hired to work in the lumber wood where
They cut the spruce tree down.
It was loaded sleds in a lumber yard
Where I got my deathly wound.
The exact circumstances of Peter Emberley’s death remain unclear.
But the details were never really the point.
Working in the woods was — and still is — dangerous. Even the most seasoned worker could suffer life-changing injuries or even be accidentally killed on the job without warning. What made Peter’s story so memorable wasn’t the uniqueness of the tragedy, but its familiarity. His story could’ve been any woodsman’s story. Maybe that’s why it endured so vividly in memory and song.
There’s danger on the ocean, where the waves roll mountain high,
There’s danger on the battlefield, where the angry bullets fly,
There is danger in the lumber woods, for death lurks sullen there,
And I have fell a victim, to that monstrous snare.
Louise Manny found that when she tried to interview the old woodsmen who remembered Peter Emberley, few wanted to speak about what exactly had caused his death. She did, however, manage to gather some fragments. It had been snowing. He was working with the horses, likely unloading logs from sleds into the river. When wet, those great logs could shift without warning.
If snow was falling, the logs would have been slick.
A log likely slipped and crushed the sixteen-year-old boy.
I know my luck seems very hard
Since fate has proved severe,
But to a victim, death isn’t the worst that can come,
I have no more fear.
He’ll allay all those deadly pains and liberate me soon,
I’ll sleep that long and silent sleep, called slumber in the tomb.
Peter Emberley didn’t die right away. He was grievously injured.
Present at the time of the accident were his friend John Calhoun and Alex McMillan, the son of the camp’s big boss, Dave. They quickly loaded the wounded teenager onto a sled and set off in a desperate race to find medical help.
But Peter’s bad luck only worsened — a fierce blizzard blew in.
Delirious and rambling, Peter spoke nonstop in the sled as the storm howled around them. He had remained secretive about his past while in the logging camp. Until that moment, even Peter’s closest friend John Calhoun knew little of the life he’d left behind.
Now severely wounded and fading, Peter opened up. He spoke about his love for Prince Edward Island. He spoke of his regrets over how he and his stepfather had constantly fought. He spoke about his mother — who he called his best friend — and the heartbreak of knowing he would never see her again. He spoke about a girlfriend he’d left behind on the Island.
“From this unhappy tale,” wrote Louise Manny, “John Calhoun made his song”:
Here’s adieu to Prince Edward Island,
That garden in the seas,
No more I’ll walk its flowery banks,
To enjoy a summer’s breeze.
No more I’ll view those gallant ships,
As they go swimming by.
With their streamers floating on the breeze,
Above the canvas high.
Here’s adieu to my father,
It was him who drove me here.
I thought he used me cruelly,
his treatments were unfair.
For ’tis not right to oppress a boy,
Or try to keep him down.
‘Twill oft repulse him from his home
When he is far too young.
Here’s adieu to my greatest friend,
I mean my mother dear.
She raised a son who fell as soon,
As he left her tender care.
Ah, little did my mother know,
When she sung me lullabies,
What country I would travel in,
Or what death I might die.
Here’s adieu to my youngest friend,
To the Island girl so true,
Long may she live to bless the isle
Where first my breath I drew.
For the world will roll on just the same,
When I have passed away.
What signifies a mortal man,
Whose origin is clay?
Though he was said to have survived for several days, there’s no record of Peter ever being seen by a doctor. The blizzard raged on, likely preventing any medical help from reaching him.
Peter said he wanted a proper funeral. He specifically asked that his eulogy be given by an actual minister — not a travelling preacher, the kind woodsmen dismissively called “shantymen.”
But even in death, Peter’s misfortunes continued. The minister couldn’t get through the storm. Instead, a fellow woodsman — likely the camp cook — stepped in to perform his funeral.
The woodsmen left Peter’s funeral feeling uneasy. Because he had come from Prince Edward Island and been so quiet about his past, they couldn’t even hold a proper “frolic” in his honour. Frolics were gatherings where woodsmen — and often the wider community — came together to raise money for an injured worker, or, in the worst cases, to support a fallen woodsman’s family. But Peter Emberley hadn’t spoken about his past, so, as far as they knew, there was no one they could help.
Meanwhile, one man sat alone in the logging camp, scribbling and scratching out lines, rearranging his friend’s final words, trying to capture a short life — and a young death — in song.
Within days of Peter’s death, John Calhoun finished the lyrics, drawn from the last words he’d heard his friend speak. He sent the song to Abraham Munn, a well-known local musician, who quickly set the words to music.
The song touched a nerve amongst all who heard it. Passed from singer to singer, it spread by word of mouth, going from one logging camp to the next across New Brunswick, then to PEI and Nova Scotia. Every woodsman who heard the song could relate. Peter’s death could easily have been their own.
