This book encompasses a historically based literary analysis through an ecocritical perspective, in a thematic examination of how backwoodsmen from the seventeenth-century through the nineteenth-century are portrayed in four works of French Canadian literature. Literary depictions of these men of European origin reveal the dominant culture's changing attitudes toward Amerindians and land use, exposing each period's problematic behavior vis-à-vis different cultures and the environment and the intercultural connections and business relationships that point to the way forward.