God and the Land:

Natural Theology and Natural History in America

Introduction

Natural history is, like angling literature and the great literatures of African hunting and exploration, a delightful genre represented perhaps best in Gilbert White's, The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne. Other classics have included, besides those we discuss here, volumes such as Rutherford Platt's writings on the American forest, Henry Beston's Outermost House, Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac, Roderick Haig-Brown's Measure of the Year or A River Never Sleeps , the many works of Loren Eiseley, and contemporary works such as Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams. I know of no other category of general reading in which I have for so long a time in my life read so many volumes; they have never ceased to delight and instruct me. These volumes turn our minds not only to the land and animals and seasons but query always a meaning within and beyond the particulars of natural order and processs: for they all seek not to describe only but to know, to understand, and such understanding bears upon a meaning not exhausted in the animals and trees, rivers and hills, themselves. Sometimes the natural historian--or more recently, naturalist--will exclaim a testimony of faith as fervent as that of any evangelical. Bartram was given to near rhapsodic outbursts as he walked and camped the Southern woods; Muir could hardly resist turning his natural observations into patently didactic moral or theological discourses. Thoreau will yet eclipse Jonathan Edwards among New England divines and will at last be recognized as America's native theologian; Walden may be the only volume of natural theology written in America. For the recent writers, their mood is less exuberant, chastened, but the sense of wonder, awe, remains.

The great era of natural history is from about 1650 to about 1800. Natural history is what Descartes might have called a 'complex' science--that is, an insufficiently rationalized collection requiring a method of clarification and ennumeration to elucidate. This complex science contained within it the seeds of botany, zoology, dendrology, geology along with anticipations of meterology, taxonomy, geography, ecology, ethology, and even anthropology and sociology. However, its closest association was with none of these sciences--for it would require most of the 19th century to bring these sciences into rational order. In its own time, natural history was most closely associated with theology, particularly that branch of theology called natural theology. We notice this for instance in the term the natural historians use to refer to the natural world: not nature but creation. [By the time 'nature' makes its appearance as a scientific and cultural construct, both natural history and natural theology are largely curiosities.[1]] The parameters within which the natural historians worked were the parameters of theology [more specifically, biblical theology], and often the point of their work was burdened with proving the propositions of theology--or at least of showing that their descriptions and ennumerations of the natural order did not conflict with scripture. For its part, the rational orderings of theology were believed not only to be warranted by scripture and revelation but confirmed by experience and the findings of descriptive science. The watchword of the age was accommodation and a nervous truce between science and theology developed--especially in Protestant areas of Europe. According to the terms of this truce, each field would go its own way, but each would seek to confirm the essential teachings of the other: theology would declaim the order of nature and restrict miracles to the earthly work of Christ or to the inner workings of faith; science would exhibit the clock-like order of nature and support the theistic assumption by pointing out the evidences--the design features--of God in the creation. God had made a world scientists could understand; science described a world made by God. There are dozens of thinkers in the late seventeenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries who reflect this view. John Ray, Robert Boyle, and William Paley stand out:

Writing about 1666, Ray believed in the accommodation of science and theology and reflected that belief in the title of his major work, "The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation" in which he wrote, "I am full of gratitude to God that it was His will for me to be born in this last age when the empty sophistry that ursurped the title of philosophy [i.e., science] and within my memory dominated the schools has fallen into contempt, and in its place has arisen a philosophy solidly built upon a foundation of experiment: against it elderly professors protest and struggle in vain....It is a noble age of discovery..." In explaining the title of his book, Ray writes, "...by the Works of Creation...I mean the Works created by God at first, and by Him conserved to this Day in the same State and Condition in which they were first made..."[2]

Robert Boyle, a contemporary of Ray's, argued for a minute purposiveness of God in the works of creation: "The philosophy I plead for, reaches but to things purely corporeal; and...teaches, that God, indeed, gave motion to matter; but that in the beginning, he so guided the various motions of the parts of it, as to contrive them into the world he design'd they should compose; and established those rules of motion, and that order amongst things corporeal, which we call the laws of nature. Thus, the universe being once form'd by God, and the laws of motion settled, and all upheld by his perpetual concourse, the general providence..."[3] For such thinkers, there was nothing in the natural world that could not be viewed as part of the plan and purpose of God however mechanical the effect described by science.

It was Archdeacon William Paley, however, who is perhaps the most representative and widely known of the the natural theologians. Taking his cues from both Ray and Boyle--and borrowing the well-known clock-maker image from Boyle--Paley wrote: "Throughout that order then of nature, of which God is the author, what we find is a system of beneficence..."[4] In his [1802] Natural Theology, Paley begins with Boyle's example of some one finding a watch who would reasonably conclude that the existence and design of the watch would necessarily imply that the watch had a designer. Paley then develops, in detail agonizing to any modern reader, the analogy between the parts of a watch implying detailed, intelligent, design and the works of nature--including the eye, ear, muscles, joints, bones, nerves, blood, right and left handedness, the structure of plants, the orders and anatomies of animals, their fins,wings, fangs, protective coloration--as implying an intelligent designer/Creator: "We have all these properties in the subject before us: and they are all indications of design. The least circumstance is the strongest of any....The most simple account of this is to refer it to a designing Creator."[5]

Paley continues, "Every organized natural body, in the provisions which it contains for its sustentation and propagation, testifies a care, on the part of the Creator, expressly directed to these purposes....The works of nature want only to be contemplated. When contemplated, they have every thing in them which can astonish by their greatness...Therefore one mind hath planned, or at least prescribed, a general plan for all these productions. One Being hath been concerned in all. /Under this stupendous Being we live. Our happiness, our existence, is in his hands. All we expect must come from him. Nor ought we to feel our situation insecure. In every nature, and in every portion of nature which we can descry, we find attention bestowed upon even the minutest parts..as if the Creator had nothing else to finish."[6]

It was this kind of thinking, argued out in detail with increasing numbers of new illustrations [and not without a growing community of scientific and philosophical opposition] that informed the context of work and often the thought of the European and American natural historians who untertook the great work of exploring, identifying, cataloging, analyzing the myriad forms of animals, trees, plants, birds, fishes, and habitats newly found in North America. Some natural historians and later naturalists were self-conscious theists who understood their work to stand directly in the lineage of Ray, Boyle, Paley. William Bartram, the great natural historian of the southeast, was an ecstatic theist who saw at every turn evidence of the wisdom of God in creation: "This world, as a glorious apartment of the boundless palace of the sovereign Creator, is furnished with an infinite variety of animated scenes, inexpressibly beautiful and pleasing, equally free to the inspection and enjoyment of all his creatures. / Perhaps there is not any part of creation, within the reach of our observations, which exhibits a more glorious display of the Almighty hand, than the vegetable world: such a variety of pleasing scenes, ever changing throughout the seasons, arising from various causes, and assigned each to the purpose and use determined....these most useful tribes [of lower plants]...excite love, gratitude, and adoration to the great Creator, who was pleased to endow them with such eminent qualities, and reveal them to us for our sustenance, amusement, and delight."[7] Bartram, however, did not leave animals out of his concern: "The animal creation also excites our admiration, and equally manifests the almighty power, wisdom, and beneficence of the Supreme Creator and Sovereign Lord of the universe; some in their vast size and strength...others in agility; others in their beauty...others for their immediate and indispensable use and convenience to man, in furnishing means for our clothing and sustenance....We admire the mechanism of a watch, and the fabric of a piece of brocade, as being the production of art; these merit our admiration, and must excite our esteem for the ingenious artist or modifier; but nature is the work of God omnipotent; and an elephant, nay even this world, is comparatively but a very minute part of his works."[8]

Others were amateur scientists or careful observers who did not transform their observations into arguments for the existence of God, but who were nonetheless constrained to make their observations within limits set by the climate of influence of natural theology. Thomas Jefferson, certainly not a pious or conventional theist, was committed, like John Ray, to the belief that the works of creation--particular created species--were sustained and could not be lost. InNotes on the State of Virginia he writes, in justifying his reference to the mammoth, "It may be asked, why I insert the mammoth as if it still existed? I ask in return, why I should omit it, as if it did not exist? Such is the economy of nature that no instance can be produced, of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct; of her having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be broken."[9]

Although many natural historians and most natural theologians saw a specific signs of God in nature, few of them, however, would interpret the evidences of divine design as specifically as did John Archdale in his 1707 "Description of Carolina" in which he wrote, "And courteous Readers, I shall give you some farther Eminent Remark hereupon, and especially in the first Settlement of Carolina, where the Hand of God was eminently seen in thinning the Indians, to make room for the English....it at other times pleased Almighty God to send unusual Sicknesses amongst them, as the Smallpox, etc., to lessen their Numbers..."[10] Here, surely, nature is being asked to account for too much theology.

