Lavinia Duke and Vernon Roby’s employer-contractor relationship

Lavinia Duke and Vernon Roby’s employer-contractor relationship brings the company’s new female representative face to face with a logging boss who expects to answer to a man. Their first encounter makes authority a practical matter: Lavinia asserts her right to inspect the cut and judge Roby’s work, while he must decide whether to accept her command. Later, after James Duke dies in the Lake Erie wreck, Roby agrees to help Lavinia bring her father to Detroit for burial and refuses payment, giving their working connection a personal consequence.

The first encounter

When Lavinia arrives at the camp with Andre Roque, Roby stares at her and asks what she is doing there. He objects explicitly that logging is not women’s business and asks where Lennart Vogel is, naming the man with whom he had worked for Duke & Sons. The question exposes the arrangement he had expected: a familiar male intermediary, not the daughter of the company’s proprietor.

Lavinia answers by explaining that she had written to Roby about Vogel’s death in a fire the previous year. She is taking over some of her uncle’s duties, she says, and knowing the men who cut for Duke & Sons is one of them. She acknowledges that she may initially lack knowledge, but asks Roby to speak frankly about the camp, the extensive cut, the landings, the coming spring drive, and any anticipated problems. Her assurance that she does not intend to interfere is paired with a direct statement that she has authority to fire or retain him according to what she finds. Roby takes a breath and answers, “Yes, ma’am”; he then tries to recover familiar ground by asking Andre whether he had worked horses for him the previous year.

Inspection and authority in practice

Lavinia does not treat the visit as a ceremonial introduction. She wants to see the choppers working, and, despite Roby’s disapproval, walks with him along the icy skid road to the hillside cut. There she watches the crew fell a tree, remove its limbs and top, and chain the log butt onto a sled. The men glance toward her as they work. One, wearing a red tuque, disparages her presence as a privileged owner’s daughter viewing workers like animals and criticizes the company’s access to public forest land. Lavinia does not hear his words, but notices his hostility in his gestures and directs Roby to identify him. Roby says the man calls himself Rattle.

Lavinia’s capacity to judge the operation develops alongside her authority over its people. She begins counting the logs and considers what she needs to learn in order to estimate their board feet accurately, including the effects of bark, saw kerf, and taper. She understands that a count of five hundred logs with an average diameter of thirty-seven inches is not enough to determine the usable lumber. Remembering that Lennart had mentioned a minister and former schoolmaster in Ohio who was preparing a mathematical guide to scaling standing trees, she considers seeking instruction. Her attention to the calculation makes the inspection more than a test of who is in charge: she is preparing to understand the work well enough to assess it.

When Lavinia returns to the question of Rattle, Roby tells her that the man has seven brothers working in the camp and that the crew will not trouble her; he adds that she is strong and has a hammer. His response reveals that the conflict is not merely between an employer and a contractor: the men’s working lives and their solidarity shape the camp’s response to authority. Lavinia nevertheless leaves Roby with a promise—or, as the narration frames it, perhaps a threat—to return for the spring log drive. Roby recognizes her casual language of ownership and smiles as he says he will look for her then. Once she and Andre have gone, he dismisses Rattle, telling him that Lavinia disliked his looks. The contractor who initially questioned her presence has acted on her decision.

The camp as a working relationship

Roby’s treatment of Lavinia contrasts with the response she later receives at Hobble Peterson’s camp. Peterson refuses to speak to her directly and directs sarcastic replies to Andre instead. The comparison clarifies what is distinctive about Roby: although his first reaction is openly dismissive, he eventually engages with Lavinia’s authority and carries out her instruction. The relationship remains grounded in the company’s power to retain or dismiss contractors, but its practical terms are established through inspection, questions, and decisions about the crew.

The wider conditions of logging help explain why control over camps and river work matters. The labor is dangerous, and river driving is singled out as the most perilous work; a camp boss argues that the company must accept the expense of boats and provisions if it expects logs to reach the mill, while Mi’kmaq and Montagnais workers move the logs through the water. In these woods, expertise, transport, and labor are bound together. Lavinia’s attention to landings, the spring drive, and Roby’s plan places her directly within that chain of work rather than at a distance from it.

A later appeal

The relationship takes on a different weight after James Duke dies in the wreck of the Liberty Tree. Lavinia reaches the shore near the wreck after two days of travel in severe cold and finds her father among the dead. She recognizes Roby among the men near the wreck and asks him for a great favor: to help bring James’s body to Detroit so the family can bury him. The request is personal, but it rests on a connection first formed through the logging business and their earlier meeting.

Roby is astonished to learn that the dead man is Lavinia’s father. He agrees to help as soon as they can recover the body and says he will take no pay. The refusal marks a clear change in the terms of the encounter: the contractor who once challenged whether Lavinia belonged in the camp now responds to her as a person in grief, offering assistance beyond paid work. The text shows no further account of their relationship, but this exchange gives its professional history a human conclusion: authority was first established by Lavinia’s competence and position, while Roby’s later kindness answers her request without reducing it to a transaction.