The Wilderness of War

**This transcript comes from an earlier broadcast of this episode. There may be some changes to the audio you hear above.**

LYNDON B. JOHNSON: The Wilderness Bill preserves for our posterity, for all time to come, nine million acres of this vast continent in their original and unchanging beauty and wonder.

PETER: Original and unchanging beauty. It’s a sentiment central to the law itself. The act defines wilderness as land, and I’m quoting, “retaining its primeval character and influence.”

There was this notion, and there still is today, that by keeping these lands off-limits for anybody but hikers, we’d be able to encounter nature in its pristine state, and the state that European settlers encountered it 500 years ago.

BRIAN: I’m zipping up my backpack now, Peter.

PETER: But if you actually read what those settlers had to say about the American landscape, you’d quickly see that it was anything but pristine. Take for instance, New England.

CHARLES MANN: The first real reports we have are from Verrazano in the 1520s.

PETER: This is Charles Mann. He wrote about some of these early accounts in a book called 1493. He says this report by Giovanni de Verrazano suggests that in southern New England, at least, the wild forests we imagine today were few and far between.

CHARLES MANN: He marched for quote, “many leagues” across the landscape and saw nothing but cornfields, farms, and so forth, with the trees just a distant line in the horizon.

BRIAN: Peter, it sounds like you’re telling me it they saw a few trees, but never did find the forest.

PETER: That’s right, Brian. And when they finally did find the forests, those forests didn’t really look primeval. Here’s how an English colonist named Thomas Morton described what he saw happening in Massachusetts in the early 1600s.

CHARLES MANN: The savages– which was, of course his way of describing the native people– are accustomed to set fire of the country in all places where they come, and to burn it twice a year at the spring and fall of leaves. The reason that moves them to do so, is because otherwise, it would be so overgrown with under weeds, that the people would not be able, in any wise, to pass through the country out of a beaten path.

And this custom of firing the country is the means to make it passable. And by that means, the trees grow here and there, like our parks, and make the country very beautiful and commodious.

ED: So you’re telling me that New England’s forests used to be like parks in England?

PETER: Believe it or not, they did. And this practice of using fire to make them that way, well, Mann read me another account by a Dutchman named Adriaen van der Donck, that underlines how widespread it was.

CHARLES MANN: “Such a fire is a splendid sight, when one sails on the rivers, [INAUDIBLE], the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers at night, while the forest is ablaze on both banks. Fires and flames are seen everywhere on all sides, a delightful scene to look on from afar.” It was like a light show for them, right? Boats would go up the Hudson River, and Dutch people would presumably sit on the deck and drink some beer, and watch the show.

PETER: So Charles, taking the broad view of, well, New England and what becomes Anglo-America, how much of it is subject to management by native peoples?

CHARLES MANN: A whole lot of it. Now, you have to remember, native people were here for 15,000 years. And so if your question is did, sometime in those 15,000 years, the forests and X place get cut down, or managed, or burned, or manipulated in some way? The answer is, everywhere. Which, over time, means that practically nothing is quote, “wilderness.”

PETER: And if nothing is, quote, “wilderness,” 500 years ago, then how do so many of us come to believe in this idea of land with primeval character? The idea that’s so central to our understanding of wilderness today?

ED: Well Peter, that sounds like a set-up question for a BackStory episode, if I ever heard one. And in fact, that’s what we’re going to be exploring today, just like our intrepid ancestors. We’ve got stories about how the widespread 19th century fear of wilderness was exploited by the US Department of War; about two men who went head to head over the value of wilderness, 50 years later; and about how the creators of one national park dealt with the fact that there were people already living in the woods that they wanted to, quote, “protect.”

BRIAN: And yes, we’ve got the story of how the Wilderness Act of 1964, signed into law 50 years ago this month, came into being in the first place.

PETER: But first, let’s return to my conversation with Charles Mann. One way of understanding how we got this image of dense, primeval-looking forests in New England is that a lot of those forests have actually looked that way for centuries. But according to Mann, that is a product of human history.

