Native Americans – NearcticTraveller

Who Started America’s Quest for Liberty?

Marooned: Jamestown, Shipwreck and a new History of America’s Origin by Joseph Kelly. 2018. Bloomsbury Publishing (Kindle edition)

Here Shall I Die Ashore: Stephen Hopkins: Bermuda Castaway, Jamestown Survivor, and Mayflower Pilgrim by Caleb Johnson. 2007. Xlibris Corp (Kindle edition)

After I wrote about Stephen Hopkins in my post about Shipwreck and Shakespeare. I had a chance to hear author Joseph Kelly talk at our virtual family reunion this fall. He discussed events surrounding Hopkins’s life, and what he viewed as his early contribution to the idea of freedom in the New World. Kelly claims that Hopkins’s revolt against the Virginia Company while wrecked on Bermuda (memorably but savagely depicted in the actions of the drunken butler, Stephano, in Shakespeare’s The Tempest) is the earliest known instance of the idea that the legitimacy of governments rests on the consent of the governed. The famous Mayflower Compact is the second, and Hopkins very likely influenced its making.

Kelly ties the principle Hopkins expressed to an earlier phenomena in the New World, the escape of enslaved Africans in Spanish colonies and the founding of self-governing communities in forests, swamps and mountains, out of reach of their former masters. These people were referred to as “Maroons,” and the term came to be applied to other castaways. This part of his account reminded me very strongly of The Exiles of Florida. The term, “Seminole,” originally referred to similar communities of Native Americans who moved to Spanish Florida’s forests and swamps to escape their enemiesand who were joined by large numbers of escaped slaves from English colonies to the north.

Another group similar to the Maroons were English soldiers who went “native” in Ireland. This was going on at the same time as the Virginia Company was beginning its program of colonization in America. Conditions in the part of Ireland held by the English army, were awful, particularly among the soldiers in border outposts. Many deserted and settled among the Irish in the unoccupied lands. This pattern was repeated at Jamestown, where a number of Virginia Company men deserted to the native people. In most of these cases, we have little record of their fate, much as with the earlier Roanoke “Lost Colony.”

Why was this happening among the people who had voluntarily signed up to go to the New World? As Kelly explains, the terms and conditions of employment turned out not to be as promised. Technically everyone who signed up received one share of company stock in exchange for venturing their lives, butaccording to the contract, holders of a single share were treated as company employees, without any rights except to sustenance and shelter. Only those who received multiple shares, because of sought-after skills, social position or actual cash ventured, had the freedom to vote on governance matters and choose leaders.

By the time Hopkins, in the flagship Sea Venture, with both the Governor, William Strachey, and the Admiral, George Somers, aboard, was wrecked on Bermuda, the ordinary adventurers had probably begun to hear from the ship’s crew and some of the soldiers aboard the real situation at Jamestown. They might have felt relief at reaching an uninhabited archipelago instead, especially one with plenty of food and water and a tolerable climate. It would have been a shock when Governor Strachey immediately imposed strict discipline, with onerous work schedules, required rollcalls, prayer services, etc. The Sea Venture sailors were so restive under this regime that Admiral Somers used his authority as fleet commander to take them to another island, where they could follow the discipline they were used to on board ship.

Hopkins’s rebellion was premised on the notion that the wreck voided their contract, since they were not in fact, in Virginia. Any activities and any sort of governance ought to be based on mutual consent, not Strachey’s command. Quite a few of the disgruntled venturers agreed. The Governor obviously saw it differently, and since he had the soldiers on his side, his view prevailed. Hopkins wisely chose to plead for mercy. I’m lucky he did, because as a direct ancestor of mine (assuming that’s correct) I would not be here if he’d been hanged.

After the maroons escaped, or rather were forced to head to Virginia on the two ships they constructed, Hopkins seemed to have kept quiet. He even became a reader in the Jamestown church, which everyone was forced to attend. He learned at least some of the local Algonquin language. Still, he seems to have had no desire to remain under the miserable rules and starvation conditions in Virginia, and he returned to England.

By 1620, he was ready to try again, and he signed on to a new company, the one formed by the Pilgrims. This time he brought along his second wife and his children. It was his daughter, Oceana, who was born on the Mayflower, although sadly, she died shortly after they landed.

From Kelly’s point of view, the key contribution of Hopkins to the Plymouth Colony and the future United States of America, was to instigate the drawing up of the Mayflower Compact. William Bradford, in his history of the Plymouth colony, says that it was partly to allay the discontent among the “Strangers,” (non-Pilgrims who came to fill out the company) that a written agreement was drafted and signed, specifying how the colony was to be governed. Again, Hopkins’s thought that landing on a remote shore, far north of where they were supposed to be, broke their original agreement and left them to decide for themselves how they would be governed. One hundred fifty-six years later this idea, that the broken relationship between the colonies and England left Americans at liberty to set up a new government, formed the basis of the Declaration of Independence.

Fortunately in 1620, it was a group of relatively mild-mannered religious dissenters, not wealthy and powerful English aristocrats, backed by soldiers, who heard Hopkins’s arguments,and they went along with them. Perhaps Hopkins, who knew the native language, was too useful to get rid of, or maybe thecompany was too small to lose anyone at that point.

