The environmental history of the New England forests focuses on three stages of use: Indian subsistence; the colonial forest economy; and wilderness appreciation. It also explores two core themes—the human labor needed to extract useful commodities, and the transformation of the idea of wilderness. Indians used the forest for hunting and cleared openings for horticulture. Colonists introduced European livestock and crops and established permanent settlements, while extracting forest products for overseas trade. Human settlement and resource depletion brought about ecological changes in the forest, fostering a transformation in the perception of wilderness from savage to sublime. This chapter investigates how Native Americans and European immigrants both used and viewed the forest environment.
The New England forest provided rich, although different, resources for Native Americans and European colonists. It is made up of three primary ecological regions. The northern forest is composed of conifers, such as balsam, fir, and spruce, and hardwoods, such as aspen and birch—food for the beavers prized by Indians and colonists for their furs. In the middle band, where Indians established horticulture and hunted deer, immigrants found white pine for ship masts, red and white oak for barrel staves, and hickory for farm tools. The southernmost band of the forest is the oak and pitch pine region, suitable for agriculture and for naval stores—products such as pitch, tar, and turpentine, needed by the colonial shipping industry. The bands vary with topography and blend together in transition zones, but foster different patterns of settlement and economic use.
The New England forest at the time of colonial settlement was an open, park-like terrain created by Indians accustomed to burning the land and clearing the underbrush in the spring and fall. Indians set fires to ease their passage through the woods and to attract deer to browse areas. Burning was a sophisticated technology developed by Indians to manage their forests.
The New England Indians were horticulturists, growing corn, beans, squash, and pumpkins. This agricultural complex had diffused northward from Mexico, reaching New England about A.D. 1000. The corn, beans, and squash complex had a number of ecological advantages that benefited both Indians and colonists. Corn and beans were planted together in the fields, so that beans twined up the corn stalks. When the leaves began to come out, the corn and beans shaded the ground, where the pumpkins and squash were planted. This ecological system of polycultures kept down insect damage and enhanced yields. Indian groups traditionally remained in one place for seven or eight years while they planted their fields, and then, when the fields were exhausted and crop yields declined, moved the entire settlement. They may have prolonged the move by adding fish as fertilizer on the fields toward the end of the cycle. It is unclear, however, how often this procedure was used, because large loads of fish had to be carried from the brook in the springtime, a period known as the “starving time,” when Indians were dependent on fish for food.
In 1616, disease struck the Indians of the New England area, decimating their numbers to a fraction of their former population. The historical records are somewhat unclear as to whether that disease was bubonic plague or smallpox, since descriptions of the Indians’ symptoms make diagnosis difficult. Bubonic plague, however, is transmitted by rodents, particularly rats, which were prevalent on the ships of the explorers who had traded along the coast, with fleas serving as an intermediary and transmitter. It is known from the historical records that the Indian villages did have many fleas during the summer months. Thus bubonic plague could have had a mechanism of transmission. Whether smallpox or bubonic plague was the cause, however, the forest at the time of European settlement was depopulated of many of its former inhabitants, their fields lying abandoned for appropriation by the new colonists. A smallpox epidemic in 1636 likewise took immense tolls on New England Indians.
The settlement of New England by English Pilgrims and Puritans was motivated by religious desires and economic needs. The two groups—Pilgrims and Puritans—who came to New England differed slightly from each other. The Pilgrims (who were religious separatists) arrived onboard the Mayflower and settled Plymouth Colony in 1620, whereas the Puritans (who had hoped to purify the church from within) left England in a vast migration in 1630 and settled the Massachusetts Bay Colony. These two groups were not the first to attempt to found a colony in New England; there were several abortive attempts in the two decades prior to the arrival of the Pilgrims. They were, however, the first to settle successful, lasting colonies in the New England area.
