From 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, By Charles C. Mann
This book came highly recommended. I second the motion.
Adriaen van der Donck was a lawyer who in 1641 transplanted himself to the Hudson River Valley, then part of the Dutch colony of Nieuw Nederland. He became a kind of prosecutor and bill collector for the Dutch West India Company, which owned and operated the colony as a private fiefdom.
Whenever possible, van der Donck ignored his duties and tramped around the forests and valleys upstate. He spent a lot of time with the Haudenosaunee, whose insistence on personal liberty fascinated him…
When a committee of settlers decided to complain to the government about the Dutch West India Company’s dictatorial behavior, it asked van der Donck…to compose a protest letter and travel with it to the Hague. His letter set down the basic rights that in his view belonged to everyone on American soil–the first formal call for liberty in the colonies…
The Dutch government responded to the letter by taking control of New Amsterdam…Angered by their loss of power, the company directors effectively prevented van der Donck’s return for five years. While languishing in Europe, he wrote a nostalgic pamphlet extolling the land he had come to love.
Every fall, he remembered, the Haudenosaunee set fire to “the woods, plains, and meadows,” to “thin out and clear the woods of all dead substances and grass, which grow better the ensuing spring.”
At first the wildfire had scared him, but over time van der Donck had come to relish the spectacle of the yearly burning.
“Such a fire is a splendid sight when one sails on the [Hudson and Mohawk] rivers at night while the forest is ablaze on both banks,” he recalled….”Fire and flames are seen everywhere and on all sides…a delightful scene to look on from afar.” …
And it was all blessedly carbon-neutral.
Early in the last century, ecologists discovered the phenomenon of “succession,” the more or less well-defined sequence by which ecosystems fill in open land…If ecological succession were unstoppable, the continents would be covered by climax-stage vegetation: a world of great trees, dark and silent. Early succession species would have vanished.
Luckily for these species, succession is often interrupted…For more than ten thousand years, most North American ecosystems have been dominated by fire…
Set off by lightning, wildfires reset the ecological clock, dialing the array of plants and animals back a few successional stages. Fire benefits plants that need sunlight, while inhibiting those that love the cool gloaming of the forest floor; it encourages the animals that need those plants even as it discourages others; in turn predator populations rise and fall…
I’m told that the Australian Aborigines also employed fire extensively.
In the Northeast, Indians always carried a deerskin pouch full of flints, Thomas Morton reported in 1637, which they used “to set fire of the country in all places where they come.”
The flints ignited torches, which were as important to the hunt as bows and arrows. Deer in the Northeast; alligators in the Everglades; buffalo in the prairies; grasshoppers in the Great Basin; rabbits in California; moose in Alaska: all were pursued by fire.
Native Americans made big rings of flame, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “by firing the leaves fallen on the ground, which, gradually forcing animals to the center, they there slaughter them with arrows, darts, and other missiles.”
Not that Indians always used fire for strictly utilitarian purposes. At nightfall tribes in the Rocky Mountains entertained the explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark by applying torches to sap-dripping fir trees, which then exploded like Roman candles.
Barbecue and Fireworks. How American can you get?
Rather than domesticate animals for meat, Indians retooled ecosystems to encourage elk, deer, and bear. Constant burning of undergrowth increased the numbers of herbivores, the predators that fed on them, and the people who ate them both.
Rather than the thick, unbroken, monumental snarl of trees imagined by Thoreau, the great eastern forest was an ecological kaleidoscope of garden plots, blackberry rambles, pine barrens, and spacious groves of chestnut, hickory, and oak. The first white settlers in Ohio found woodlands that resembled English parks–they could drive carriages through the trees. Fifteen miles from shore in Rhode Island, Giovanni da Verrazzano found trees so widely spaced that the forest “could be penetrated even by a large army.”…
Incredible to imagine today, bison roamed from New York to Georgia…When the Haudenosaunee hunted these animals, the historian William Cronon observed they “were harvesting a foodstuff which they had consciously been instrumental in creating. Few English observers could have realized this. People accustomed to keeping domestic animals lacked the conceptual tools to recognize that the Indians were practicing a more distant kind of husbandry of their own.”
Indian fire had its greatest impact in the middle of the continent, which Native Americans transformed into a prodigious game farm…
When Indian societies disintegrated from disease and mistreatment, forest invaded savanna in Wisconsin, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, and the Texas hill country.
Europeans forgot what the landscape had looked like and why. Captain John Palliser, traveling through the same lands as Fidler six decades later, lamented the Indians’ “disastrous habit of setting the prairie on fire for the most trivial and worse than useless reasons.”
Afterward even the memory of indigenous fire faded. By the twentieth biologists were stoutly denying its existence. The “open, park-like woods” seen by early settlers, Harvard naturalist Hugh Raup asserted in 1937, were not caused by fire; they “have been, from time immemorial, characteristic of vast areas in North America.”
Raup’s summary description of the idea that they were due to regular, wide-scale Indian burning? “Inconceivable.”
I wonder, would that be considered the scientific concensus of the time?
“It is at least a fair assumption,” a widely used college forestry textbook remarked in 1973, “that no habitual or systematic burning was carried out by Indians.”
I guess so. Luckily, science is always marching (slowly) on.
In the western United States, the geographer Thomas R. Vale wrote in 2002, the “modest” Indian population “modified only a tiny fraction of the total landscape for their everyday living needs.”
Vale is in the minority now.
Spurred in part by historians like Cronon, most scientists have changed their minds about Indian fire. Using clever laboratory techniques, they have convinced themselves that in most cases the tribal lore and old chronicles were right all along…Carrying their flints and torches, Native Americans were living in balance with Nature–but they had their thumbs on the scale.
Shaped for their comfort and convenience, the American landscape had come to fit their lives like comfortable clothing. It was a highly successful and stable system, if “stable” is the appropriate word for a regime that involves routinely enshrouding miles of countryside in smoke and ash.
Kinda makes you wanna dress up in buckskins and blow off a few Roman candles, doesn’t it? Well, feel free. It’s still your country. Something we should all be grateful for.