The Natural History of the Present, Chapter 4

Chapter 4: A Little History of the Edible Landscape in North America
Where did the modern system of resource exploitation come from? Before the world was marketable, it was edible, and humans, like all plants and animals, were part of that world.

About 13,000 years ago, amidst the retreat of the glaciers that had covered much of northern North America, signs of human occupation appear. In some places, signs appear much earlier: in southern Chile perhaps 30,000 years ago, somewhat less in a cave in western Pennsylvania (the age of the Pennsylvania remains is still disputed). Some writers claim the diversity of North American Indian languages would have taken 50,000 years to evolve. In the present-day United States undisputed signs of people appear as fluted stone points embedded in the bones of the so-called Pleistocene megafauna, the larger (greater than a 100 pounds) grazers and browsers and their predators (also large) that inhabited that slightly earlier earth, 400 to 600 human generations removed from us. So-called Folsom points were found with the bones of ice-age bison in Folsom, New Mexico, and with those of woolly mammoths and mastodons in the Ohio Valley and in New York State. The eastern landscapes would have been just south of the glacier’s edge. During the next few thousand years most of these large animals would become extinct. (Some writers claim the extinctions occurred much faster, over a period of 300 years, from 13,200 to 12,900 years ago.) In North America the Pleistocene megafauna included species of hairy elephant like the herb-eating mammoth (animals of the tundra) and the forest-browsing mastadon, a fierce carnivorous bear (which some claim kept many people from crossing the Bering Plains), 4 genera of giant ground sloth, a large wolf, a tiger, several kinds of horse and donkey, a camel, a moose-elk, a tapir, a cheetah, 2 types of llama, a yak, a giant beaver, 3 kinds of ox. All these animals disappeared. Most of them were larger than those that succeeded them.

In the eastern half of North America, the area south of the glacial front was an open tundra of grasses and sedges, with scattered clumps of balsam poplar and black spruce. This belt was 50 to 100 miles wide. Modern deciduous trees like oak, hickory, beech and birch grew near the glacier in favorable locations (within 100 miles in the Northeast, 15 miles in south central Illinois), along with white-tailed deer. The tundra was more productive than the modern tundra because of its more southerly location and thus its warmer summers. The grassland extended south along the Appalachians to Georgia. Here, lower elevations supported an open and parklike boreal forest, with deciduous trees in south-facing coves. In Georgia this forest merged into a closed oak and hickory forest like that of the Middle West today. West of the Mississippi, the Plains and Southwest were wetter. Much of the Plains was a humid forest; the water in the Ogallala aquifer was still accumulating. Sea levels were 300 feet lower and grazing and browsing land extended some ways out onto the continental shelves, though less far off the coasts of North America than off those of Europe, whose shallow continental shelves were extensive. What would become cod banks in the Gulf of Maine were forested islands. The climate that favored the steppe was created by the mile-high ice, which held a constant high pressure system over it. This kept the climate cool and dry. As the glacier had advanced, trees had retreated south, finally reaching their so-called southern refugia. Trees move a few hundred to a thousand feet a year, depending on how they are dispersed (gravity, wind, the guts of seed-eating birds, the beaks of blue jays, the mouths of squirrels). Oaks in Europe returned north at 500 meters a year, in North America perhaps two-thirds of that, or 200 miles a millennium. (While jays will carry an acorn several kilometers in a trip, it takes several decades for that tree to bear acorns.) The seeds of North American wild ginger are dispersed by ants up to 35 meters a year, so ginger could theoretically move north only 10 to 11 kilometers (6 miles) in 16,000 years; but ginger probably moved north 450 kilometers (250 miles) in that time. Many herbs and trees seem to have moved faster than observation would support, an indication that uncommon occurrences (such as seed transport by floods, windstorms or tornadoes) become relatively common ones over a long period of time. Fish also retreated south along favorable drainages and disappeared from rivers and lakes under the ice. The north-south alignment of the Mississippi is one reason that river is so rich in fish species. But oak, hickory and white-tailed deer were found within a hundred miles of the glacial wall in New England; and oak, elm and ash (the last two nutrient-demanding species that require good soils) amidst clumps of black spruce within 15 miles of the glacier in south-central Illinois. Such trees would re-occupy the landscape when the climate ameliorated.