Does Hopkins deserve to be revered as a founding father? I certainly think his position in colonial American history is exceptional: Bermuda, Virginia and Plymouth – quite an adventurous life. He also helped negotiate one of only a few treaties with Native Americans that were not broken during the lifetimes of the signers, another being William Penn’s with the Lenape. He was possibly English America’s first recorded tavern keeper, cause enough for renown in the eyes of many. Hopkins’s ideas about consent were certainly not unique. Within a generation or so, the Levellers, who formed, in the words of Christopher Hill, one of the first modern political parties in England, were asserting similar principles. One of the authors in my next post, Elizabeth Anderson, has quite a bit to say about them and about how their struggle for freedom and dignity byordinary people faced with powerful people and corporations continues to this day.

Caleb Johnson’s biography of Hopkins gives much more detail about his life, insofar as we know it, but without Kelley’s focus on what political views he might have had. Still, he makes clear that Hopkins was a dissenter, not only in Bermuda, but also in Plymouth. He was sometimes part of the governing council and a key player in relations with the Pequot and other Indians and at other times a thorn in the side of his Pilgrim neighbors. He was fortunate to have produced several surviving children, among whom his oldest daughter, Constance, moved with her husband, John Snow, to Eastham on Cape Cod. It was here that her descendants would have married into the Doane family, descendants of John Doane, who came to Plymouth on a later ship and played an influential role in the 1630s and 40s before moving to the Cape. It was a daughter of that family who married my great great great grandfather in the 1760s and lived with him in North Carolina.

Linguistic Exploration in Carolina

Talkin’ Tar Heel: How Our Voices Tell the Story of North Carolina by Walt Wolfram and Jeffrey Reaser. University of North Carolina Press. 2016.

I read the Kindle edition which has all the photos and links to audio and video samples.

North Carolina has as rich a diversity of dialects of English as any linguist could hope to find in the U.S. say Walt and Jeffrey, two linguistics professors at North Carolina State University. They ought to know, having conducted thousands of interviews all across the state from Matteo in the east to Murphy in the west, as part of the North Carolina Language and Life Project.

Their book aims to give those not trained in linguistics an idea of just how diverse Tarheel speech is and to show how history, geography and culture have shaped the way residents of the state talk.

I grew up from age five to twenty-one in a college town in the Research Triangle within the North Carolina Piedmont. In that time, I was exposed to a large sample of the various regional dialects, from the local kids around town and the ones from further out in the country, who attended to schools in town. I ran into more diversity traveling from the mountains to the coast, with my family, my friends, their families and the Boy Scouts. Later, I worked summers with a variety of custodians, construction laborers, mailmen and others, black and white, old and young. As upper middle-class southerners, my family employed African American maids and babysitters, as did my grandparents and my friends’ parents. This was the era just before full integration of North Carolina’s public schools, so I had only token contact with African American speech there.

My first significant contact with Spanish speakers was when I went to college for two years in New Mexico. North Carolina had only a tiny population of Hispanics then. That changed rapidly in the 1990s, and it profoundly affected the area where my father grew up, and where I still own a piece of the family land. The explosive growth of the hog farming and pork packing industry brought hundreds of Mexicans and Central Americans to the little tiny town that I had known since I was a child: besides the farms and packing plants, a world-famous garment factory employed Hispanic women for their sewing skills. Spanish stores, a pool room and restaurants reoccupied the increasingly deserted main street. On the corner near our land, a derelict country store was made into a very authentic Mexican restaurant, an oasis in what had become essentially a food desert.

My father’s family is from the southeastern corner of the state. My mother’s family, though, is from Ohio, and I lived from ages two through four in Minnesota, so my earliest linguistic influences from family and playmates were only partly “southern.” Thus, most people I meet don’t recognize me as a southerner by my speech. Interestingly, of my four younger siblings, my two sisters show the most pronounced North Carolina accents, and both have a greater tendency to use such characteristic expressions as “you all.” All of them learned to talk while living in N.C. and they are ordered brother – sister – brother – sister, so it’s not a matter of age. It seems perhaps to be a question of peer interactions, but I’m not sure why it worked out like that.

There’s more to this as well: my father had only moderate traces of his rural southern upbringing in his speech, although his five siblings (one brother, four sisters) all had stronger accents. My paternal grandfather (born 1869, died 1965) also lacked very strong rural North Carolina speech, although his wife, who was from Virginia, certainly sounded “southern.” Perhaps education was a factor: both father and grandfather attended the University of North Carolina, as well as other schools. Class was also a factor, perhaps, both were medical doctors.

One trace of regional speech that I noticed in my father and grandfather was a slight broadening of certain vowel sounds. This was more memorably apparent to me in my great uncle, whom I saw often while growing up. He was college educated also, but he attended NC State College (as it was then called). Fans of the teams of other schools referred to it as Moo U. This may have reflected a perceived, possibly real, difference in social class from those who went to Duke and UNC. At any rate, when my great uncle pronounced the word “pond,” it came out as “pawned.” I have wondered whether this was a feature carried over from the speech of my great great great grandfather, who came from Orkney, Scotland, to North Carolina in the 1760’s. He was a late participant in the migration of Scots to North Carolina, and I don’t think that Orkney speech was exactly like that of the Scots-Irish or the Highland Scots who came earlier. My ancestors came to Orkney, probably from the Black Isle on the southern edge of the Highlands, as early as the fifteenth century.

