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THE USE AND ABUSE OF FORESTS BY THE VIRGINIA INDIANS.

By Hu Maxwell, United States Forest Service.

The opinion that Virginia at the time it first became known to white men was covered with vigorous and unbroken forest is erroneous. The proof of this is found in the writings of explorers and early historians. Woods covered much of the region, and fine forests abounded in some parts, but the Indian had made much more serious inroads upon the primeval growth of timber than the casual reader has generally supposed. This becomes more apparent when fragmentary accounts by different writers are brought together. The clearings made by Indians for agricultural purposes were comparatively large, but they were small in comparison with openings made by fires set accidentally, wantonly, or to the end that more wild game might abound, with improved opportunities for hunting it. Though white men are rated high as destroyers of forest, they are not in the same class with Indians. Virginia at the present time has six or seven acres of cleared land per capita. At the time of the first explorations the Indians had succeeded in deforesting thirty or forty acres for every individual in their tribes, and were proceeding with the work of destruction from the sea to the mountains and beyond. It is not possible to give exact figures. but thirty to forty acres of treeless land per capita is conservative. The population, however, was small at that time.

This estimate is based on records left by eye witnesses, or by those who had personal knowledge of the matter recorded, or at least had excellent facilities for ascertaining the facts. The

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Indian’s attitude toward the Virginia forests will be considered from three points of view: (a) His use of wood in his arts of war and peace; (b) the clearing of fields for agriculture; and (c) his habit of burning the woods. His influence upon the growth and spread of certain species, and the suppression of others, will be considered also.

The Indian’s Use of Wood.

The Indian population of that portion of Virginia between the Alleghany mountains and the sea at the time European settlement began near the coast, has been estimated at 17,000.¹ That allows approximately two and a half square miles, or 1,600 acres, for every man, woman, and child. It is less than one per cent. of the State’s present population, and appears ridiculously small; yet few regions of the United States, within historic times, had Indian populations as dense as Virginia’s. It was a center of population compared with many other areas of like extent. The average for the whole United States is believed to have been about one individual to 8,000 acres, or one-fifth the density of the present State of Nevada’s population.

Scattered and thin as Virginia’s Indian population was, the region could not have supported that many people if they had depended upon the chase alone. They drew supplies from several sources, and in practically every one of them, with the exception of fishing, it was necessary to destroy more or less of the forest to augment food supply. The quantity of wood used was small compared with that destroyed or left to natural decay, though the natives made constant use of the abundance about them, and it was of the utmost importance in their crude economy. They wasted a thousand trees where they put one to a good purpose. Poles, withes, and bark were utilized in making houses and wigwams. Their tools and weapons were largely of wood before they obtained metal from Europeans. Their hatchets of stone, bone, and shell had wooden handles, and the

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few recorded instances wherein the kind of wood was named, indicate that hickory was preferred, and to this day it remains the best handle wood in Virginia. Their wooden swords, edged with rows of flint points, or broken shells, were formidable weapons in the hands of savages. The Indians frequently carried spears with stone, bone, and later with iron heads. Locust was occasionally, perhaps generally, taken for spear shafts. The bow was the Indian’s most important arm in chase and war. Locust and witch hazel were said to have been generally used for bow wood; but three bows, procured very early on the coast of Virginia and still preserved in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, England, are said to be of ash. The Virginia Indian’s bow was about six feet long, which was twice the length of bows used later by many western tribes. The three bows at Oxford are highly polished and nearly as black as ebony.

The Virginia Indian was no less a fisherman than a hunter. The many broad and beautiful rivers, fine creeks, and deep estuaries tempted him to that occupation and rewarded him well. He pierced large fish with wooden arrows and transfixed them with spears of wood, but his chief dependence was placed upon weirs and traps which he constructed with wood. Faithful drawings by contemporaneous artists have been preserved, and exhibit the native’s fishing apparatus in Virginia.² The traveler by steamer to-day along the Potomac, Rappahannock, York, James, and other rivers of Virginia sees long lines of stakes protruding from the water. They hold the modern fisherman’s nets. Three hundred years ago similar apparatus was to be seen on the same rivers, but the red man was then the fisherman. The poles and stakes were severed and sharpened by fire, and were thrust into the soft submerged bars by the wild men who then lived along the shores. Land food failed at times, and the Indian could take to the water with the assurance that his weirs would not leave him empty-handed. Famine was impossible for those who lived sufficiently near the water to share the harvest

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gathered by the extensive traps, blind alleys, and pallisaded culsdesac; but if the supply of fish was cut off, the wolf of starvation frequently haunted the red man’s wigwam.

The Virginia colonists were quick to discover the vulnerable points in the Indian’s line of defense, and made use of that information from the very first. In the declaration of war against the tribes which had taken part in the massacre of 1622, one of the orders to the troops setting out upon the campaign against the Indians was to “pluck up their weirs.”³

Perhaps nowhere on the American continent were canoes more extensively used than by the Virginia Indians of the tidewater region. The canoe maker was the most ambitious artisan. These vessels were upon every stream, and their journeys were swift and silent. They were hollowed from a single trunk. Mention was occasionally made of bark canoes, but it remains uncertain whether they were made in Virginia or came from the north by river routes and land carriage. Some of the references indicate that birch bark canoes might have come from the north.⁴ If the bark canoes were made in Virginia, they were most like slippery elm bark. Canoes were sometimes made of it farther north.⁵