Although it would rapidly differentiate itself into the several life and earth sciences as we approach the 19th century, natural history was just coming into its own as North America began to be explored and settled. In some ways it appears that natural history was evoked by this discovery and exploration; at the least the variety of species of flora and fauna, the land and its patterns of rivers and mountains, and the variations of climate and weather infused the old theory of providential design with many new illustrations. At the same time the discovery of the fossils of many extinct quadrupeds and marine fossils high in the Appalachian mountains taxed the theoretical and explanatory skills of theologians and scientists alike. America appeared at once to offer the best confirmation of the assumptions of natural theology and yet its natural history seemed to challenge as much as it confirmed. Unfortunately, the challenge was answered more by moral theology than by natural theology. In the practical experience of the settlers notions of Creation, Paradise, and Edenic gardens quickly gave way to deserts, wilderness, thickets, swamps, and bogs. One English traveller, journeying from Pennsylvania to Kentucky and continually disappointed in the provisions and accommodations along the way, commented upon entering Kentucky, "Instead of a garden, I found a wilderness..."[11] Much of the subsequent transformation of the land and its resources would be driven by a righteous fury against wilderness and by religious zeal to transform the chaos of rough places into order.[12]

The Seventeenth Century: The Land

The first full explorations began in the 16th century, followed by many transient and then a few permanent settlements. Throught the 17th century explorations moved inland toward the fall line with a few hardy adventurers crossing the Blue Ridge to the drainages of the Ohio valley. By the 18th century when the upland south began to be settled, the European intellectual model was that of rational design in nature, according to which the natural world is the mechanical emblem--the design--of an orderly, if now remote, God. Traces of God, however, could still be found in the creation: in the order of the seasons, the increasing predictability of planetary motions, in the specializations of animals; the faithful mind could see God's design if not hand in the migration of birds, in the gestation of rabbits, in the work of the bees. To the European mind in 1600 or 1700, the great garden of God, the great glyph of design, was North America. It was a world made for man and man for it. Africa was unexplored. Asia all but unknown. The South received special interest because of its climate, flora, and fauna: and especially original Virginia lying as it did about N Latitude 35deg.--the latitude of Eden, of Paradise. The controlling myth, the modelling image, was the biblical Eden: a paradise of plenty to satisfy every human want almost without labor. In the early narratives we find--even when we make allowance for the commercial interests of promoters--an almost awe-like sense of fulness of the land that taxes the catalog and descriptive powers of the writers: the land is overwhelming in size, in game, in fish, in trees, in fruits.[13] America, but especially the South, was apprehended as remedying the curse placed upon Adam that he should labor for his food.[14]

In 1634, the Jesuit, Fr. Andrew White, celebrated the soil of the new land in his "Briefe Relation": "I will end therefore with the soyle, which is excellent so that we cannot sett downe a foot, but tread on Strawberries, raspires, fallen mublerrie vines, acchorns, walnutts, saxafras etc: and those in the wildest woods. The ground is commonly a blacke mould above, and a foot within ground of a readish colour. All is high woods except where the Indians have cleared for corne. It abounds with delicate springs which are our best drinke. Birds diversely feathered there are infinite, as eagles, swans, hernes, geese, bitters, duckes, partridge read, blew, partie coloured, and the like, by which will appeare, the place abounds not alone with profit, but also with pleasure+ Laus Deo"[15]

We must note, however, that in addition to the sense of the land as the bounty of God, there is also the idea among these early writers, that this bounty is ripe for commercial exploitation: the Arcadian ideal of a beauty to be enjoyed and medidtated upon seldom seems to have touched them. "The mildnesse of the aire, the fertilitie of the soile, and the situation of the rivers are so propitious to the nature and use of man as no place is more convenient for pleasure, profit, and mans sustenance....So then here is a place a nurse for souldiers, a practise for marriners, a trade for merchants, a reward for the good, and that which is most of all, a businesse (most acceptable to God) to bring such poore infidels to the true knowledge of God and his holy Gospell."[16] John William de Brahm, an engineer and surveyor from South Carolina, was sent in 1756 to build a fort at Loudon in the Cherokee country on the Little Tennessee River. He wrote, "Their (Cherokees) vallies are of the richest soil, equal to manure itself, impossible in appearance ever to wear out...Should this country once come into the hands of the Europeans, they may with propriety call it the American Canaan, for it will fully answer their industry, and all methods of European culture and do as well for European produce... for provisions of all kinds...be it for metals, minerals, fossils and stones, or be it for manufacturys of all kinds. This country seems longing for the hands of industry to receive its hidden treasures, which nature has been collecting and toiling since the beginning ready to deliver them up..."[17] John Smith by 1616 already had a more somber view; he referred to Virginia as, "This deare bought Land with so much bloud and cost, hath onely made some few rich, and the rest losers."[18]

Although he writes later than the first discoverers and explorers, Bartram conveys the sense of sacred wonder experienced at the sight of the new found land blocking the horizon of both sail and thought of the first Europeans: "There are few objects out at sea to attract the notice of the traveller...[but] the sudden appearance of land from the sea, the strand stretching each way, beyond the utmost reach of sight; the alternate appearance and recess of the coast, whilst the far distant blue hills slowly retreat and disappear; or, as we approach the coast, the capes and promontories first strike our sight, emerging from the watery expanse, and, like mighty giants, elevating their crests towards the skies; the water suddenly alive with its scaly inhabitants; squadrons of sea-fowl sweeping through the air, impregnated with the breath of fragrant aromatic trees and flowers; the amplitude and magnificicence of these scenes are great indeed, and may present to the imagination, an idea of the first appearance of the earth to man at the creation."[19]

It was this vision of Creation, of Eden, that supplied metaphor for the first voyagers two hundred years before Bartram: Raleigh, Bland, Smith, and others.[20] Although the matter of the similarity of latitude between Eden and the southern portion [now North Carolina] of Virginia was considered by Raleigh in his History of the World, it was taken up more directly by Edward Bland in his advertisement to entice settlers; he quotes Raleigh as the motto of his account of the exploration and description of Carolina: "Paradise was created a part of this Earth, and seated in the lower part of Eden or Mesopotamia...it stands thirty-five degrees from the Equinoctiall, and fifty-five degrees from the North-pole, in a temperate Climate, full of excellent fruits, chiefely of Palme-trees without labor...This tree alone giveth unto man whatsoever his life beggeth at Nature's hand. The like are also found in the East and West Indies as well as in Paradise, which countries are also blessed with a perpetuall Spring and Summer, etc."[21] John Archdale notes that the province of Carolina lies "parallel with the Land of Canaan."[22] In his account of Maryland, George Alsop wrote, "The Trees, Plants, Fruits, Flowers, and Roots that grow here in Mary-land, are the only Emblems or Hieroglyphicks of our Adamitical or Primitive situation...which still bear the Effigies of Innocency..."[23] Yet, if not quite the Biblical Eden, it was nonetheless a land where, as Gilbert Imlay writes of Kentucky, "where nature makes reparation for having created man."[24]

Eighteenth Century: Slaying the Beasts

It was difficult for the European mind to comprehend the bounty of North America in 1500. So full, so overwhelming were the herds and flocks that they could not be measured in the hundreds of descriptions made and sent back to kings and councils of Europe. It was a North American Serengeti, a land filled with wildlife--game--in variety, size, and number such as Europeans had never dreamed of. By all accounts, even when allowance is made for imprecise observation, hearsay, exaggeration, and downright fabrication, the numbers were prodigious, primal, apparently limitless. On an exploratory voyage in 1583, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, having listed many kinds of birds and mammals encountered around Newfoundland, reported, "We could not observe the hundreth part of creatures in those unhabited lands: but these mentioned may induce us to glorifie the magnificent God, who hath superabundantly replenished the earth with creatures serving for the use of man..."[25]

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."[26] 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."[27] 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..."[28] 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."[29] 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..."[30] , although Thomas Ashe's estimates are lower: "In Winter [there are] huge Flights of wild Turkies, oftentimes weighing from twenty, thirty, to forty pound."[31]

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."[32] 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."[33] 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.[34] 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.[35]

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."[36] 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.[37]

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.[38] 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."[39]

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."[40] 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."[41]

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."[42] 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.