I picked up over the years a couple of other curious tidbits that suggest the persistence of early ancestral immigration: one was my grandfather telling us that, “If it rains on Saint Swithen’s day, it will rain for forty days.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swithun) The other is the use of the name “didapple,” pronounced “die-dapple,” for a pied billed grebe. I heard this from the son of one of my father’s childhood friends, as we stood beside their large millpond, looking at various birds. This appears to be a variant of the name dive-dapper, used by Shakespeare in Venus and Adonis.

Talkin Tarheel is a rich tapestry of similar history, culture, and personal stories, all showing how people came to talk as they do and how those distinct dialects are evolving in the twenty-first century. As the authors are constantly emphasizing, no language is ever static, least of all one in a place undergoing rapid demographic and economic change. Old ways of living and speaking are disappearing, such those of the “hoi toiders,” from the Outer Banks and of the mountain folks, like the last of the old-time moonshiners. These dialects are in danger of being lost as living speech. Both these groups feature in several sound and video clips from the Language and Life Project.

Other groups are very unlikely to lose their distinctive forms of speech, although they to are changing in response to growing urbanization, mass communication and other factors. I first heard of the Lumbee Indians back in 1958, when I saw the headlines about the battle they fought against the KKK at Maxton (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Hayes_Pond) This story is rightfully excluded from a book that tries to include and value all North Carolinians (not the Klan as such, of course, but the rural whites, who might be unfairly associated with that detestable group). I was very happy to read that the Lumbee are doing well, and that they maintain their own dialect of English proudly. At 55,000 enrolled members, they are the largest population of Native Americans East of the Mississippi, though they have yet to receive the federal recognition they deserve. It is unfortunate that almost no trace of their original language can be found, unlike the much smaller Cherokee tribe, who still live in the western mountains and who are working hard to keep their language, famously given written form by Sequoia, alive.

There are many stories of African American history to accompany the discussion of their dialect (or dialects, as there is an increasing urban vs rural difference). Freedom Hill, on the Tar River, was incorporated as Princeville, making it the first African American town in the U.S. There is a wonderful clip telling of the struggles of Princeville to survive in the face of floods from recent hurricanes. Even if, like me, you don’t like to see rebuilding in flood prone areas, it’s impossible not to admire Princeville’s community spirit. Likewise, there is an interesting account of the Freedman’s Colony on Roanoke Island, the place of Lost Colony fame. When I go there again, I must visit the museum display that tells its story.

Talkin Tarheel is full of fascinating linguistic detail, showing how much the application of painstaking scientific techniques can illuminate even very subtle distinctions among dialects, such as the tendency of Hispanics to retain the syllable timed pattern of Spanish when speaking their dialect of English, unlike the stress timed pattern used by most English speakers.

The authors conclude with a celebration of the diversity of dialects in North Carolina and express the hope that through efforts like the North Carolina Language and Life Project, linguistics can help erase the stigma and prejudice that distinctive speech too often evokes and instead appreciate the variety of ways of Talkin Tarheel.

This post is dedicated to the late, much missed, MEB, who loved language and loved teaching and defending the interests of her young, immigrant Hispanic students in Alamance County.

Deep History

Prairie Erth by William Least Heat-Moon. Houghton-Mifflin Co. 1991.

This book is deep history of a single locality, Chase County Kansas, a thinly populated, largely rural part of the Flint Hills and the great North American grasslands. The book’s coverage extends far into the geologic past and up to the early 1990s. By then, as in much of rural America a peak of population and development had been passed, and its farms, ranches, villages and towns were becoming depopulated. Heat-Moon spent many months driving and walking about the county, systematically taking up one by one the grid of USGS topographic maps (twelve central ones and thirteen more that cover the edges) that include Chase County. He talked with a great many of the residents and others with connections to the land, the people and the history. He also read extensively, prefacing each of the twelve sections (one for each central topo map) with a series of excerpts from his commonplace book, relating to the themes he follows in that section. The quotations come from hundreds of books, newspapers, journals.

Geology, botany, zoology occupy almost as much of the six hundred pages as the people. A Native American himself, he devotes much space to the aboriginal people, the Kaw, also sometimes called the Kansa (among a host of other names that he cites) By the time he wrote, the few remaining members of that tribe resided on Oklahoma, to which they had been “removed” in the 1870s.

Summarizing this remarkable work of observation, listening and reflection is not possible. I was deeply impressed both by how fascinating a seemingly backwater place can be and by how deeply Heat-Moon engaged with the land and people. Despite often being seen as an eccentric outsider, he showed great respect for the locals and was able to win the confidence of many. His self reflections are often profound and often extremely amusing. The best travel writers often are like that: I think of Bill Bryson.

What I realized reading Prairie Erth was how much I am interested in the deep history of the places I have lived. I think that’s why I am captivated by books that lay out the events that shaped the landscapes I am most familiar with. If you have seen my earlier posts, New World History, Forgotten but not Gone, Ecosystem Lost and Found?, The Journeys of Holling C. Holling, and even Amphibious Reflections, you will have encountered my interest.

I live in the Pine Barrens region of southern New Jersey, on land once part of Gloucester Plantation, which was centered on Gloucester Furnace, an iron foundry. It can be fairly said that the Pine Barrens were one of the industrial centers of the early United States, although now, many people describe them as a “pristine wilderness.” This sort of blindness to the past seems endemic among us, as amply demonstrated in Forgotten Grasslands of the South and Looking for Longleaf.