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Yellow poplar was the common canoe wood among the Virginia Indians, and the vessel was made in one piece from a solid leg. Lengths of forty or fifty feet have been recorded, but the usual size did not exceed half that. The largest carried thirty or forty persons. Probably the earliest mention by Europeans of the poplar dugout in Virginia was by Hariot, in the year 1600. He called the tree “rackiock,” which is presumed to have been its Indian name.⁶ One of the wood cuts in Beverley’s Virginia history shows native canoe makers at work. When it is borne in mind that the drawing from which that cut was engraved was probably made by an artist who had actually witnessed the Indians at work, and who saw just what the picture exhibits, the historical value of the engraving is apparent. The native canoe makers are shown with a large, straight trunk mounted on a scaffold, and they are at work with fire and rubbing stones to hollow it. The shell is thin, the superfluous wood has been removed, and the canoe’s lines are graceful. The background of the same picture exhibits the Indian method of felling a tree, by encircling the base with a ring of fire and confining it to a narrow notch until the tree is thrown. A log in the process of being severed by fire is likewise shown. It was a fortunate circumstance, from an historical standpoint, that some of the early voyagers to Virginia and residents in the colony, had the services of competent artists whose pictures have been preserved, affording valuable insight into the customs and handiwork of the Indians.⁷

Without canoes, the Indians in tidewater Virginia would have been greatly hindered in their movements. Many of the streams were too broad and deep to ford, but the light craft, propelled by from two to twenty paddles, glided swiftly and silently through many a maze of creeks, channels, estuaries, and lagoons. In the early years of the colony, when it became necessary to

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fight or threaten the savages, the white man’s first thought was. to strike at the canoes. An order issued in the war against the blind chief, Opechancanough, though its language was somewhat rhetorical and bombastic, explicitly pointed out the manner in which the rebellious savages ought to be attacked: “Pursue and follow them, surprising them in their habitations, interrupting them in their hunting, burning their towns, demolishing their temples, destroying their canoes.”

Eight years before that time, when the people of Jamestown had unsuccessfully attempted to force Powhatan into a treaty of peace by kidnapping his daughter Pocahontas, they resorted to the threat that, unless he came to terms speedily, they would burn his canoes.⁸ However, the marriage soon after of the captive Indian girl to one of her captors, brought the desired peace, and it was not deemed necessary to burn her father’s canoes.

The Virginia forests contributed directly a considerable part of the Indian’s food, bark, roots, berries, fruits, and nuts. It was in connection with the food supply that the Indians exerted their greatest influence upon the spread of tree species. That matter will be accorded its proper consideration on another page. In the savage’s struggle for food, few things that were nutritious and not poisonous escaped him. He knew the food value of every tree, shrub, and weed. Several of these still bear the names which the Virginia colonists adopted from the Indians, noted instances being persimmon, chinquapin, and hickory, which trees owed their chief value to the food which they supplied the Indian.⁹ Several other things common in early colonial life in

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the Old Dominion still retain names given them by the Virginia Indians, among them being opossum, raccoon, terrapin, puccoon, pone, hominy, tuckahoe, tomahawk, and poke (Verratrum viride).¹⁰

Land Cleared for Agriculture.

The Virginia Indians paid much more attention to agriculture than has been popularly supposed. Scarce though their population was, they could not have subsisted without tilling the soil. Necessity compelled them to clear land, and thus they involuntarily, and without intention on their part, took steps toward civilization. The aggregate extent of their clearings cannot be determined, because their fields and truck patches were widely scattered, and no one person saw or left record of any considerable part of them. The extent of such clearings becomes more impressive when accounts of various travelers are brought together and presented in one view. Wherever explorers left records, no matter in what part of Virginia, mention was made of cornfields. If those which received specific mention were listed together, the total would run into many thousands of acres, and yet it is reasonably certain that early writers actually saw only a small portion of the clearings, while the larger part was never discovered or mentioned. The whole acreage under cultivation must, therefore, have been very much in excess of what the records show.

The clearing of ground for gardens and fields cost the Indians much labor which was performed by women. Small undergrowth was pulled out by the roots, or burned or broken off, and the larger trees were killed by bruising the bark at the base of the trunks and removing it. Stone mauls were used for that purpose. Occasionally rings of fire burned the bark off. The trees which were subjected to such injury speedily withered, but

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the fall of the trunks might be delayed ten years. Meanwhile the Indians cultivated the ground, clearing away each year the fallen limbs and trunks. The chief crops were corn, beans, pumpkins, and melons.

Writing about 1611, Dale mentioned the abundance of corn grown by Indians between Point Comfort and the site of Richmond. The natives of Kecoughtan had 3,000 acres of corn¹¹ and during Captain Smith’s expeditions on the Nansemond and on the Chickahominy rivers he saw extensive corn fields. The queen of the Appomattox Indians had one field of one hundred acres near the present site of Petersburg, and the blind old chief, Opechancanough, had one of equal size.¹² The fields belonging to the chiefs were planted and tilled by the gratuitous labor of the women of the tribes.

Near the forks of the Nansemond, in 1609, the Indians who defeated Captain Martin improved the opportunity by carrying from their cribs 1,000 baskets of corn, which they concealed in the woods. Captain Smith declared that a ship load of the grain could have been procured by him on the Chickahominy. Corn generously supplied by the natives from their cribs saved the people of Jamestown from starvation on one occasion. Mention, at different times, of cargoes of a hundred or a thousand bushels were frequent. In 1614 the Chickahominy Indians bound themselves by treaty to supply the colonists with 1,000 bushels of corn yearly, in exchange for a few iron hatchets.