In North America, as the ice began to retreat, and incontrovertible signs of people appear, the Pleistocene megafauna began to disappear. Its disappearance was worldwide, except in Africa, where modern people and large animals evolved together. The extinctions took much longer in northern Eurasia, where people had also lived with the animals for a long time. Were the extinctions caused by people or the changing climate? People may have been new to the Americas but people had been hunting mammoths in central Europe and Russia for tens of thousands of years. In Australia and South America large mammal species also disappeared when humans arrived. In Australia this happened 50,000 years ago and corresponded with a long-term drying of the climate and also with the modification of the habitat by fire. Fire set by humans changed large portions of Australia’s semi-arid zone from a mosaic of trees, shrubs and grasslands to fire-adapted scrub. With the grassland also disappeared a large flightless bird and the marsupial lions and carnivorous kangaroos that preyed on it and a 7 meter long lizard. One of the more ingenious theories to explain the extinction of the Pleistocene megafauna in North America puts animal behavior, climate change and human predation together. As the glaciers retreat and the climate grows wetter (and more favorable to trees), the large grazers help maintain the grass, through the fertilizing effects of their dung and the constant re-creation of new grass shoots, whose high transpiration rates dry and oxygenate the soil. Mastodons, like modern elephants, fed on trees, breaking off branches and stripping bark. They kept forests open. Mammoths and mastodons recycle nutrients quickly, eating 250 to 300 pounds of vegetation a day, much of it of poor quality (that is, woody: only large animals with large fermenting stomachs can eat such poor quality vegetation). Thus they maintain the habitat. Continual hunting pressure reduces the number of large grazers somewhat. A relatively small kill rate may accomplish this since the large animals mature slowly and have widely spaced young. While in Asia, these animals had evolved with increasingly skilled human hunters, in North America game animals had lived without people for tens or hundreds of thousands of years and had little fear of them, and so, despite their size, may have been easy to hunt. As grazing pressure falls, parts of the grassland begin to be replaced by forbs and shrubs, then with willow, aspen, birch, black spruce. With a climate less and less favorable to grassland, and continuing predation on the large animals, such changes accelerate. At the same time a rapidly rising ocean eliminates more of the grazers’ habitat. So this scenario turns into a downward spiral for the grassland and its inhabitants. For the most part, the large animals were replaced by smaller modern grazers and browsers, all adapted to predation by man: the modern bison, elk, big-horn sheep. Many of these animals came with people across the Bering Strait. Because of the extinctions, some niches are still open. The Southwest could support more browsers on its thorny scrub. The fruits of some species of large-fruited trees in the American tropics are eaten nowadays only by a few species of large-beaked birds. Once they were eaten by elephants and their relatives (or several other genera of megafaunal fruiteaters), the seeds that survived passage through the animal’s gut getting a good start in a pile of dung. (This trick was used by a biologist to re-establish dry tropical forest in Central America; he fed the tree fruits to horses, who shed the seeds in their dung; the seeds sprouted in the manure.)

While the demise of large, tame animals under human hunting has happened in many places (California Indians eliminated large sea mammals from their coasts, New Zealand Polynesians the moas, the Australians their large mammals), matters may have been complicated in North America by a comet that struck 12,900 years ago. The explosion caused immense wildfires, and would have reduced or eliminated both the peoples of the Clovis culture and the large mammals on which those peoples depended. This would explain why Clovis points disappear abruptly from the fossil record about the time the comet struck, while stone points of a different make (reflecting another wave of immigration) appear some time later. The comet may also have triggered the massive release of glacial meltwater from the center of the continent to the North Atlantic that slowed the Gulf Stream, causing 1500 years of Younger Dryas cooling in Europe (12,800 to 11,500 years ago).