Nineteenth Century: Felling the Giants of the Forest

Nearly every early traveller was awed by the trees, the immense scope of the forests and the stature of individual trees: Capt. John Smith wrote in his "Description of Virginia" [1612], The wood that is most common is Oke and Walnut: many of their Okes are so tall and straight, that they will beare two foote and a halfe square of good timber for 20 yards long [i.e., a tree 42" in diameter x 60' to the first branches]"[43] In the "Discovery of New Brittaine" [1650] Edward Bland observes the area around the Chowan River on the North Carolina border with Virginia, "On both sides...is very much exceeding rich land, [there] are old Indian fields that beare two Crops of Indian Corne a yeare and hath timber trees above five foot over, whose trunks are a hundred foot in cleare timber, which will make twenty Cuts of Board timber a piece, and of those there is abundance."[44] In 1664 William Hilton exploring in the lower Cape Fear River basin made this observation, "We measured many of the Oaks in several places, which we found to be in bignesse some two, some three, and others almost four fathoms." We may assume that Hilton's men were measuring with a sounding line which they stretched around these trees; a tree four fathoms--24 feet in circumference--would be 7-1/2 feet in diameter. Hilton continues, "In height, before you come to boughs or limbs, forty, fifty, sixty foot, and some more, and those Oaks very common in the upper parts of [the river]. Likewise Walnut, Birch, Beech, Maple, Ash, Bay, Willough, Alder and Holly; and in the lowermost parts [of the river] innumerable of Pines, tall and good for boards or masts..."[45] In 1666 Robert Horne observed of the country around Charleston, "The whole Country consists of stately Woods, Groves, Marshes, and Meadows; it abounds with variety of as brave Okes as Eye can behold, great Bodies tall and streight from 60 to 80 foot, before there be any Boughs, which with the little under-wood makes the Woods very commodious to travel in, either on Horseback or a foot."[46] Horne's observation is paralleled by that of Andrew White: [1634] "The Woods for the most part are free from underwood, so that a man may travel on horsebacke, almost anywhere, or hunt for his recreation."[47] Such open woods suggest a forest ecology radically different from what we know today.[48]

It is these forests, these trees, I try to get my students to imagine who have never seen more than the remaining trash woods we now call forest in the South or on the Domain. Would that their rainforest passion could be turned backward and made historical just for a moment. Perhaps if they could look back and see what we have lost they might understand Philip Fithian's comment about the sorrow of the Indians who saw these trees, forests, lands, rivers, brought to ruin; Fithian wrote, "It is no small thing, I suppose, that would make an Indian weep--but, ah, these were pleasant places." So incapacitated are we of understanding that, knowing only the diminuitive saplings of butchered forests, we declaim against the early writers saying that they exaggerated or that they had imprecise measurments. Hear then Bartram: [The scene in southeastern Georgia] "continuing some time through these shady groves, the scene opens, and discloses to view the most magnificent forest I had ever seen....The ground is perfectly a level green plain, thinly planted by nature with the most stately forest trees, such as the gigantic black oak (q. tinctoria) liriodendron, [etc.] whose mighty trunks, seemingly of an equal height, appeared like superb columns. To keep with the bounds of truth and reality, in describing the magnitude and grandeur of these trees, would, I fear, fail of credibility; yet, I think I can assert, that many of the black oaks measured eight, nine, ten and eleven feet diameter five feet above the ground, as we measured several that were above thirty feet girt, and from hence they ascend perfectly straight, with a gradual taper, forty or fifty feet to the limbs."[49] It is no wonder I believe that Bartram saw in these natural scenes confirmation of his belief in God: "Having in this journey, met with extraordinary success...in making a very extensive collection of new discoveries of natural productions; on the recollection of so many and great favors and blessings, I now, with a high sense of gratitude, presume to offer up my sincere thanks to the Almighty, the Creator and Preserver."[50]

By the end of the Eighteenth century most of these great eastern groves were cut, but some great tracts remained in the mountains. In 1867 John Muir echoes the same awe and wonder as he crosses Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia on his walk to Florida: [September 2, 1867] "Folding my map, I shouldered my little bag and plant press and strode away among the old Kentucky oaks...not, however, without a few cold shadows of lonliness, although the great oaks seemed to spread their arms in welcome....I have seen oaks of many species in many kinds of exposure and soil, but those of Kentucky excel in grandeur all I had ever before beheld. They are broad and dense and bright green. In the leafy bowers and caves of their long branches dwell magnificent avenues of shade, and every tree seems to be blessed with a double portion of strong exulting life."[51] [September 9] "The soft light of morning falls upon ripening forests of oak and elm, walnut and hickory, and all Nature is thoughtful and calm. Kentucky is the greenest, leafiest State I have yet seen....Far the grandest of all Kentucky plants are her noble oaks. They are the master existences of her exuberant forests. Here is the Eden, the paradise of oaks."[52]

[September 18] "Up the mountain on the state line [east of Madisonville in the Unaka mountains]. The scenery is far grander than any I ever before beheld. The view extends from the Cumberland Mountains on the north far into Georgia and North Carolina to the south, an area of about five thousand square miles. Such an ocean of wooded, waving, swelling mountains beauty and grandeur is not to be described. Countless forest-clad hills, side by side in rows and groups, seemed to be enjoying the rich sunshine and remaining motionless only because they were so eagerly absorbing it. All were united by curves and slopes of inimitable softness and beauty. Oh, these forest gardens of our Father! What perfection, what divinity, in their architecture! What simplicity and mysterious complexity of detail! Who shall read the teaching of these sylvan pages, the glad brotherhood of rills that sing in the valleys, and all the happy creatures that dwell in them under the tender keeping of a Father's care?"[53]

It was not a quiet garden, however. Muir was fortunate to have seen it before the ruin of timbering and mining swept across the land; I wonder what categories of description he would now invoke to describe the strip-mined hills of Kentucky and Tennessee, the Copper Basin on the North Carolina border where he crossed over from Tennessee. Already there had been presage: as he passed Elizabethton, Ky, he noted in his journal for September 3, 1867, "Passed gangs of woodmen engaged in felling and hewing the grand oaks for market." [54] The attack upon the Kentucky forests followed almost upon Muir's heels. In "Night Comes to the Cumberlands," Harry Caudill writes, "A sustained logging boom accompanied the drive of the timber companies to buy up the best of the trees. For some forty years after 1870 thousands of mountaineers toiled a large part of each year to produce logs for the downriver markets."[55] Caudill's description of this forest matches Muir's and other early travellers: "...generally the timber began at the 'foot' of the hills and extended upward over the 'spurs' and 'points' and through the rich coves to the tops of the ridges. The great poplars and whiteoaks grew, for the most part, near the base of the hills and in the coves, while the lesser oaks and chestnuts predominated on the sharper points an near the hilltops. Countless walnuts dotted the forest, thousands of them without blemish and a yard or more in diameter. The Goliaths were the superb, pencil-straight poplars, some of them towering one hundred and seventy-five feet and achieving a diameter of seven or eight feet. Next to these in value, if not in size, were the whiteoaks, which sometimes reached a thickness in excess of five feet....No region in earth's temperate zone boasts a larger variety of forest trees than the Cumberland Plateau, and in these years they abounded in natural profusion, little damaged by the avarice or caprice of men." Avarice and caprice would rule the day: the impoverished mountaineers sold the trees for a pittance to buyers who knew their real worth. "Thousands of trees were sold for a little as forty to seventy-five cents each. Few of them brought more than a dollar. One deed, executed in 1889...recites, 'that for...the sum of $20,000, the grantor hereby...sells...unto the grantee 40,000 poplar and whiteoak trees, each of said trees to measure not less than 30 inches in diameter under the bark, stump high, measuring three feet above the ground, without fire damage or blemish...'"[56] Using the destructive "splash dam" method of getting the logs out of the forest--where log ponds are created by daming the mountain streams and then blasting the dams to create a cascade to carry the logs downstream--the Kentucky forests were cut: "The runs made deep inroads into the vast forest, and commenced its reduction to the pitiful remnant of cull and second-growth which cloaks the plateau today."[57]

This is the same land surveyed by Gilbert Imlay in 1791 when he addressed the inhabitants of Kentucky, "In your country, like the land of promise, flowing with milk and honey, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths, that spring out of vallies and hills, a land of wheat and barley, and all kinds of fruits, you shall eat bread without scarceness, and not lack anything in it...Thus, your country, favored with the smiles of heaven, will probably be inhabited by the first people the world ever knew."[58] If you read this passage today in Pineville or Hazard Kentucky, few would think Imlay was describing the land where they live. So complete the ruin, the loss, the alteration and dimunition from original condition that no one of us could say, "This is Kentucky [or Tennessee]."

