The Napoleonic Wars cut Great Britain off from her customary suppliers of timber in Scandinavia. As an alternative, she turned to her British North American colonies and extended imperial tariff protection and other inducements to encourage the exploitation of the massive pine forest for export purposes. The valley of the Saint John River became one of the centres of this lucrative trade. For the inhabitants of Saint John, both merchant and labourer, this meant added prosperity.
The benefits were less certain for the timber cutters who were known as "shantymen". Trees felled in the winter, cleaned, squared off and dragged to the water's edge were, in the spring, tied together into rafts and floated downstream. The farmers who did the work in winter earned some cash for their trouble but all too often drank or squandered their earnings. Physical injuries were also always a possibility. The effects of the timber trade upon the viability of the farming economy are a matter of dispute. Contemporary observers hinted that the absence of the men from their farms in the spring and early summer tended to retard agriculture, but current research questions this viewpoint. Nevertheless, conditions undoubtedly improved after the abolition of alcohol in the camps, but the benefits of the timber trade for the forest workers remained uncertain. This engraving from The Illustrated London News (April 7, 1866) shows structures which were erected on the Saint John River in order to facilitate the traffic in timber.