Deglaciation took 8000 years. It was a time of flood stories, biblical or Abenaki. The melting ice raised sea levels about 360 feet. During some periods the sea rose as much as 10 feet in 70 years; depending on the slope of the coastline, this could mean the sea moved inland hundreds of yards during a man’s lifetime. But there were more catastrophic events. One reading of the geological data indicates that approximately 7600 years ago, the rising waters of the Mediterranean broke through a natural dam in the Bosporus and flowed into the basin of the Black Sea. At that time the lands around the Black Sea were occupied by Neolithic farmers. The rising flood waters moved over the grainfields and villages of the lakeside plains at a quarter mile a day. The refilling of the Sea happened in a year or two. An alternative theory claims that the rise in the Sea was much slower and was caused by glacial meltwater draining into it from the north; and that the Black Sea then broke through the dam and flowed into the Mediterranean. At any rate a flood, and almost within sight of Ararat. Rising sea levels invaded Hudson’s Bay and floated the remains of the Laurentide ice sheet about 12,800 years ago. Icebergs sailed out through Hudson and Davis Straits and drifted 1900 miles across the Atlantic toward the coast of France, dropping behind them over the ocean floor the rocks and mud of the Bay that had been frozen to their bottoms, thus letting us read of their passage. The melting of the ice sheet changed the air circulation pattern over North America, and let a more modern climate develop. The glacial grassland of eastern North America became an open woodland of boreal conifers, with paper birch, balsam poplar, alder and willow; and then a forest of northern hardwoods, such as sugar and red maple, quaking aspen, and yellow birch, together with hemlock, red and white pine, and red spruce. The more nutrient-demanding species such as white ash, elm, and basswood arrived last. Some species, like red oak, continue to move north and upslope. Meanwhile the boreal conifers continued their move north, overshooting the modern treeline by 175 miles during the Hypsithermal, 9000 years ago, when the climate was warmer and drier than today. A fully modern climate was dependent on the return of the Gulf Stream, which was shut off by massive meltwater drainage into the North Atlantic during the final collapse of the North American ice sheet.

With the return of the Gulf Stream came the establishment of a modern air circulation pattern over North America. East of the Rocky Mountains the climate is controlled by three air streams: warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico; cold, dry air from the Canadian Arctic; and moderate maritime air from the Pacific. Precipitation in the East for most of the year depends largely on the converging streams from Canada and the Gulf, one cold and dry, one warm and moist, meeting along the axis of the jet stream. Summer precipitation is often convective: moisture rising from the sun-warmed landscape and transpired by trees and grasses condenses into clouds as it rises into the cooler upper atmosphere. Condensation occurs about marine salt particles and methyl sulfate nuclei produced by marine algae, as well as about other natural and industrial aerosols, and falls as rain. (Condensation droplets that form around sulfur dioxide particles from the burning of fossil fuels are usually too small to fall as raindrops and remain as clouds.) The Pacific air loses its moisture over the mountain chains of the western United States (the Sierra Nevada, the Rocky Mountains): thus the broad arrow of modern grassland that pushes east from the rain shadow of the Rockies over the plains of the Dakotas and the prairies of Illinois and Ohio into western Pennsylvania, and along the shores of the Great Lakes into New York State. With a modern climate, a modern forest developed in the eastern United States between 6000 and 8000 years ago. None of this is static; more warmth loving trees (oaks, hemlock, hickory, chestnut) kept moving north and upslope; and red spruce, a slightly more boreal species than its companions in the northern forest, and a signature tree of the higher elevations of the Appalachians during Euro-American settlement, only became abundant there 2000 years ago.

