Sid Gendron spends his days milling reclaimed Ontario wood. He is also the author of Blood & Dirt, a four-generation family saga set in the Alberta foothills.
Most people meet Sawmill Sid beside a portable mill, in a driveway or a park or a municipal yard, with a storm-felled maple waiting to be turned into something worth keeping. Fewer people know that when the saw is quiet, Sid Gendron has been writing — and that the writing has turned into a novel.
It is called Blood & Dirt, and it has its own home on the web at bloodanddirt.ca.
An Empire Forged in the Frontier
Blood & Dirt is a generational saga set in the Alberta foothills, where the soil is less a resource than a record — a diary of survival written in sweat. It follows four generations of Robertson women holding a ranching empire together while corporate ambition presses in from one side and frontier justice pushes back from the other.
There is Sheila, the Ranch Queen who turned the unwritten rules of the range into law. Her daughter Fern, just as dangerous in silk as in the dirt. Violet, the bridge of the dynasty, mending fences in the timber by noon and dismantling land grabs by sunset. And Lili, the fourth generation, watching from the edges and learning how the whole thing works.
“The mountains don’t change. The women just get stronger.”
Why a Sawmiller Writes About Ranchers
The overlap is not as strange as it first sounds. Milling is a trade built on the long view. A red oak that comes off a trailer today started growing before anyone now living was born, and the boards cut from it will outlast the people standing around the mill watching them come off the deck. That is the same arithmetic a ranching family runs on: work that only makes sense if you measure it in generations rather than seasons.
It is also the arithmetic behind the day job. Everything we do at Sawmill Sid comes back to keeping usable wood out of the landfill and putting it back into the community — the same instinct to protect something that took decades to grow. You can read more about how the mill got started, or about the milling, furniture, and consulting work that keeps it running.
The Book Is Coming — You Can Get In Early
Blood & Dirt is not out yet. There is a waitlist, and joining it is the simplest way to hear about the release before anyone else. Head over, read the opening pages, meet the Robertson women, and put your name down.