The Pristine Myth: Indians and Nature

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The Pristine MythIndians and Nature
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So dense was the original forest, it was
claimed, that a squirrel might travel from the
Atlantic to the Mississippi from tree limb to
tree limb without ever touching the ground.
Cleared of this nineteenth-century romanticism,
the original accounts tell a different story.
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So open were the woods, one author advised with
a touch of hyperbole, it was possible to drive a
stagecoach from the eastern seaboard to St. Louis
without benefit of a cleared road. The virgin
forest seemed to many explorers not much
different from the parks and champion fields they
had known in Old England.
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It was not the forests of the New World that
startled them and strained their vocabulary, but
the grasslands. The virgin forest was not
encountered in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries it was invented in the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries.
Stephen J. Pyne, Fire in America p. 6
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• The Pristine Myth
• William M. Denevin
• How did it come about?

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The Early Europeans
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The Pilgrims Experience

• The Mayflower
• Massachusetts
• November 9, 1620
• Only half the 102 people on the Mayflower
  survived the first winter

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Hernando de Soto

• 1539 Landed in Florida with 200 horses, 600
  soldiers, and 300 pigs
• Seeking gold

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La Salle

• Rene-Robert Cavalier, Sieur de la Salle
• Was the next European to visit the Arkansas
  country in 1682 140 years after Soto

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De Sotos Pigs

• Pigs carry anthrax, brucellosis, leptospirosis,
  taeniasis, trichinosis, and tuberculosis.
• Ironically, these were the ancestors of the
  razorback hogs that became the staple of frontier
  diet.

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Romantic writers of the late 18th and early 19th
centuries

• Michel de Montaigne
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• William Wordsworth
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• Henry David Thoreau
• Ralph Waldo Emerson
• James Fenimore Cooper

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Agriculture in the Americas

• Corn (maize)
• Squash and Pumpkins
• Peanuts
• Kidney and Lima Beans
• Manioc
• Peppers
• Tobacco
• Yams and Potatoes
• Tomatoes

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Maize

• Developed in Mesoamerica
• Genetic origins unknown
• Must be sown by humans
• Revolutionized agriculture

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Indians took the first steps toward modern maize
in southern Mexico, probably in the highlands,
more than six thousand years ago. Modern maize
was the outcome of a bold act of conscious
biological manipulation arguably mans first,
and perhaps his greatest, feat of genetic
engineering, Nina V. Federoff, a geneticist at
Pennsylvania State University, wrote in 2003. It
makes twenty-first century scientists sound like
pikers, I said when I contacted her.
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Thats right, she said. To get corn out of
teosinte is so you couldnt get a grant to do
that now, because it would sound so crazy. She
added, Somebody who did that today would get a
Nobel Prize! If their lab didnt get shut down
by Greenpeace, I mean.

• Charles C. Mann,
• 1491 p. 196

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The Milpa

• Maize, beans, and squash
• Nutritionally balanced
• Renews soil nutrients

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Wildlife Management
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The impact of the Indian on the forest has not
been admitted readily by historians, in much the
same way as it has been ignored by plant
ecologists in the past. More often than not the
Indian has been depicted as the uncivilized
inhabitant of an uncivilized environment even a
product of it a migratory hunter devoid of the
ability to clear the forests and cultivate the
land.

• Michael Williams,
• Americans and Their Forests p. 32

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American Indians learned how to manage trees and
other plants because they depended on them for
construction, materials, firewood, weapons,
clothing, basketry, cordage, foods, wooden tools,
dyes, and medicines. Obtaining what they needed
without destroying all the plants required an
intimate knowledge of each species and the
restraint that comes from living things.

• Thomas M. Bonnicksen,
• Americas Ancient Forests p. 106

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American Indians pruned, thinned, weeded, sowed,
tilled, and transplanted wild plants long before
the introduction of agriculture. They knew they
could promote plant growth this way and increase
the production of fruits and nuts.

• Thomas M. Bonnicksen,
• Americas Ancient Forests p. 107

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Osage-orange bows
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...the plants and game upon which American
Indians depended thrived in forest mosaics that
included a variety of successional stages. Most
animals require two or more kinds of vegetation
for their habitat, such as openings where they
can find food and closed forest for cover.