Now the myth of paradise is turned on its head, inverted, and we have the lost garden world of Night Comes to the Cumberlands. [The same ruin of the world is described in Georgia in Tobacco Road.] The South of Edenic plenty had experienced the distributed consequences of the Fall. The benign imagery had shifted; now it seemed almost as if such a torpid, torrid, profligate world had to be punished, ravished, for its sinfulness. And ravished it was. The deforestation of planters in the first half of the 19th Cent. was continued by loggers in the last half abetted by increasing use of steam power and the pull of larger markets. By 1900 most of the best was gone; by 1930 what was left interested only marginal loggers who could not afford to move west. Another half century of high-grading stripped the remaining isolated good trees as quickly as they matured leaving finally a waste wood economically and aesthetically suitable only for stripping and chipping. Garden had become barren; blessing had become curse, no less for the whites who cast their forests down the hillsides than for the Indians who killed game far beyond their needs for food and clothing.

Faulkner's stories, "The Old People" and "The Bear" in Go Down Moses chronicle the loss of the forest: each year as the company of hunters makes the trip to the great woods, it takes longer. Logging and settlements had come to the forest and its edge steadily receded before the hunters. From the hunting camp they could hear the locomotive hauling out the logs. In the old forest, the men's memories had threaded and twisted through the trees and over the hills like the game trails themselves in one dark, matted recollection of place owned by no one. It is the complex relation to the land of Indians, slaves, whites--as confused as the blood in Sam Fathers veins--that Ike McCaslin decries, "Dont you see?" he cried. "Dont you see? This whole land, the whole South, is cursed, and all of us who derive from it, whom it ever suckled, white and black both, lie under the curse?"[59] In the end Major de Spain sold most of the timber to a lumber company from Memphis and the old hunt was gone forever. In the final scene, Boon Hogginbeck goes mad beneath the Gum Tree and smashes his gun, impotent against the squirrels.

Twentieth Century: Gathering at the Rivers

There was hardly an early naturalist or traveller who did not comment upon the rivers and waters of the new land. In exploring the Virginia Tidewater, John Smith wrote in 1612, "The country is not mountanous nor yet low but such pleasant plaine hils and fertle valleyes, one prettily crossing an other, and watered so conveniently with their sweete brookes and christall springs, as if art it selfe had devised them."[60] Father Andrew White had a similar view of Maryland, "It abounds with delicate springs which are our best drinke."[61] Samuel Wilson wrote [1682], "Carolina doth so abound in Rivers, that within fifty miles of the Sea you can hardly place your self seven miles from a Navigable River, and divers are navigable for good big Vessels above three hundred miles."[62]

Besides providing means of navigation and the springs waters to drink, the rivers provided food: the innumerable waterfowl that flew above them, the fish that swam in them, and the shellfish on their bottoms: Among the first observers was Alexander Whitaker: [1613] "In winter our fields be full of Cranes, Herons, Pigeons, Partridges, and Blackbirds: the rivers and creeks bee ouer spread euery where with water foule of the greatest and least sort,as Swans, flocks of Geese and Brants, Duck and Mallards, Sheldrakes, Dyuers, etc., besides many other kinds of rare and delectable birds..."[63] Alsop, "Here in Mary-land is a large sufficiency, and plenty of almost all sorts of Fishes, which live and inhabit within her several Rivers and Creeks, far beyond the apprehending or crediting of those that never saw the same, which with very much ease is catched, to the great refreshment of the Inhabitants of the Province."[64] "The Rivers abound with variety of excellent Fish, and near the Sea with very good Oysters, in many of which are Pearl..."[65] Whitaker [1613] stated, "I cannot reckon nor guie proper names to the diuers kinds of fresh fish in our rivers."[66] Exploring around Hilton Head in 1666, Robert Sandford wrote, "It abounds besides with Oyster bankes and such heapes of shells as which noe time can consume, but this benefitt it hath but in common with all the rivers." Sandford noted that these shell heaps would provide the necessary material for lime to make mortar to use with the convenient local clay for making bricks.[67] "Eels,Crabs, Prawns twice as large as ours in England: Oysters of an Oblong or Oval Form; their number is inexhaustible; a man may easily gather more in a day than he can well eat in a year; some of which...[yield] bright round Oriental Pearl."[68] Mark Catesby, premier bird naturalist of the colonial period, wrote, [1731] "The coasts of Florida, including Carolina and Virginia...have a muddy and soft bottom./At low water there appears in the rivers and creeks immense beds of oysters, covering the muddy banks many miles together; in some great rivers extending thirty or forty miles from the sea, they do not lie separate, but are closely joined to one another, and appear as a solid rock a foot and a half or two feet in depth, with their edges upwards."[69]

We simply no longer have the imagination to conceive of the waterfowl: today, I still try to imagine what it was like in 1946 when my father, a duck hunter in the Back Bay below Norfolk, told me that sometimes at their offshore blind, in the early morning of a bright day, that you could feel the chill when the great flights of ducks passed between the blind and the sun. In 1600, the sight and noise of a December morning in the southern marshes must have been stupendous.[70] Wilson: "On the Rivers and brooks are all the winter moneths vast quantitys of Swan, wild Geese, Duck, Widgeon, Teale, Curlew, Snipe, Shell Drake, and a certain sort of black Duck that is excellent meat, and stayes there all the year."[71] In 1759, Andrew Burnaby observed numbers of waterfowl in the Virginia marshes and noted, "The American shell-drake and blue-wing [teale] exceed all of the duck kind whatsoever; and these are in prodigious numbers."[72]

Across the mountains, the rivers were no less important, although initially and perhaps fatefully, the rivers were seen as great highways leading to the heartland of Kentucky and Tennessee and on to the Mississippi valley. These were the corridors of the French Broad, Holston, Nolichucky, Cumberland--the rivers of delight which threaded the southern Appalachians.[73] In 1791 Gilbert Imlay noted, " You will observe, that, as far as this immense continent is known, the courses and extent of its rivers are extremely favourable to communication by water; a circumstance which is highly important, whether we regard it in a social or commercial point of view."[74] Here in middle Tennessee he noted, "In a word, no spot can be marked in that country, that is more than 20 miles from a boatable stream, so great are its advantages of water conveyance."[75] The bottoms along the rivers were cleared for wagon roads for settlers moving west, and the same roads eastward carried the droves of hogs, sheep, mules, cattle, and turkeys driven from middle Tennesee to eastern markets from Philadelphia to Charleston.

As the population grew, as industry expanded, and as the nation migrated through and beyond the mountains, few recognized or even deplored the alterations that were taking place in the waters of the land. A rare observer was that mad southern patriot, Edmund Ruffin: "When our ancestors first reached this shore, nearly the whole country was in a state of nature. The savages had cleared for cultivation but a few fertile spots on the banks of the rivers; all the remainder of the land was under one great forest. The streams had not been obstructed by the cutting down of trees across their beds...No dams had obstructed the free and regular course of the streams, and therefore no artificial floods were formed. The soil not having been cultivated, was not exposed to be washed away by the rains into the rivers. The waters were generally clear, instead of being generally muddy, as since all these circumstances have been changed."[76] Ruffin continues, "Bottom lands in their natural state, must have presented scenes of remarkable beauty. The clear stream, not as yet choked by the earth washed from cultivated land, and rarely obstructed, flowed in deep and meandering channel....When the neighboring higher lands, and especially the bordering hill-sides, were cleared and cultivated and their soil and even the sub-soil in many cases were washing down with every heavy rain, then commenced the ruin of both the natural beauty of the bottoms and much of their available value for cultivation."[77]

John Muir had been fortunate to see a few of these hill-sides before the destruction occurred: [Muir September 12--near Montgomery, TN] "Crossed a wide cool stream [Emory River], a branch of the Clinch River. There is nothing more eloquent in Nature than a mountain stream, and this is the first I ever saw. Its banks are luxuriantly peopled with rare and lovely flowers and overarching trees, making one of Nature's coolest and most hospitable places. Every tree, every flower, every ripple and eddy of this lovely stream seemed solemnly to feel the presence of the great Creator. Lingered in this sanctuary a long time thanking the Lord with all my heart for his goodness in allowing me to enter and enjoy it....Near this stream I spent some joyous time in a grand rock-dwelling full of mosses, birds, and flowers. Most heavenly place I ever entered....Forded the Clinch, a beautiful clear stream, that knows many of the dearest mountain retreats that ever heard the music of running water."[78]

Conclusion

From 1500 to 2000, over this half millenium, the natural history of North America has undergone the recapitulation of the biblical fall: a pristine condition irretrievably lost by waste and greed--by sin. In Loving Nature, James Nash writes, "In our time, particularly, the meaning of sin must be properly extended to cover ecological misdeeds, and the human condition underlying them. The ecological crisis and the host of actions contributing to that crisis are best understoon in the context of sin....Sin literally defiles the land."[79] To continue the biblical analogy, we are now living in exile from paradise; our ecological garden has been destroyed, not by some fierce invader, not by an alien serpent, but by ourselves. And by the muddied, polluted waters of this Babylon wasteland we hang up our harps in stunted trees and weep. It is right that we should feel guilt, grief, and shame for what we have done to this land.

