Annie Proulx has returned to Canada setting her tale initially in colonial Quebec prior to the defeat by James Wolfe. As in English Canada the virgin forest that once covered most of what is now Eastern North America is seen as oppressive and threatening and in need of conquering, being fought back to allow civilization to flourish. French Missionaries brought their old country diseases with them decimating the Native Populations of America. The French Signeurial system exploited indentured habitants. The despised corvé forced them to work on roads and civic projects.
We begin with a habitant, René who having survived his 3 year servitude takes up land and begins a family. About 80 pages in our focus switches from René to Duquet who engages in the fur trade after fleeing his Signeurial Servitude and then sails to France where he books passage to China. Sixty pages later we switch back to René’s children who are Migmaw or Métis and the French Missionaries who try to convert them to European ways.
Proulx has a turn of phrase that takes some getting used to, not to mention the fact that she imitates the sintax used by the French and Migmaw in English.
As Howard Zinn, Harari, and even Prince Charles similarly explain the arrival of Europeans upset the hunter/gather lifestyle of indigenous peoples. Not only was that diet more varied and healthy, but it allowed the people to move about so that they not deplete any one area with the impact of their presence. By contrast agriculture required the forest be cleared and tied the colonists to a single plot of land and hung their fortunes on the success of a few crops. The indigenous people who were supplanted had no concept of land ownership and were vulnerable to this invasion.
It gets worse, the European invaders considered the indigenous people less than human and when they resisted the incursion a bounty was put on their heads and troops interceded on behalf of the settlers to drive out or slaughter the “Indians’ on their ancestral lands.
The novel covers a broad sweep of history the characters we follow becoming lumber barons
operating in the white society to which they have become assimilated. The Duquets become Dukes and successive generations continue the lumber trade from the board room rather than as forest workers. The sweep continues to New Zealand embracing the Maori and their struggles with European incursions before returning to the Dukes in New England.
Summary
Annie Proulx’ Barkskins covers over three centuries of the timber industry in America in 736 pages. It begins with the habitants of Lower Canada fighting back the oppressive forest to eke out a living among the stumps and moves on to the forests of New England, Maine, Ohio, and the Michigan Peninsula with side-trips to places such as China, Brazil and New Zealand. It touches on Native issues for First Nations peoples once roamed the entire continent. Timber barons saw forests as limitless and felt no need to replenish the resource by replanting. Harvesting moved from chopping with an axe to hand saws to portable power saws. Finishing went from squaring logs to saw pits to gang saws driven by water wheels to whirling blades that cut thousands of board feet per day. Forest products were moved by rolling logs onto river ice hauled by oxen, steam driven “donkeys”, to rail lines and eventually logging trucks. Logging methods turned millions of acres of trees into stumps and shoulder high slash fueling monstrous conflagrations and eventually proving there was a limit to clear cutting. It takes half a century for a forest to regrow in favourable conditions. The men who chopped these trees were seen as expendable and logging remains a dangerous trade to this day though modern tree harvesters place a man inside a protected cab sitting in front of a computer terminal where he identifies the tree species and the behemoth does the rest.
Raw statistics and history are one thing but it is in the cost in human lives, the machinations, and struggles of people to make a living that the real drama lies. The continent was opened up by the search for buck-toothed rodents the original tree harvesters whose pelts provided the felt for the fashionable millinery trade. The insatiable thirst for beaver pelts extirpated them from much of their former range. It was only later entrepreneurs saw the forests for the trees and the timber trade was born. Slash and burn tactics the world over yield farm land of only limited fertility denuding the land of forests, silting stream beds and fueling algae growth with agricultural run-off. Hunter-gather societies have been displaced by agriculturalists whose livelihood is tied to single crops at the whims of weather and stock exchanges. The lumber industry has found the limits of old growth forests and corporations now look to ever more remote and inaccessible stands and fight with environmentalists over the last vestiges of virgin trees. First Nations struggle with the desire to protect Mother Earth and the desire to provide jobs for their people. What worth a tree if it can’t be cut?
Finally the book looks at the study of forest ecology and the attempt to reclaim what was lost.
If I have any complaint it is that the book is too long and tries to accomplish too much in one tome.