The Pilgrims came for two reasons. One was to seek religious freedom; the other was economic. They wanted natural resources and products from the New World to trade with England, including timber, fish, furs, and medicines. The Pilgrims landed first on Cape Cod, near present-day Provincetown on the northeastern tip of the Cape. Once there, they made three expeditions out onto the land. On one of those trips, they found and confiscated a cache of seed corn that the Indians were preserving for the following year. They took that corn back to the ship to plant in their ultimate settling place. The landscape on Cape Cod, as they described it, was “open and without underwood,” consisting mainly of sandy plains. As such, it differed from the environment they found on the mainland coast at the colony they established near Plymouth Rock.
William Bradford, author of The History of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647, is the source of much of the knowledge about Pilgrim perceptions of the New England forest. Bradford writes that the Pilgrims encountered “a hideous and desolate wilderness full of wild beasts and wild men.” This was the perception of a people terrified by their new environment and the challenges of survival. To them the country had a “wild and savage hue.”1 Such ideas of wilderness and wildness were prevalent in the literature of New England settlers from the beginning. A distinction between nature and culture, wild and civilized, was thus implicit in the ways in which Pilgrims recreated themselves and their community.
Wood from the vast forests was the primary resource used by the colonists for shelter and fuel. They built and lived within a wooden stockade at the edge of the forest, against the ocean shore, symbolizing the demarcation between the wilderness outside and their own identity and central community inside. Each house was fenced, emblematic of the individual family’s own home and sense of separation from other colony members, even as they engaged in a cooperative venture together. The colony was also fixed in space, which was different from the shifting hunting-gathering and horticultural economy found among Indian survivors in the local forest.
The Puritans followed the Pilgrims to New England, settling in Massachusetts Bay, to the north of Plymouth colony, in a large migration in 1630. John Winthrop led the Puritan migration at a time when tensions between the British king and the Puritans had greatly intensified in England.
Before Winthrop’s ship, the Arabella, left England, Winthrop noted the reasons for migrating: “The whole earth is the Lord’s garden,” he said, and quoted God’s instruction in Genesis 1:28 “to increase, multiply, replenish the earth and subdue it.”2 This verse gave the colonists permission to subdue nature. They believed that they brought with them a mandate from God giving them dominion over the earth. They looked to the New World to supply economic items to trade, as well as necessities for subsistence. Prior to settlement, the natural resources needed to subsist in the New World had been catalogued—fish, deer, furs for trade and clothing, salt, trees for lumber, masts, pitch, and tar for shipbuilding. They knew where iron for future mills was located and that there would be sufficient grass for cattle and goats, as well as acorn mast for pigs released into the woods.
Several features differentiated European land use patterns from those of the Indians. Colonial land tenure was based on the concept of private property. Colonists entered into treaties with the Indians in order to exchange trade goods for land, obtaining title in perpetuity. While Indians often believed they were only giving hunting rights and planting rights, colonists wrote up agreements that took title “forever.” In addition, Europeans claimed vast tracts of land for their kings, who in turn granted title to colonies for settlement. There was thus a vast difference in understanding as to what was actually being negotiated at the time.
Colonial agriculture combined Indian and European patterns. The settlers first planted the corn/beans/squash complex (including pumpkins) that had been domesticated by the Indians. They added to the Indians’ triad their own tetrad of European cultivated grains—wheat, rye, oats, and barley. Wheat did not do well after the first few decades because it was struck with a “wheat blast.” God, they said, had seen fit to “smite the wheat,” killing it with what was later found to be a fungus hosted by the surrounding barberry bushes. Rye and corn, therefore, became the basic ingredients of the bread used in the colonies.
The colonists also added livestock to the ecosystem—components that environmental historian Alfred Crosby called the Europeans’ “portmanteau biota” and biologist Jared Diamond called “the major five”—i.e., the five domesticated animals that spread worldwide with European colonization. These five large animals brought by the colonists—cattle, pigs, goats, oxen, and eventually horses—had been domesticated in Eurasia over a period of several thousand years and were essential to the Europeans’ settled agricultural complex. Oxen and horses—used in plowing—combined with broadcast grains and the three-field rotation system, promoted permanent colonial settlements. Pigs and cattle roamed in the woods and fields, disrupting Indian’s shifting horticultural and hunting patterns, and consumed large quantities of meadow grasses, altering New England ecology.