We must recall, however, that the biblical story looks ahead as well as behind: the complete story is Creation, Fall, Redemption. It is first and foremost the story of personal salvation, but Scripture suggests that the Redemption will also be an event of cosmic renewal: not just a new Adam, but a new Creation, a transformed physical order. Some, with very good reasons and arguments, would protest however, that the prelude to the New Creation is apocalypse--an apocalyspe that is increasingly seen by some as environmental as much as social or political in nature. Some radical environmentalists envision an apocalyptic annihilation of the human race in a holocaustal atonement for man's disruptive presence: the "New Creation" will be a centuries distant restoration of a natural order without human beings in the landscape. For these radicals, the Beast that rules the world and will destroy man in divine retribution is technology--the knowledge and skills, the techniques and applications, the devices and machines that we have used to alter, modify, use, abuse, transform, and finally destroy the naturalness of the natural world.

As much as I believe we have with our own hands destroyed not a mythic but a real paradise, as much as I believe that the sin of our lost and fallen condition is mirrored everywhere in the way we treat the land, yet I do not believe in a technologically caused ecological apocalypse--no more than I believe that what is wrong with this planet is the presence of human beings. I do not believe these things. We, no less than the stars and the birds, are part of the divine plan, a plan not yet completed. As human beings we face two challenges: to find some way of living together and to find some way of living with and upon the earth. Do I believe we can re-grow the paradisal environment of North America in 1400? No. We will never see those trees, those herds, those birds, those clear rivers again. We must recall that the biblical imagery, the story of Creation, Fall, Redemption, New Creation, moves in its imagery from garden to city: we do not return to some lost but recoverable natural paradise, but we journey forward, to a city: a city that includes but exceeds nature. I think the eco-restorationists are wrong not least for using romance and sentiment as a means of turning us from the tasks before us. The nostalgia for paradise manipulated by these restorationists whether in the form of "conserving" threatened species, protecting old growth forests, or in picking up litter on the roadside--this nostalgia, these causes, are finally obstacles to the solution of the double task before us: peace and justice as the remedy to greed and need.

A lot of things will have to change--our commitment to cars, our commitment to neat-and-clean [especially with our lawns and roadside right-of-ways], our passion for new objects [our Walmart syndrome], our belief in our inalienable right to newspapers and soda cans. Do not think for a moment that I believe that if we all do our little part we can make this happen. There are no fifty little things you can do to save the enviroment or the planet. Boy Scout morality, the morality of aggregated self reliance, of collectivized individual efforts, are not the solution but the cause of our condition. Recycling is not the solution; our belief in it is the typical cause of our problem. The solutions I envision here are high technology, human ecology, systems solutions. The task is not to recycle junk mail; the task is to create a marketing system where people can buy what they need and where merchandizers are not allowed to boost profits by also passing on to the generic people the cost of mass advertizing: all mail should be one rate first class. The task is not to recyle newspapers but to make newspapers as obsolete as candles and oil lamps--technologically, they belong to the same world--information access should be much easier than using a newspaper. The need for recyclings will disappear when every object produced includes in its sale price the actual cost of its eventual disposal: not a bottle bill, but a universal object deposit bill. What we need is not more individual effort and local initiative but more technology, more general systems solutions to fundamental problems.

The final hope for the land probably will not lie in specific acts of preservation, nor in wilderness itself, nor even finally in nature or naturalness; growing population will transform utterly our inherited imagery of all such tokens and render them romantic and historical at once. Ultimately such hope as there may be will be found not in what we do about the land, air, trees, and waters but in what we do about cities. I have meditated often about a Tarahumara Indian saying that I read years ago: The Tarahumara were primitive Indians of northern mexico who lived almost without trace high in the mountains. After the Spanish settlement and the development of the land with many towns and villages, the Tarahumara--who for years refused to wear clothes--would occasionally come down from the mountains and enter the villages and towns of the low country. They would enter the town, not speaking to anyone and would walk the streets, looking into houses. They neither purchased nor traded and after a while they would leave and go back to the mountains. They did this each year, and as they got ready for their trip to town, they had a saying, a kind of explanation of what whey were doing: "We are going to see how it is with those who are mistaken," they would say.

I have written more than once in my ecological journal that cities are a mistake, and the emotions that rise up in me when I look at Chicago, LA, New York--or Tokoyo, and especially Mexico City--are the closest feelings I have to sickening terror. For all my native optimism, I do not know if we as a species are upto the task of dealing with these cities and the human need they represent and the environmental impact and degredation they cause. Yet, I know this: in the Biblical tradition, the imagery of garden and desert was replaced by that of the city, the celestial city, the city of God. In Bunyan's Progress, Pilgrim did not seek a garden, but a city. Our destiny is not in the garden or the wilderness or the desert: it lies in our capacity--not to live upon the land--but to live together. Perhaps the failure of natural theology to sustain an argument for God in the design of the world was no more than what we should have expected: it is a fallen world. Our task is not to write a new natural theology nor even to save the rainforest or the taiga of Siberia; it is rather to write a new moral theology suitable for a city for God built upon this earth.

The City of God awaits us: not in some temporally distant, psychically transformed, out-of-body twilight zone, but here--in Sewanee, in Tennesseee, in Dixie, in America, in Mexico, in Somalia, in Siberia, in Antartica. [As a believing Christian,] I believe this: we can--by the grace of God filling all our efforts--make a better world: we can cure ignorance, we can heal wounds, we can cure disease, we can end war, we can end hunger, AND we can do it without destroying the land or the water or the air. I believe we can develop non-polluting technologies--that we will be able to manufacture entirely without waste--that we can farm to feed a planet with three times the current population, and do it on less land we than we now use and without ruining the soil, the rivers, or the air.

I will leave you with these words I give to my students each time they struggle to find sense and coherence in my condemnations of recycling: recycling is not the answer. Forget recycling. Work for peace and justice.

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Salley, Alexander S., Jr. Narratives of Early Carolina: 1650-1708. [Original Narratives of Early American History, J. Franklin Jameson, general editor.] New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1911.

Seton, Ernest Thompson. Wild Animals I Have Known. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1926.

Thwaites, Reuben G. Early Western Travels. Cleveland, OH: Arthur H. Clark, Co., 1905.

Tyler, Lyon G., ed. Narratives of Early Virginia: 1606-1625. [Original Narratives of Early American History, J. Franklin Jameson, general editor.] New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1907.

United States Department of Agriculture. American Soil Conservationists. Soil Conservation Service. Miscellaneous Publication No. 449, 1941, re-issued 1990.

Waddell, Gene. Indians of the South Carolina Lowcountry, 1562-1751. Columbia, S.C.: Southern Studies Program, Univ. of South Carolina, 1980.

Whitaker, Alexander. Good Newes from Virginia. London: William Welby, 1613.

White, Gilbert. The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, sixth edition. London: Swan Sonneschein & Co., 1888.

Williams, Samuel Cole, ed. Early Travels in the Tennessee Country: 1540-1800. Johnson City, TN: The Watauga Press, 1928.

[2]Quoted in John C. Greene, The Death of Adam (Ames, Iowa, 1959), pp. 1, 4.

[3]Ibid., p. 12.

[4]William Paley, "A View of the Evidences of Christianity,"Works (Philadelphia, 1850), p. 378.

[5]Paley, "Natural Theology, "Works, p. 434.