People had inhabited this landscape for at least 11,000 years. They had hunted the large animals and watched the glaciers retreat. They had begun to influence forests long before the trees came into equilibrium with their soils. Were these prairies, newly created, with their buffalo and elk, entirely natural? Some argue that by helping to eliminate the Pleistocene megafauna, human hunters also helped create the modern grazers, partly through hunting pressure, partly by opening the ecosystem to animals that migrated with the people from Eurasia. Hunting pressure by humans tends to favor early-maturing, smaller animals: the modern bison, as compared to the larger earlier species, whose bones are found at the bottoms of the boneyards beneath buffalo jumps. The grasslands of North America were once thought to be a creation of climate and topography alone; of atmospheric circulation patterns, a mountain rain shadow. Now it seems more likely that in parts of the landscape climate and topography only set the scene. Much of the Plains are too dry and windy for trees, and the wet prairies of Illinois were too wet for too long in the spring and then too dry in the late summer and fall; these wet prairies were inhabitated paradoxically by drought-resistant plants. But grazing (by buffalo, elk, bighorn sheep, prairie dogs) and browsing and grazing (by antelope and by jackrabbits in the drier short-grass and sagebrush steppes) as well as burning (by lightning strikes and Native Americans) maintained and extended the reach of the prairie. In part, both the landscape and the large grazers that inhabited it were man-made. Former prairies in Illinois or Minnesota that are not burned today are invaded by trees. Burning was a major tool of landscape modification by gathering and hunting peoples. Modern studies indicate that burning every 2 to 5 years maximizes prairie productivity. The Kentucky barrens (called barrens by the Americans because they were treeless) consisted of 6000 square miles of buffalo and elk pasture kept open by grazing and browsing by the animals and by burning by their Native American hunters. Some eastern prairie landscapes still existed at the time of European contact, when most of the natives who maintained them were already dead of European diseases. LaSalle saw buffalo grazing along the south shores of the Great Lakes. These would have been the Pennsylvania buffalo, larger and blacker than the Plains buffalo. There were still an estimated 12,000 of these animals in Pennsylvania in the 1700s. (Since the modern buffalo crossed the Mississippi in their movement east only 1000 years ago, these animals may have been there only a few hundred years.) Buffalo, New York, was named for a buffalo trail that went along Lake Erie. Such trails, following the easiest route between two points, may have been quite old; perhaps migrating mammoths laid out the original paths. At any rate, during a period of damper climate, burning would have held back the forests in places where they would have otherwise invaded. Thus the “oak openings” of Ohio and western Pennsylvania; the buffalo along the southern shores of the Great Lakes; the elk in Michigan and New York State; the populations of buffalo along parts of the Atlantic coastal plain. The oak scrub and blueberry barrens used by prairie chickens in New England and New York State were also maintained by fire, and may have been (like the vegetation on mountaintops) relics from glacial times, kept open by humans for their plants and animals. All these animal pastures, which had existed for thousands of years, many since the melting of the glaciers, would be cleared of wild animals in no time by the Euro-Americans, who had no intention of pasturing communally-owned wild animals. They were capitalists and agriculturists, with visions of a privately-owned landscape of barns, fields, woodlots, iron plantations, gristmills, cattle.