The song soon crossed the border into Maine, and from there travelled west and south — popping up in the Great Plains, throughout Appalachia, and beyond.
“Peter Emberley is among the most famous Prince Edward Islanders,” wrote Island Magazine. “From Newfoundland to Michigan, storytellers and singers related the story of the Island boy and his untimely death in the New Brunswick lumber woods until the tale was known across the northeastern part of North America.”
Over the decades, the song continued to grow and spread as more artists put their own spin on it. In the 1960s, Bob Dylan heard Bonnie Dobson sing the song, and it inspired him to write The Ballad of Donald White.
As the years passed, and the song passed from singer to singer, the lyrics shifted. A new, overtly religious ending was added. Perhaps it was added because Peter Emberley himself had asked for a proper funeral as his dying wish.
The revised version with the new ending finishes by imagining Peter lying in his grave, waiting for “the return of the Saviour and Judgment Day,” and asking listeners “to bless his resting place.”
It was based on this revised version of the song with its different ending that, in 1963, the people of Boiestown gathered around Peter Emberley’s grave. They replaced the old, rotting wooden cross with a polished granite gravestone. At long last, a proper minister delivered the eulogy Peter had asked for, blessing his grave. Peter’s descendants came from Prince Edward Island. They brought handfuls of red Island soil to scatter on his grave. Alexander Calhoun, John’s nephew, read his uncle’s lyrics.
But there were two places where the song was never sung: the place Peter Emberley came from, and the place where he died.
It was said the song was subject to a self-imposed ban in West Prince, PEI, where Peter Emberley had grown up. And it was never sung in the camps around Boiestown, where he was laid to rest — not out of disrespect, but out of fear that it would bring bad luck.
“Many woodsmen, say flatly they wouldn’t stay in a camp where [the song] is sung,” Louise Manny wrote.
For all their grit and toughness, the woodsmen could be surprisingly sensitive, and deeply superstitious.
The song’s ending had been changed over the years. The original ending had not been religious, and told a much different story of what became of Peter Emberley after his death.
Louise Manny interviewed the original songwriter, John Calhoun, and found that he vehemently “objected to his song being tampered with.” He despised the new, religious ending that had been added to the song he had written so many years before. He believed they completely changed the song’s whole meaning.
For the woodsmen who had worked with Peter didn’t believe that he was lying in the ground, waiting for Judgement Day like the song’s new ending said.
They had believed that Peter was still there, among them.
The woodsmen believed that Peter Emberley lived on in the trees and that he could be seen in the quiet flap of wings.
The woodsmen held their own distinct local, spiritual tradition that softened the harshness of life in the woods.
One of their most sacred beliefs — one entirely unique to The Maritimes — revolved around a particular type of friendly, inquisitive, intelligent birds that hung around their camps.
The birds had many nicknames in the logging camps.
Some called them “gorbies,” a Scottish word for glutton, because the birds would always appear at lunchtime, seeking to share the woodsmen’s dinners.
Other woodsmen called them “whiskey jacks,” a mangled attempt at pronouncing Wisakedjak, the name of a Cree trickster spirit — a fitting title for a bold, precocious bird with little fear of people.
The most common nickname given to grey jays in Maritimes logging camps, though, was “The Woodsman’s Ghost.”
For the woodsmen believed that a man who died in the forest didn’t truly leave it. Instead, he lived on, in the form of a grey jay.
These tough, burly woodsmen, hardened by years of labour in harsh conditions, softened at the sight of the little birds. They shared their meals freely, believing the jays were the spirits of friends lost to logging accidents. In these birds, they saw campmates who’d died young, still visiting the camps, flitting from tree to tree.
To harm a grey jay was among the worst sins a woodsman could commit. To do so was to bring misfortune on the whole camp. For the grey jay was The Woodsman’s Ghost.
The men who had actually known and worked with Peter Emberley didn’t believe his life had actually ended at the tender age of sixteen in a random accident in some lonely patch of New Brunswick woods. He’d simply taken another form. He was still there among them — watching, gliding silently through the evergreens. Only now he was feathered, and now he was free.
Peter Emberly had become a grey jay — The Woodsman’s Ghost.
The original ending of the ballad that John Calhoun wrote — the one that echoed across snowy camps and smoke-filled bunkhouses — made no mention of a grave or a Judgement Day. For the woodsmen never believed that Peter Emberley’s story ended in the ground.
Which is why the song ended with Peter Emberley flying away:
But there’s a world beyond the tomb,
To it I’m nearing on,
Where man is more than mortal,
And death can never come.
The mist of death, it glares my eyes,
And I’m no longer here.
My spirit takes on its final flight,
Unto another sphere.
