Gatineau country is a forested timber region north of the Ottawa River where the Sel brothers join a growing logging economy. The family’s move there follows the retreat of thick, wild woodland before farms and earlier cutting; in the new camps they find work, but also a system that turns pine into export timber through arduous labor, dangerous river drives, and extensive waste. The region’s forests promise renewal and employment, yet the narrative repeatedly shows how the timber frontier advances by consuming the landscape on which its workers depend.

Forest Frontier and the Move North

As worked-over woodland gave way to cornfields and pasture, Josime urged the family north toward trees that still stood thick and wild. He had heard of a timber operation in Gatineau country run by a man from Boston, with three camps sending log rafts down to Montreal. The north was both a direction and a hope: a place where the family could continue making a living among forests not yet cut down.

The Sels’ arrival belongs to a broader expansion of prospecting and land acquisition. Timber lookers searched for good pine stands; small entrepreneurs bought land and stumpage, dammed streams to power sawmills, and pursued the squared timber that could be shipped to Britain. The Ottawa and its tributaries made this region part of a much larger network of forest extraction. Pine-filled valleys stretched along rivers including the Gatineau, the Black, Dumoine, Coulonge, Rouge, and Lièvre, while waterways carried the logs toward mills, ports, and overseas buyers.

Camps, Work, and Unequal Risk

The Sel brothers hired on with William Scugog, who sent them to a camp on the Gatineau. Their first response was distrust of the camp and its men, but the work placed them within a mixed labor force assembled to cut and process timber. Scugog and his oldest son, Cato, moved between houses on the Gatineau, Montreal, and Quebec, seeking promises of money from timber merchants for pine that was often still standing and unseen. The contrast between the merchants’ credit and the workers’ labor is built into the region’s timber economy: financing and sales were arranged at a distance, while the physical risks remained at the cutting site and river.

At the camp, tasks followed the shape of the timber. Jinot preferred felling trees to scoring them for the hewer; Amboise, with longer arms, took to scoring, while Josime proved skilled at hewing with a broadax, trimming squared logs close to the chalk line. Their different abilities made the brothers useful at different stages of production, but the work also transformed whole stands of forest into standardized cargo.

The timber was prepared for shipment as squared logs because rafts of squared timber were easier to assemble and less likely to roll when packed aboard ships bound for England. That practical advantage came at a steep ecological cost. About a quarter of each squared tree was lost in the process, while unsuitable trees were left to rot and severed branches, bark, and chips accumulated across the ground. The camp treated this waste as tolerable because trees seemed abundant; that confidence echoed the wider belief that the forest could indefinitely absorb cutting.

Rivers, Transport, and Danger

Gatineau country’s waterways were not merely scenery but essential infrastructure. Logs moved down rivers toward mills and markets, and the work of driving them required workers to navigate the shifting timber. Across the logging economy, bosses assigned river work to Indigenous men, treating their exposure to the water as an expected part of the labor system. A camp boss’s defense of river-driving expenses made the chain of dependence explicit: water moved the logs and powered the mills, so companies had to pay to get timber to the sawmill. The expense was borne in human risk as well as money.

The broader camps where the Sels worked were harsh places of long days and scant comfort. Men rose before daylight, carried sharpened axes to the cut, and returned after dark to crowded shanties and limited food. In river work, serious accidents and deaths were common; wooden crosses along the banks marked the danger. This regional history gives the movement north a double meaning. Gatineau country offered the Sels a way to keep working, but employment meant entering a system in which the river’s value to the company depended on laborers accepting dangers the company could not remove.

Extraction and the Expanding Timber Market

The pine cut in Gatineau country formed part of a trade extending well beyond the local camps. Squared timber was fashioned for transport to England, while merchants and sawmill owners used rivers and streams to connect forest stands to processing and sale. Later, Duke & Breitsprecher sent its first shipload of best pine to Sydney, Australia, and a buyer there sought a decade-long supply contract while also exploring New Zealand kauri. That later trade underscores the book’s recurring pattern: distant markets continually seek new forests, and commercial interest in one timber supply can lead to another frontier.

Across these successive frontiers, the claim that forests were plentiful competes with scenes of depletion. In New Zealand, logging stations skimmed the shore forest, shifted onward, and left smoldering stumps and deep accumulations of waste; the narrative explicitly connects this method to the conviction that the forest was there for the taking. Gatineau country’s wasteful squaring of pine belongs to the same extractive logic, even though the local account centers on work and timber transport rather than a final reckoning with the region’s forests.

Industrial Change and the Forest’s Limits

The Sels’ working lives span a transformation in the tools and infrastructure of forestry. The poll ax gave way to the double-bitted ax, then to the crosscut saw; older gang saws were replaced by circular saws and long steel band saws. Oxen gave way to horses, then to donkey engines and Shay-geared locomotives. As roads reached forests farther from water, trucks and roads displaced river drives. These changes altered how timber could be reached, felled, and transported, making larger-scale cutting possible rather than ending the demand for labor or danger.

The book sets that expanding technological power against the vulnerability of both forest and worker. Machinery could turn distant stands into accessible supplies, while the movement of the frontier left earlier woodlands broken and cleared. For the Sel family, Gatineau country is one link in a multigenerational history of forest labor; for the wider timber economy, it is a productive landscape joined to mills, rivers, and overseas markets. Its significance lies in that tension: the forest appears immense enough to sustain settlement and commerce, but the work of making it profitable steadily alters the land and carries danger downstream to those who move the logs.