Edible landscapes provide food, shelter, clothes, tools and fuel in a renewable way, and in amounts that support a more or less constant human population. While the human population increased steadily up to the time of the adoption of agriculture 10,000 to 11,000 years ago, most of this increase is thought to have been because of the occupation of new habitats. For most of human time (perhaps 160,000 years), the landscape was renewable and edible; edibility was its function. A buffalo hunter sitting on the edge of the Plains in Wyoming a thousand years ago would have been aware of animal traps as far as he could see. A trap might consist of a log enclosure at the foot of a low bank. The animals would be driven over the bank into the pen; the injured, frantic animals caught inside were then speared, shot with arrows, battered with stone mauls, slashed with hatchets. Converging lines of piles of stones (the stones for the piles and the logs for the trap had to be gathered and carried by hand, perhaps for miles, from wherever they might be found) extended back from the brink of the bank for a thousand yards or more, forming a chute up which the animals would be driven. People would jump out from behind the stones waving hides to drive the beasts on. The problem for hunters on foot was getting the animals into the chute. Buffalo have poor vision but are curious and approachable upwind; one might decoy them by pretending to be buffalo, or wolves. In the early spring the grass near a chute might be burned: this would provide new grass to lure the animals. A tall enough bank or cliff wouldn’t need a pen since the animals would be sufficiently hurt in the fall so as not be able to escape. Some sites are quite old; some cliff drives have bones from the larger, Pleistocene bison that preceded the modern “dwarf” bison of the Plains. Hunting in this way was a group endeavor. Once dead, the animals had to be tended to immediately or their flesh would spoil. The meat from four adult bison (about 1600 pounds) would yield about 160 pounds of dried meat (depending on how dry one got it, the amount could be double that), which would keep for several months, and feed a family of six for two months on a ration of half a pound a person a day. (Fresh meat was consumed at six to eight pounds per person per day.) Most of the animal was used. The Plains Indians were buffalo gourmands: delicacies included the stomach contents (a sort of salad), unborn fetuses, the milk from nursing cows, bone marrow, nose gristle. Hunters in a hurry took only the hump and tongue. A green soup was made from drowned and rotten buffalo. What was left at a kill site, which would vary with the number of animals killed and the number of people and the state of their food supply, turned into bait for scavenging bears, wolves, golden eagles, coyotes, skunks, badgers, and bobcats, all of which fed and were ambushed at kill sites. The buffalo returned to the prairie not only through their dung and remains but through the dung and bodies of their predators. Cliff drives were undoubtedly wasteful, when more animals were killed than the people could use.

Animal traps varied with location and prey. The Pit River, the longest tributary of the Sacramento River of northern California, was named for the abundance of pit traps for deer (steep-sided holes in the ground, lightly covered with brush) in its valley. In historic times mountain sheep were trapped in pens in Rocky Mountain pastures by the Shoshone. The drives exploited the animals’ tendency to run down from a look-out area and then up again; and from there off a bank and into the pen. Nursing herds, which formed more tractable groups, were usually driven. Animals in the pen were killed with clubs, which have been found in caves. Eight thousand years before this, when the climate on the Plains was wetter, and some anthropologists think the hunters came by sailing canoe from Pacific islands rather than by foot across the Bering Strait, mountain sheep were netted with nets of juniper bark cordage. Nets 50 to 60 meters long and 1.5 to 2 meters high have been found folded in mountain caves. In the Great Basin, pronghorn antelope, which can be restrained by a visual fence, were lured into brushwood enclosures and driven round and round until exhausted, then clubbed to death. Their numbers in the Great Basin may have been kept artificially low by this method. On the North American taiga, frozen lakes were used to set up traps for caribou. The chute for the drive was made from small evergreens set out on the ice, the trap constructed in the forest on shore. Samuel Hearne reports trap enclosures reached a mile around and the chute would reach out for a mile or more. Openings in the trap’s brush fence were fitted with snares. Animals that weren’t snared were shot with bows and arrows or speared. If possible, in all these cases, no trapped animals were spared, as people thought that escaped animals would warn the others. Modern peoples of the eastern woodland, such as the Huron, drove white-tailed deer into similar pens, on land.

People who depended mostly on hunting and gathering moved often. Some of the plains hunters of the time before the horse moved every second or third day. Because of the lack of water, only the edges of the plains, along the rivers and creeks, were habitable. (But seasonal pools, seeps, and wallows were more abundant in the pre-settlement plains, letting individual hunters travel further.) The technology of drying meat was one of the things that made the lives of hunters on foot possible, as were dogs, used for transport. Whether such cultures had any effect on the numbers of game animals is uncertain. Before the plains hunters began trading with the Americans, their effect on the buffalo was probably negligible. Antelope may have been suppressed in the Great Basin, but probably not in California (where the Central Valley had a herd of a million or more animals). In the East some writers think the population of white-tailed deer was kept artificially low. The Iroquois take of deer has been estimated at 11,000 animals, while the annual deer kill in New York State by automobiles is now about 60,000 animals, and the herd numbers over a million; the kill by hunters is around 200,000. The farmed, logged-over and developed habitat of the State is now much more suitable for deer, which like most game animals prefer early successional (some would say partly destroyed) landscapes. (White-tailed deer are one of the few large mammals in North America more numerous now than at European contact.) But villages could keep the populations of game animals near them low.