John Smith, speaking generally of conditions in Virginia as he found them, said that the autumn brought the Indians “plenty of fruit from their fields. * * * Their houses are in the midst of their fields and gardens, which are small plots of ground, some 20, some 40, some 100, some 200 acres.”¹³ William Strachey, who wrote about 1620, said of Indian settlements near tidewater: “Much ground is there cleared and opened,

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enough with little labor already prepared to receive corn or make vineyards of two or three thousand acres.” Hugh Jones gives the Indian credit for selecting good soil for their fields. “Wherever,” says he, “we meet an Indian old field or place where they have lived, we are sure of the best ground.”¹⁴

Following the massacre of 1622, the Indians who had implicated themselves were driven from their possessions, and the policy of turning loss to profit was at once discussed by the Virginians who proposed to seize the vacant fields. It was declared that the open land would be enough to meet the needs of the colonists for years to come without clearing more.¹⁵

In 1623 an expedition to the Potomac River inflicted punishment on the natives in that quarter by “burning their houses with a prodigious quantity of corn which they had conveyed into the woods, and the English were not able to bring it to their boats.”¹⁶ This was evidently in pursuance of an order issued the preceding year to “starve the Indians by burning and spoiling their corn fields.”¹⁷

Mention in foregoing pages of cleared land refers to tidewater Virginia only, the region between the sea and the falls of the river. The country back of that, next to the mountains, was unknown till the end of the half century following the founding of Jamestown. Meager information concerning some of it had been obtained from Indians, and it is not improbable that traders had penetrated considerable distances;¹⁸ but the first recorded

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exploration to the base of the mountains occurred sixty-two years after Jamestown Island was settled. John Lederer, a German who wrote his diary in Latin, traversed different parts of the region in 1669 and 1670. He had not proceeded far before he noted the presence of Indian fields, some of which had been abandoned, perhaps because of the incursions of Iroquois for New York, who were then carrying on a war of extermination against many southern tribes on both sides of the Alleghany mountains. Lederer’s notes show that agriculture was practiced nearly or quite as far as the base of the mountains.

“The country here,” says he, speaking of the region near the present Virginia-North Carolina line, “though high, is level, and for the most part a rich soil, as I judge by the growth of the trees; yet, where it is inhabited by Indians, it lies open in spacious plains.”¹⁹

Speaking of an island, probably in a tributary of the Roanoke, he said: “The island, though small, maintains many inhabitants. * * * Upon the north shore they yearly reap great crops of corn, of which they always have a twelve months’ provision aforehand, against an invasion from their powerful neighbors.”

The next year, Lederer was again in western Virginia, and on June 16, 1670, when he was probably in the present county of Madison, he wrote in his diary: “The country here, by the industry of these Indians, is very open and clear of woods. * * * They plant abundance of grain, reap three crops in a summer, and out of their granary supply all the adjacent parts.”

Fifty-four years after Lederer’s journey to the Roanoke River, William Byrd passed that way and spoke of the old Indian fields which, though long abandoned, had not yet relapsed into forest. “There is scarce,” said he, “a shrub in view to intercept your prospect, but grass as high as a man on horseback.”

One or two early glimpses of Virginia farther west than Lederer went may be had, and the ever-present Indian fields come in for mention. In 1671 the New River, a tributary of the Kanawha,

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was reached, at a point near the present Virginia-West Virginia line, but the exact spot is unknown. The exploration was carried on by what has usually been called the Thomas Batts expedition, though practically all that is known of it is contained in a journal kept by Robert Fallows, who accompanied Thomas Batts and Thomas Wood.²⁰ On September 13, 1671, the explorers camped in a valley near New River, where were many “brave meadows and old fields.” Rev. Clayton added an explanatory note saying: “’Old fields’ is a common expression for land that has been cultivated by the Indians and left fallow, which is generally overrun with what they call ‘broom grass.’” Two days later Fallows wrote in his diary: “We understand the Mohecan Indians did here foremdly live. It cannot be long since, for we found corn stalks in the ground.”

The next day the diary further refers to cleared land: “We went ourselves down to the river side, but not without great difficulty, it being a piece of very rich ground whereon the Mohecans had farmerly lived, and grown up with weeds, and small prickly locusts and thistles to a very great height that it was almost impossible to pass. It cost us hard labor to get through.”

That was the farthest point west reached by the explorers. They proposed to go on, but their Indian guides balked and refused to proceed through fear of the “Salt Indians,”²¹ But for that unfortunate circumstance, eye witnesses might have left a record of conditions at that time beyond the mountains in Virginia,

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the region which is now West Virginia. It was at that very time passing through a crisis. Its inhabitants were being swept away, and the region between the Alleghany mountains and the Ohio River was henceforth to remain an unpeopled wilderness until its settlement by white people—a century later. It would be instructive to know what that region’s condition was at that time, but the fear of the “Salt Indians” caused the expedition to turn back, and we must be satisfied with a few glimpses into the forbidden, transmontane province of Virginia. Indians who were sufficiently civilized to manufacture salt, and make of it a commercial commodity, might be presumed to be skilled in agriculture also, and the few extant scraps of information concerning them show that they were.²² Proof of western clearings is not so abundant as of eastern, but that is due to a peculiar historical circumstance rather than to the probable smallness or scarcity of the clearings west of the mountains. Many of the openings had time to lapse again into forest before any white man saw them, for they remained untenanted a hundred years.