Fortunately, there have always been some more inquiring minds, who have sought out the past and tried to preserve or at least document it. For my area, there are many books, like Forgotten Towns of Southern New Jersey, that record these past landscapes and communities. Many individuals like Jean Soderland, are researching the history of indigenous people. There is now a periodical devoted to all aspects of the regions history, SoJourn.

I have had at least five colleagues who dedicated their research to understanding the geological and cultural history of the region: a hydrologist, a geographer, a historian, an archaeologist and a geologist. The geologist started out in horticulture, but became so interested in the natural landscapes of the Pine Barrens that he took a PhD in geology to further his collaborations with a noted glacial geologist. He has contributed greatly to our knowledge of the ways that the Ice Ages shaped the topography of the Pine Barrens and indeed the entire North American coastal plain.

The North American Coastal Plain consists of marine of riverine sands and gravels accumulated on the edge of the ocean. From these soils develop that drain rapidly and are prone to severe drought. Fire has been a force in the landscape for millions of years, varying in frequency and intensity with climate and, since a few thousand years ago, with human activity. Groundwater saturates these porous sediments, often nearly to or above the surface. Upland vegetation historically burned often, the extensive lowlands only in severe droughts.

The ice age climate was dry, cold and ferociously windy as frigid air flowed off the ice sheets only a short way north. The landscape that developed as the climate warmed included wide but very shallow river channels, with streams too small for their valleys. These were created by melting permafrost. There are numerous shallow ponds in depressions, some nearly circular, created by powerful winds during full glacial periods, others long, winding and narrow, created by blowing sand blocking stream courses. Low, sandy ridges are the remains of ancient fields of dunes created by the same winds that blew out the depressions.

Early European settlers cut the trees, dammed the streams and began creating mills, cranberry bogs and crop fields. They started many iron plantations in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries, utilizing the local bog iron, the pine forests (for charcoal) and the shell maddens left by the aboriginal inhabitants, the Lenape, to produce iron. As iron industry moved west, paper and glassmaking took over the old water powered mill sites.

Today, the former Gloucester Plantation tract has been through several phases of settlement and resettlement. The land was promoted in a real estate endeavor that became Egg Harbor City. A town was laid out, at first facing Landing Creek and the Mullica River, then reoriented to the railroad that was built in the 1850s from Philadelphia to Atlantic City. The hinterlands were sold as farms, mainly to German-speaking immigrants, most of whom left eastern cities to escape the anti-immigrant Know-nothings (see Before the Storm and Politics and War) Egg Harbor City thrived as an agricultural and small manufacturing town and then gradually faded until the advent of the FAA Technical Center, Stockton College (now University) and the Atlantic City Casinos. These brought in new residents, but not much new commerce, which developed mostly in the central and eastern parts of Atlantic County. The establishment of the Pinelands National Reserve in 1979 restricted commercial and industrial development and even residential development over much of the Gloucester tract.

Farming continues, mainly commercial blueberries (a crop developed in the Pine Barrens) and, more recently, community supported agriculture. Much of the land, however, reverted to forest. Not the open woodlands of the years before fire suppression became the policy in New Jersey, but dense, closed canopy oak and pine forests, with thick understory of huckleberries. This lowered the groundwater table, drying up ponds and headwater streams. It also caused the native herbaceous plants to become much less frequent and with them their associated insects, especially butterflies and moths. Many are now only found in a few well managed preserves and, ironically, in utility line corridors and airports, which are kept open by mowing in the dormant season.

The region’s roadsides, once a haven for native herbs, have been converted by mowing and addition of cool season grass, to monotonous and sterile strips. Unpaved roads, trails and open areas are now the domain of off-road vehicle enthusiasts, who flood the Pine Barrens on weekends, destroying habitat. The worst are the “mudders,” who have wiped out hundreds of localities for rare and endangered wetland plants. Species not native to the Pine Barrens are increasingly taking over, especially on recently abandoned cleared land. I am in continual struggle with autumn olive, multiflora rose, Asian barberry, and Eurasian bittersweet.

I pin my hopes on the position of the New Jersey Coastal Plain as the northernmost (excepting Long Island and Cape Cod) part of the great North American Coastal Plain biodiversity hotspot. As climate change pushes populations northward and sea level rise shrinks the Coastal Plain, southern New Jersey may be a critical refuge for southern species. But who can tell? It could just as well succumb to rampant deregulation and competing interests, like the infernal off-roaders.

Change over millions of years shaped the landscape and the evolution of the Pine Barrens’ characteristic flora and fauna. I tried to impress this on my students in the years I taught ecology. The processes that operate in the lithosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere and biosphere – energy flow, nutrient cycling, population dynamics, evolution and cultural change – shape what we see around us. And every development leaves traces on the land and in the living organisms that inhabit it. Without an understanding of the history of the place you are in, you cannot understand its present or future.

Struggling for liberty, post Civil War

The Republic for Which It Stands, The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896, Oxford History of the United States by Richard White. Oxford University Press, 2017, 968 pages.

