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Updated: April 30, 2025
After him come the axmen, the ploughmen and the artisans, and orchards and mills and oatfields creep on a little farther into the wilderness.
"They're a little larger than the average," her companion explained, "Still, that's the kind of thing you run up against when you buy land to start a ranch or clear the ground for a mine. Chopping, sawing up, splitting those giants doesn't fill one with languorous dreams; the only dreams that our axmen indulge in materialize. It's an unending, bracing struggle.
Hundreds of axmen, going ahead, cut a road twelve feet wide, along which cavalry, infantry, artillery and wagons and pack horses stretched for miles. The weather was beautiful, the forest was both beautiful and grand, and to most of the Englishmen and Virginians the march appealed as a great and romantic adventure.
With French and Indians all about him he had not the remotest chance and, helpless, he was compelled to watch the Marquis de Montcalm march to what he felt was going to be a French triumph. Swarms of Indian scouts and skirmishers preceded the army and Canadian axmen cut a way for the artillery, but to Robert's great amazement these operations lasted only a short time.
Except from the water, it was almost impregnable; cannon might have reached it from shore, but two axmen could have held the narrow way against an army. Brian laughed softly and ordered the men to remain where they were. "What are you going to do, master?" queried old Turlough anxiously. "I am going to lean on my sword, as you advised me," chuckled Brian, and rode on alone.
Not knowing what we had to expect in the mountains I fortunately ordered about twenty of my own men to bring axes at their saddlebows. We'll put 'em all at work." In a few minutes thirty good axmen were cutting down trees, saplings and bushes, and more than a hundred others were strengthening the lean-tos, thatching roofs, and making rude but serviceable floors.
Hire of 30 men as axmen, and for preparing, constructing, and erecting stations and signals in advance, from June 1 to November 30, 1842, being 183 days, at $1 each per day 5,490.00 Hire of 30 other men as instrument carriers, chain bearers, canoe men, and packmen for 183 days, as above, at $1 per day each 5,490.00 Hire of 1 carpenter and 2 cooks 183 days, as above, at $1.25 per day each 686.25
And I may state here, although it must sound like a large story, that during those five working days the ten of us felled, sawed and rolled out on the ice two hundred and eighty-six cords of white-birch bolts. Of course it was the saw and the two relieving spans of horses which did the greater part of the work, the four axmen doing little more than fell the tall birch-trees.
If we need a few axmen, we can pick 'em up at Marquette. I think this gang'll stick. I picked 'em." There was not a young man in the lot. They were most of them in the prime of middle life, between thirty and forty, rugged in appearance, "cocky" in manner, with the swagger and the oath of so many buccaneers, hard as nails.
So that at high noon they rode away to the east, threescore strong, with Brian and Cathbarr and the remaining eight axmen in the van. Brian did not spare either man or horse that day, for there was little food left them; when midnight came they had slipped past Galway and were ready to ride south, though they all went to rest supperless.
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