New Hampshire matters less as a single, bounded setting than as part of a forest frontier repeatedly crossed by people, timber, and competing claims. The novel associates it with isolated communities whose knowledge of ridges and waterways makes them formidable in regional conflict, with sawmills that turn pine into a commercial resource, and with business networks reaching beyond the colonies. Its recurring presence connects local extraction to the broader transformation of forests and Indigenous lands.

Frontier Communities and Conflict

New Hampshire appears in an account of Scots-descended settlers recently arrived from Ulster, whom a speaker describes as clannish, proud, hard-drinking, and accustomed to remote living. They prefer the open air to the comfort of houses, endure harsh conditions, and treat ridges and watercourses as their routes and the forest as their shelter. The speaker presents their familiarity with the country as comparable to that of Indigenous people, while also describing them as key fighters in the growing antagonism between the French and the English. This portrayal makes the forest not merely a backdrop but a source of mobility and strategic advantage in a contested region.

Dud McBogle, his brothers, and his sons are identified as members of this group. Their reputation shapes how Charles Duke approaches them: when warned that McBogle is dangerous and difficult to deal with, Duke dismisses the stories with humor, but still considers bringing him into a business partnership. The contrast between the exaggerated tales and Duke’s practical interest shows how regional reputation and commercial calculation converge around New Hampshire’s remote settlements.

Sawmills and Timber Competition

The novel places McBogle’s operations in a wider timber economy. He runs five or six or more sawmills on tributaries of the Penobscot and in New Hampshire, and his inquiries into Duke’s sawmills, ships, fortune, timber tracts, and townships signal the emergence of a serious rival. His mills are productive enough to draw attention, but one is known as a “thunderstorm sawmill” because it runs properly only when rain raises the water. The detail ties industrial output to the conditions of local waterways and underscores the practical limits of early sawmilling.

Duke and his associates consider absorbing McBogle’s business through a partnership rather than simply buying him out. McBogle has ties to Elisha Cooke, the Wentworths, judges, and businessmen in New England, while Benton Dred-Peacock can offer transatlantic contacts that McBogle lacks. Duke resolves to visit with Dred-Peacock and other men, judging that they must approach in a group because they do not know how large McBogle’s following is. The proposed meeting never takes place as planned: news that Dred-Peacock has inherited an English title, a house, and a two-thousand-acre estate abruptly changes his political self-understanding and removes him from the colonial venture.

A Region in a Wider Forest Economy

New Hampshire’s place in the novel extends beyond McBogle’s mills. When Charles Duquet seeks a source of lasting wealth, he rejects furs and other animal commodities as vulnerable to scarcity, disease, overtrapping, and fickle markets. He turns instead to forests, imagining timber as a resource capable of sustaining shipbuilding, housing, and fuel. The southern English colonies’ mast-pine trade offers a model, and Duquet proposes to accumulate capital in furs before shifting into timber. New Hampshire belongs to this developing geography of forest extraction, where the promise of permanence depends on treating woodland as a continuing supply.

The same forest economy is shown changing the landscape through the spread of sawmills. In a disputed border region among Maine, New Hampshire, and New Brunswick, Achille finds a Frenchman recruiting a crew to cut pine through the winter and work rafts when the ice breaks. The account describes logging in hundreds of places: large softwoods fall, seedlings return, but the new growth alters the density and succession of the forest. The woods remain alive, yet they are no longer what they were. Achille recognizes a parallel with the Mi’kmaq, whom settlers use and diminish as they take the forest’s wealth.

Indigenous Land and the Cost of Expansion

The timber frontier is inseparable from colonial dispossession. Père Crème tells a French official that Indigenous people suffer as their land is taken and their children are drawn toward French goods and ways. He emphasizes that the country belongs to them through generations of residence, even as French officials regard Indigenous people chiefly as military auxiliaries in the struggle to hold territory. Although this exchange does not locate the dispute solely in New Hampshire, it supplies the political context for the frontier economy in which the region participates: land and forest are claimed by colonial powers while the people who have long lived there are treated as expendable.

The Mi’kmaq articulate that conflict in terms of an encroaching wave. Their land is increasingly shared with settlers and their animals, whose grazing and foraging compete with Indigenous food practices; boats and nets take fish, while introduced plants displace local ones. The loss is cumulative rather than confined to a single confrontation. As sawmills multiply and cutover tracts change species composition, the forest’s gradual alteration accompanies the narrowing of Indigenous access and livelihood. New Hampshire therefore signifies both the commercial expansion of timber and the human and ecological costs obscured by the language of abundant frontier resources.