I listened to the Audible edition, ably read by Noah Michael Levine. This is another entry in Oxford’s multi-volume history, which includes James McPherson’s excellent Battle Cry of Freedom, The Civil War Era. The author casts the history of the last third of the nineteenth century as a struggle among competing definitions of freedom. He builds much of his narrative around the way in which the ideals articulated by Abraham Lincoln shaped the struggles of the period. Republicans were the party of free labor, seen as the key to every man being able to build and maintain a secure home for his family. Free labor, which was taken to mean freedom of contract between employers and employees, was often invoked to justify government inaction in the face of unfair and exploitative relations. The ideal of the home drove both the efforts to support freed slaves and to acculturate Native Americans to the values and religion of whites, whether they liked it or not. Similarly, the home was man’s castle, but too often, it was the woman’s prison.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, the future of millions of freed slaves was the most obvious problem facing the country. The efforts of the federal government to provide for these people and to protect them from the exploitation and violence they faced in the South were hampered by unwillingness to expropriate the lands of rebels, reluctance to maintain troops in the rebel states, and lack of resources to provide for the largely destitute freedmen. Racism contributed to northern indifference and southern resistance. On the other hand, the Republican Party saw the former slaves as a pool of potential votes. There was some success in the immediate aftermath of the war, but in the end, the “old barons,” the large landholders, were able to reestablish control in most of the South. The desire to put the freedmen to work and end their dependence on government provisions, forced most into labor or tenancy agreements that left them little better off than before emancipation.

Nevertheless they resisted the attempts to reduce them to something like their previous condition, and in some parts of the South, they were able to do so for awhile. As the old political order was reestablished, however, they were met with more and more violent repression. As the last federal troops left, the regime of Jim Crow was firmly established, cemented in place by disastrous Supreme Court rulings that allowed false promises of “separate but equal” to count for “the equal protection of the laws.” Despite the gains of the Civil Rights movement, generations later, the current Black Lives Matter campaign and the resistance it engenders show we remain short of the goal.

The other major issue was the future of the western states and territories, especially in the prairie and Great Plains. The Homestead Act and massive land grants to the railroads were intended to open up these regions to agriculture, as well as linking the Pacific Coast to the rest of the country. In the lands between the Mississippi River and the 100th meridian, this strategy was successful, leading to enormous demographic and economic growth. In the arid regions further west, it largely failed, as did efforts to remove the Plains Indians to reservations without bloodshed. Inconsistent policies and lack of understanding and respect for Native American cultures led to a string of broken treaties, wars and massacres by both sides. Railroads made the slaughter of the bison herds into a profitable business, and in the end the army forced the Indians into small reservations. [Ironically, the famous Buffalo Soldiers, black cavalry units including many Union Civil War veterans, were part of the forces deployed. According to one history I read, they suffered more violence at the hands of white townspeople in the communities they were protecting than from the Native Americans.]

In moving to the Gilded Age, White covers a vast array of developments, including the rapid rise of industry, especially steel and railroads, both for their economic importance and for their large role in the struggle for labor rights. He also details the conflict over monetary policy, especially as it split different interest groups and sections of the country and shaped the national political scene. He describes the rise of the temperance movement and the larger preoccupation with home and morality it was part of. White shows how all these developments were seen by the leading contemporary observers and activists. It is especially interesting to learn how the generation that had supported anti-slavery and free labor tried to understand the new realities that emerged with mass industrial employment, increasing immigration and rising wealth and consumption.

In thinking about all of these questions, it is impossible to miss the parallels to our era. We struggle with questions about rapid social and economic change, labor rights, the role of marriage and the family and immigration among others. One difference is that a populist insurgency has succeeded in electing its candidate President. So far though, there seems to be no stopping the momentum that is taking us back towards the economic inequality of the Gilded Age.

All in all, The Republic for Which It Stands is a detailed political, economic and social history that serves as a very readable (listenable) introduction to the periods it covers. There is a very extensive annotated bibliography. I’d like to try more volumes in this Oxford series.

When Worlds Collide

The_Conquest_of_Tenochtitlan — The Conquest of Tenochtitlan And when we saw all those cities and villages built in the water, and other great towns on dry land, and that straight and level causeway leading to Mexico [i.e. Tenochtitlán], we were astounded. These great towns and cues [i.e., temples] and buildings rising from the water, all made of stone, seemed like an enchanted vision from the tale of Amadis. Indeed, some of our soldiers asked whether it was not all a dream. It is not surprising therefore that I should write in this vein. It was all so wonderful that I do not know how to describe this first glimpse of things never heard of, seen or dreamed of before. . . .I say again that I stood looking at it, and thought that no land like it would ever be discovered in the whole world…. But today all that I then saw is overthrown and destroyed; nothing is left standing. True History of the Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Díaz del Castillo (1492-1580)

1491 (Second Edition): New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. Audible recorded edition, original publication 2006 by Charles C. Mann

1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. Audible recorded edition, original publication 2011 by Charles C. Mann

These two books form a pair of inquiries, first into what the New World, comprising the nearctic and neotropical biogeographic realms, were like prior to the coming of Europeans (and Africans) after 1492 and second into what the resulting “Columbian exchange,” wrought in biological and cultural terms across the world.