The Iroquois of western New York who “warred upon the whole world,” depopulated the region, now forming a large part of West Virginia, about 1672, as John Clayton states in the quotation given from his writing. They obtained firearms from the English and Dutch on the Hudson²³ and became irresistible to tribes that still fought with bows. They did not occupy western Virginia after they had made it a solitude, but about ninety-five years later they ceded or sold a large part of it to land speculators.

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It was still without human inhabitants.²⁴ The speculators who came into possession of it proposed to settle it and call it “Indiana.”

The salt works operated by the Shawnees and referred to in the Fallows journal were almost certainly situated on the Kanawha, a short distance above Charleston, W.Va., though some have supposed the place referred to was in the present county of Monroe, W.Va. The Kanawha salt works have been extensively operated for a century, and are still among the largest in the United States.²⁵

Eighty years after the Iroquois conquest, Christopher Gist found old fields between the mountains and the Ohio which had not yet been totally obliterated by encroaching forests. On March 4, 1752, he found a “great many cleared fields covered with white clover,” and elsewhere he spoke of “some meadows,” and “an old Indian road.” In Tygart Valley, near the western base of the Alleghany mountains, the first settlers, in 1753, discovered large tracts over which forests had but lately closed, and smaller areas still in sod; while on Cheat River, forty miles distant, James Parsons, in 1769, found trees, apparently a century old, which had taken possession of land that had formerly been cleared, as he judged from the uniform size of the timber, and the fact that trees had grown up through artificial cobblestone floors, perhaps used as drying places for Indian corn, nuts, fruit, and fish.

The land on the Kanawha River, where the Indians made salt, and where it is assumed they lived in considerable numbers, subsequently became the property of General Washington. On August 20, 1773, he inserted an advertisement in the Maryland

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Journal and Baltimore Advertiser, offering to lease 20,000 acres to settlers.²⁶ A hundred years had elapsed since the Indians had abandoned their homes there, and yet large tracts of comparatively open land remained, over which the forests had not yet spread, which may be inferred from General Washington’s description. “As these lands,” said he, “are among the first which have been surveyed in the part of the country they lie in, it is almost needless to promise that none can exceed them in luxuriance of soil, or convenience of situation, all of them lying on the banks either of the Ohio or Kanawha, and abounding with fine fish and wild fowl of various kinds, as also in most excellent meadows, many of which, by the bountiful hand of nature, are, in their present state, almost fit for the scythe.”

Any openings in the forest in that region were artificial, as the land was naturally covered completely by woods. The meadows of which Washington spoke could have been none other than remnants of extensive cornfields abandoned by the Indians a hundred years before. It is thus seen that clearings made by the Virginia Indians were found in large numbers in all regions that were fairly well explored, but in smaller numbers where explorations were fewer; but no explorer in any extensive region failed to report openings in the forest, made, or supposed to have been made, by natives for purposes of agriculture.

Indian Forest Fires.

The Indian used a little wood, destroyed vastly more to make room for his fields, but his real work of forest destruction was done with fire. He was wasteful and destructive, as savages usually are, and the word economy had no place in his vocabulary. When he had abundance, he squandered like a pirate, and when want pinched, he stood it like a stoic.

The Indian is by nature an incendiary, and forest burning was the Virginia Indian’s besetting sin. The few trees and poles which he took for use, and the thousands destroyed to make his cornfields, were a small drain on the forests in comparison

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with the millions which his woods fires consumed. It is not known how long he had been burning the valleys and mountains before the whie men came to Virginia, but the custom was general at the time of the first settlement, and it was, apparently, of long standing, though evidently growing worse. There is reason to believe, though there is no positive evidence of it, that the lesson of destruction was being learned from western Indians who, by the agency of fire, were changing forests into treeless prairies. If any considerable regions of Virginia, except swamps too damp to burn, had escaped repeated visitations by fire, the early explorers failed to make note of them. Complete destruction of forests by fire had already occurred over tracts aggregating hundreds of square miles, and undergrowth had been injured or destroyed almost everywhere in the regions early explored. In many localities the mature trees alone remained, and they were frequently so thinned and depleted that the woods resembled parks rather than forests, as is abundantly set forth in contemporaneous writings. Over very large tracts, at the period of discovery, the forests had apparently reached the last stage before their fall. No small wood was coming on to take the place of the old trees, and with the death of the mature timber many regions would have been treeless. A writer on Virginia’s economic history sums up the evidence contained in the early records by saying: “Freedom from undergrowth was one of the most notable features of the original woods of Virginia.”²⁷

Before quoting from explorers and early historians to show the extent of Indian burnings, and their injury to the forests, it is necessary, to a proper appreciation of the situation, to consider the motives which prompted the savages to become incendiaries and to burn the very woods which sheltered them. Doubtless many fires were accidental, or resulted from carelessness, but generally the Indians burned the woods to increase food supply, directly or indirectly. So far as they reasoned at all, they doubtless thought that the end justified the means. The food supply was directly increased by fires which facilitated hunting

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operations; indirectly, by opening the way for the growth of grass, nuts, fruits, and berries, thereby causing game to congregate in certain localities. The fruits of many vines and trees were eaten by the Indians. Observation doubtless taught those savages, as it has taught more civilized man, that food-bearing trees and plants multiply more rapidly, and yield more abundantly, on the margins of burned tracts than in deep forests. The Indian was cunning enough to put his knowledge to practical account, and sufficiently farsighted to set fires one year that the burned tracts might yield more sustenance the next year and in future years. The fall of some score millions of feet of prime timber in a forest conflagration meant no loss to the Indian, if briars and grass followed, for they brought together beasts and birds which furnished the Indian with more food than he could have procured in the forests that fell.²⁸

The extent of the Indian’s burnings in Virginia, and the condition in which early settlers found the forests outside the native’s fields and gardens, were described by early writers. Captain John Smith, who saw nearly all parts of the region that could be reached by boat, and also much of the interior, thus describes conditions, on page 67 of his works previously quoted:

“Near their habitations is but little small wood or old trees on the ground, by reason of their burning of them for fire, so that a man may gallop a horse among these woods any way except

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when the creeks or rivers shall hinder. * * * At their buntings in the deserts there are commonly two hundred or three hundred together. Having found the deer they environ them with many fires, and betwixt the fires they place themselves.”

