This Land, This South

An Environmental History

Albert E. Cowdrey

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780813108513, 9780813119335
• eBook ISBN: 9780813188676
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Here is the story of the long interaction between humans, land, and climate in the American South. It is a tale of exploitation and erosion, of destruction, disease, and defeat, but also of the persistent search for knowledge and wisdom. It is a story whose villains were also its victims and sometimes its heroes.
Ancient forces created the southern landscape, but, as Albert E. Cowdrey shows, humankind from the time of earliest habitation has been at work reshaping it. The southern Indians, far from being the "natural ecologists" of myth, radically transformed their environment by hunting and burning. Such patterns were greatly accelerated by the arrival of Europeans, who viewed the land as a commodity to be exploited for immediate economic benefit. Their greed and ignorance took a heavy toll on the land and all those it supported.
Climate, interacting with history, also played its part. The diseases brought to the New World from Europe and later from Africa found in the South a warm and hospitable abode, with devastating consequences for its human inhabitants. Until well into the twentieth century, endemic illnesses continually eroded human resources.
Cowdrey documents not only the long decline but the painfully slow struggle to repair the damage of human folly. The eighteenth century saw widespread though ineffectual efforts to protect game and conserve the soil. In the nineteenth century the first hesitant steps were taken toward scientific flood control, forestry, wildlife protection, and improved medicine.
In this century, the New Deal, the explosion in scientific knowledge, and the national environmental movement have spurred more rapid improvements. But the efforts to harness the South's great rivers, to save its wild species, and to avert serious environmental pollution have often had equivocal results.
This Land, This South, first published in 1983, was the first book to explore the impact of humans on the southern landscape and its effect on them. In graceful and at times lyrical prose, Albert Cowdrey brings together a vast array of information. This important book, now revised and updated, should be read by every person concerned with the past, present, and future of the South.

1

Isolation and Upheaval

THE HISTORY OF THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE IS ONE OF SEPARATION FROM THE Old World broken by intermittent rediscovery. Because there are penalties for prolonged isolation, the two great discoveries of which we have knowledge entailed ecological revolution.

The origin of the American Indian was long a mystery and in many respects remains one. He is a cousin of the Mongoloid peoples, the descendant of a common ancestor. His original home was in northeastern Siberia. He sprang, it would appear, from homogeneous stock, perhaps a few closely-related tribes of big-game hunters who preyed on the great fauna of the Pleistocene. (The Eskimo is a Mongoloid from a later incursion.) Indians are believed to have entered the vast cul-de-sac of the American continents during the glaciations when sea levels were low and a land-bridge connected Alaska with Siberia. Some certainly came during the period from 28,000 to 10,000 years ago, and others may have arrived much earlier. They spread rapidly over a truly pristine continent where no human had been before them. Some may have entered the South. Crude scrapers and choppers found in Alabama, as well as archeological sites in South Carolina and Texas, suggest, though they do not prove, very early human occupation—on the order of 38,000 to 40,000 years ago.¹

From about 11,000 B.C. to about 6,500 B.C., America was populated by Paleo-Indians, people at approximately the cultural level of the Upper Paleolithic in the Old World. Fluted (grooved) spear-points are their major monument. So too may be the catastrophic Pleistocene extinctions, for their arrival and progress coincided with the destruction of dozens of species of large animals. When the Folsom hunters of 8,000 B.C. ranged the Llano Estacado of western Texas and New Mexico, these lands were green savannahs, with wooded valleys hiding streams and marshy spots. In this pleasant landscape the animals were ambushed, killed, and butchered. Dwelling on ridges that overlooked the watering-holes, the hunters’ world was a movable feast as they followed the herds, warring against elephants, horses, camels, sloths, and bison. The Indians used ambushes and natural traps such as ravines, driving their prey with fire. Lightly armed with stone-tipped thrusting spears, they may by such methods have killed many animals to secure the meat of a few.²