Mann collected the latest scientific and historical evidence from a wide range of first hand sources, mostly working archaeologists, anthropologists, demographers, historians and others. He traveled through North, Central and South America to see the discoveries that are changing our notions about the human population of the Americas from the end of the ice ages to the present. He revisited the first hand accounts of the earliest European explorers, who often reported densities of human settlements that were disbelieved by those who followed just a couple of generations later, after European diseases had depopulated vast regions. He recounts the epic battles of the scientific past: how new discoveries were often flatly denied by the powerful authorities of the time, even in the face of hard evidence. Some academic scientists took all the credit for discoveries which were originally made by amateurs and lay people. The history of Native Americans has been contested ground for centuries, and now the Native Americans themselves are becoming more deeply involved, not always, as far as I can see, on the side of the best science. This may partly be blamed on postmodern and post colonialist concepts of truth, but a lot is simply the difficulty of making sense of the evidence. Betty Meggars, author of Amazonia: Nature and Culture in a Counterfeit Paradise, which I greatly admired as a young ecologist, is an example of someone who, at the time 1491 was published, opposed the idea that humans could have lived in the Amazon Basin in large settlements with permanent, as opposed to shifting agriculture. I think her basic ideas about ecological limitations are sound, but it seems as if she was refusing to see that the ecology of the Amazon forest was more complex than was understood in the 1970s. Since those early days of the save the rainforest movement, we have learned a lot about the Amazon and other forests that contradicts ideas about primeval forests, undisturbed for centuries, being what Europeans encountered as they ventured to Africa, Asia and the Americas. Many environmentalists are reluctant to accept these findings, because they rightly fear that they could be used to justify unregulated exploitation by destructive modern methods. Still, I see no use in denying hard won understanding. I, for one, accept the idea that across the earth, humans have played a much greater role in shaping the landscape and for a longer time than we previously believed. Mann’s detailed accounts of the latest understanding of life of Native Americans prior to 1492 point to just how much was lost in the collision between the peoples, plants, animals and diseases of two formerly isolated realms.

Mann’s second book, 1493, takes up the story to try to see how this fatal, but pregnant, collision transformed the rest of the planet. Central to this was trade: the rapid exchange of all sorts of goods, including new crops, new livestock and unfortunately, new pests and diseases across the globe. The trade was facilitated by the new sea routes opened up, especially the Spanish route from Mexico to Manila, made possible by the vast deposits of silver and gold in the new Spanish colonies. Chinese silks and porcelin flowed east to New Spain and then Europe, while silver, especially, flowed to China. Along with the coin went crops like maize, chili pepper and sweet potato, whose conquest of Asian diets Mann details. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, sugar, tobacco and later, cotton began to flow to Europe, made possible by the labor of enslaved Africans. Transplanted Europeans, their crops and their livestock began to replace the native populations from Argentina to Quebec, remaking the landscape in a melded version of the old and new. Escaped slaves formed a crucial part of the ecological and cultural heritage of areas like Brazil and the southeastern US (see my post on Exiles of Florida).

All this history and ecology, so different from what I learned in school, and even as a graduate student forty years ago, is a reminder that very little of our understanding of ourselves and the world we inhabit can be taken as fixed and certain. Perhaps my favorite bit of revisionist history in either book is the notion that the famous passenger pigeon did not darken the skies in vast flocks containing billions of birds back before Columbus. Instead, it rocketed to huge numbers when the demographic collapse of Native Americans led to a regrowth of deciduous forest across formerly densely inhabited landscapes in eastern North America. How do we know they were not so abundant back in the day? Because passenger pigeon bones are scarce in archeological sites from pre-Columbian times, despite the historical fact that the birds were good to eat and easy to obtain in the early 19th century.

There were surely be further developments in this fascinating field of inquiry, but for now, these two books are not a bad place to begin.

Freedom and Exile in Florida

Giddings, Joshua (1795 – 1864) The Exiles of Florida, Or, the Crimes Committed by Our Government Against the Maroons, who Fled from South Carolina and Other Slave States, Seeking Protection Under Spanish Laws. 1858. Columbus OH. Follett, Foster and Co.

[image: By USMC – NARA archive, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4012354%5D

I listened to the very fine Librivox recording.

A remarkable polemic by a U.S. Representative from Ohio (1838-1859). This account of events in Florida from the late 1600s to the date of publication, was supported by numerous documents from the records of the US Congress, including treaties, military reports, letters and legal filings. The basic story is very simple: Africans fled from slavery, first in South Carolina and later in Georgia, and sought refuge in Spanish Florida, where Spanish authorities granted them freedom. The slaveowners sought desperately to get them back, even after several generations of the original slaves’ descendants had been settled in communities under Spanish law. Escaped slaves and their offspring were considered lost or stolen property, just like stray cattle. [Note the similarity to some peoples’ attitude towards the children of undocumented immigrants, despite the 14^th Amendment.] As time passed, slaves continued to flee to Florida, and joined native Americans, often living in close proximity, sometimes intermarrying. Some of the natives were a subgroup of the Creek Nation, who became estranged from the main body of Creeks, who lived in Georgia. These Africans and Americans became known in Spanish Florida as “Seminoles,” which basically means “exiles” or “runaways.”