Robert Beverley, on page 136 of his History of Virginia, goes a little more fully into the fire hunt, which was the chief means by which Indians destroyed forests. He says:

“A company of the Indians would go together back in the woods any time in the winter when the leaves were fallen and so dry that they would burn, and fire the woods in a circle of five or six miles compass. * * * They make all the slaughter chiefly for the sake of the skins, leaving most of the carcasses to perish in the wood.”

It is evident that a fire started in that manner would continue to spread until rain extinguished it, and in case of long drought, it would overrun extensive regions.²⁹

William Bullock was an eye witness of early forest conditions in Virginia. In a tract printed in London in 1649 he gave the following description, evidently with some exaggeration, concerning the distance to which a man was oridnarily [sic] visible in the woods:

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“The body of the country from the rivers is generally woody, but not like ours in England, for they are so clear from underwood that one may be seen above a mile and a half in the woods, and the trees stand at that distance that you may drive carts or coaches between the thickest of them, being clear from boughs a great height. Strawberries and grapes grow there in abundance.”³⁰

Andrew White, whose expedition to the Potomac River in 1633 has been referred to, thus speaks of the forest conditions in that region:

“On each bank of solid earth rise beautiful groves of trees, not choked up with an undergrowth of brambles and bushes, but as if laid out by hand, in a manner so open that you might drive a four-horse chariot in the midst of the trees.”³¹

A description by another writer follows:

“No shrub or underwood chokes your passage, and in its season your foot can hardly direct itself where it will not be dyed in the blood of large and delicious strawberries.”³²

The wild strawberry is a small but a highly important witness to the open and ragged condition of the forests of lower Virginia. It does not grow in woods sufficiently dense to shut out much of the sunlight; and its great abundance, testified to by early writers, is proof that the tree canopy was very thin or wholly wanting over an extensive region. The abundance of these berries impressed Ralph Hamor in 1614; while William Strachey, who wrote six years later, speaking of the open and park-like condition of the woods, declared that “at no point was it impossible for horse and foot to pass,” and that horses could be ridden at full speed among the trees without risk of collision with the trunks.

The foregoing references were by writers who laid no claim to a knowledge of conditions in the back country. Their observations had been confined chiefly or entirely to the region between

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the falls of the rivers and the sea, a strip about one hundred miles wide across eastern Virginia, extending from the Potomac River to North Carolina. Back of this was another belt of about equal area, lying between the falls of the rivers and the mountains, and bounded likewise by the Potomac on the north and Carolina on the south. It remained practically unexplored for more than half a century after the lower rivers were settled. Few references to the region are found in authors who wrote earlier than 1670. When, however, explorers began to push into the back country, they found that Indians had been as industrious with their forest fires there as in the lower country. Large areas of pasture lands, designated as savannahs, occupied tracts from which former forests had disappeared. John Lederer, whose account of Indian corn fields on tributaries of the Roanoke has been quoted, left record of extensive openings which were unquestionably due to fires. Of one such near the source of the Rappahannock River he wrote in August, 1670:

“We traveled through the savannah among vast herds of red and fallow deer which stood gazing at us, and a little after we came to the promotories or spurs of the Appalachian mountains. These savannahs are low grounds at the foot of the Appalachians which all the winter, spring, and part of the summer lie under snow and water, when the snow is dissolved, which falls down from the mountains commonly about the first of June.³³ Then the verdure is wonderfully pleasing to the eye, especially of such as having traveled through the shade of the vast forest, come out of a melancholy darkness of a sudden into a clear and open sky. To heighten the beauty of these parts, the first springs of

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most of those great rivers which run into the Atlantic Ocean or Chesapeake Bay, do here break out, and in various branches interlace the flowery meads whose luxurious herbage invites numerous herds of red deer, improperly called elks by ignorant people.”³⁴

Beverley the historian, who whote about thirty-five years later than Lederer, and if not an eye witness himself, doubtless had conversed with persons who were, speaks thus of conditions found in the mountains of Virginia by early explorers:

“They found large level plains, and fine savannahs three or four miles wide, in which were an infinite quantity of turkeys, deer, elks, and buffaloes, so gentle and undisturbed that they had no fear at the appearance of men, but would suffer them to come almost within reach of their hands.”³⁵

Speaking elsewhere of explorations near the sources of the principal Virginia rivers, Beverley says:

“In some places lie great plats of low and very rich ground, well timbered; in others, large spots of meadows and savannahs wherein are hundreds of acres without any tree at all, but yield grass and reeds of incredible height. And in the swamps and sunken grounds grow trees as vastly big as I believe the world affords, and stand so close together that the branches or boughs of many of them lock into one another; but what lessens their value is that the greatest bulk of them are at some distance from water carriage.”³⁶

William Byrd, who wrote a history of the survey of the dividing line between Virginia and North Carolina in 1728-9, frequently

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mentions tracts on which fires had greatly damaged the timber. The surveyors were inconvenienced on different occasions by the proximity of forest fires. He speaks thus on one occasion, the place being in southwestern Virginia:

“The atmosphere was so smoky all around us that the mountains were again grown invisible. This happened not from haziness of the sky, but from the firing of the woods by the Indians, for we were now near the route the northern savages take when they go out to war with the Catawbas and other southern nations. On their way, the fires they make in their camps are left burning which catching the dry leaves which lie near, soon put the adjacent woods in a flame.”