Whether they actually destroyed the great fauna remains in doubt. The die-off also correlates with the drying of the plains. Yet the notion of climatic change overtaking swift-moving animals like the horse and camel, well able to survive in and regions, strains belief. Evidence is persuasive that man did not evolve in the New World; he erupted suddenly as a new force, armed with weapons of stone and fire. His prey had no opportunity to adapt gradually to the great killer. In this view man’s coming exemplified, in Charles Darwin’s words, “what havoc the introduction of any new beast of prey must cause in a country, before the instincts of the indigenous inhabitants have become adapted to the stranger’s craft or power.” The Pleistocene extinctions, however, can only have been a most complex process. Climatic change and human hunting acted simultaneously but in very different ways to transform ecological balances. Man may have administered the coup-de-grace to species under pressure from an altered habitat. By destroying carnivores, he may have set off population explosions in some species of herbivores which then crowded out others by competing for diminished food sources. The possibilities are many, the evidence spotty. Early man participated in the extinctions, but we do not know how.³

In any case, the consequences were a major calamity for the later complex Indian societies. Their domesticates—dog, guinea pig, llama, guanaco, and vicuña—were a poor lot by comparison with the domesticates of Eurasia. Animal muscle is a prime mover of civilization. Cultures devoid of the horse and bullock, however brilliant their expedients were at a permanent disadvantage in peace or war against others so equipped. The horse, domesticated from Asian stock, reentered the North American continent bearing a conquistador on its back; its role in the conquest was a considerable one. Some of its descendants, running wild in a hospitable environment, became the mounts of the plains Indians and an essential ally in their hunting, warring, empire building, and resistance to the whites—in short, in the renascence of their culture. What Montezuma’s generals might have done with light cavalry, to say nothing of war elephants, remains a teasing dream.

Paleo-Indian hunters may have entered eastern North America during the Two Creeks interstadial, about 10,000 B.C., when the drying of the high plains forced the big game eastward. (At this time “the East” meant the Southeast plus the Ohio valley and the Atlantic coast to Maine. Glaciers still covered the rest.) Here the Indians found and attacked the tree-browsing mastodon. The East is littered with elegant Clovis spear points that mark their coming. Early sites occur in present-day Texas, Alabama, Florida, Missouri, Tennessee, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Virginia.⁴

By the eighth millennium B.C., the extinction of the great fauna—the mammoth, horse, and camel had all vanished in the ninth millennium, Bison antiquus a thousand years later—began to bring into existence the durable cultural forms which archeologists call the Archaic. Indians turned to a mix of small-game hunting, fishing, and wild-plant collecting. In some places wandering hunters attached themselves to unmoving food sources, such as mussel beds, and turned to a semisedentary lifestyle. The marks of an aging, presumably more populous culture were plain in the intensive exploitation of more limited areas, and in the diversified food sources—deer, raccoon, opossum, birds, fish, shellfish, wild vegetables.⁵ This tradition was not only a temporal phase but an enduring aspect of Indian life; in remote and poor regions the Archaic lingered past the time of Columbus.

Meanwhile, a third Indian tradition, the Woodland, took shape along the Mississippi and Ohio rivers after 1,000 B.C. Agriculture, including the first use of corn in the region, cord-marked or fabric-marked pottery, and elaborate burial customs characterized the Woodland world. Immense earthen mounds were used for burials, as at Poverty Point, Louisiana, or to form enclosures, or to represent the shapes of animals. Notable centers of culture flourished near Chillicothe, Ohio, and in the temple mounds at Kolomoki in Georgia. Woodland Indians cultivated native plants as well as the squash and a tropical variety of corn which had diffused northward from Mexico. But gathering was still an important activity—wild nuts, fruits, berries, and seeds like those of the ragweed were important to their diet—and they remained hunters, harrying deer and smaller game.⁶

The Mississippian tradition rose along the middle reaches of the river in the floodplain between Vicksburg and St. Louis. During its 800-year reign (ca. 700–1500 A.D.) it spread to river valleys throughout much of the Southeast. The highest culture north of Mexico in its day, the Mississippian was characterized by a firmer agricultural base—the growing of corn, beans, and squash, in particular—by its riverine locations, its large towns defended by palisades studded with wooden towers and sometimes by flooded moats. Within the walls, mounds topped by temples or the homes of chiefs dominated a stratified society.⁷ Elegant tools and carvings and a well-developed religion were among the Mississippian achievements.