By the beginning of the 19^th Century, conflict was rife along the border between the new United States and Florida. Between 1810 and 1819, the US and Great Britain made various attempts to gain control of the Florida panhandle. The destruction of the “Negro Fort” on Prospect Bluff above the Apalachicola River by the US Navy, resulted in the deaths of over 300 free Africans. The Seminoles, including the remaining free Africans, continued to resist to attempts of the Georgians, white Floridians and Creeks to capture them or drive them out of the border territories. These raids and counter raids led to Andrew Jackson bringing the US Army into the Seminole territory (which was still legally Spanish) to drive the natives out and seize the Africans for sale into slavery. Jackson’s ruthless policies were popular with many Americans but criminal in the eyes of others. In the end, the US acquired Florida from Spain and convinced the British that future trade relations were more important than resisting the violent overthrow of their interests in Florida and Jackson’s arbitrary execution of two of their officers. Congressional resolutions condemning Jackson’s behavior failed. The Seminoles were forced to accept a treaty confining them to central Florida.

The later chapters of the Seminole Wars repeated the pattern: South Carolinians and Georgians clamored for seizure of their lost “property,” namely the Africans living freely in Florida. Raiding and retaliation went on, and the US Army again intervened, only to face guerilla resistance from the Seminole. Throughout the period from 1819 to 1858, as Giddings documents, Congress struggled with the impetuous calls of the southerners for war and the northerners’ demands that existing treaties be respected and the free Africans be left alone. The anti-slavery Members argued that these wars, which cost tens of millions of dollars, were making all Americans complicit in the dirty business of hunting and enslaving people who had been free for generations and who lived on US soil.

The Second Seminole War, from 1835 to 1842, ended with the removal of most of the Seminoles, including the free Africans, to the Indian Territory, where the Creeks and other southeastern Nations had already been forced to go. Along the way, the slavers never gave up trying to get the Africans into their possession, by legal maneuvers or by force, but thanks to the honor and integrity of a few US Army officers, notably General J.W. Worth, the assurances of safe passage to the Seminoles were made good. Giddings particularly commends his handling of the war chief Wild Cat, whom Giddings evidently met in 1857. The peaceful removal of a large body of Africans and Native Americans to the territory was made possible by the respect and trust between Worth and the chief.

Not that the Black Seminoles’ troubles ended after resettlement: they were required, by a treaty to which they were never a party, to settle in the lands assigned to the Creeks. The Creeks and their co-conspirators, the southern slavers, insisted that the Africans were slaves and wanted to seize them. General Matthew Arbuckle did all he could to uphold the honor of the US by sticking to treaty stipulations that those who submitted to removal to the Territory were free. Once the Africans left the protection of the Army’s fort, however, nearly a hundred were seized in a raid by Creeks and slavers, and despite a habeus corpus hearing (before a pro-slavery judge) in Arkansas, were shipped to New Orleans and sold, disappearing into the general slave population. Seeing that they could not expect protection from the laws and treaties of the US, a group of the black Seminoles and some Native allies left for exile in Mexico, where they resided until the late 20^th century, serving as border guards in the local militia, and before the Civil War ended slavery, fending off efforts of Texas slavers to seize them. For more fascinating information about the diverse fates of these exiles and their continuing struggles to be recognized and respected, see the Wikipedia article on “Black Seminoles.” The story continues in this Guardian update from 2018.

Giddings was a great investigator, and although his biases are clear, a good reporter. In this account he lays bare the unremitting efforts to force all Africans into bondage, in accordance with the laws of every southern state, which saw all Negros as either someone’s property, or subject to seizure by whomever could lay hold of them. He exposes the duplicity of successive Presidents and cabinet officers, trying to walk the tightrope between the pro and anti-slavery forces and the bitter divisions in Congress over the issue. In 1842 Giddings was censured by the House for persistently bringing up the question of slavery. He resigned his seat, but was immediately reelected by his constituents. Later, he made public the contents of a treaty, which had been kept secret by the Administration, because it contained assurances the lives and property of the Seminoles, including the free Africans, would be protected. When he pointed out how the State of Georgia had been violating these terms by pursuing the exiles, he was threatened on the floor of the House by a Member from Georgia, wielding his cane as a weapon. Giddings died while serving as Lincoln’s consul general in Montreal, before the victory of the Union and passage of the 13^th amendment. His The Exiles of Florida is a masterpiece of polemic as well as fascinating history.

The search for Cíbola

Castañeda, Pedro de. The Journey of Coronado, with other accounts of the journey, including Jaramillo, Hernando de Alvarado and Coronado himself, translated from the Spanish by George Parker Winship. Librivox.

This was the famous expedition in search of Cíbola, the “seven cities of gold.” The search was prompted by reports from Cabeza de Vaca and his companions, when they returned to Mexico in 1535, after their eight-year odyssey from the Gulf Coast (Cabeza’s account is also available on Librivox – I may write about it later). One of his companions, the African Estevan, made it to Zuni pueblo in 1539, as part of a scouting party led by Friar Marcos de Niza. There he was killed or perhaps simply dropped out of sight. The reports of de Niza convinced Coronado and Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza to mount an expedition. In three years of exploring the southwest of what is now the United States, various parties of the expedition reached as far as the southern end of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado and its South Rim, Zuni Pueblo, the pueblos of the Rio Grande valley, Blanco Canyon in the Texas Panhandle and the Arkansas River, east of present day Dodge City, Kansas. None of these places yielded any gold or other valuables. Either de Niza had a bad case of giving the answer wanted rather than the truth, or his zeal to spread the gospel made him try to see how far he could convince the army go among these unconverted peoples. The native communities could not even feed the expedition without being reduced to near starvation themselves. Some of the Rio Grande pueblos resisted and were overcome by force in bloody assaults. The difficulties of maintaining an army in the field in that country, with only horses and humans for transport, are hard to imagine (they did have a supply flotilla sail up the Gulf of California into the Colorado, but it could not enter the Grand Canyon, and at any rate, was much too far west to help). Once they were out on the plains, east of the Rio Grande and the mountains, they found it impossible even to keep track of where they were. Hunting parties wandered lost for days in the featureless landscape of grass and shrubs, with only the occasional river canyon as a landmark.

