Depletion of New England’s old-growth forests

The depletion of New England’s old-growth forests is a long, uneven process that reshapes both the landscape and the lives organized around it. In the novel, trees fall to axes, farms and roads spread into cleared ground, wildlife retreats, and logging moves toward new watersheds as familiar supplies diminish. The changing forest is not merely a backdrop to commercial expansion: it becomes its measure, its commodity, and the accumulating cost of a belief that there will always be more timber beyond the horizon.

Expansion into the forest

Settlement and land conversion proceed together. Crown corvée gangs widen a western trail into a road, bringing more settlers into the forest; as chopping becomes an everyday sound, trees are cut and maize planted between the stumps. Woodpeckers leave for wilder ground, while deer and moose retreat and wolves move north. René Sel, working at the edge of this transformation, feels that the forest is always before him and that his repeated blows cannot match the immense extent of the wooded earth. Even the stumps send up multiple shoots from living roots, but that renewal does not erase the scale of the clearing.

Around the Penobscot settlement, paths multiply from a few tracks into webs of trails and then roads. Their condition changes with the season: mud holds the traffic before summer heat turns it to fine, choking dust. Meanwhile, settlers and logging companies strip the bay’s banks and advance up the Penobscot. Wheat and hay fields take the place of woodland; linked stumps and root wads become barriers for livestock, and houses along the shore are joined by fences. This gradual remaking of the landscape makes settlement visible as more than isolated occupation: roads, fields, and enclosures consolidate it.

Timber as a promised permanent resource

The commercial logic of forest clearance grows out of the instability of the fur trade. Charles Duquet sees beaver pelts arrive in quantities so great that French warehouses are full, but he also recognizes that a trade dependent on animals and shifting markets can collapse through overtrapping, disease, or other unpredictable causes. He wants wealth lasting beyond a single boom and a fortune that can pass to his sons. In his calculation, the forest offers what the fur trade cannot: a commodity he believes to be enduring, abundant, and capable of supplying timber for ships and houses as well as wood for warmth. He plans to profit from furs while preparing to move into timber, treating the forest’s apparent extent and capacity to regenerate as guarantees of continued growth.

Duquet’s ambition connects the New France forest economy to markets and trade routes well beyond the region. In India, Captain Verdwijnen exchanges some ceramics and silks for food and spices and takes on Patna opium for medicinal trade in Amsterdam; Duquet considers whether a three-cornered route might work for a lumber merchant. The scene places timber within an expanding commercial imagination, in which transport and distant buyers could turn forest products into a business on a much wider scale. Later, Duke & Breitsprecher sends its first shipload of best pine to Sydney, Australia, and a buyer there seeks a decade-long supply contract while expressing interest in New Zealand kauri. The search for markets and sources of wood thus continues across oceans even as regional supplies become less secure.

Scarcity, fire, and movement to new timberlands

The landscape’s apparent abundance proves vulnerable to both extraction and fire. After an immense wildfire moves out of New Hampshire, destroying fifty miles of coastal forest and reaching far inland before rain extinguishes it, coastal timber holders look covetously at Duke & Sons’ interior holdings, which have escaped the fire. The disaster changes the relative value of surviving forests: timber once treated as plentiful becomes more desirable because other owners have lost theirs. The contrast between burned coastal land and interior timber also shows how fire can intensify competition rather than end the demand that helped make the forest vulnerable.

As New England’s best timber is used up, logging shifts to different woods and rivers. Around the turn of the century, Jinot Sel finds that Marchand’s camp is cutting in the Allagash watershed, where some of the best remaining white pine grows. The move is not presented as proof that the old forest has been restored; it is a relocation toward a remaining stand. Later, in the Gatineau, a former riverman explains that white pine has given out in Maine and that workers are now cutting spruce and hardwood. The change in species and location registers depletion through the altered choices available to loggers.

This work depends on river transport as well as trees. Rivermen use long pike poles to control logs and swinging tools to shift jammed timber; their labor requires constant movement among logs in fast water. James Duke is told that timber profits depend largely on transportation costs and that steamboats could change the movement of logs. The expectation that steam engines might eventually carry timber from dryland pineries beyond navigable rivers suggests how technology could widen the area accessible to the industry. Better transport promises new supplies and markets, even as it weakens the limits that once kept some forests beyond easy reach.

Colonial settlement and the altered ecology

Forest depletion is intertwined with the occupation and reorganization of Mi’kmaw land. When Sosep and his companions reach Mi’kmaw country, he points out French families settled along the shore and describes woodlands and productive edges that had provided generations with berries and edible roots. Much of this land has been plowed for maize and turnips, and salt marshes drained to produce hay for livestock. Moose, caribou, and bears have retreated; beavers have been reduced by heavy taking for skins that can be exchanged for guns and metal pots. The changing ecology therefore alters both food sources and the practices connected to them, including the custom of placing a beaver skin on a grave.

The spread of fields, roads, and fences makes the loss of Mi’kmaw access part of the same process as timber extraction. The novel sets the settlers’ conversion of land to agriculture beside the diminishing animals and plant resources on which Mi’kmaw life has depended. The consequences are cumulative rather than confined to a single clearing: land is enclosed, game withdraws, and trade turns animal life into colonial currency. Forest depletion thus records not only a decline in trees but a change in who can use the land and what kinds of livelihood it can sustain.

The limits of the inexhaustible-forest idea

The novel repeatedly exposes a gap between the scale of commercial appetite and the ecological complexity of a forest. In Michigan, James Duke reacts to a vast stand by imagining that a thousand men could not cut it within a thousand years and declaring that the company will bring in a thousand men. Armenius Breitsprecher recognizes in that response an intention to clear the continent. He objects to clear-cutting, the waste of usable wood, soil destruction, erosion, and the absence of concern for the future, while noting that the choppers assume the supply is endless and that another forest will always be found. His alarm makes explicit what the shifting frontier can conceal: moving the logging operation does not undo the damage left behind.

The argument later becomes a direct disagreement about what counts as a forest. Charley describes wild woodland as an interdependent whole of air, roots, ferns, lichens, insects, disease, soil, water, and weather, a forest existing for itself rather than for human benefit. Dieter answers from the standpoint of managed timberland, where trees are planted for revenue, employment, shade, and recreation, and where wild forests are cut and replaced with trees that can be managed. He invokes the idea of timber as a renewable crop and presents managed forestry as a way to maintain supplies and control erosion. Their exchange does not erase the distinction between a complex old-growth ecosystem and a replacement stand; it shows that the word forest carries competing assumptions about use, value, and renewal.

Across successive locations, extraction appears to solve scarcity by moving elsewhere: from one river system to another, from white pine to spruce and hardwood, and from North American timber to overseas supplies. That movement gives the industry a continuing horizon, but it also makes depletion easy to treat as someone else’s problem or as a temporary obstacle. The novel’s long chronology counters that illusion by setting commercial plans against roads, retreating wildlife, altered Mi’kmaw livelihoods, burned stands, and forests cut down to the ground. What looks inexhaustible at the scale of a single venture is repeatedly shown to be finite at the scale of a place and a human lifetime.