below, they raise them out; but those that have oxen put a chain or rope round the stumps, which are generally two feet high, and after the roots are cut upon one side, the oxen will pull them out.

In most cases the various operations connected with clearance were probably carried out by the farmer and his family (as was so in Johnstone’s description of the junking and burning, extracted above), with the women of the family also being involvedz‘“. Lord Selkirk also gives us evidence of extended family groups, as well as other new arrivals, ”working in common" to carry out those clearing activities where, as he put it, ”the joint efforts of a number of men are requisite, and a single individual can scarcely make any progressmz, while MacGregor (1828) mentions ”chopping frolics”, where a farmer ”procuring a few gallons of rum to drink on the occasion,

sends for his neighbours to assist him in levelling

the forest”.283 Those who had the means could

also pay others, especially men more skilled with the axe, to carry out the felling, or any of the other operationsze“, while, according to MacGregor

231

Selkirk (1805) (p. 178, not extracted) describes the “Amazonian vigour” of a woman taking on tree-felling almost as if it were an exception, though I expect that the women of the family were much more involved in all of the operations than he thought.

2“ Selkirk 1805 (p. 176, not extracted).

283 Anon. (1867) also recalled nostalgically the “the stumping frolics of the ‘good old times' “ — though in this case whiskey was the beverage that assisted the operation.

28“ Stewart (1806) commented that he had "seen many young men from Scotland who before they were two years on the Island, would earn as much money at clearing woodland, as any American in the country”, and in fact (and clearance operations were costed in monetary values throughout the period: in his diary Selkirk (1803) wrote that a man named ‘Angus Currie‘ had told him "the current price for chopping and junking“ was 25 shillings per acre, with another 25 shillings for “piling and burning" — though I note in his book of two year later, Selkirk (1805) said it cost 3 to 3‘/2 guineas per acre for "the whole work" (excluding stumping) [1 guinea = 21 shillings]. [Hill] (1819) said the cost at that time was 20 to 21 shillings an acre, but this did not include the burning stage. The cost seems to have hardly risen during the whole century, for, about thirty years after Selkirk, Lewellin (1832) said the cost of cutting down, junking and burning was 50 to 60 shillings per acre, while seven years later Hill (1839) gave the cost, for “cutting down, chopping up, and burning and fencing" as seventy shillings an acre. Then in 1841 a government enquiry was told by James Millar of Frenchfort that it had cost him £3 an acre to hire someone to “cut down, pile and burn" an area under softwood “which had grown up over an old French clearance" (Anon. 1841, p. 79). He added that clearing heavy hardwood would have cost more. James Arthur of New Glasgow gave a slightly lower value (£2. 10 shillings per acre) to the same enquiry for "cutting down, piling and burning (p. 75). Finally, a submission from the tenants of Lot 22 to the Land Commission (1860) claimed it cost “at least £4 and 10 shillings per acre to clear away the wood“ (this did not include stumping, while a witness to the Land Commission of 1875 (Alexander Anderson the surveyor) costed land clearing (excluding the stumping) at “about £3 an acre".

46

(1828), there even seems to have been some men (he says especially ”the descendants of the American Loyalists") who made a ”trade” of buying land, clearing it in part, building a house and barn, and selling it on for a profit to newly arrived immigrants.285

Undoubtedly some of the wood cut down during land clearance operations must have been set aside for the immediate use of the settler for

fencing, firewood and building purposesm. However,

as MacGregor (1828) points out, most of the wood felled had no value in the ”timber trade”: he said that due to the high cost of trans- Atlantic shipping, only ”the largest and straightest trees” that could be ”hewn square” were of value, and ”not one in ten thousand is esteemed so”. The simple fact was that land clearance produced so much surplus wood for which there was no immediate use — either on the farm or elsewhere on the island, or for export (in the early years especially, there was not the shipping infrastructure or the markets) — that the only recourse was to ”destroy" the timber on the spot by burning it.

However such burning did leave one useful product — in the form of ash that provided an

Stumping was a separate charge: Lewellin (1832) said stumping and levelling cost £2 to £3 per acre, the upper value of which is identical to the £3 per acre stated by James Millar of Frenchfort for “stumping, burning and levelling" (Anon. 1841, p, 79), and to the cost given 28 years later in a submission to the Land Commission of 1860 by the tenants of Lot 22, which stated that removing the stumps cost not less than £3 per acre. (l note that James Arthur of New Glasgow gave a slightly lower value of £1. 17 shillings per acre to the 1841 enquiry for “stumping and clearing off the stumps" (Anon. 1841, p. 75)). Finally, a witness to the Land Commission of 1875 (Donald Ferguson of Lot 35) said that his neighbour had paid $9 an acre (monetary conversion having occurred in the interval) for "turning out the old stumps" on a piece of land that had been covered by “a somewhat heavy growth" of timber that had been cut down about eight years previously, and he thought that it would have cost another $9 for piling and burning the stumps.

235 Both Lewellin (1832) (p. 191, not extracted) and Lawson

(1851) refer to the possibility of new settlers buying partly cleared farms.

”6 This is mentioned by only a few recorders: Selkirk (1805) refers to the wood from clearing being in excess of that required for “fuel or other purposes”; Stewart (1806), in describing the (and clearance procedures, refers to tree trunks being “taken away for other purposes"; MacGregor (1828) refers to logs from clearance being used for fencing; and there is a much later reference to the stumps being used for fences (Ward 1887). By 1875 a witness to the Land Commission (Donald Ferguson of Lot 35) said they were glad to have any trees cut down in clearance operations "for the fuel".