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THIS PAPER PRESENTS a portrait of sub-contracting foresters at work in northeastern Ontario in the opening decades of the 20th century. Drawing upon a little-known source, the provincial forestry registers for Sudbury and North Bay Districts, the author traces the evolution of a sample of 269 sub-contractors. The length and locality of their activities, their ethnicity, the extent and nature of their contracts, and the number of firms they did business with, are the study's main variables. Although there is no doubt about their economic precariousness in some respects, notably the fact that they were constantly moving their operations and suffering frequent interruptions, it appears in the long run to have been exaggerated in the literature. In fact, the economic performance of paper-makers in the region was not much more brilliant than that of the sub-contractors. In addition the way Ontario assigned cutting permits allowed several other regional forestry enterprises to work at the same time. Regional monopolies in the woods, such as we find in Québec and New Brunswick, did not occur. Also, the sub-contractors showed a surprising degree of flexibility by the contracts they negotiated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]