Down to Earth_Nature's Role in American History

by Ted Steinberg

  In 1966, anthropologist Henry Dobyns created a huge stir when he proposed a figure in the 10- to 12-million-person range, revising that number upward in 1983 to 18 million. Employing a “top-down” approach, Dobyns used “depopulation ratios” based on his assessment of how various epidemic diseases—the most significant factor in the decline of the Native American people—affected the various Indian groups. He then broke up the continent into regions and multiplied the lowest figure for an area by the ratio, yielding the highest population total to date. Predictably, Dobyns and the so-called high counters have been accused of being pro-Indian.7

  If the population in 1492 was indeed much closer to 18 million than to 1 million, then the rationale behind European conquest begins to unravel. The Europeans justified wresting the land from its aboriginal inhabitants on the grounds that the native peoples were not really using it. Compared to the population of Britain or Spain in the seventeenth century, the North American landscape must have seemed sparsely populated to the European eye. Those who did live on the continent, moreover, were seen practicing hunting and gathering, roaming the land like wild animals in the Europeans’ view. Such small numbers of people living a mobile existence, in other words, had left the landscape in a wasted, unimproved condition. As the white settlers saw it—eventually taking their cue from philosopher John Locke—anyone entering such a wilderness who then set about making improvements was entitled to ownership over the property. Increase the size of the aboriginal population, however, and the Europeans begin to look like conquerors and thieves rather than “settlers” of virgin land.

  To cite any population estimate, high or low, without rehearsing a litany of qualifications papers over the tremendous controversy that lies at the heart of the population debate. The temptation simply to throw up one’s hands is enormous. Anthropologist Shepard Krech, after reviewing all the currently available literature, argues for a figure in the range of four to seven million. Those inclined toward the highest numbers, he points out, have assumed that lethal European diseases emerged early, spread across wide expanses of the continent, and were always fatal to vast numbers of Native Americans. Yet the documentary record for these epidemics is extremely minimal, and some of the evidence that does exist undermines this set of assumptions. That said, whether Krech’s estimate is indeed sensible, as he submits, remains open to debate. Probably the only sure thing that can be said is that the notion of a true figure for the precontact population is a chimera.8

  MANY EGG BASKETS

  To survive in North America, the Indians exploited the seasonal diversity of the various landscapes they inhabited. This was especially true in the far northern reaches of New England, where cold and frost, in addition to the stony soil deposited by the glaciers, made agriculture a risky and difficult venture. Compelled to adopt hunting and gathering, Native Americans found that in a temperate climate, the spring and summer months offered a plentiful supply of food. From March through May, the Indians used nets, weirs, and canoes to catch fish on their way to spawn upstream, while migrating birds such as Canada geese and mourning doves further bolstered the food supply. In the summer months, they also gathered various kinds of nuts and berries. By the fall, however, as the temperature turned colder and the region’s plants began storing energy in their roots, the Indians ventured inland to find other sources of food. Eventually breaking up into small hunting groups, men set off after beaver, moose, deer, and bear, tracking the animals through the prints they left in the snow; women cleaned and prepared the meat, while tending to the campsites. In contrast to the summer, when food was in abundance, February and March often spelled privation, especially if a lack of snow made it more difficult to follow the animals. The Indians thus exploited various habitats, migrating across the landscape depending on the season of the year. As one European observer noted, “They move … from one place to another according to the richness of the site and the season.”9

  In the South, a warmer climate more conducive to agriculture allowed the Indians to combine farming with hunting and gathering to produce an even more secure subsistence diet. With the onset of warmer weather, late in February or early in March, men built fires to clear trees and ready the ground for planting. Women then formed the soil into small hills, sowing corn and beans, while planting squash and pumpkins in trenches between the mounds. Mixing such crops together had a number of important benefits that typically led to bumper agricultural yields. As the different plants competed for sunlight and moisture, the seed stock eventually became hardier. The crop mix may also have cut down on pests, as insects found it difficult to find their favorite crop in the tangled mass of stalks. Meanwhile, bacteria found on the roots of the beans helped to replace the nitrogen that the corn sucked out of the soil, enhancing the field’s fertility. But the so-called “nitrogen-fixing bacteria” were never able to add back all of the nitrogen lost, and fertility eventually declined, spurring the Indians to move on to find another area of trees to burn.10

  Southern Indians scheduled hunting and gathering around their shifting agricultural pursuits. In the spring, after burning the trees, men set off to catch fish. In the summer, the Indians along the coast moved further inland to hunt turkeys and squirrels and gather berries, returning back downstream in time to harvest crops in the fall. The Indians were so attuned to the seasonal variation that characterized the forest that they often gave the months such names as “herring month” (March) or “strawberry month” (June) to describe the food they had come to expect from the landscape. Meanwhile, as the weather turned colder, nuts and acorns proliferated, attracting such game as deer and bears. As the animals fattened themselves on the food, their coats became thicker, making them inviting targets for Indians, who in the winter hunted them for meat and clothing.11

