Aha, now that I know it's from Newfoundland, I found a version online in the MacEdward Leach collection. (I'd always assumed it was either New England, or non-Maritime Canadian in origin.)

But ... the version I heard differs from both Leach and Peacock, and I don't know how it came to surface in New Hampshire, apparently before the song was published! (A year before Peacock, and Leach's first Canadian collection, 1965's Folk Songs and Ballads of Lower Labrador. Or was it included in Leach's Ballad Book, 1955?).

It was 1958 when a couple of singing friends, Tony Morse and Anne? (Mrs. Peter) Fleming, sang this to me at Hanover, NH (found the note I'd made at the time), and the only verse they had was distinct. It sounds like a first verse that's missing from Peacock AND from Leach:

I am a river driver, and from Charlestown I come,
I never earned a penny but what I called my own,
And if ever I get off of this job, this town I mean to roam,
For I'm a river driver, and I'm far away from home.

Neither Morse nor Mrs. Fleming were Newfoundlanders, or source singers in the usual sense -- a couple of singing friends,one a former Dartmouth College student, the other a student's wife. They never said where they got the verse, or the tune either. Mystery!

Bob