During the seventeenth century, nature in New England was commodified in terms of specific resources. Animals such as beaver, fox, and lynx were trapped for their pelts and traded. White pine masts and other forest products, such as turpentine, pitch, and tar, were extracted from the New England forest. These resources became part of an emerging system of world trade.
European colonists came from countries that were undergoing transformations from organically based to inorganically based economies. In the Middle Ages, wind, water, animal muscle, and human labor were integral parts of an organic economy, used to supply human needs. But by the seventeenth century, when New World colonization was taking place, inorganic resources were increasingly beginning to be exploited, such as iron ore for guns, spades, and kettles and silicon for glass-making. Charcoal from timber (an organic product) was necessary to fuel the forges and furnaces at the base of the inorganic economy of the iron industry. Forest products were also essential to building ships for trade and for the barges, locks, and warehouses used to transport and store commodities.
During the seventeenth century, capital from Old England was infused into New England. The colonists were financed by companies in England that provided money for ships and for the transport of settlers to the New World in order to establish colonies. In return, the colonists were expected to extract natural resources and return them to the mother country. Mercantile capitalism, or long-distance trade financed by merchant capital, was the earliest form of capitalism that developed. It began to link the continents together, as the explorations surveyed and cataloged the natural resources of the world.
In order to obtain products that were part of the rising mercantile economy, the settlers began to identify resources for trade from their new environment—furs, fish, and forest products. Colonists trying to survive in the struggle against nature developed the ability to extract commodities from it. In exchange, they not only needed iron products, they also wanted particular foods obtained through long-distance trade, such as coffee and tea, spices from the Orient and Africa, and sugar and molasses—commodities not produced in New England.
Beginning in the 1640s, wood products from the New England forest were traded with Barbados, the Canary Islands, Madeira, and England. Ships following triangular trade routes started by loading manufactured items in England, then sailed to the Canary Islands for wine, and finally to Boston for barrel staves. Or, ships might go directly to Barbados to pick up sugar and molasses and then take these products to New England to exchange for red and white oak barrel staves, made from timber extracted from the New England forest.
Perhaps the most important forest product was the white pine used in the mast trade. The forest trade was an extension of the fur trade northward into New Hampshire from the original Massachusetts Bay Colony. On the bays that led into the ocean were mast landings for logs brought down the rivers and floated into coastal bays for loading onto ocean-going ships. By 1700, along the New Hampshire and Maine coasts, there were ninety sawmills and thirty teams of oxen. Three to four ships a year sailed for England, loaded with masts for the British navy, which was vying with France, the Netherlands, and Spain for supremacy of the seas in an emerging era of nationalism. Ships commanded the seas, not only for commercial purposes, but for warfare. New England’s forests provided essential naval stores, such as white pines for tall straight masts; oak roots for “knees” to build ship hulls; tar and pitch for sealing the hulls; and spars and yards on which to hang the sails from the masts.
In extracting products from the forest, an economic system developed, based on the forest as a natural resource, on logging labor, and on merchant capital. Forest laborers included cutters, who chopped down the trees; barkers, who stripped the bark from the trees; swampers, who prepared the way for logs to be transported downstream; and teamsters, who hauled the logs with oxen. Other skilled laborers included drivers, raftsmen, scalers, and sawyers. At the sawmill, logs were cut into planks to be sold on the market. The mill owner, who supplied the capital to construct the mill, was often one of the wealthiest people in town.
The economic system depended on a structural split between labor and capital. By the early eighteenth century, class distinctions had formed in the American colonies between people at the bottom of the economy (such as the lumberers, whose skilled labor often took years to develop), the mill owners who transformed logs into boards, and the Boston and Portland timber merchants who marketed the extracted products. At the upper levels of the economic hierarchy were the mast agents, sent by London contractors to the New England colonies to supervise the mills and lumberers. George Tate, mast agent in Falmouth (now Portland) Maine, for example, had an expensive three-story house built in 1755 on the edge of the Fore River, and was quite wealthy for an eighteenth-century New Englander.