• Impact on the American Forest

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Thus the forests and the Indians sustained one
another. Remove the Indians and the forest and
wildlife must change. They were inseparable.
There is no doubt that American Indians were an
integral part of Americas ancient forests.
Thomas M. Bonnicksen, Americas Ancient Forests,
pp. 224-225
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Use of Forest Resources

• Medicines
• The sap, needles, or bark of many trees as
  laxatives
• Bark and leaves used as poultices for burns
• Trees also provided drops for earaches and
  remedies for coughs, heartburn, toothaches, and
  headaches. Bonnicksen, p. 93

• Food
• Bark was often eaten during starving times
• Northwest Indians made cakes of hemlock bark,
  which they considered a delicacy.
• Forests also provided fruits, berries, roots,
  nuts, acorns, maple syrup, and honey

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Shelter
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Plank Houses
Ellen Hrabovsky photo
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Decorative Art
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Dugout Canoes
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Indians used tremendous quantities of fuel wood
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An Eastern Woodland Village
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Discoveries and Controversy in the Amazon

• One third arid savanna
• Half upland forest the classic image of the
  tropical forest Mann 2005
• Considered to be ecologically fragile (soil,
  rain, and heat)

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Betty J. Meggers

• Smithsonian
• 1971. Amazonia Man and Culture in a Counterfeit
  Paradise
• Slash burn agriculture the only means of
  subsistence due to Amazons ecology
• Nature limits growth

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• 1940s 1950s archeological expeditions by
  Meggers and Clifford Evans to Marajó at the mouth
  of the Amazon
• Known for pottery made between 800 and 1400 A.D.
• Society was most advanced at its beginning and in
  decline afterwards
• Postulated that Marajó was occupied by immigrants
  from Peru and that the harsh climate and poor
  soil of the Amazon caused the cultural decline

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Anna C. Roosevelt

• Archeologist with the Field Museum
• Led second excavation on Marajó in 1970s using
  remote sensing technology not available to Meggers

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• The society on Marajó had developed there, had
  lasted for more than a thousand years, had
  possibly well over 100,000 inhabitants, and
  covered thousands of square miles Mann 2005.
• People of Marajó had improved the forest, not
  been defeated by it. The places occupied by the
  Marajóara showed the most luxuriant and diverse
  growth Mann 2005.
• Meggers disputes Roosevelts claims, calling it
  flawed research

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• At another site, Roosevelt discovered evidence of
  a culture that might be as much as 13,000 years
  old approximately as old as the North American
  Clovis culture.
• Roosevelt concluded that rather than the people
  of the Amazon being stifled by the environment,
  they helped to shape it.
• Roosevelts conclusions are supported by other
  scientists as well.

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• Slash and burn agriculture is impractical with
  stone axes slash burn is the product of
  European tools
• Slash and burn is commonly recognized as the
  major cause of loss, not preservation, of
  tropical forest.
• Early Spanish records tell of dense populations
  along the banks of the Amazon its tributaries.

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Terra preta do Índio

• Indian dark earth
• May make up as much as 10 of Amazonian soil
• Contains charcoal, nutrients and organic matter
• Found mixed with pottery shards
• It is anthropogenic

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• Indians of the Amazon are known to have
  cultivated at least 138 species of plants as
  early as 4,000 years ago Mann 2005.
• More than half, maybe 80 percent are trees.
• Indians planted planted fruit trees and nut
  producers to shelter the soil from rainfall.
• Some scientists believe the Amazon forest is
  anthropogenic.

Papaya plantation
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At the time of Columbus the Western Hemisphere
had been thoroughly painted with the human brush.
Agriculture occurred in as much as two thirds of
what is now the continental United States, with
large swathes of the Southwest terraced and
irrigated. Among the maize fields in the Midwest
and Southeast, mounds by the thousand stippled
the land. The forests of the eastern seaboard
had been peeled back from the coasts, which were
now lined with farms. Salmon nets stretched
across almost every ocean-bound stream in the
Northwest. And almost everywhere there was
Indian fire.

• Charles C. Mann
• 1491 p. 320