Once permanent settlements were established, more detailed accounts appeared, but there was still the sense that the species and numbers were immeasurable. Alsop: "As for the wilde Animals of this Country, which loosely inhabits the Woods in multitudes, it is impossible to give you an exact description of them all, considering the multiplicity as well as the diversity of so numerous an extent of Creatures." Deer he observes are the common provision of the Province and so plentiful that venison is avoided rather than desired as a food. At one point Alsop had eaten so much venison that "it so nauseated our appetites and stomachs that plain bread was rather courted and desired than it." Besides deer there were wolves, bears, panthers, elk, "cat of the mountain," rackoon, fox, beaver, otter, possum, hares, squirrils, woodchuck, and muskrats, but notes, "The meat of most of these Creatures is good for eating, yet of no value nor esteem here, by reason of the great plenty of other provisions, and are only kill'd by the Indians of the country for their Hydes and Furrs, which become very profitable to those that have the right way of traffiquing for them..." He continues: "Fowls of all sorts and varieties dwell at their several times and seasons here...the Turkey, the Woodcock, the Pheasant, the Partrich, the Pigeon, and others, especially the Turkey, whom I have seen in whole hundreds in flights in the Woods of Mary-land..." He describes waterfowl as arriving in "millionous multitudes." John Hammond writing about the same time echoes Alsop's observations: "Waterfowl of all sortes are...plentifull and easie to be killed....Deare all over the Country, and in many places so many that venison is accounted a tiresome meat; wilde Turkeys are frequent, and so large that I have seen some weigh neer threescore pounds..." Thosmas Ashe (perhaps repeating an earlier account) observed of Carolina, "Deer, of which there is such infinite Herds, that the whole Country seems but one continued Park, insomuch, that...one hunting Indian has yearly kill'd and brought to his Plantation more than 100, sometimes 200 head of Deer." The turkeys of the Carolinas were apparently as large as those of Maryland: in 1666 Robert Horne wrote that, "The Woods [around Cape Fear] are stored with Deer and Wild Turkeys, of a great magnitude, weighing many times above 50# a piece..." , although Thomas Ashe's estimates are lower: "In Winter [there are] huge Flights of wild Turkies, oftentimes weighing from twenty, thirty, to forty pound."
There were herds of elk and buffalo as well. In 1669-70, John Lederer was one of the first Englishmen to explore the country above the fall-line in Virginia. In the valley of the Rapidan tributary of the Rappahannock River near present day Culpepper, Virginia, he describes travel through the 'savanae' "amongst vast herds of red [elk] and fallow [whitetail] deer which stood gazing at us...These Savanae are low grounds at the foot of the Apalateans...their verdure is wonderful pleasant to the eye, especially of such as having travelled throught the shade of the vast forest, come out of a melacholy darkness of a sudden, into a clear and open skie." Along the springs of the rivers are "flowry meads, whose luxurious herbage invites numerous herds of red deer (for their unusual largeness improperly termed elks by ignorant people) to feed." The eastern buffalo were numerous as well, although it is hard now for us, lacking an understanding of the ecology of these forests and prairies of the east, to imagine the buffalo as an eastern animal. In his History of the American Indian, Adair notes, "In early times the American bison ranged in great herds through the Southeast and Old Southwest [i.e., Mississippi and Alabama]." He reports accounts of large herds as far eastward as Georgia, one herd containing ten thousand animals. Bartram reports mounds of buffalo bones in Georgia, while the site of Nashville may have been chosen as much for its proximity to the "French Lick" as for its river location.
Albert Ganier notes that French Lick was, "a great gathering place for herds of Buffalo, Elk, Deer and assorted animals. Nashville was the northern terminus of a great Buffalo trail that led southwestward and which...later became known as the Natchez Trace." Ganier also reports the account of another lick where "one could walk for several hundred yards at an in the Lick, on Buffalo skulls and bones,and the whole flat around the Lick was covered with their bleached bones." The buffalo and elk were used as food by both Indians and white settlers, but most were killed out by 1790. Ganier notes that the buffalo were rare by 1800.
In 1797, a young Englishman, Francis Baily, travelled with several companions from Memphis across lower middle Tennessee to Nashville, and Baily later travelled on to Knoxville. Although Baily and his companions were indifferent, if not incompetent hunters [they had burned their only rifle in the campfire one night], they experienced many days of hunger and ate only ground corn and water because they could find no game. At one point they met a group of Cherokee deer hunters who shared their honey and venison with them, but already the game was scarce. Gilbert Imlay had already noted the trend as early as 1791: "The buffalo are mostly driven out of Kentucky. Some are still to be found upon the head waters of Licking Creek, Great Sandy, and the head waters of Green river. Deer abound in the extensive forests; but the elk confines itself mostly to the hilly and uninhabited places. / The rapidity of the settlement has driven the wild turkey quite out of the middle countries; but they are found in large flocks in all our extensive woods."
Although current anti-hunting sentiments would argue differently, subsistence hunting was not, until the last decade of the eighteenth century, a material factor in the disappearance of the game. The impact of the fur-trade was far greater. In the developed system, New Orleans and particularly Charleston were the hubs of fur-trading systems that reach more than a thousand miles inland. Indians did the hunting and trapping, trading with factors or traders in the mountains, and the hides were shipped to the seaports for eventual transport to Europe. Bartram had noticed what its impact must inevitably be: "The hides of deer, bears, tigers and wolves, together with honey, wax and other productions of the country, purchase their cloathing, equipage, and domestic utensils from the whites....They wage eternal war against deer and bear, to procure food and cloathing, and other necessaries and convenciences; which is indeed carried to an unreasonable and perhaps criminal excess since the white people have dazzled their senses with foreign superfluities." Many of the hides from Tennessee and Kentucky were shipped up the Tennessee River to the French Broad [if bound for Charleston] or up the Holston into Virginia [if bound for Philadelphia]. The Moravians at Salem were both hunters and traders in this system for the hides that went to Charleston: "Deer skins were the big item. On March 15, 1775, the Moravians sent five wagons loaded with 9,400 pounds of deer skins from Bethabara to Charlestown. That same year two hunters, who came to Bethabara from across the mountains, left 1,600 pounds of deer skins at the store."
After the revolutionary War, as the land beyond the mountains began to be opened and settled, the vision of plenty renewed. George Washington had reported (from the account of his partner and land speculator Dr. John Connolly) of the area along the Cumberland River, "The climate is fine; the soil remarkably good; the lands well watered with good streams and level enough for any kind of cultivation. Besides these advantages from nature, it has many others not less important to a new settlement, particularly game, which is so plentiful as to render the transportation of provisions thither, bread only excepted, altogether unnecessary." How quickly the limits were discovered then exceeded and the game disappeared is perhaps more frightening than the extinction of species themselves. The elk were gone by 1750; most of the buffalo by 1790; by 1800 deer and turkeys had become scarce over much of the south. The carolina parakeet was extinct in most areas by 1890; passenger pigeons held on until the last quarter of the 19th cent., but by 1900 they had disappeared as both a commercial and subsistence item, killed out as much by the clearing of the forests as by the direct slaughter of the birds themselves. Recall that for the first half of the 19th century, the population of each of the southern states was approximately doubling each decade. The pressure of this human population upon land, forest, and water finished what had begun with the fur trade two centuries earlier. To support new hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of people, the land had to be converted to farmland quickly. This meant clearing the forest. Let us turn next to the story of the trees.