Just borrowed a copy of AS from a friend, and what rankles me the most (besides the awful prose) is that Galts Gulch is so unrealistic. I mean, how could they possibly make a tractor in such a small rural settlement? They would have to take a lot of men to mine the iron ore, more men to mine coal to make coke with, make a lot of equipment to make a blast furnace to refine it into pig iron, make a lot of equipment to refine it into steel. Then they would have to make tools to make machine tools to tool the steel into parts. Especially for the engine, this can not be hand-tooled! The tolerances are too low for that. It takes a large infrastructure chain composed of many machine shops, mines, and mills to make a tractor. Completely out of reach for a community like Galts Gulch.
And also, how can there only be one lumberjack in Galts Gulch? Lumber jacking is a highly cooperative work process. It takes teams of laborers to build access roads to the site and teams of woodcutters to chop down each tree safely and transport it to storage.