[6]Ibid.,p. 486. Also: "The universe itself is a system; each part either depending upon other parts or being connected with other parts by some common law of motion... In our own globe, the case is clearer [than with the planets]. New countries are continually discovered, but the old laws of nature are always found in them; new plants perhaps, or animals, but always in company with plants and animals which we already know, and always possessing many of the same general properties....the same order of things attends us, wherever we go." Ibid, p. 469.

[7]William Bartram, The Travels of William Bartram, ed. Mark Van Doren (New York, 1955), pp. 15, 17.

[8]Ibid., pp. 20-21.

[9]Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia [1785] (New York, 1964), p. 48. Gilbert Imlay took a somewhat different view; in considering the quadruped remains found along the Ohio River in the 1770's, Imlay notes a report that the extinct animal might have been carnivorous: "Can then so great a link have perished from the chain of nature? Happy we that it has. How formidable an enemy to the human species, an animal as large as an elephant, the tyrant of the forests, perhaps the devourer of man! Nations, such as the Indians, must have been in perpetual alarm. The animosities among the various tribes must have been suspended till the common enemy, who threatened the very existence of all, should be extirpated. To this circumstance we are probably indebted for a fact, which is perhaps singular in its kind, the extinction of a whole race of animals from the system of nature." Gilbert Imlay, A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America (London, 1797, New York, 1969), pp. 325-326.

[10]John Archdale, "Description of Carolina," in Narratives of Early Carolina, ed. William S. Salley, Jr. (New York, 1911), p. 285.

[11]Adlard Welby, "A Visit to North America, 1821" in Early Western Travels, ed. Reuben G. Thwaites (Cleveland, OH, 1905), p. 212.

[12]See Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven and London, 1982).

[13]This theme is present in the accounts of the earliest voyages although the Edenic imagery is not common until the Seventeenth Century: "But the Territorie and soyle of the Chesepians [the inhabitants around the Chesapeake Bay]...was for pleasantness of seate, for temperature of Climate, for fertilitie of soyle and for the commoditie of the Sea, besides multitude of Beares (being an excellent good victuall) with great woods of Sassafras, and Wallnut trees, is not to be excelled by any other whatsoever." Richard Lane, "Account of the Particularities of the Imployments of the Englishmen Left in Virginia, 1585-1586," in Early English and French Voyages, ed. Henry S. Burrage (New York, 1932), p. 247. The Rev. Alexander Whitaker wrote, after describing the game and fish of Virginia, "Wherfore, since God hath filled the elements of earth, aire, and waters with his creatures, good for our food and nourishment, let not the feare of starving hereafter, or of any great want, dishearten your valiant minds from comming to a place of so great plentie...God may deferre his temporall reward for a season, but be assured that in the end you shall find riches and honour in this world, and blessed immortality in the world to come." Good Newes From Virginia (London, 1613), pp. 42,44; he also observed, "The whole Continent of Virginia situate within the degrees of 34 and 47 is a place beautified by god, and with all the onrnaments of nature, and enriched awith his earthly treasures...," p. 37.

[14]The descriptions of the bounty of the land contrast sharply with the experience of the first settlers at Jamestown, particularly during the "starving time" of 1609-10; many who died simply refused to work enough to gather the available food around them: "Wee had more Sturgeon then could be devoured by dogge and man; of which, the industrious by drying and pownding, mingled with caviare, sorrel and other wholesome hearbs, would make bread and good meate...So that of those wilde fruites, fish, and berries these lived very well, in regard of such a diet. But such was the most strange condition of some 150, that had they not beene forced nolens volens perforce to gather and prepare their victuall, they would all have starved, and have eaten one another, " William Simmonds, "The Proceedings of the English Colonies in Virginia [1612]"in Narratives of Early Virginia, Lyon G. Tyler. ed. (New York, 1907), pp. 185-188, and "...of five hundred within six moneths after Captaine Smiths departure, there remained not past sixtie men, women, and children, most miserable and poore creatures; and those were preserved for the most part, by roots, herbes, acornes, walnuts, berries, now and then a little fish...it were too vile to say, and scarce to be beleeved, what we endured: but the occasion was our owne, for want of providence industrie and government, and not the barrennesse and defect of the Countrie, as is generally supposed...," John Smith, "The Generall Historie of Virginia by Captain John Smith, 1624; The Fourth Booke,"Narratives of Early Virginia, pp. 294-301.`

[15]Andrew White, "Father White's Briefe Relation," in Narratives of Early Maryland , ed. Clayton C. Hall (New York, 1910), p. 45. Smith also noted the quality of the soil: "The best ground is knowne by the vesture it beareth, as by the greatnesse of trees or by abundance of weedes, &." Smith, pp. 82-83. In 1602 John Bereton explored the "north part of Virginia", the area around Massachusetts, and wrote, "...coming ashore, we stood a while like men ravished at the beautie and delicacie of this sweet soile..." and in comparison with the endowments of this land, "...the most fertile part of al England is (of it selfe) but barren..." John Bereton, "Briefe and True Relation of the Discovery of the North Part of Virginia, 1602" in Burrage, Early English and French Voyages, p. 335. The original richness of the original soil is suggested in James Rosier's account of the Weymouth expedition along the Maine coast in 1605: "Wednesday, the 22 of May, we felled and cut wood for our ships use...and digged a plot of ground, wherein, amongst some garden seeds, we sowed peaze and barley, which in sixteen days grew eight inches above ground; and so continued growing every day halfe and inch, although this was but the crust of the ground, and much inferior to the mould we after found..." James Rosier, "A True Relation of the Voyage of Captaine George Waymouth, 1605" in Burrage, ed. Early English and French Voyages, p. 365.

[16]John Smith, "Description of Virginia and Proceedings of the Colonie By Captain John Smith, 1612" in Tyler, Narratives of Early Virginia, pp. 97-98.

[17]John William de Braham, "De Braham's Account," in Early Travels in the Tennessee Country: 1540-1800 , ed. Samuel Cole Williams (Johnson City, TN, 1928), p. 193. Robert G. Healy provides an account of the eventual impact of this vison of the land in Competition for Land in the American South: Agriculture, Human Settlement, and the Environment (Washington, DC, 1985).

[18]John Smith, "Generall Historie, Book IV," in Tyler, Narratives of Early Virginia, p. 322.

[19]Bartram, Travels, pp. 29-30.

[20]See George H. Williams, Wilderness and Paradise in Christian Thought (New York, 1962) and Charles L. Sanford, The Quest for Paradise: Europe and the American Moral Imagination (Urbana, IL, 1961). Annette Kolodny provides a feminist critique of the psycho-sexual metaphors implicit in many colonial accounts of wilderness and paradise in The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers 1630-1860 (Chapel Hill, NC and London, 1984).

[21]Edward Bland, "The Discovery of New Brittaine," in The First Exploration of the Trans-Allegheny Region by the Virginians 1650-1674. Clarence W. Alvord and Lee Bidgood, eds. (Cleveland, OH, 1912), pp. 112-113.

[22]John Archdale, "A New Description of that Fertile and Pleasant Province of Carolina," in Salley, Narratives of Early Carolina, p. 288.

[23]George Alsop, "A Character of the Province of Maryland, 1666," in Hall, Narratives of Early Maryland, p. 344

[24]Gilbert Imlay, Topographical Description , p. 375.

[25]Edward Haies, "A Report of the Voyage of Sir Humfrey Gilbert, Knight, 1583," in Burrage,Early English and French Voyages, p. 205.

[26]Alsop, op. cit., in Hall, Narratives of Early Maryland, p. 345.

[27]Ibid., pp. 345-347.

[28]John Hammond, "Leah and Rachel, or, The Two Fruitfull Sisters Virginia and Mary-Land, 1656" in Hall, Narratives of Early Maryland, p. 291. Hammond, also, "Fowle and Venison, certainly cannot but be sufficient for a good diet and wholsom accommodation, considering how plentifully they are, and how easie with industry to be had," ibid., p. 292. Some have suggested that the large size of the American turkey derived from cross breeding with domestic turkeys but consider the observation in the Andrew White's "An Account of the Colony of Lord Baron of Baltimore, 1633": "There are [in Maryland] also great quantities of wild turkeys, which are twice as large as our tame and domestic ones," Hall, Narratives of Early Marlyland, p. 10.

[29]Thomas Ashe, "Carolina, Or a Description of the Present State of that Country, 1682" in Salley, Narratives of Early Carolina, p. 150.