Some time after that, another fire was observed of ‘which he speaks: “As we marched along we were alarmed at the sight of a great fire which showed itself to the northward.” * * * “We could not see a tree of any bigness standing within our prospect, and the reason why fire makes such a havoc in these lonely parts is this: The woods are not there burnt every year, as they generally are among the inhabitants, but the dead leaves and trash of many years are generally heaped up together, which being at length kindled by the Indians that happen to pass that way, furnish fuel for a conflagration that carries all before it.

In 1716 Governor Spotswood of Virginia led a party of explorers across the Blue Ridge into a very small part of the Shenandoah Valley. Though that region was not one hundred miles from tidewater, and the lower part of Virginia was colonized a hundred years before, the Shenandoah Valley was an unknown land. If Governor Spotswood left a journal or report of his discoveries it has never come to light. Practically all that is known of the expedition that can in any way interest the geographer, is contained in a diary by James Fontaine, one of the Governor’s companions. The diary is more minute in its accounts of the stores of liquors carried and consumed, and in the size and number of rattlesnakes killed, than in descriptions of the country, yet a little of the information is valuable. The following from his journal, in the same year to Brunswick County in the southwestern part of the State applies to a tract some distance east of the BIue Ridge:

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“We met with several Indians, and about twelve we came to Meherin River, opposite Christanna Fort. We saw this day (April 2, 1716,) several fine tracts of land, and plains called savannahs, which lie along by the riverside, much like our low meadow Iands in England. There is neither tree nor shrub that grows upon these plains, nothing but good grass, which, for want of being mowed or eaten down by cattle, grows rank and coarse. These places are not miry, but good, firm ground.”³⁷

The promptness with which forests take possession of cleared ground in Virginia is proof that the meadows and savannahs described by Lederer, FaIlows, Beverley, Fontaine, and others, had not been long exempt from periodic fires which kept seedling trees out. At the present day, woods quickly spring up at the first opportunity, and the following extract from Beverley shows that they did the same thing two hundred years ago:

“Wood grows at every man’s door so fast that after it has been cut down it will in seven years’ time grow up again from seed to substantial firewood, and in eighteen or twenty years it will come to be very good board timber.”³⁸

Treeless Tracts in the Shenandoah Valley.

The foregoing descriptions of broken and depleted forests in Virginia relate chiefly to the region between the mountain and the sea, with a glimpse of the vacant land stretching from the southern mountains to the Ohio River. An interesting tract yet remains for examination. It is the Shenandoah Valley, a small part of which Governor Spotswood saw but did not describe. It is one of the finest regions in the United States, and it was doubtless a favorite hunting ground for Indians since time immemorial. No portion of Virginia was more terribly burned. In some parts of the valley, the lower portion in particular, Indian fires had done their worst before white men came. The exact date of the region’s first exploration, if Spotswood’s was not

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the first, is not known. The falls of the Potomac, fourteen miles above Washington, seem to have been the limit of exploration about the year 1700.³⁹ The Shenandoah Valley is known to have been a highway for Indians traveling north or south, and camps of natives were in the valley, at certain times at least, until after settlements by white men began, about 1730; but the valley probably had no resident tribes subsequent to the Iroquois conquest about 1672. The worst burning doubtless occurred before that time. A vague account of the region reached John Smith when he was exploring the Rappahannock a hundred years before the first white man is known to have seen the valley. It is worthy of note, and remarkable, that the very earliest reference to the region was misleading in an essential point, for the valley was said to be a place which Indian fires had not yet injured. When John Smith questioned the warrior Amoroleck whom he captured on the Rappahannock, as to the land beyond the mountains, the Indian’s answers showed that he knew of the Blue Ridge, but all he could tell of what lay beyond was that “the woods had not been burnt.” If the warrior referred to the lower part of the Valley of Virginia, he was mistaken, for the woods had been burnt. An area now occupied in part by the three counties—Frederick, Berkeley, and Jefferson—was treeless. The burnt lands extended across the present State of Maryland, and into Pennsylvania, and in those States were long called “The Barrens,” and occasionally are still so called, on account of the stunted timber which once grew there.⁴⁰ The area of the treeless region in the Shenandoah Valley exceeded 1,000 square miles in one body.⁴¹ Grass covered

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the region except for an occasional fringe of trees along the streams where fires would not burn. When the Indians no longer set their fires, trees began to creep back, and the early settlers were obliged to clear away the young growth to open their farms.

In W. H. Foote’s Sketch of Virginia, he says: “A large part of the valley from the headsprings of the Shenandoah to the Potomac or the Maryland line, a distance of about 150 miles, embracing ten counties, was covered with prairies abounding in tall grass, and these, with scattered forests, were filled with pea vines. Much of the beautiful timber in the valley has grown since the emigrants chose their habitations.”

The Virginia Indian’s Influence Upon the Spread of Species.