The most formidable impact on man and environment, however, and the most enduring, lay in establishing corn (Zea mays) as the basis of agriculture. Maize probably derived from a wild plant now called teosinte in Meso-America 8,000–15,000 years ago. The plant was almost certainly transformed by human selection, “man’s most remarkable plant-breeding achievement,” in the words of one authority. The modern plant is a biological monstrosity, unable to survive unless human hands separate the kernels from the cob and plant them. (Otherwise the seedlings are so dense where the ear falls that competition may prevent any from reaching adulthood.) The inability of corn to scatter its seeds is a mark, as striking in its way as temples or pyramids, of Indian artifice in the transformation of nature.⁸

The “most efficient of all cereals in converting nutrients and solar energy into foodstuff,” corn made possible the great Indian civilizations, the provincial but impressive cultures north of Mexico, and the relatively dense Indian population of some 96–100 million that may have existed in the Western Hemisphere before the coming of the Europeans. The whites in turn would find it “the most useful grain in the World; and had it not been for the Fruitfulness of this Species, it would have proved very difficult to have settled some of the Plantations in America.”⁹ As a food source, Zea mays has one notable failing in that it fixes an important vitamin, niacin, in a chemical bond that resists digestion. Bean plants intercropped with corn provided an important supplement, assisting the return of nitrogen to the soil and supplying a necessary addition to the human diet, as well. Mississippian sites were confined to river bottoms, probably in consequence of the need to grow corn without fertilizer, whose use the southeastern Indians, unlike those of the Northeast, never learned. In the lowlands they fished and hunted, traded, and spread the forms and insights of their culture by boat, enduring floods for the sake of the fresh alluvium brought by the waters.¹⁰

In the later Indian South, the three traditions coexisted, enabling different communities to survive in a variety of natural settings. At the same time, the unities of Indian culture pervaded the region. Their use of fire to clear land for planting and to drive animals during the fall and winter hunting transformed the landscape. Fire became central to the maintenance of a human-centered ecology. Burning discouraged larger forest fires by clearing deadfall and brush; it provided nutrients for trees; it kept the woodlands open, encouraging growth of grass, and making acorns easier for animals, birds, and men to find. It helped to create and preserve meadows whose dense, shrubby margins were the hiding place and browsing place of the deer. Culling the deer herds by hunting provided a sound control on the species, whose caution, speed, adaptability, and prolific breeding protected it from extinction. Indeed, the deer by breeding too fast would soon have starved themselves without predation both human and nonhuman. Deer were the bison of the southeastern Indians, and in some measure their cattle, both prey and symbiont.

Fire helped shape the face of the land in ways that struck European travelers and explorers. Even before they reached the coast, they might smell the smoke of burning woods, as did one off Delaware in 1630, who wrote that “the land was smelt before it was seen.” Inland a few miles from the Virginia shore they found heavily timbered areas interspersed with savannahs of “many hundred acres” covered by tall grass and spotted with bogs where trees still grew thick with interlacing branches. In many places the land was a deer park like the one spied by Barbadian explorers along North Carolina’s Cape Fear River in 1663: “We found a very large and good Tract of Land on the N.W. Side of the River, thin of Timber, except here and there a very great Oak, and full of Grass, commonly as high as a Man’s Middle, and in many Places to his Shoulders, where we saw many Deer and Turkies; one Deer having very large horns and great Body, therefore we called it Stag-Park.” Much of the upland region was open, with meadows of “fine-bladed grass six foot high, along the Banks of . . . pleasant Rivulets,” where the naturalist John Lawson saw “buffalos and Elks” at the turn of the eighteenth century.¹¹

The woodlands of longleaf pine may be the work of man. In the natural succession, the longleaf forest gives way in time to a mixed growth of gum, oak, loblolly, and short-leaf pine. Where the longleafs maintain themselves as the dominant tree, plant scientists adjudge them a “fire climax”—the product of an incomplete succession interrupted by fire. (Because of its thick bark, rapidly growing root system, and seeds which germinate on exposed soil, the longleaf is unusually though not perfectly fire resistant. Hence its competitive advantage in woods that are frequently burned.) The supposition that millennia of Indian burning halted the forest succession over large areas is rational, if in the nature of the case unprovable.

