Michigan is presented as a seemingly inexhaustible timber frontier whose forests make industrial expansion appear both natural and limitless. The state becomes a proving ground for the Duke company’s large-scale logging: steam-powered mills and circular saws raise output, while sawdust and uncut oversized trees expose the costs and limits obscured by abundance. Its significance lies in the contrast between the promise of perpetual wealth and the accumulating consequences of treating forests as an endless supply.

Timber Frontier and Commercial Ambition

The idea of the forest as a durable source of wealth takes shape before the Michigan operations. Watching the fur trade swing between scarcity and surplus, Charles Duquet rejects dependence on animals and turns to timber, imagining a commodity that Europe lacks and that could support a fortune for generations. He plans to profit from furs first and move into wood when prepared. His ambition supplies an early commercial logic for the later timber frontier: forests seem more permanent than the volatile resources they replace.

The novel also places timber within a wider trade network. In India, Captain Verdwijnen exchanges ceramics and silks for food and spices and acquires opium for trade in Amsterdam; Duquet considers whether a three-cornered route might work for a lumber merchant. Much later, Duke & Breitsprecher sends its first shipload of the best pine to Sydney, Australia, where a buyer seeks a decade-long supply contract and raises the possibility of partnering in New Zealand. Michigan timber is thus not merely local produce: it enters distant markets through shipping, contracts, and the search for new sources of wood.

Mills, Machinery, and Waste

At the company’s board meeting, the discussion of production makes the tension between efficiency and waste concrete. Noah Ludlum warns that the steam-powered circular saws wobble, cut a wider kerf, and turn more than three hundred board feet out of every thousand into sawdust. The sawdust is burned for boiler power or discarded, while the largest trees are left in the woods because the available saws cannot cut logs more than about half their diameter. The same machinery that increases the pace of production therefore wastes timber and cannot fully process the biggest trees.

Lavinia treats that waste as a secondary problem beside expansion. She argues that Michigan’s trees are plentiful enough that the company need not economize on sawdust, and she cites the Avery Mill’s expected output of three million board feet that year, ahead of the previous year. Her immediate objective is to replace older water-powered, up-and-down sawmills with circular saws and steam engines, while considering double circular saws for larger logs. The exchange reveals a governing assumption: rising capacity matters more than conserving material when the resource is believed to be abundant.

That assumption is reinforced by demand. During the war years Duke Logging profits from the need for lumber, and the end of the war does not end the market: the South’s rebuilding sustains demand. Elsewhere, James Duke and Lennart Vogel identify transportation costs as central to timber profits and discuss how steamboats might change log movement; Edward Duke imagines railways reaching dryland pineries beyond river routes. The mills’ appetite for faster machinery depends on transport infrastructure and expanding markets, tying Michigan’s forests to a broader industrial system.

Labor and the River-to-Mill Chain

Timber production rests on arduous, hazardous work. In the camps, men rise before daylight, eat salt pork and tea, carry sharpened axes to the cut, and return to crowded shanties where they sleep on the dirt floor beneath shared blankets. The workforce includes migrants and men from many communities, among them Mi’kmaq workers. Its members are bound by demanding labor and risk, but not by equal conditions or control over the work.

River driving is described as the most dangerous stage of the chain, and a camp boss explains that companies must pay its costs because water moves logs and powers mills. The work is assigned disproportionately to Indigenous laborers, whom employers treat as suited to dangerous water. Rivermen use long pike poles and tools for freeing jammed logs, balancing and moving among the floating timber. The logs that feed the sawmills therefore arrive through labor that the commercial account of efficiency tends to hide.

Across three generations, the Sel family witnesses successive changes in the tools and infrastructure of the woods: poll axes yield to double-bit axes, crosscut saws replace axes, and circular and band saws succeed older gang saws. Oxen give way to horses, then donkey engines and Shay-geared locomotives; roads and trucks eventually replace river drives. Mechanization changes how timber is reached, felled, and moved, but it does not make the work benign. The novel links technological change to a larger scale of extraction and to a logging profession in which injury and early death remain persistent risks.

Abundance, Ecological Loss, and Narrative Significance

The contrast between Michigan’s apparent plenty and the damage of extraction belongs to the novel’s wider account of forest exploitation. In New Zealand, logging stations and trading posts move from one profitable shore forest to the next, leaving waste and burned ground; the phrase that the forest was there for its newcomers expresses the entitlement underlying such expansion. Michigan’s forests are likewise treated as available stock, even as the mill meeting records sawdust, uncut trees, and the drive to increase output.

The novel sets that commercial short-termism against a longer view of forests and responsibility. Dieter Breitsprecher tells the board that timber may become scarce and more valuable than projected, arguing that continued forestland can yield future wealth whether for lumber or paper. The trees planted on older Breitsprecher land, expected to become valuable timber decades later, make the board consider a timescale beyond immediate returns. Michigan consequently stands at the center of a conflict between extraction that assumes abundance and stewardship that recognizes both limits and the future value of living forests.