Successive generations of North Americans have viewed their continent’s natural environment in different ways. From the vantage point of the present, it is clear that perceptions of the land have changed dramatically from the first years of settlement to the Civil War. Not only have such visions often shifted, but also different peoples have used their particular perspective to reshape the land itself and make it fit their own sense of what nature should be. If the consequences of some changes, such as cutting forests and filling in lowlands, have been deliberate and purposeful—to open the landscape and create sweeping vistas, for example—other human undertakings, such as mining and dam building, have brought results neither anticipated nor intended. Native peoples, no less than the first colonists and subsequent immigrants to North America, have reshaped the natural environment to meet their physical wants and spiritual needs. Indeed, much of the landscape we know today reflects patterns of use and abuse that began several centuries ago.
Long before the first European settlers reached the continent’s eastern shores, native peoples had developed agricultural practices that had changed the face of the land. By cutting away the bark to kill trees selectively, Indians in the Virginia tidewater (low, coastal land) and much of the Northeast had cleared space to plant small gardens of corn, squash, beans, and melons. Although the first English immigrants described the countryside as almost entirely wooded, the forests provided canopies of large, well-spaced trees under which a horse and rider could pass unhindered. By frequently moving their garden plots to find more-fertile soil and by periodically burning the undergrowth, Indians had further opened the land, in this way facilitating their hunting of deer and other game. Native American visions of the landscape not surprisingly featured people living in harmony with nature, whose riches they celebrated in seasonal rituals and through time-honored practices.
In contrast, the European colonists who intruded on this harmonious world often viewed it as alien and menacing; some called it, in the language of the Bible, a “howling wilderness.” The newcomers to America brought with them agricultural practices and preconceptions about nature based on their experiences in England. They saw uncultivated lands as “wastes” that needed to be “broken,” “dressed,” and “improved.” In New England, transplanted English settlers attempted to subdue what they considered a fearsome wilderness by mapping the countryside, draining marshlands, clearing pastures, fencing particular parcels, and planting wheat and other familiar crops. Within twenty years of the initial Puritan settlement, Edward Johnson boasted of the newcomers’ achievements: “This remote, rocky, barren, bushy, wild-woody wilderness, a receptacle for lions, wolves, bears, foxes, racoons, beavers, otters, and all kind of wild creatures, a place that never afforded the Natives better than the flesh of a few wild creatures and parched Indian corn inched out with chestnuts and bitter acorns, now through the mercy of Christ [has] become a second England for fertility in so short a space, that it is indeed the wonder of the world.”
So, rather than adapting to their new land, the English either changed it by cutting trees, building farms, and plowing or searched for soil and landscape features that reminded them of the English countryside. Seeking to tame the land and to conquer their fear of it, generations of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century settlers nevertheless failed to gain the mastery they desired. In part, this failure resulted from their custom of settling along waterways. To expedite travel and facilitate the shipment of agricultural produce, newcomers invariably built their homes along rivers. Despite the colonists’ attempts to control waterways through dams, rivers never failed to remind them of nature’s unpredictability and power. Rivers could, and often did, change course abruptly or flood during sudden rainstorms. Not until the middle of the eighteenth century did the colonists begin to discard their negative view of the landscape as a wilderness to be feared and controlled, and to substitute the idea that nature could be as much useful as fearsome.