At the very top of the hierarchy was the Surveyor of Pines and Timber, the king’s agent, who upheld British laws pertaining to the forest. He was the enforcer of the Broad Arrow Policy, instituted in the 1690s in New England, which reserved all white pine trees 24 inches in diameter, measured at 12 inches off the ground, for the British Crown. The King’s Broad Arrow was cut into the tree by mast agents and sub-agents who went through the forest, blazing the arrow into tall pristine white pines. The policy was an early conservation measure inasmuch as it preserved a natural resource for later economic use.
The Broad Arrow Policy was modified over the next forty years through various proclamations and extensions. It was first expanded to include not only white pines, but also pitch pines necessary for naval stores. The area of reserved trees was then extended into New Jersey and New York. By 1721, the proclamation was further modified to include all young trees, even the smallest trees bordering a township. The objective was to preserve all pines more than two feet in diameter at one foot above the ground as potentially useful for ship masts for the British navy.
The Broad Arrow Policy was a source of contention between the colonists and the British. It was among the numerous complaints that ultimately led to the American Revolution, and was also the source of skirmishes in towns such as Weare, New Hampshire, where the mast agents who rode into town were pulled from their horses and their horses’ tails and manes sheared. The agents were then tarred, put back on their horses, and run out of town.
By the early eighteenth century, a major transformation had taken place in the ecology of the New England forest as a result of European colonization and the marketing of forest products. Hundreds of acres of timber had been cut, creating climatic change. The air was less moist, the hillsides drier, and there was the potential for more wind, especially for hurricanes that came up the coast. The colonists had not only created possibilities for more runoff and erosion, but they had depleted many of the animals and birds that were integral parts of evolved ecosystems. They radically reduced the numbers of beavers, otters, bears, foxes, and deer. They killed blackbirds, woodpeckers, and crows as pests (which the Indians had refused to kill because they were the sacred bearers of corn). The native wildflowers were sharply diminished, and English flowers and weeds had been introduced. Many of the marshes and beaver ponds had been drained, and fish stocks in the rivers depleted. The forest was a vastly different place than that occupied one hundred years earlier by Indians.
The economic system that developed in New England was part of an emerging capitalist system that linked nature, labor, and capital, turning natural resources into commodities to be traded on the market. The commodification of nature occurred as part of the so-called triangular trade, involving Europe as a source of manufacturing and management, Africa as a source of slaves, and the New World as a source of natural resources. Natural resources were used for subsistence, providing people with food, clothing, shelter, and energy. Alternatively, nature could be used for exchange value—that is, as a means of trading and profit-making. There were, therefore, two forms to the exploitation of nature, one for use and one for profit.
The Marxian approach clarifies the relationship between nature and capital that emerged in the New World. Marx linked land, labor, and capital together in a framework centered on modes of production (society’s infrastructure) and ideas (society’s superstructure). His idea of land can be broadened to include the environment, and more generally nature itself, providing a framework for environmental historians to use in analyzing the human relationship to nature.
In his foundational work, Das Kapital, written in the 1860s, Karl Marx analyzed the structural split between labor and capital, such as that emerging in the New World’s timber industry. The lumberer became part of the process of appropriating nature for profit by adding surplus economic value to the log. Although nature gives humanity free resources in the form of free timber, the capitalist appropriates that timber for himself. The capitalist takes the timber, to which the laborer has already added value, and adds further value by cutting the log into planks at the sawmill. The worth of the timber therefore increases. By adding additional value to the timber, it can be sold at a profit. But that profit is created at the expense of the wage laborers, who are paid less than the profit obtained by the capitalist.