[30]Robert Horne, "A Brief Description of the Province of Carolina, 1666" in Salley, Narratives of Early Carolina, p. 68

[31]Thomas Ashe, "Carolina...," in Salley, Narratives of Early Carolina, p. 151. Mark Catesby's account seems most realistic: "It is commonly reported that these turkeys weigh sixty pounds apiece, but of many hundreds that I handled, I observed very few to exceed the weight of thirty pounds." Mark Catesby, The Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands [1731-1743] in alan Feduccia, ed. Catesby's Birds of Colonial America (Chapel Hill, NC and London, 1985), p. 169.

[32]It is not true as was thought for a long time that there was a continuous forest from the coast to the Mississippi river; in addition to the "Indian fields" there were these "savanae" or Eastern prairies, the origins of which are not clear, but which contained grass ecosystems similar to those found west of the Mississippi. The earlier view is expressed, for instance, by Edmund Ruffin, "The savages had cleared for cultivation but a few fertile spots on the banks of the rivers; all the remainder of the land was under one great forest," quoted in American Soil Conservationists, USDA Soil Conservation Service, Miscellaneous Publication No. 449, p.43. See also the reference to the "Big Prairie" in northern Alabama in John R. Bedford, "A Tour in 1807 Down the Cumberland, Ohio, and Mississippi Rivers from Nashville to New Orleans," Tennessee Historical Magazine, Vol. V, No. 1 (April, 1919), 40-68. Prairies and glades are documented at several other sites in Tennessee. Adair notes extensive grasses in the woodlands as well as in open grasslands: "There is a number of extensive and fertile Savannas, or naturally clear land, between the Missisippi and the western branches of Mobille river. They begin about two hundred and fifty miles above the low lands of the coast, and are interspersed with the woods to a great distance, probably three hundred miles....The soil of the clear land, generally consists of loose rich mould to a considerable depth, and either a kind of chalk, or marl, underneath. We frequently find the grass with its seeded tops as high as our heads, when on horse-back, and very likely it would bear mowing, three or four times in one season. As the Indians gather their wild hemp, in some of these open fertile lands, both it and our hemp would grow to admiration, with moderate tillage; and so would tobacco, indigo, cotton, and flax, in perfection." James Adair, History of the American Indians [1775], ed. Samuel C. Williams (Johnson City, TN, 1930), p. 494. See also p. 304.

[33]William Talbot, "The Discoveries of John Lederer," in Alvord and Bidgood, pp. 163-164.

[34]Adair, History, p. 445, n. 256. On July 28th, 1739, a ranger traveling with General Oglethorpe wrote, "The Things being all got over the River [Ogeechee] we set forward, The Indians killing plenty of Deer and Turkeys for our Refreshment, also several Buffaloes, of which there is great Plenty and they are very good Eating. Though they are a very heavy Beast they will out Run a Horse and Quite Tire him." in "A Ranger's Report of Travels with General Oglethorpe, 1739-1742," Travels in the American Colonies, ed. Newton D. Mereness (New York, 1916), p. 219. Along the Ohio river at the confluence of the Wabash Captain Harry Gordon observed "great herds of Buffaloe" in 1766, noting that "The herds of Buffaloe are hereabouts Extraordinary large and frequent to be seen." in "Journal of Captain Harry Gordon' Journey from Pittsburg Down the Ohio and the Mississippi to New Orleans, Mobile, and Pensacola, 1766," Ibid., pp. 468-69. Gilbert Imlay repeats an account of buffalo around the Blue Lick in Kentucky: "I have heard a hunter assert, he saw above 1000 buffaloes at the Blue licks at once; so numerous were they before the first settlers had wantonly sported away their lives," and describing other licks in eastern Kentucky, he observes,"The amazing herds of buffalo which resort thither, by their size and number, fill the traveller with amazement and terror, especially when he beholds the prodigious roads they have made from all quarters, as if leading to some populous city; the vast space of land around these springs desolated as if by a ravaging enemy, and hills reduced to plains..." Topographical Description, pp. 320, 323-324; the habits of the buffalo in Kentucky are described by Daniel Boon, "The buffalo were more frequent than I have seen cattle in the settlements, browzing on the leaves of the cane, or cropping the herbage on those extensive plains...," quoted in Imlay, op. cit., p. 339.

[35]Bartram, Travels, pp. 263-264. Bartram noted, however, "As for the animal productions, they are the same which originally inhabited this part of North America, except such as have been affrighted away since the invasion of the Europeans. The buffalo (urus) once so very numerous, is not at this day [1773] to be seen inthis part of the country; there are but few elks, and those only in the Apalachian mountains." Ibid., p. 62.

[36]Ganier, pp. 70-71.

[37]Ganier also notes, however, that David Crockett reported elk in the river bottoms of Obion and Dyer counties between 1820 and 1830. Ganier, p. 71. Adair suggests that Indian waste also contributed to their disappearance: "The buffalos are now become scarce, as the thoughtless and wasteful Indians used to kill great numbers of them, only for the tongues and marrow-bones, leaving the rest of the carcases to the wild beasts." History of the American Indians, p. 445-446. Some Indians had apparently developed highly specialized tastes; on the 1527 Panphilo de Narvaez expedition Cabeza de Vaca reported, "In the town where the emeralds were presented to us [probably near Ures on the Rio Sonora] the people gave Dorantes over six hundred open hearts of deer. They ever keep a good supply of them for food, and we called the place Pueblo de los Corazones." In "The Narrative of Cabeza de Vaca," Spanish Explorers in the Southern United States, 1528-1543, ed. Frederick W. Hodge (New York, 1907), p. 109. See also Catesby: "A fawn cut out of the deer's belly and boiled in its natural bag, is a dish in great esteem with them." The Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands , p. 146. Roseann R. Hogan, "Buffaloes in the Corn: James Wade's Account of Pioneer Kentucky," Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, Vol. 89, No. 1 (Winter, 1991), 1-31, provides an account of the complex and violent relations between settlers and Indians over control of land and hunting rights.

[38]In 1725, Capt. Tobias Fitch, on a mission to negotiate with the Upper "Creek " Indians in Alabama, was told by the head man, Hopeahachey, "We are very glad to see you here and tho we have not Such Intertainment To give you as you give us when we Come to you, yet such as we have we give you Freely; and we are very glad to see that you Can eat such as we Live on. When you are at home your Dyet is kept more under command. Your Chatle are kept in large pens and Likewise your Sheep; your Turkeys and Ducks are at your Doores. Now with us it is not so. We are forced to hunt and Take a Great deale of pains To get our provisiones befor we eat it..." Mereness, Travels in the American Colonies, p. 190.

[39]Imlay, Topographical Description, p. 65.

[40]Bartram, Travels, pp. 183-184. See also Charles M. Hudson, "Why the Southeastern Indians Slaughtered Deer," in Indians, Animals, and the Fur Trade: A Critique of Keepers of the Game. ShepherdKrech III (Athens, GA, 1981), pp. 155-176. See also Catesby: "Before the introduction of firearms...they made no other use of the skins of deer..than to clothe themselves...but as they now barter the skins to the Europeans for other clothing and utensils they were before unqcquainted with, so the use of guns has enabled them to slaughter far greater number of deer and other animals than they did with their primitive bows and arrows. This destruction of deer and other animals being chiefly for the sake of their skins, a small part of the venison they kill suffices for them; the remainder is left to rot, or becomes a prey to the wolves, panthers, and other voracious beasts. With these skins they purchase of the English, guns, powder and shot, woolen cloth, hatchets, kettles, porridge pots, knives, vermilion, beads, rum, etc." The Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands , p. 147. On the reference to "tigers": "This creature is called, in Pennsylvania and the northern States, panther; but in Carolina and the southern States,is called tyger; it is very strong, much larger than any dog, of a yellowish brown, or clay colour, having a very long tail; it is a mischievous animal, and preys on calves, young colts, etc." Bartram, Travels, p. 63.