  A similar seasonal subsistence cycle based on farming and hunting and collecting prevailed further west on the Great Plains. Apart from climate, which despite the potential for drought favored agriculture, soil on the midwestern prairies was as much as a full foot deeper than the two to four inches commonly found in New England. In the valleys of the Platte, Loup, and Republican rivers in present-day Nebraska and Kansas, Pawnee men and women capitalized on the excellent soil and favorable weather conditions by first burning areas during the early spring. Women then sowed corn, beans, and squash in small plots during April and May, hoeing them periodically. Women also spent the spring gathering Indian potatoes, an abundant root crop often relied on in periods of scarcity. In July and August the Pawnees packed the dry foods—wild and domesticated—that they harvested in the river valleys and used them to sustain themselves as they journeyed to the mixed-grass prairie west of the 98th meridian to hunt buffalo. (Buffalo thrive on the grasses—blue grama, buffalo grass, and red three-awn—primarily because they find them easy to digest.) In September, the Pawnees returned to the river valleys to harvest their crops, before leaving again in November for the plains to hunt buffalo. The primary goal of this system of hunting and horticulture—in existence for centuries before the coming of white settlers to the plains region—was to obtain a diversified set of food sources. It might be termed a “not-putting-all-your-eggs-in-one-basket” approach to deriving a living from the land.12

  Obviously the Indians transformed the ecology of North America in their efforts to survive. But two points about their particular relationship with the land are worth underscoring. First, ample evidence suggests that in many instances, Native Americans exploited the landscape in a way that maintained species population and diversity. In California, for instance, Indians pruned shrubs for the purpose of basket making, but took care to do so during the dormant fall or winter period when the plant’s future health would not be jeopardized. Similarly, shifting agriculture tended to mimic natural patterns in a way that modern agriculture, with its emphasis on single-crop production, does not. Second, dietary security, not the maximization of crop yields, was the most important element of Native American subsistence. At times this decisi
on not to stockpile food could hurt them, even if it contributed to long-term ecological balance. It was common in northern New England for Indians to go hungry and even starve during February and March (when animal populations dipped), rather than to store more food during the summer for winter use. While this failure to maximize food sources may have jeopardized Indian lives, it also helped to keep population densities relatively low. The low density, in turn, may have contributed to the overall stability of these ecosystems, preserving the future prospects of the Indians’ mode of food production. North America may well have suffered from a relative lack of biological resources (at least when compared with Eurasia), but the Indians managed to see in the land a vast expanse of possibilities for ensuring food security.13

  PLEASE FORGIVE US

  None of this is meant to suggest that the Indians viewed the land and its plant and animal life in only a practical light. In fact, Native Americans invested nature with a great deal of symbolic value, engaging in ritual behavior and telling stories that tended to complicate the relationship they had with the natural world.

  Indian understandings of animals are a case in point. Among the Northern Algonquians, for example, the boundary between people and game animals appears to have been quite fluid and porous. Beavers were seen as participating in social relationships with human beings. One account from the 1760s, written after the killing of a bear, observed that Ojibwa hunters took the animal’s head “in their hands, stroking and kissing it several times; begging a thousand pardons for taking away her life; calling her their relation and grandmother.”14 Unlike the Europeans, who tended to uphold a clear and distinct difference in their minds between themselves and the animal world, some Indian groups seemed inclined to blur such boundaries.

  The Cherokee Indians in the South, who hunted deer, believed that the animals experienced emotions just as human beings did. Were they to fail to treat deer with the proper respect, the animals, as the Indians saw it, would become angry and act out their feelings on the hunters. According to one Cherokee myth, if a hunter forgot to ask forgiveness for killing a deer, he might make the animal so vengeful that it would retaliate by inflicting disease. The emotional bond they had with animals, in combination with the fear of retaliation, may have led the Indians to refrain from killing more creatures than they needed to survive, creating in the words of one anthropologist a kind of “natural balance” based on the idea that “nature is capable of striking back.” But that said, Cherokee myths say nothing about the consequences that might befall them if they killed too many deer. Indeed, any such conservation impulse might well have been undermined by their belief in the reincarnation of animals.15 Whether they were ecologically minded or not, one thing is clear: In general, Native Americans had a far more symbolically rich understanding of nature than the later Europeans, who generally embraced a utilitarian stance toward game.