The social effects of the split between labor and capital in the New England forest economy were discussed with concern by the New England elite. Jeremy Belknap of Yale College, in his 1812 History of New Hampshire, noted that the contractors and agents were the ones who made huge fortunes, but the laborers who actually spent their time in the woods spent their money on credit. They bought liquor, or engaged in other forms of indulgence, and lost most of their earnings. They were paid at the end of the season, but anticipated their earnings on credit and were henceforth kept in a state of debt and poverty. This helped to create a class of exploited wage workers.
Belknap’s ideas were reinforced by Timothy Dwight, President of Yale College, in his book Travels in New England and New York (1823). Dwight said: “Those who are lumbermen are almost necessarily poor. Their course of life seduces them to prodigality [and] thoughtlessness of future wants.”3 Dwight echoed a concern, prevalent at the time, that people on the frontier had degenerated into living like animals, and because they subsisted primarily on animal meat, they themselves would became wilder, losing their civilized characteristics. Belknap and Dwight thus expressed concern about what was happening to laborers in growing industries such as the timber trade.
A third commentator on the forest industry was Edward Kendall, who traveled in the U.S. in 1807–8. Kendall observed that many settlers had “degenerated … into lumberers.” They wandered through the forest “making spoil … of the wealth of nature.” They gave nothing back to nature, there being no sense of reciprocity between them and the forest. In contrast to seventeenth century ideas that timber was a gift of the earth, the lumberer simply took for himself what nature gave. “What nature plants he enjoys, but he plants nothing for himself.”4 Despite an emerging consciousness about conserving and replanting timber by the time of the American Revolution, Kendall nonetheless noted and deplored the enormous waste. But not only was the structural split between labor and capital apparent by the end of the colonial period, a split between mind and nature was also evident.
In his 1995 article, “Are You an Environmentalist, or Do You Work for a Living?” environmental historian Richard White observed that most people (such as the New England colonists and timber workers), through most of human history, have known nature through their bodies, by working in it directly. In the New England forest economy, cutters, barkers, teamsters, and raftsmen cut down trees, moved logs across rough terrain, and risked their lives to float them downstream, working daily from sunrise to sunset. They put out enormous energy, interacting with nature through bone, brain, and muscle to produce physical work. Ordinary people, throughout the settlement of the country, labored directly in nature, whether in forests or on farms. Only the elite (such as Belknap, Dwight, and Kendall) were exempt from the bodily toll taken by work. As the country was industrialized and more people worked in urban industries, an increasing physical and intellectual distance between people and nature opened up. Artists, writers, and intellectuals who came to appreciate nature aesthetically and to advocate its preservation were often removed from the necessities of daily labor in forests and on farms. This distinction between physical work in nature and intellectual work about nature is still apparent today.
As an intellectual in the university, White points out that much of his own connection to nature comes from recreation. Whereas today’s lumberers (like their counterparts in colonial New England) work directly in the environment and know nature through their laboring bodies, today’s environmentalists (like the colonial elite and early preservationists) know nature through the mind, through aesthetic appreciation, and through recreation. White offers not only an historical analysis of the split between mind and nature, but suggests a means of healing it as well. He concludes that if we “could focus on our work rather than on our leisure, then a whole series of fruitful new angles on the world might be possible.… We may ultimately find a way to break the borders that imprison nature as much as ourselves. Work, then, is where we should begin.”5 White’s view about the split between mind and nature is reinforced by the transformation of the image of wilderness in the minds of the Pilgrims and Puritans who lived directly in the New England forest, to that of the elite and urban dwellers who appreciated and preserved it for its aesthetic and recreational values. What did wilderness mean at the time of New England colonization, and how did it change?