[41]Chester Davis, Hidden Seed and Harvest: A History of the Moravians, (Winston-Salem, NC, 1959), p. 49. The Moravians were meticulous record keepers, recording the numbers of people bitten by snakes, the snakes killed, the hides transported, along with the numbers and types of trees felled. See Records of the Moravians in North Carolina: Volume I 1752-1771, Adelaide L. Fries, ed. (Raleigh, NC, 1922), p. 373, which notes an April 1768 trip to Charleston from Wachovia. 3000 pounds of dressed deer skins were transported in April, another 4400 pounds the following November. Several trips were made each year from the Moravian settlements in North Carolina to trading posts in Pine Tree (Camden) and Charleston, SC. Wagon trains usually followed the drainages of the Catawba and Yadkin Rivers. Another indication of the trade is found in the many colonial records of business transactions: "Palace Court, Wednesday June 15th 1737: The Accountant acquainted the Trustees that the following Bank Receipts came to his hands since the last Meeting...One for two Pounds fifteen Shillings and ten Pence paid in by the Accountant Which with four hundred and twelve Pounds thirteen Shillings and four Pence accounted for by him in the Payment Book makes together the Sum of four hundred and fifteen Pounds Nine Shillings and two Pence receiv'd of Messrs Peter Simond and Co for seven Cases of Deer Skins imported from the Ship two Brothers weighing three thousand and sixty Eight Pounds Weight sold to them at two Shillings and Eight Pence half Penny a Pound." Allen D. Candler, The Colonial Records of the State of Georgia (Atlanta, GA, 1904), p. 289. At one and a half pounds per skin [see entry for January 12th 1740 at p. 377] this shipment represents about 2045 skins. For additional information on the records of game harvested and shipped see Gene Waddell, Indians of the South Carolina Low Country 1562-1751 (Columbia, SC, 1980), p. 41.

[42]Connolly was in the Cumberland area some time between 1763 and 1770. Samuel C. Williams, Early Travels in the Tennessee Country 1540-1800 (Johnson City, TN, 1928), pp. 213, 227.

[43]John Smith, "Description of Virginia," in Tyler, Narratives of Early Virginia, p. 90.

[44]Edward Bland, "The Discovery of New Brittaine," in Alvord and Bidgood, p. 120.

[45]William Hilton, "A Relation of a Discovery, 1664" in Salley, Narratives of Early Carolina, p. 47.

[46]Robert Horne, "A Brief Description," in Salley, Narratives of Early Carolina, p. 68.

[47]Anonymous, "A Relation of Maryland, 1635" in Hall, Narratives of Early Maryland,p. 79.

[48]A good short account of the ecological diversity of these coastal forest is given by Samuel Wilson: "Near the Sea the Trees are not very large, they grow pritty neare together; farther up they are larger, and grow farther asunder, and are in most parts free from Underwood, so that you may see near half a mile amongst the bodyes of the large tall timber trees, whose tops meeting make a very pleasing shate, yet hinders not grass, myrtle, and other sweet scenting shrubs here and there from growing under them: Amongst these Groves of Timber Trees are here and there Savana's, (or grassy plains) of several magnitudes clear of Trees, which have occasion'd some that have seene them to compare Carolina to those pleasant Parks in England, that have abundance of tall Timber Trees unlop'd, here you may hunt the Hare, Fox, and Deere all day long in the shade, and freely, spur your horse through the Woods to follow the chase." "An Account of the Province of Carolina, By Samuel Wilson, 1682" in Salley, Narratives of Early Carolina, p. 170.

[49]Bartram, Travels, p. 56.

[50]Bartram, Travels, p. 63

[51]John Muir, A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, William F. Bade, ed., Houghton Mifflin Co., (Boston and New York: 1916), p. 2.

[52]Muir, A Thousand-Mile Walk, pp. 14-15.

[53]Muir, A Thousand-Mile Walk, 38-39.

[54]Muir, A Thousand-Mile Walk, p. 5.

[55]Harry Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area (Boston/Toronto/London, 1963), pp. 66-67.

[56]Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands, p. 64. The greed and avarice had a social history ultimately rooted in the land ownership patterns of England: in a society where the poor "rioted" to obtain the "lop and top" of felled trees in a local forest and where nighttime poaching of deer was endemic, social constraints in favor of conservation were ineffective; it was these poor of England, Scotland, and Ireland who settled the American forests and whose descendants cut these forests of the upland South. See Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. James E. Harting (London, 1888), pp. 31-32.

[57]Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands, p. 69.

[58]Imlay, Topographical Description, p. 376.

[59]William Faulkner, Go Down Moses (New York, 1973), p. 278.

[60]John Smith, "Description of Virginia," in Tyler, Narratives of Early Virginia, p. 82.

[61]Andrew White, "A Briefe Relation of the Voyage Unto Maryland, 1634" in Hall, Narratives of Early Maryland, p. 45.

[62]Samuel Wilson, "An Account of the Province of Carolina, 1682" in Salley, Narratives of Early Carolina, p.171.

[63]Whitaker, Good Newes from Virginia, p. 42.

[64]George Alsop, "A Character of the Province of Maryland, 1666" in Hall, Narratives of Early Maryland, p. 348.

[65]Samuel Wilson, "An Account...of Carolina," in Salley, Narratives of Early Carolina, p.171

[66]Whitaker, Good Newes from Virginia, p. 42. In 1759 Andrew Burnaby reported, "These waters [the rivers of the Chesapeake Bay] are stored with incredible quantities of fish such as sheeps-heads, rock-fish, drums, white pearch, herrings, oysters, crabs, and several other sorts. Sturgeon and shad are in such prodigious numbers, that one day, within the space of two miles only, some gentlemen in canoes caught above 600 of the former with hooks, which they let down to the bottom, and drew up at a venture when they perceived them to rub against a fish; and of the latter above 5000 have been caught at one single haul of the seine." Travels through the Middle Settlements in North America (Ithaca, NY, 1960), p. 11.

[67]Robert Sandford, "A Relation of a Voyage on the Coast of the Province of Carolina,1666" in Salley, Narratives of Early Carolina, pp. 103-104. Edmund Ruffin noted the many Indian shell heaps on the South Carolina sea islands and urged the use of shells in preparing "calcareous manure" to improve the soil; he also observed that little use was made of the shells and that they were seen as an encumbrance and were removed sometimes by dumping them into nearby creeks and rivers. See Edmund Ruffin, Agriculture, Geology, and Society in Antebellum South Carolina, ed. William M. Mathew (Athens, GA and London: 1992), p. 126.

[68]Thomas Ashe, "Carolina, or a Description of the Present State of that Country, 1682" in Salley, `Narratives of Early Carolina, p. 152.

[69]Mark Catesby, The Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands , p. 143.

[70]Arthur Barlowe's "Narrative of the First Voyage to the Coasts of America [1584] in Early English and French Voyages, ed., Henry S. Burrage (New York, 1932): "This Island [the Outer Banks along Pamlico Sound] had many goodly woodes full of Deere, Conies, Hares, and Fowle, even in the middest of Summer [July 2] in incredible abundance." p. 229. Also, "Under the banke or hill whereon we stoode, we behelde the vallyes replenished with goodly Cedar trees, and having discharged our harquebuz-shot, such a flocke of Cranes (the most part white) arose under us, with such a cry redoubled by many echoes, as if an armie of men showted all together." Ibid.

[71]Samuel Wilson, "An Account...of Carolina," in Salley, Narratives of Early Carolina, p. 171.

[72]Burnaby, Travels, pp. 11-12.

[73]A good summary of both the lore and the literature is found in Michael Allen, Western Rivermen, 1763-1861 (Baton Rouge and London, 1990). See also the account of John Bedford's journey down the Cumberland. An account of the long boat journey from Pittsburg to New Orleans is found in "Journal of Captain Harry Gordon's Journey [1766]," in Mereness, Travels in the American Colonies, pp. 457-489. The use of the river bottoms as primary wilderness roadways is described in Sam B. Hilliard, Hogmeat and Hoecake: Food Supply in the Old South 1840-1860 (Carbondale/Edwardsville/London/Amsterdam, 1972), and in Forest McDonald and Grady McWhiney, "The Antebellum Southern Herdsman: A Reinterpretation," Journal of Southern History, XLI, No. 2, (May, 1975), 147-166; see also Edmund Cody Burnett, "Hog Raising and Hog Driving in the Region of the French Broad River," Agricultural History, XX, (April, 1946), 86-103. A typical account of river bottom travel is found in Williams, "Dr. Thomas Walker's Journal [1750]," in Early Travels in the Tennessee Country, pp. 169-174; the close association of roads and rivers is found in the table, "Road from Philadelphia to the falls of the Ohio by land," in Imlay, Topographical Description, pp. 376-378.

[74]Imlay, Topographical Description, p. 75.

[75]Imlay, Topographical Description, p. 73.

[76]Edmund Ruffin, 1855, American Soil Conservationists, p. 43.

[77]Ruffin, 1855, American Soil Conservationists, p. 45.

[78]Muir, A Thousand-Mile Walk, pp. 30-32.

[79] James A. Nash, Loving Nature: Ecological Integrity and Christian Responsibility (Nashville, 1991), pp. 117-118.