You see, right around the same time those Europeans we heard about were writing about the park-like woods, the people who made those woods look that way were dying off in droves. Over the period of a few decades, upwards of 90% of New England’s native population was wiped out by old world diseases. So when the pilgrims famously arrived in 1620–

CHARLES MANN: What they saw was this agricultural landscape. They saw farm fields, they saw skeletons of bodies all over the place. And so what they settled in was an emptied, not an empty, an emptied landscape. It was a tragedy, it was a cemetery. What happens is they move into these cleared areas. Something like the first 50 English settlements in New England were on top of abandoned native villages.

PETER: Right, so that erases those villages completely.

CHARLES MANN: Yeah, erases those villages. And then of course, the people who come 15 years later don’t even really know that there was a village there to begin with. Meanwhile, the landscape around them changes, as well. And part of it they clear, and then they plant a whole field of wheat, or something like that. And then the stuff that they don’t clear, they leave alone. They don’t burn.

And the result is that the undergrowth grows up, and it become thick and dark and entangled. And you get this bifurcated landscape that’s much more similar to what they would have been familiar with in England. So New England, the name is right, they literally did their best to re-create the landscape they were familiar with.

PETER: And as they erased evidence of prior management and occupancy, then there’s a collective amnesia, or forgetfulness, about what the first settlers had right in front of their eyes. They could see this, they moved to these areas that were open, because they had been cultivated.

CHARLES MANN: Absolutely. Until by the 19th century, you had this curious thing where Thoreau– right, who we think of as Mr. Wilderness, right? In the 1850s, 1857 I think. He talks about how when he goes into the Maine woods, in that wonderful three-part book, the Maine Woods, he actually can’t go into the woods for large sections, because the undergrowth hasn’t been burned. And it’s so thick that it’s impassable. So what they do– Here’s the report. “The walking was worse than ever, because of the fallen timber. The fallen trees were so numerous, that for long distances, the route was through a succession of small yards, where we climbed over fences as high as our heads.”

Now think about this. He’s going into the Maine woods. He actually can’t walk in the woods. He has to go from one farmland to the next, with the woods over here. Which shows you how much the landscapes– You have John Smith who’s reporting, and goes to a place like Jamestown in about 1610, that the woods are so open, that he can ride through them at a gallop. He was so crazy, he may actually have done that.

And here, Thoreau can’t even walk through the woods in 1850. So you see a huge ecological transformation has taken place.

PETER: So in a way, our modern notions of wilderness really focus on what we take to be untouched places, and we want to cherish these as if they were a route back into a deep past. When it might be more appropriate to have a better understanding of what has happened to the lands we live on.

CHARLES MANN: Thoreau, and again in The Maine Woods, keeps talking about the universal, dense, evergreen forest. He took that as this timeless thing that had always been there. He didn’t know better. I mean, we have the advantage of 100 years of historical research. And I don’t want to dis Thoreau, who was a remarkable guy in every way. But he got that part wrong.

PETER: But now we are becoming more aware of changes in the land, that we have more of an historical consciousness. And there is a sense that what was once there, if we could save some remnant of it, needs to be preserved. How do modern ideas about wilderness relate to the first images that you’ve been studying of people who settled in New England?

CHARLES MANN: Well the modern images of wilderness relate in a very uneasy way to what was actually here. Many, many, many of American ecosystems evolved for a thousands of years in the presence of native fire. And a lot of the environmental problems we’re having in the west relate to the fact that when we start managing them a la Smokey the Bear– no fire– we end up creating a kind of ecosystem that hasn’t been seen on the continent for a really, really long time. And something unnatural, quote unquote, and new. Something distinctively modern.

And so when we think we’re recovering the past, what we’re actually doing is creating something that hasn’t been there for a very, very long time.

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PETER: Charles Mann is the author of 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. And before that, the best-seller, 1491. He spoke to us from the wilds of New England public radio.

ED: It’s time for a short break. When we get back, to dam or not to dam, that is the question.

BRIAN: You’re listening to BackStory. Don’t go away.