There is little if any evidence that the Virginia Indians planted trees with deliberate purpose, but there is no doubt that they caused trees to grow where unaided Nature would not have planted or maintained them. “By the dwellings of the savages,” says Captain Smith, “are some great mulberry trees, and in some parts of the country they are found growing naturally in pretty groves.” Other contemporaneous writers were impressed with the number of mulberry trees near the Indian towns. The natives manifested a great fondness for the fruit. It was claimed by early chroniclers that both the red and white species were native in Virginia, and Beverley thought there were two red species and one white; but there was only one mulberry found wild in Virginia at the time of settlement. The white species was imported.⁴² The early colonists thought that the many mulberry trees growing about the old Indian field, might be turned to account in silk growing, but the downy leaves of the red mulberry are unsuited as food for silkworms, and the experiments were not successful.⁴³ The mulberry, in common with all fruit trees, bears more abundantly when growing in the open than

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when crowded in forests, and because of this fact, trees near Indian towns would naturally multiply from the abundance of seed scattered about the clearings. The value of the trees for growing food was sufficient to cause the savages to spare them, and in time large numbers would be found, exactly as reported by Smith and others.

Simlar causes would tend to increase the number of all trees whose fruits were valuable to the Indians as food. Fragmentary accounts by early historians leave no doubt that the persimmon, hickory, and black walnut were much more abundant and prolific there than they would be in unbroken forests. Plums were plentiful, and this fact points to open tracts and thin woods, for it is well known that the plum bears little fruit in thickets, and the trees are not plentiful. Hickory and black walnut were said to constitute one-fourth of Virginia’s forest trees in the early years of the colony.⁴⁴ That is a much higher per cent. than these two species hold now in any extensive tract of forest which has not been greatly thinned by fire or otherwise. They are disposed to resist the crowding process, are intolerant of shade,⁴⁵ and their abundance, if not greatly overestimated by contemporary writers, is proof that the Virginia woods were thin and let in abundance of light. Both the hickory and the walnut were generally called walnut in the eastern States in early times. Both are aggressive and vigorous trees, and were just the sort to push in and take possession of open spaces in the woods where soil was suitable. Their seeds are large, and their nutritious kernels tempt squirrels and other animals to carry them considerable distances, and plant them abundantly. The Indians valued the nuts of both trees as food, and near their towns would encourage rather than hinder their growth.⁴⁶ The natives sometimes used hickory ashes as a substitute for salt.

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The persimmon was fruitful in Virginia, and trees were abundant. Few explorers failed to mention it in their journals, and it was said to produce “like ropes of onions,” which was doubtless an allusion to the long, thick clusters of fruit on the twigs. The persimmon does not yield abundantly unless growing in the open, and its remarkable fruitfulness, which was mentioned by so many early chroniclers in Virginia, renders it highly probable that when the settlement of the country began, the tree was industriously taking advantage of the burnt woods and old fields to extend its range.

Sumac and sassafras were plentiful in Virginia three hundred years ago, and they, too, are old field trees, and thrive in open ground where light is good.⁴⁷ The Indians made some little use of both as food, and of sumac for dyeing, but perhaps neither had much importance in their estimation. The spread of both species is generally due to the scattering of seeds by birds, but the ground must be moderately open, or little germination and growth will occur. That these conditions were generally found is evident from the abundance of sassafras and sumac in the region when white men first became acquainted with the coast of Virginia. To this day, Virginia remains an important source of sumac for tanning, and of sassafras for oil, and the supply comes from old fields and abandoned lands.⁴⁸

Scarcity of Pine.

A great change has occurred in three centuries in the size and location of the areas occupied by pine in Virginia. At the present time it monopolizes a large part of the old fields, and

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when persimmon, hickory, walnut, plum, and mulberry fight with it for possession, they have little chance. Conditions have evidently been reversed since Indian times. At the period of discovery, pine was confined chiefly to the immediate coast, and to tracts near the mouths of large rivers, if reliance may be placed upon the negative evidence deduced from the fact that the first historians seldom spoke of it back from the shore. There is also some evidence of a positve kind. About 1622 a report was made on the pine in Virginia. The London Company was advised by the Governor and council that the profitable manufacture of pitch and tar in the colony would be doubtful because the pine trees were so widely scattered that the product could not be conveniently collected.⁴⁹

The presumption is that Indian fires in tidewater Virginia had not yet sufficiently opened the woods to give loblolly pine a foothold in the interior, but that it began its all-conquering advance up the country after tobacco and corn had inpoverished the soil, and numerous plantations had been abandoned. That condition was not brought about until after the Indians had retired from the region.⁵⁰

Virginia’s Prehistoric Forests and Indian Fires.

History does not tell of the beginning of forests or of fires in Virginia or anywhere else in America. The Indians were doubtless in this country many thousand years ago. An immense period of time was required for the spread of tribes from end to end and side to side of North and South America. History does not so much as suggest the limit of the red man’s antiquity, and geology throws little light upon it. His ancestors probably hunted the musk ox in the Ohio Valley during the age of ice. If they did, then the Indian witnessed the slow advance of forests northward as the sheet of ice retreated into Canada,

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and he saw species after species creep over the barren tracts. If such was the case, the red man, during his long and uninterrupted occupancy of the land, was acquainted with all successive forest conditions, with every change, every advance and retreat of species in this country, during a hundred centuries or more. Was he always a forest burner?