The habit of burning, like that of eating corn, has proved durable. In colonial times (and later) a number of laws were passed which forbade the practice. But southerners gave little heed to the law; on the evidence of the repeated enactments, burning continued and has not ended today. A 1943 study concluded that “in the vegetation of the Southeast, effects of fire are more striking than in any other region of the world.” Fires, of course, can have destructive effects; they may promote erosion by destroying ground cover or kill the longleaf pines themselves if set too often. A study in the 1960s found “by far the greatest loss” of American forests to fire was in the Southeast, a third of it attributable “to fires purposely set as part of a long-established practice (whether good or bad) to help establish new crops of pines, to improve grazing, and to help reduce the fire hazard.”¹² Fire, like agriculture, to which it was closely allied, reshaped much of the South in line with the needs of its human masters.

The less tangible aspects of the Indian past are not without interest for the historian of the South. To read studies which treat broadly of the whole Indian culture is to be left, among so much that is strange, with a sense of eerie familiarity. The southeastern Indians, it would appear, not only did much hunting and ate a corn-centered diet. They also drank great quantities of a blackish fluid rich in caffein—though as an emetic—, loved violent games, doted on oratory, were great devisers and purveyors of myths, and had a taste for blood vengeance and a legal system (or nonsystem) based on private justice. Influence of a common land? Parallel development of two peoples? Enough said. Such matters are beyond footnoting. But the eerie feeling does arise.

The value of Indian ways cannot be seen only in what has survived; much of what was best was quick to perish. The general satisfactoriness of Indian life to those who lived it must have been great despite its hardships and the cruelty of its wars. The advantages of their highly adapted lifestyle are suggested by estimates that they were able to live off the country much of the time, providing by manual labor only about one-fourth of the year’s subsistence. Recent studies have confirmed that a mixed regime of hunting and shifting agriculture forms the most energy-efficient of all economic systems, requiring only .05 to .10 calorie of input to produce a calorie of food energy. This efficiency, of course, depends on a large ratio of land to population, as well as on the gearing of effort to subsistence. As noted by one Virginia historian in the eighteenth century and another in the nineteenth, the effect of the maladapted culture introduced by the Europeans was “to make the native pleasures more scarce.”¹³

The varied life and limited labor surely contributed to the Indians’ extreme reluctance to be converted to white ways. Early settlers repeatedly commented on the great difficulty of persuading Indians under any condition to adopt Christianity and civilization. In 1728 William Byrd II remarked on the “bad success” of the charitable in conveting Indians, who, “after they returned home, instead of civilizing and converting the rest . . . have immediately lapsed into infidelity and barbarism themselves.” English racism was not the whole reason. The Jesuit father Pierre de Charlevoix, an astute cleric who traveled through Canada and Louisiana, roundly declared that “there never was so much as a single Indian that could be brought to relish our way of living,” a fact which he attributed to the liberty and naturalness of their lives.¹⁴ Perhaps their initial resistance was as much a tribute to Indian good sense as the later success of some tribes, especially in the South, in adopting (and adapting) white ways when they had become convinced that no other way to survival lay open.

These reflections should not, however, be taken to endorse a myth of our own time, the notion of the Indian as natural ecologist. Writers nowadays like to speak of the Indians’ “balanced ecological systems,” but the historian may wish to enter a partial dissent. The successive appearance of Paleo-Indian, Archaic, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Note to the Revised Edition
• Introduction
• 1 Isolation and Upheaval
• 2 The Problem of Survival
• 3 The Uses of the Wild
• 4 The Row-Crop Empire
• 5 Exploitation Limited
• 6 Exploitation Unlimited
• 7 Conserve and Develop
• 8 The Transformation Begins
• 9 South into Sunbelt
• 10 Myth and Dream: An Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliographical Note
• Index