Maine is the novel’s central landscape of timber wealth and its costs: a vast, river-laced forest that Charles Duquet imagines as a permanent commodity, then a region increasingly cut into fragments for distant markets. Its development links timber speculation to transport, labor, industrial technology, and ecological change, exposing the widening distance between the promise of renewable wealth and the damage left by extraction.

Forests and the timber prospect

For Duquet, Maine’s forests offer an answer to the instability of the fur trade. Beaver pelts could become too abundant for the market or disappear through overtrapping, disease, or other causes; he wants a resource that can support wealth across generations. He settles on the forest, believing that timber is both valuable in Europe and so extensive that it can replace itself. The southern English colonies already supply pine for naval masts, and Duquet sees the possibility of a French timber business supplying ships, houses, and fuel. His plan is to use profits from furs to prepare for a later move into timber rather than abandon the existing trade immediately. When he proposes the shift to Toussaint and Fernand Trépagny, they offer no strong enthusiasm.

The novel later presents Maine not as an untouched abstraction but as a territory with particular waterways and practical constraints. Mrs. Brandon describes it as heavily forested, especially in valuable white pine, and threaded with lakes, ponds, rivers, and tributaries. She names the Androscoggin, Kennebec, St. George, St. John, Allagash, and, above all, the Penobscot. Logs depend on waterways for transport, but feeder streams require dams, and the spring freshets determine when timber can be driven downstream. The geography that makes Maine rich in timber also makes access and movement central business problems.

Timber, transport, and industrial growth

Maine’s lumber economy depends on the cost of moving wood. Lennart Vogel explains that transport expenses largely determine timber profits, while steamboats and, potentially, railways promise to change how logs reach market. In a company meeting, Freegrace reports that delayed spring drives and meager snow have forced contractors to use dams to move logs from feeder streams, adding labor and time. Vogel estimates that the company employs more than a thousand men in the woods for six to eight months of the year, at ten dollars a month plus bed, board, and tools. Competition between camps even affects provisions: employers hire cooks to attract workers with better meals.

The drive toward greater output reshapes the landscape. In the years after the Sels worked on the Gatineau, Maine’s forests draw lumbermen, jobbers, land agents, and Boston buyers. As the remaining pine stands become scarce and remote, markets expand to spruce, hackmatack, hemlock bark, and hardwood. Vast forest areas are reduced to stumps and scattered remnants; exposed streambanks receive harsh sunlight, and silted pools and gravel bars discourage trout. Towns grow around the trade, with saloons, eateries, hotels, and other businesses serving the lumber workforce. Logs rumble through during the spring and summer, sawmills run day and night, and wagons carry lumber to the wharves. Bangor boasts of being the world center of lumber shipping.

Mechanization magnifies both the industry’s ambition and its demands on infrastructure. Maine’s mills adopt circular saws, including a forty-eight-inch blade at a mill on the Kenduskeag and another in Waterville rumored to cut four thousand board feet per hour. Steam engines are presented as part of a larger wave of invention, with the prospect of railways reaching dryland pineries that rivers cannot serve. In the Michigan operations, James Duke describes how the company’s Maine experience frames its plans: a mill producing about three thousand board feet daily cannot keep pace with the speed of the cutters, and portable mills near logging sites could process lumber before it must be transported. The contrast makes Maine both a source of commercial models and a warning that accelerating the weakest link in production can intensify the whole chain of extraction.

Labor and risk in the woods and rivers

The camps are built around strenuous seasonal labor. Men rise before daylight, eat salt pork and tea, walk to the cut with sharpened axes, and return near dark to basic food and cramped quarters. There are no bunks in one camp: workers sleep in a row beneath a greasy blanket on a dirt floor. After spring driving, many spend their wages in nearby bars and brothels before looking for another contract. The narration presents logging as work taken up by young men with few alternatives and little to lose, while the language of bravado masks its danger.

River work is especially hazardous. The novel describes wooden crosses along the banks and records the boss’s practice of assigning water work to Indigenous men, treating their deaths as no less expected than those of white workers. Rivermen use long pike poles and swinging tools to shift hung-up logs, running and jumping across timber that moves in the current. Jinot Sel is assigned to the bateaux; the river’s rocks, rotten ice, and unstable logs make the work dangerous, while prolonged exposure to icy water leaves workers with painful swollen legs. The account connects the industry’s transport system to a labor hierarchy in which risk is not shared equally.

This labor force is drawn from many communities and regions. Marchand’s camp includes Irish and coastal workers, French Canadians, St. Francis Indians, Passamaquoddy, Mi’kmaq, and men from Prince Edward Island, as well as workers from farther away. The border between Maine and Québec follows waterways in such a convoluted way that men cross it freely. Logging thus creates a mobile, mixed workforce, but the solidarity of the “brotherhood of the ax” exists alongside harsh conditions and unequal exposure to danger.

Extraction, markets, and consequences

Maine’s timber does not remain a local commodity. After Duke & Breitsprecher sends its first shipload of its best pine to Sydney, Australia, a buyer seeks a decade-long supply contract and also raises the prospect of trade in New Zealand kauri. The exchange places Maine pine within an expanding overseas market and makes the search for timber supplies global. Duquet’s early vision of a business that could grow and dominate is echoed in later corporate efforts to secure wood across regions, but the novel’s changing forests make clear that commercial expansion is not the same as endless abundance.

The contrast between Maine’s former scale and its fragmented remains is central to the setting’s significance. Companies and buyers pursue whatever species can still be marketed as pine becomes scarce; mills, roads, dams, and new machinery increase the reach and speed of cutting. Yet the consequences persist in altered streambanks, diminished trout habitat, and forests converted into stumps and stubs. Maine therefore stands both for the wealth that timber commerce creates and for the ecological costs that this commerce leaves behind. The region’s history challenges the assumption that a forest can be treated as an inexhaustible resource simply because it once seemed immense.