There is ground for the opinion that the Indian was not always an incendiary. Had he been one, the woods could not have spread so wide and so far. Nothing is more certain than that oft repeated and long-continued fires will finally destroy a forest and make a prairie or a desert. Had the natives been indulging their habits of firing the woods from time immemorial, they would have kept down the forests, and white men from Europe would have landed upon the shores of a grass continent. That such was not the condition at the time of discovery is warrant for the belief that the Indians had acquired their incendiary propensities within a comparatively recent period, and, at the same time, evidence is apparently conclusive that the fires were gaining the mastery over the woods, and that the primeval forests were disappearing.⁵¹

Without doubt considerable forest burning would have occurred if not a human being had been on the American continent. Many fires are started by lightning. Statistics collected by the United States Forest Service for the year 1909 show that of 3,138 forest firest reported, 294 were caused by lightning.

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The theory that the Indians of the Mississippi Valley commenced burning forests when the buffaloes appeared, finds some support in the records of history and geology. If the theory is correct, the buffalo originated among or beyond the Rocky Mountains, and, spreading eastward in search of pasture, reached the forests of the Mississippi Valley. That is believed to have occurred in comparatively recent times, perhaps not much more than a thousand years before the discovery of America. Evidence of it is found in the absence of buffalo bones in waste heaps, caves, drift, gravel, and bogs of the region until the most recent deposits were made. The mound builders pictured almost every animal now found native in the region, except the buffalo, and this fact is interpreted to mean that those people were not acquainted with the buffalo. In the fossil deposits about certain saline springs in Kentucky are found the bones of many extinct and still living animals, from the musk ox of the ice age, down to the creatures of the present. They lie in the bogs, layer upon layer, the oldest below, the most recent on top[.] The bones of the buffalo are found only in the surface layer, showing that this great quadruped came the most recent of all.

It has been supposed that the Indians who built the mounds in the Mississippi Valley were agriculturists, and were beginning to rise in the scale of civilization, but with the coming of the buffalo they found it so much easier to live on the flesh of that animal than to cultivate the soil, that they abandoned their fields, turned hunters, and lapsed into savagery.⁵² In order to enlarge the grass tracts and afford pasturage for buffaloes, they burned the land, killed the timber, and the encroachment of prairies upon the forests began from that time.

Certain it is that the buffalo had reached the Atlantic coast at the time of the discovery of America. It is also certain that it was a grass eater and sought open tracts where pastures were good. Buffaloes were much more numerous in Virginia than in Pennsylvania east of the mountains, and on the Atlantic slope William Byrd, writing in 1729, said they were seldom found north of the fortieth parallel of latitude. These animals made

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trails long distances through the wooded regions, connecting one pasture with another. There is no question that Indians burned the pastures and surrounding woods yearly to improve the range, increase game, and make hunting easier. The deer, elk, and buffalo were among the finest game animals in Virginia, and quotations from Beverley, Lederer, Fallows, Byrd, and others show that these animals congregated in large numbers where grass was found. It was to the Indian’s interest to thin and destroy the woods that grass might grow more abundantly, and no one acquainted with his habits has ever charged him with neglecting his interests in this particular.

The greatest buffalo hunters of all the Indans in America were the Sioux, who occupied seven hundred thousand square miles of territory west of the Mississippi, from the Arkansas River northward. Investigators have been led to believe that the ancestors of those Indians had something to do with prehistoric Virginia. It is not imporbable [sic] that their buffalo hunting began there, and that they moved west, allured by the greater abundance of those animals, at a period so recent as to form a connecting link between tradition and history. A study of geographic names, of languages, and of traditions has apparently indicated that the cradle of the Siouan nation was in the mountains of western Virginia, upon the Monongahela, Kanawha, and Great Sandy Rivers.⁵³ It has been supposed that when the great western migration occurred, certain remnants remained behind, and moved over the mountains to Piedmont Virginia. There they were found by explorers a year or two after the founding of Jamestown. They extended from the Potomac at Harper’s Ferry southward, near the mountains, to South Carolina. They were warred upon by Powhatan’s Confederacy on the east, and later by the Iroquois from the north. John Smith fought the Sioux upon the Rappahannock River in 1608. The warrior Amoroleck, who told Captain Smith that the woods behind the Blue Ridge had not been burned, was a Sioux. The Indians whose deserted corn fields Captain Batts found on New River in 1671 were

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Sioux, and those were also Sioux who, according to Lederer, constantly kept corn stored for a year’s supply.⁵⁴

It does not necessarily follow that, after Indians commenced to burn the forests of a region, they kept at it incessantly until the woods were gone. Certain large areas doubtless had periods of rest during which they could, in a measure, recuperate, and could restore many bare tracts to woods again. No fact of Indian history is better known than that extensive regions were left without inhabitants during long periods. These would be times of rest, and of growth, while, perhaps, in another region, a hundred miles away, fires would continue without interruption year after year. When the Iroquois drove the Shawnees out of what is now West Virginia in 1672, they left the region without people, and it had a hundred years of rest during which there were few fires, and forests restored themselves. A large part of Kentucky was without Indians at the time of discovery, and its forests had opportunity to recover. At the time Virginia was settled, the whole interior of Pennsylvania was an unpeopled wilderness. Similar conditions were doubtless found, at one time or another, in many parts of this country—periods of excessive burning, followed by times of rest, during which the Indians and their fire brands were absent. Virginia, between its mountains and the sea, was passing through its fiery ordeal, and was approaching a crisis, at the time the colonists snatched the fagot from the Indian’s hand. The tribes were burning everything that would burn, and it can be said with at least as much probability of Virginia as of the region west of the Alleghanies, that if the discovery of America had been postponed five hundred years, Virginia would have been pasture land or desert.