  FIRE AND FOREST

  No Indian practice has done more to undermine the view of precontact America as a wilderness than the native people’s use of fire. By the eve of European settlement, large parts of the continent had been radically transformed from forest into open ground—a point underlined by European observers. Of the area near Salem, Massachusetts, the Rev. Francis Higginson wrote in 1630, “I am told that about three miles from us a man may stand on a little hilly place and see diverse thousands of acres of ground as good as need to be, and not a Tree on the same.” Puritan Edward Johnson remarked about New England that it was “thin of Timber in many places, like our Parkes in England.”16

  Similar observations about the openness of the landscape applied further south as well. One Andrew White, on a trip along the Potomac in 1633, remarked that the forest was “not choked up with an undergrowth of brambles and bushes, but as if laid out by hand in a manner so open, that you might freely drive a four horse chariot in the midst of the trees.” After arriving in Florida in 1538, Hernando De Soto and his party of 600 men spent three years exploring a large section of the South, including parts of present-day Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana. On their extensive travels they found the land—save for swamps—to be eminently unobstructed.17

  Besides a source of ignition, it takes favorable weather in combination with fuels dry enough to burn for a wildland fire to start. Some parts of North America—Florida, for example—are more conducive to fire than others—such as New England—are. But within these geographic parameters, the Indians seem to have burned the land for a number of different reasons. In the South especially, burning provided a front-line defense against fleas, biting flies, mosquitoes, and ticks. By thinning the forest, burning also facilitated travel and hunting and made it easier for Native Americans to avoid surprise attacks from human and animal enemies. On the Great Plains, they lit fires to signal the discovery of buffalo herds or the approach of whites.

  Fire also played an important role in Indian subsistence strategies. It was especially useful in creating environments attractive to game animals such as deer, elk, turkey, and quail. At various places in the East, burning the land fostered the so-called edge effect, creating an area of open meadowland on the border of a forest. A variety of wildlife flocked to such edge habitats, where Indian hunters easily dispatched them.18

  Indians also employed fire more directly to improve their hunting prospects. Across the continent, Native Americans used fire to surround animals such as deer and buffalo, killing them as they passed through the one possible path left open (on purpose) for escape. The Sioux, for example, were known to set fire to the plains during their buffalo hunts. According to one observer, the buffalo, “having a great dread of fire, retire towards the centre of the grasslands as they see it approach, and here being pressed together in great numbers, many are trampled under foot, and the Indians rushing in with their arrows and musketry, slaughter immense numbers in a short period.”19

  PRAIRIE ON FIRE

  Indians set fire to the land, as shown here in Alfred Jacob Miller’s 1836 painting, to shape it to meet their subsistence needs. Not all parts of the continent experienced such anthropogenic burning. (National Archives of Canada/C-000432)

  After tribes such as the Pawnees adopted the horse, they too employed fire, managing the grasslands of the plains to help feed the creatures. Burning the land removed ground mulch and allowed sunlight to penetrate the earth more directly, accelerating the growth of grass and, more importantly, increasing yields during the spring and summer when the horses needed food most. Whites traveling out to the plains, for their part, remained quite aware that venturing through unburned sections of the prairie risked the possibility of inadequate feed for their mounts.20

  Further west in California, fire had long played a vital role in the ecology of the region. Indeed, much of the state’s plant life evolved in response to fire, incorporating the periodic burnings into their life cycles. Native people such as the Wukchumni Yokuts and Timbisha Shoshones set fire to freshwater marshes, thereby fostering the growth of forage for livestock, providing more space for waterfowl nesting, and increasing overall species diversity.21 The Indians thus harvested food that they themselves played a key role in creating. In this sense, many coastal California environments were human artifacts, the product of Indian burning, and would have reverted to woody vegetation had the native peoples not intervened. The notion of a precontact “wilderness” certainly has no place here.

  Although burning played an important positive role in Indian survival, it also had some negative effects. First, fires (especially those that raged out of control) destroyed trees, creating at times a shortage of timber in the grasslands, where such vegetation was scarce to begin with. Second, in upland areas of the South, repeated burning increased erosion and destroyed the mineral content of the soil. Finally, setting fire to some forests, notably oak ones, reduced the nuts and acorns available for human and animal consumption, again potentially undermining a subsistence regime.22

  The Indians clearly left their mark on the North A
merican landscape. Fire, from both lightning and deliberate Indian practice, produced the open, grassy expanses that dominated large sections of the continent. Such fires also simplified the forest cover. In the South fire encouraged the growth of various species of pine trees, at the expense of such hardwoods as hickory and oak.23 To call North America on the eve of European arrival a pristine wilderness is to deny the very powerful role that the Indians, with fire as their principal tool, played in shaping the landscape.

  CONCLUSION

  The native people carried on a complex dialogue with the natural environment, made even more difficult to discern by the limitations of available evidence. But this much we can say: Indians certainly had a deep understanding of the various places in which they lived. Unlike the Europeans who followed them, they experienced the environment on a number of different levels—moral, spiritual, and practical—exploiting the seasonal diversity of various terrains through agriculture and hunting and gathering and producing a great deal of ecological security for themselves in the process. This was a culture founded on attaining day-to-day needs, not on the maximization of production.

  Indians unquestionably left their mark on the landscape. In southern New England, for instance, the Indian population may have surged so much in the period immediately before European arrival that it even undermined the subsistence base, degrading the available supply of arable land and bringing on a food shortage.24 In the end, deriving a living from a place is a complex process, and all cultures are capable of miscalculations, even the earliest ones, who clearly took their cue from daily needs and not from the logic of the market.