Vast as they were, the rich forests of British North America had little commercial importance until Napoleon’s blockade of European ports drove English wood prices up and generated a transatlantic commerce that made wood the great export of early nineteenth-century British North America. Furs, which had dominated shipments from Lower Canada until 1790, constituted less than 10 per cent of the total by 1810,
When wood products, including ships, accounted for three-quarters of the colony’s exports by value. The trade was heavily concentrated until 1830 on the production of square timber—baulks, or “sticks” of wood hewn square with axes—but exports of sawn deals (7.5 centimetres/3 inches thick), boards (5 centimetres/2 inches), and planks (2.5 centimetres/1 inch) increased steadily thereafter. By 1840 they accounted for more than a third of British wood imports from the colonies.
By then there was barely a tributary of the Miramichi, St. John, and Ottawa rivers in which the forest had not felt the bite of the lumberman’s axe. Wood (hewn timber and sawn lumber, as well as minor commodities such as barrel staves) came to the Quebec market from the Trent and Richelieu watersheds, and crossed the Atlantic from the Saguenay and many an inlet on the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Tied to the rivers, the trade first moved rapidly inland, removing the best pine trees from a relatively narrow band of the mixed hemlock-white pine-northern hardwood forest. Only as the supply of large, accessible trees dwindled and sawmill capacity increased were less impressive trees cut. Then operations pushed back up smaller streams in which lumberers sometimes needed to blast away obstructions, build dams from which water could be released to flush out the cut, or construct “canals” through swamps, and slides and flumes round rapids. So although extensive tracts denuded of timber were rare in the early nineteenth century, by 1840 large, heavily culled parts of the forest had been changed in character and in the mix of species they contained. And because fires were frequent—if rarely as notorious as the “Great Fire” of 1825 on the Miramichi, which ran over thousands of square miles—many burned and blackened areas scarred the landscape before mid-century.
Three factors—technology, climate, and regulations—shaped the early timber industry. Technology imposed a striking unity on the trade; whether producing timber or lumber, the industry depended upon the strength of men and beasts and the energy of wind and water. From Nova Scotia to the Canadian Shield, trees were felled with axes, hauled to riverside by oxen (or, increasingly, horses), and floated out on the spring freshet. All of this was hard work, and some of it was dangerous. The best trees in the forest towered roughly 46 metres (150 feet) and considerable skill and effort was needed to bring them down safely. The single bitted poll axe used to fell trees and lop branches from them weighed 2 kilograms (about 5 pounds). The broad-axe used to produce a smooth, square-hewn face was twice as heavy. Even after trees were bucked (cut into more manageable lengths) and squared (which wasted a quarter of the wood), sticks often measured 12 or 15 metres (40 or 50 feet) in length
Lumbering on the St. John River captures the annual flurry of activity on the river near St. John as rafts of timber and logs from the upper valley were sorted and sold. Watercolour (nineteenth century) by Lieutenant James Cummings Clarke.
And 60 centimetres (24 inches) a side. These were cumbersome to move and to load aboard sailing vessels. So the river drive, by which sticks and logs were brought to port or mill, was the most hazardous part of the lumberers’ operation. Especially on narrow streams, crews were kept frantically busy using poles or “cant hooks” to guide their cut around snag and shoals. Men were often immersed in icy water; death and injury were constant risks.
Climate set the annual rhythm of the industry. Because trees fell to the axe more easily when their sap no longer ran, and the labour of hauling massive sticks was much reduced on snow and ice, lumbering was essentially a winter occupation. The downriver drive depended on the raised water levels of the spring snowmelt, and from Quebec, at least, shipping was limited to the summer and fall. Sawmills were also limited in season by their reliance on water power.
Regulations set the framework of the industry. Although there were important differences between the colonies, the tendency everywhere was to restrict and regulate the access of individual lumberers to the forest. Eighteenth-century imperial regulations that were intended to save masts for the King’s navy proved anachronistic and ineffective in the face of expanding settlement and a rising market for wood, and by the mid - 1820s licences were required to cut trees on ungranted (Crown) land. Payment of a low—but much resented—fee gave lumberers a short-term right to take a certain quantity of wood from specified tracts of the public domain.
When the trade began there was an expanding market for wood, good timber was readily available, and little capital was required to exploit it. Family groups and partnerships of three to six individuals, perhaps farmers attracted to work in the nearby forest during their off-season, dominated the trade. Often part-time operations, these ventures generally produced between twenty and two hundred tons of timber a year and sold it to a local storekeeper for cash or credit. They were frequently closely integrated with the other tasks of rural life, as the 1818 diary of William Dibblee, a New Brunswick farmer, neatly reveals. After several entries through January and March recording the activity of his boys. Jack and William, getting timber, Dibblee wrote:
April Jit All Fools Day.. .Too Cold for Sap—Boys geting Timber—Fredk [another son] 8c Ketchum [a young neighbour] at Sugar Camp—Afternoon Fredk Hawling Timber—Barked my Twine for Long Net.
April 3rd... It snowed last Night 3 Inches... Boys geting Timber—Bad Spring.
April 4th... Boys now Taping as fast as They can—The Sap now Runs a little...
April 30th Set out Some Onions. Sowed Some Lettuce and Pepper Grass. Wm. and Fredk. Hawling Timber. Boys fixing Meadow 8c Mending Fence.
This informal, easy-to-enter trade that linked settlers through storekeepers and merchants in provincial ports to commercial houses across the Atlantic was an important supplement to a farming life.
Changes began to be felt in the second quarter of the century, as large entrepreneurs increased their control of the trade. The changes they implemented had their roots in the growing capital requirements of the industry as it moved into remote and difficult areas and diversified into lumber production. At the same time, higher licence fees and tighter regulation of the Crown domain (which limited illegal cutting) increased the costs of forest exploitation. And the competition and the cyclical booms and busts that plagued the trade were especially detrimental to small, independent operators. Taken together, these forces squeezed small family ventures and opened the way to commercial integration and a few powerful companies.
The timber trade, unlike the trade in fish and furs, was a considerable stimulus to growth and investment in the colonies. It encouraged immigration to North America by making cheap transatlantic passages available on vessels that would otherwise have sailed westbound in ballast after delivering their wooden freights to Britain.
Ship building, which expanded in tandem with the timber trade and provided a large part of the fleet that carried wood across the Atlantic, employed over 3,300 people in Quebec during 1825 alone. Many thousands worked in the trade, in camps, on the drive, and in sorting and loading wood for shipment. The demand for hay and food in the lumber camps stimulated agriculture. Countless small contributions came from local farmers who hauled hay, oats, and other provisions into the forest during the winters. Larger quantities of oats, beef, pork, and livestock from the farms of Prince Edward Island supplied lumberers on the Miramichi; and fine flour, pork, quartered beef, butter, biscuits, and other supplies went from Quebec to feed “the great number of men in the Woods” of northern New Brunswick.
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