Most hunters and gatherers get the bulk of their calories from gathering and the buffalo hunters also gathered wild plants: young stems and leaves of Balsamorrhiza and Chenopodium; bitter-root roots; sego lily bulbs; wild onions; fruits of chokecherry, buffalo berry, gooseberry. Such wild fruits, bitter-sweet and rich in vitamin C, would be beaten up with fat and dried meat into pemmican, a calorie-rich, easily transportable winter food. In the Great Basin, seeds of yucca, Indian ricegrass, wild rye, limber pine, saltbush, and Chenopodium were collected, the small-seeded grasses beaten off the stem into baskets, the pine cones with their large seeds collected before the seeds had fallen and let open in baskets or on mats in the sun or around the fire; some cones, like those of the sugar pine, were set alight so they would open and shed their seeds. Sometimes rodents collected the food: the Pawnee and Winnebago stole caches of ground beans from meadow voles, the Northwest Indians robbed caches of aquatic arrowheads from muskrat nests, the Seri and Yaqui robbed caches of mesquite pods from pack rats. In the Great Basin, Mormon crickets, an abundant, large insect, were driven into shallow trenches, grass was set over the top of the trench and lit, the roasted insects then collected and stored. A woman could collect several bushels in a day, the caloric equivalent of a year’s supply of pizza. Harvesting can increase the abundance of some plants. Grizzly bears create lily gardens above timberline by digging and eating the lily bulbs in the fall. Digging loosens the sod in which the lilies grow. Some of the sod is left exposed and rots, releasing nutrients to the ground. The lilies reproduce by bulb scales on the sides of the bulb, which fall off when they are handled, thus starting new lily plants; the bears also leave many bulbs (especially smaller ones) in the ground. The result is a thicker growth of lilies in the dug-over ground (a lily garden), more forage for animals like mountain goats (which eat the blooms), more spectacular scenery for the hiker, a greater resource for the bears. Bitter-root and sego lily (as well as roots like camas and groundnut in other regions) probably responded this way for the Native Americans, as ramps (wild onions) are said to increase yearly when gathered by modern commercial collectors. The point of course is not to take all the bulbs. Australian aborigines replanted the tops of the wild yams they dug, so the plants would regrow. In general, harvesting seeds and wild fruits tends to spread the plants around. Some plants however require other techniques: California Indians burned stands of wild rice grass in the fall to increase the yield. Burning volatilizes some nutrients but cycles others through the system more rapidly, increasing yields. With some species of perennial plants, lightly harvesting young stems for food, as the Californians did with their native clovers, increases the size of the underground parts, which then produce more stems. Using the landscape by gathering thus subtly changed it, often for the better, from the point of view of the gatherers.

