Montréal is both a waypoint and a marketplace in the novel’s shifting geography of forests and trade. Travelers meet there before heading upriver, timber reaches the city only after hazardous journeys, and workers gather there when contracts fail. The city thus connects distant woods to commercial networks, while exposing the gaps between timber production, transport, and payment.

A meeting place on the route north

After ten days on foot, Jinot Sel, Josime Sel, and their companions reached Three Rivers, where they joined Omamiwinini travelers preparing to go upriver beyond Montréal. Their party included women and children and was moving before the onset of harder cold. The travelers described Odaawa people returning toward Manitoulin Island after earlier disease had driven survivors away; some had settled at Three Rivers. Their account places Montréal within a route shaped by Indigenous migration and the continuing movement of families through a landscape already altered by disease and colonization.

At First Meeting Place, another name for Montréal, an Odaawa girl gave Jinot a fern frond as the canoes passed a green rock face. The travelers did not linger: they called their farewells and continued upriver with the Sels. The brief encounter makes Montréal a point of contact rather than a destination. It links Jinot’s journey toward wage work with other people’s return toward home, and gives the route a human dimension beyond the lumber trade.

Timber, transport, and the market

Montréal also sits at the commercial end of the Gatineau’s timber route. William Scugog and his eldest son, Cato, moved between houses on the Gatineau, in Montréal, and in Québec, securing promises of money from timber-shipping merchants for pine that was still standing and often unseen. Their business depended on turning anticipated forest resources into credit before the logs had been cut, squared, and delivered.

The Sel brothers worked in the Gatineau forest, where only some pines in each plot were suitable for squaring. Squared timber was easier to assemble into rafts and less likely to roll during shipment to England, but hewing wasted about a quarter of each squared tree; unwanted trees, severed branches, bark, and chips accumulated on the ground. The waste was substantial even by the standards of Maine lumbermen. The practical advantage of a marketable, transport-ready log therefore came with a material cost at the cutting site.

At the end of one winter, the Scugogs had enough squared timber for two rafts. William’s larger raft consisted of fifty cribs, with a smaller raft belonging to Cato. The rafts traveled over smooth water but broke apart at falls, forcing the crews to take them down crib by crib and assemble them again. Once the timber reached Montréal, the commercial chain faltered: Scugog had arranged no place to moor the unwieldy rafts. The choppers and rivermen also felt that he paid them reluctantly, while tavern talk held that he was having difficulty selling the timber. Arrival in the city did not guarantee either a ready buyer or fair-seeming payment.

Work and precarity

Montréal appears as a gathering place for woodsmen as well as a timber market. After rejecting a return to the Penobscot and the landscape of old graves and depleted woods, Jinot and his companions went to the Golden Pine, a brothel frequented by woodsmen and fur traders, and planned to meet afterward at the Wing King saloon, where beds could be rented in a large storeroom. The scene locates itinerant workers within the city’s lodging and drinking economy, between jobs and away from the camps that organize their labor.

Their prospects reflect a wider labor system. At Marchand’s camp, workers rose before daylight, ate salt pork and tea, and walked to the cut with sharpened axes; the day ended with sparse food and sleep on a dirt floor beneath shared blankets. After the spring drive, many spent their wages in the nearest town and waited for another contractor to hire them. River work was particularly dangerous, and employers assigned it to Indigenous workers. Montréal’s role in this cycle is not just to receive timber: it is also a place where people whose labor moves the logs seek shelter, companionship, and the next source of wages.

Narrative significance

The city’s episodes bring together several scales of the novel’s forest history. At one scale, Montréal is a lived place of meetings, short farewells, saloons, and uncertain work. At another, it is a point in a supply chain running from the Gatineau cutting grounds through river transport toward overseas markets. That chain relies on the skill and danger of choppers and rivermen, while leaving waste in the woods and uncertainty over sales and wages along the way.

The contrast between the imagined abundance of forest and the actual difficulty of making timber profitable recurs in Montréal’s scenes. The Scugogs can assemble rafts, but falls disrupt them; they can bring timber to the city, but lack a mooring place and may struggle to sell it. Montréal therefore marks both connection and friction: the forest may appear inexhaustible to merchants, yet every stage of its conversion into wealth depends on labor, infrastructure, and markets that can fail.