Washington marks the Pacific frontier of the novel’s lumber economy: a place where eastern loggers pursue enormous trees, where high-lead camps make climbing and rigging part of the work, and where companies seek coastal timber for distant markets. It represents not an untouched escape from the depleted East but a further stage in the industry’s expansion, bringing new opportunities alongside severe risks to workers and forests.

Western Migration and the New Timber Frontier

After Blony Jacko and Pollo Jacko find the reservation constricting, they move west, first working a winter in Idaho. There, river driving still carries logs to sawmills; in spring, fellow workers talk of California, Oregon, and Washington, where trees are said to rise three hundred feet. A logger named Shirt tells Blony of an immense green wall of timber along the coast, a story that turns the western forest into both a landscape of astonishing scale and an invitation to travel farther. The brothers’ westward movement follows the lumber trade’s restless search for new stands as familiar grounds and ways of working change.

High-Lead Work and Blony’s Death

In Washington, Blony works as a choker setter, the lowest position in a high-lead logging camp. He wants to become a climber after watching Napoleon Tessier ascend a giant Douglas fir with spurs, rope, saw, and ax, trim its limbs, and top it so the bare spar can be rigged for moving large logs. Although the camp boss initially looks down on Blony and Pollo as East Coasters and mixed-race workers, Tessier argues that climbers are scarce, and Blony is allowed to try. His first climb succeeds; he takes to the work and grows faster, hoping to outdo Tessier.

On his last climb, Blony plans a stunt: after topping the tree, he will stand on his head and whistle. The spar splits as the heavy crown hinges over, trapping him. Tessier must climb back up and cut the spar below him; Blony falls with the tree still holding him, and the men bury him that way. His death makes the danger of the new work immediate and personal. Afterward, no one wants to climb and rig tall trees, and his relatives’ later logging choices unfold under the shadow of that loss.

Logging Work, Technology, and Risk

The labor system that reaches Washington has a longer history in the northeastern woods, where the Sels and other workers fell trees, build booms and roads, drive logs, and work in sawmills. The work is organized around the movement of timber: a camp boss insists that water is essential to getting logs to the sawmill, and river drivers keep logs moving through hazardous currents. In the older camps, Indigenous workers are assigned much of this dangerous river work, treated as if they were naturally suited to it rather than as laborers exposed to unequal risks.

Across generations, tools and transport alter the work without removing its dangers. The poll ax gives way to the double-bitted ax, then the crosscut saw; sawmills replace older gang saws with circular and band saws. Oxen give way to horses, then to donkey engines and Shay-geared locomotives. As roads penetrate forests away from rivers, trucks and roads displace the river drives. In the western forests, machinery and rigging allow loggers to handle trees beyond the scale of ordinary ax work, but the resulting increase in reach and speed helps bring the continent’s remaining old forests within the industry’s grasp.

Timber, Markets, and Forest Loss

Washington’s timber is connected to a widening commercial network. Duke & Breitsprecher sends its first shipload of its best pine to Sydney, Australia, and its representative, Lawyer Flense, meets a buyer interested in securing a decade of supply and finding a partner for efficient logging camps in New Zealand. The proposed arrangement links Michigan timber, Pacific-coast forests, overseas demand, and the company’s pursuit of new sources. Washington is part of this broader coastal expansion rather than a self-contained local industry.

The company’s later account of its western operations exposes the tension between commercial planting and forest conservation. Dieter says the firm supports replanting a year after a cut, calling the process balanced. When challenged over the replacement of ancient redwoods and the effects on species diversity, soil, erosion, and watersheds, he answers that the company cuts what grows along the shoreline while leaving rougher inland timber untouched because removing it would require costly rails and engines. The exchange makes the limits of that assurance plain: access costs, rather than ecological protection, determine which forests are left standing. Washington thus belongs to a narrative in which new markets and machinery extend the lumber business even as the damage and the risks of extraction accumulate.