Other landscapes demanded other forms of accommodation. In the boreal woodland south and east of Hudson’s Bay, a more difficult landscape fed the Cree. The Cree ate mammals and fish, greens, berries. One of their prey animals, the varying hare, has a strong population cycle with a 7 year period. Such cycles are typical of many northern animals. In this case, the rise and fall of the hare was followed, at a slight remove, by that of the lynx that ate them. The lynx is a furbearer, so records of lynx skins sold to traders provide a record of varying hare populations. The Cree would eat more hare when they were available, taking hunting pressure off the moose, their other major meat resource and the big game animal of the snowy regions south of the caribou range, and north of the deer. Beaver were a reliable winter food, if not over-exploited. A hunter knew where to find them, how to trap them. It was said a winter camp smelled of balsam boughs and boiling beaver. The animal’s fur was an added benefit. Anadromous fish like Atlantic salmon, blue-back herring and sea-run trout inhabited the rivers of the St. Lawrence drainage up to Niagara Falls and north around the coast through much of Labrador (when, far enough north, trout and salmon are replaced by Arctic char). Other fishes lived in the drainages of the large inland lakes. Fish were relatively easy to capture in spring and fall, when they made their spawning runs. They could also be caught through the ice in winter. Waterfowl and shorebirds were seasonally abundant. Some bands depended largely on muskrat, which were extremely abundant, and also somewhat cyclical, in large river deltas. The small lakes scattered inland from Hudson’s Bay held large lake trout. They could not be fished every year. Growth of the fish was too slow, so the lakes had to be fished in rotation. Game management was handled by the tribes through the assignment of individual hunting territories. (Individual territories probably replaced those of small hunting bands, a change associated with trapping for fur.) Further north, caribou were taken where their migration paths took them across rivers or through lakes, where the animals could be ambushed and shot with bows and arrows as they approached a river crossing, or speared from canoes while swimming a lake. Berries were often abundant. Blueberry barrens were burned, which increased their yield tenfold, making more food available for people, for foxes and bears, for the chicken-like birds of the barrens (grouse, ptarmigan, prairie chickens). Fires often got away and regrowth of the forest could take a long time. The Cree of northern Alberta set landscape-manipulating fires to produce a mosaic of mature and early successional landscapes attractive to game: berries to lure birds and bears; herbs and grasses for rabbits and mice, and thus martens and foxes. The Cree might renew cattail marshes for muskrats or aspen stands for beaver with fire. Fires in the boreal forest could be destructive. Life under the gray winter sky of Quebec or Maine was perhaps not so hard as one supposes: one old Cree lady told an anthropologist that her rabbit-skin winter clothes were so warm that as a girl she sometimes slept outside in the snow.

Perhaps this was an exaggeration. In the late 1700s Samuel Hearne records finding a young Western Dog-rib woman living alone on the taiga. (Hearn, an employee of the Hudson’s Bay Company, made several exploratory walks of a thousand miles or more north and west from the Company’s trading settlement on Hudson’s Bay.) She had been captured by a war party of Athapascans and adopted into that tribe. The Athapascans had killed her infant child when she was captured. She had not forgiven them this and had escaped. Her tribe lived far to the west and she didn’t know where she was, so once free of her captors she set up camp on the taiga, certain that sooner or later some of her people would come her way. She lived by snaring ptarmigan, hare and ground squirrels, along with a few beaver and porcupines. She had made fire from two stones and had sewn a new set of rabbit-skin clothes. She also had fashioned a hundred fathoms of line from the inner bark of willow for a fishing net, which she was planning to use when the fish began to run that fall. She lived alone for seven months. What is impressive about the woman is that she could survive so easily and so well; and she apparently didn’t mind being alone. The landscape was her home in a way it could not be for the Europeans; their own natural landscape was not home for them in this way. For Europeans of that time, human life took place on a divine earth, remade by men in god’s image: the cultivated, domesticated landscape of Europe, a landscape whose history went back several thousand pre-Christian years. The natural post-glacial landscape of Europe, the European forest (as impressive as that of Ohio or Kentucky), once as familiar to its inhabitants as the taiga to this woman, had become an alien one to its present inhabitants, a home of spirits and devils. If possible, Europeans took their domestic landscape with them, and so could live far from the apple orchards and barnyards of Europe as long as wheat could be grown, fruit trees planted, and communication with Europe (the spiritual center of the world) existed. Being marooned on an island like Robinson Carusoe was one of the mythic fears of the time; and not without precedent. But the whole colonization of the earth by people had consisted of journeys something like that woman’s; with small bands of people who could make do with what was around them, and whose spiritual lives were connected to the landscape about them.