“Human locusts”

“Human locusts” is the book’s image for people whose pressure on the forest leaves depletion, waste, and danger in its wake. First applied by timber interests to loggers and settlers they regard as threats to their holdings, the phrase also implicates the larger extractive system: merchants and companies profit from timber while the forest and its workers absorb the costs.

The phrase and its immediate context

In a discussion of Duke family timber operations, Edward Duke lists the expenses of surveying and milling, then turns to what he sees as more serious problems: dwindling supplies of large, first-rate white pine and theft from company holdings. He denounces shingle and clapboard makers and New Brunswick loggers, calling the latter “the locusts of the forest.” His language makes the forest seem like a valuable possession under siege, and casts people who take timber outside the company’s control as a plague upon it.

The accusation is not limited to theft. Edward describes settlers’ fires escaping from cleared plots and consuming timber, and alleges that some operators deliberately burn the edge of valuable stands so the damaged land can be bought cheaply. Cyrus Hempstead broadens the complaint, saying Maine and New Brunswick forests teem with lawless men and that the company longs for virgin woodland without “human locusts,” as Maine supposedly once was. The image thus joins unauthorized cutting, fire, and settlement into one threat, while revealing the timber owners’ longing for a forest free of competing claims.

Who gets called destructive

The phrase carries an irony because the Duke enterprise itself depends on converting forests into saleable wood. The company’s concern about first-rate pine declining is evidence that extraction has limits, yet its response is to look farther west for more timber. The forest is treated as a resource to secure and manage, while rival loggers and settlers are blamed for making its depletion visible. “Human locusts” therefore describes not simply damage, but the boundary between extraction deemed legitimate by owners and extraction condemned as theft or waste.

That contradiction reaches beyond the Maine and New Brunswick dispute. New Zealand shore stations combine logging with trading in flax, spars, and lumber; camps, warehouses, sawmills, and shipyards move toward the next promising stand, leaving stumps and deep waste behind. The cutting shifts from kahikatea to kauri, and felled timber is burned along with brush, vines, and other forest life. In this account, the newcomers take what can turn a profit without learning the country they are transforming. The phrase’s logic can consequently be turned back on the commercial system: the destructive pressure is not confined to unauthorized individuals when organized businesses also clear forests and move on.

Labor, risk, and the forest economy

The image also obscures the people who perform extraction. Lumber camps bring together workers from varied backgrounds, including Mi’kmaq, French Canadians, Irish, and men from Prince Edward Island. Their routine is exhausting and precarious: they rise before daylight, work with axes in the cold, return to crowded shanties, and sleep on the dirt floor. Many spend their wages after the spring drive and then seek another contract. The work is described as destructive, but for these laborers it is also work available in a life with few alternatives.

The dangers are distributed unequally. River driving is regarded as the most hazardous task, and camp management assigns water work to Indigenous workers. A boss explains that water is essential because it moves logs and powers mills, insisting that the company must accept the cost of the drive if it wants logs at the sawmill. The production chain therefore depends on skilled river labor even as those who do it face exceptional risk. The forests and workers are both treated as inputs to a commercial system, but only the workers’ danger is made immediate in the camp accounts.

Across generations, the Sel family witnesses changing tools and methods: the poll ax gives way to the double-bitted ax, then the crosscut saw; mills adopt faster saws, oxen give way to horses, and engines and locomotives replace animal power. Roads and trucks eventually displace river drives. These changes intensify the scale and speed of logging, helping machines level the remaining old forests. The phrase’s image of a swarm gains force alongside this transformation: extraction is no longer only the work of individual cutters but an expanding industrial process.

Significance and limits of the image

“Human locusts” is a forceful accusation, but not a neutral description. It identifies real pressures—timber theft, clearing fires, and extensive cutting—while its speakers’ interests shape who counts as destructive. The distinction between the owners’ timber and others’ timber makes questions of ownership and profit inseparable from the language of conservation. The same business that laments the disappearance of valuable pine continues to seek new stands and overseas supplies.

The book’s wider pattern complicates the image further: forests do not vanish in one dramatic moment but are progressively cut, burned, transported, and replaced as commercial attention moves elsewhere. That slow, cumulative damage is paired with a labor system in which workers, especially those assigned river driving, absorb risks that make timber production possible. The phrase thus names a conflict over who is blamed for forest loss, while the narrative shows that the damage belongs to a broader economy of extraction.