The concept of wilderness is one of the most complex ideas in environmental and human history. As environmental historian Roderick Nash pointed out in Wilderness and the American Mind (1967), the word wilderness comes from old English and Germanic words, wildern and wildeor. Nash notes, “The root seems to have been ‘will’ with a descriptive meaning of self-willed, willful, or uncontrollable. From ‘willed’ came the adjective ‘wild’ used to convey the idea of being lost, unruly, disordered, or confused.”6 To many people living in medieval Europe, the ancient forests contained dense trees and underbrush, deep shadows, and frightening beasts. The word was likewise associated with barrenness and the desert. In the Bible, the book of Deuteronomy is called “In the Wilderness,” and many of the connotations of wilderness come from the desert lands in which the Israelites sought enlightenment and in which they wandered for forty years. Wilderness, therefore, means not only a dense forest, but also a barren land. In addition, there is the sense of fear and bewilderment. Such connotations associated with the concept of wilderness came with the Puritans to the New World as cultural baggage. The wilderness is the antithesis of the garden, or of paradise. The biblical story says that Adam and Eve were driven out of the Garden of Eden into the wilderness, a desert. They had to labor in the earth to change it into a garden, just as the colonists had to change the New England wilderness into a cultivated garden.
The idea of wilderness appeared in the sermons of many of the ministers of New England churches during the 1640s and 1650s. Hartford, Connecticut minister Thomas Hooker (1586–1647) preached that Puritans “must come into and go through a vast and roaring wilderness” before “they could possess that good land which abounded with all prosperity [and] flowed with milk and honey.”7 Peter Bulkeley preached in 1646 that God had dealt with the Puritans as he had “dealt with his people Israel” for “we are brought out of a fat land into the wilderness.”8 Rhode Island founder Roger Williams (1603–83) likewise spoke of a “wild and howling land” as a reminder that his people had fallen from grace and that their souls were spiritual wildernesses.9 Thus purification of the wilderness in the soul of the Puritans was an important part of the religious experience. The wilderness provided symbolic justification for Puritan land conversion as well. They could take over the wilderness from the Indians and transform it into a garden through their own ecological additions, even as they transformed the spiritual wilderness in their own souls.
The idea of wilderness changed in this country toward the end of the eighteenth century as a result of ideas developed in England, Germany, and France. In England, Edmund Burke’s Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) began to look at forests, mountains, and waterfalls as beautiful places. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime in 1761, in which nature and wilderness began to take on meanings of reverence and awe. God’s action in the land through thunderstorms and lightning was now looked upon not as the work of the devil, but as a manifestation of God’s goodness. The sublime was manifested in waterfalls, mountains and canyons, and in sunsets, rainbows, and oceans. The idea of the sublime as a religious experience became important in the romantic period of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in America. Nature was now cathedral, temple, and Bible.
New Englanders began to treasure their mountains, forests, and waterfalls and to look upon them as exemplars of the sublime rather than as obstacles to be surmounted, as the Puritans had viewed them. In her poem “An Hymn to Evening” (1773) African-American poet Phillis Wheatley of Boston eulogized the sunset as God’s glory in the world below: “Through all the heav’ns what beauteous dyes are spread! But the west glories in the deepest red: So may our breasts with every virtue glow, The living temples of our God below!” In “Thanatopsis” (1817), Massachusetts poet William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) wrote of “the venerable woods—rivers that move in majesty,” while his poem “A Forest Hymn” began with the lines “The groves were God’s first temples.” Massachusetts teacher Caroline Barrett White wrote in 1850: “When I contemplate nature my heart expands with an intensity and feeling of love, of admiration, of reverence for that Being who has spread out before us the sublime works of creation.…”10
The American wilderness began to be appreciated in the nineteenth century as the nation’s forests began to disappear. What remained of nature that had not been used for economic purposes or settled was eulogized as wilderness. Wilderness was also connected with a sense of racism against Indians. Indians had lived on the North American continent for at least 10,000 years. They had managed the land, made their presence known, and transformed it through hunting, gathering, and fire. But by the late nineteenth century, Indians were being moved to reservations, and national parks were being designated as people-free reserves. Although William Bradford had found the New England forest “full of wild beasts and wild men,” his “wilderness” nevertheless contained Indians. In contrast, the Wilderness Act, passed in 1964, stated that in a wilderness, the earth and its life are untrammeled by “man,” and that “man” himself “is a visitor who does not remain.” Wilderness was thus defined as devoid of human presence.
The concept of wilderness, therefore, has changed over time. In 1977, Roderick Nash summed up the changes, noting that “historians believe that one of the most distinguishing characteristics of American culture is the fact that it emerged from a wilderness in less than four centuries.”11 In 1995, however, environmental historian William Cronon wrote a controversial article entitled “The Trouble with Wilderness” in his edited book Uncommon Ground (1995), arguing that wilderness is a social construction. The idea of “wilderness,” Cronon noted, is “a profoundly human creation.”12 Like “nature,” “wilderness” is a cultural construct. As an idea, it is a product of civilization, created in contrast to civilization. It is only through our own civilization that we know something that is not civilized to be wilderness. Cronon observed that “There is nothing natural about the concept of wilderness. It is entirely a creation of the culture that holds it dear, a product of the very history it seeks to deny.”13 There is a sense of an opposite, or otherness, to the idea of “wilderness.” In the article, Cronon argued that “we mistake ourselves when we suppose that wilderness can be the solution to our culture’s problematic relationships with the non-human world, for wilderness is itself no small part of the problem.”14 Numerous ecologists, environmental advocates, philosophers, and historians, however, differed with his interpretation on the grounds that nature was a real, evolved, ecological system rather than a historical construct. The Pilgrims and Puritans, therefore, have left not only the legacy of a transformed New England, but also a transformed idea—that of wilderness.
Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, the New England forest was transformed from a land perceived as a wilderness to a land of useful commodities, to be extracted from nature by human labor. For Pilgrim and Puritan settlers, sawmill entrepreneurs, and the English king, the forest played a central role in organizing ways of life and perceptions of nature. It provided timber for masts, naval stores, barrel staves, and construction; habitat for beaver, deer, and ducks; and a source of fertile soils for agriculture. It was perceived variously as a threat to settlement, the home of the devil, and a place of religious purification; as a land of sublime goodness and picturesque beauty; as a vanishing national asset, and later as a place where “man is a visitor who does not remain.” The forest as wilderness is also connected to human labor as a means of transforming natural resources into commodities, as well as a place where people do not labor at all, but simply observe the beauties of nature. Environmental historians, in probing the meanings of changing concepts such as wilderness and labor, cast light on their historical complexity.
Notes
1. William Bradford, Of Plimoth Plantation (Boston: Wright and Potter, 1901), 94–95.
2. John Winthrop, “Conclusions for the Plantation in New England,” in Old South Leaflets, no. 50 (1629), 4–5.
3. Timothy Dwight, Travels in New England and New York, ed. Barbara M. Solomon and Patricia M. King (1823; reprint, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), 2:160–61.
4. Edward Kendall, Travels Through the Northern Parts of the United States in the Year 1807 and 1808 (New York: I. Riley, 1809), 3:75–76.
5. Richard White, “Are You an Environmentalist, or Do You Work for a Living?” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: Norton, 1995), 185.
6. Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 1.
7. Thomas Hooker, Application of Redemption—The Ninth and Tenth Books, 2d ed. (Cornhil, England: Peter Cole, 1659), book 9, 5.
8. Peter Bulkeley, The Gospel-Covenant, or the Covenant of Grace Opened (London: Benjamin Allen, 1646), 143.
9. Roger Williams, quoted in “The Wilderness and the Garden: Metaphors for the American Landscape,” by Peter Fritzell, Forest History 12, no. 1 (April 1968): 16–32, at 22.
10. Phillis Wheatley, “An Hymn to the Evening,” in Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (London: E. Johnson and A. Bell, 1773), 59; William Cullen Bryant, The Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant (New York: D. Appleton, 1906), 22, 79; Caroline Barrett White, Diary, Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 1849–1915, manuscript, September 9, 1850.
11. Roderick Nash, “The Value of Wilderness,” Environmental Review 3 (1977): 14.
12. William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness, or Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: Norton, 1995), 69.