Castañeda gives dramatic accounts of the buffalo (which the translation renders as “cows,” presumably for the Spanish, “vacas”) and the natives who hunted them, living in tents on the open plains. His other botanical and ethnographic accounts are interesting but colored by his outlook as a Spaniard: The natives in the pueblos, camps and villages are described as to dress and customs, with frequent specifics on sexual matters, as “they do not practice sodomy,” in one place or “they are very great sodomites,” in another. One peculiar topic was the deadly poisoned arrows made by some of the natives the expedition fought with, which apparently included poison from the same plant that yields Mexican jumping-beans (Sebastiania bilocularis S. Watson, arrow poision plant, according to the USDA plants database). Even more interesting was the antidote: quinces, which Castañeda notes growing in many places the expedition passed through. The quince (genus Cydonia) is native to Asia, but could have been introduced to Mexico early in the 16^th century. Northern Mexico is a minor quince producing region today, according to the Wikipedia article. Perhaps it was spread by the natives ahead of the Spanish themselves, or possibly Castañeda was just confused about the identity of a native fruit, as he seems to have been about the “cows.”

Overall, this is more of a reading for the historian or ethnographer than the naturalist. To give account of the landscape you are passing through, so that it can be recognized later, you have to be interested in more than gold.

The Librivox readers were outstanding as usual.

John Wesley Powell

The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons by John Wesley Powell. Revised edition, published by the Smithsonian Institution. 1895. I listened to the Librivox version, by a very able group of readers.

I remember seeing the six-cent John Wesley Powell expedition commemorative stamp, when it was issued in 1969, but I never gave it much thought, except to notice that the steersman has only part of his right arm. I had learned somewhere, sometime, that he was the leader of the first United States expedition through the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. When I came across this account in the Librivox catalog, I thought I ought to listen to it, and I’m glad I did. This is the story of an epic journey told by an extraordinary individual.

Checking Powell’s biography on Wikipedia, I learned that by the time he was 25, he had rowed the entire Mississippi, Ohio, Illinois, and Des Moines Rivers and been elected to the Illinois Natural History Society. After his service in the Civil War (he lost the forearm at Shiloh) Powell taught geology at Illinois Wesleyan University. Along with his students and his wife, he made an expedition to Colorado to collect geological specimens.

His expedition, ten men in four boats, left Green River, Wyoming, on May 24, 1869, and reached the mouth of the Virgin River, at the lower end of the Grand Canyon on August 30, with two or three boats and six men. Three men had left to climb out of the canyon shortly before the end, because the expedition was dangerously short on food and still faced unknown risks on the river. As it happened, they were the unlucky ones: Powell later was told they were killed by Shivwits Indians, who believed they were part of a party that had murdered some other Indians shortly before Powell’s men passed through.

Powell’s book reads like a journal and is based on the records he kept, but some later editing occurred, apparently. Whatever the case, it is a harrowing tale. One boat was wrecked early, and the rest were frequently capsized. Food was lost or spoiled by wetting, so by the end, they were in danger of running out. Many stretches had to be portaged round or the boats lowered and hauled through on ropes. That and the rowing made every day exhausting. At one point their fire spread into some driftwood and nearly incinerated them in a narrow alcove where they had camped. Powell and some of the others also made regular ascents of the canyon walls to take instrument readings, examine the landscape and scout ahead where possible. These involved rough and dangerous ascents of thousands of feet and tortuous scrambles through narrow slot canyons. This by a man with only one hand!

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the voyage was the uncertainty of what they faced ahead. Around the bends of the river, they were sometimes confronted by large falls or dangerous rapids, with little time to decide whether to go ahead and try to run them or make desperately for some safe stopping point. It seemed possible that they might meet an impassable obstacle at a point where they could not escape from the canyon. They could face a choice between starvation and near-certain drowning. Today, hundreds raft down the Grand Canyon, aided by years of experience, modern equipment and a flow now controlled by the Glen Canyon Dam. Powell’s trip was a plunge into the unkn0wn, Samuel Walter Foss’ opening lines for The Coming American “Bring me men to match my mountains,” could be applied to Powell and his crew, perhaps modified to “…men to match my canyons.”

John_Wesley_Powell_with_Native_American_at_Grand_Canyon_Arizona — Powell and Tau-gu, a Paiute, 1871-72

His descriptions of the geology, the river, the landscape and vegetation are vivid and sometimes enthralling. The latter part of the book describes the trip he made in 1870 and 1871 back over some of the same ground, but visiting many of the Native Americans resident in the lands north of the canyon and eastwards to the Pueblos of New Mexico. These are also fascinating. He worked for the rest of his life as a geographer, ethnologist and administrator at the US Geological Survey and the Smithsonian Institution and was a strong advocate that development in the arid western states, should be carefully limited.

Death Valley Days

Land of Little Rain by Mary Hunter Austin, first publication 1903 by Houghton Mifflin.

The Librivox recording of this wonderful book from the first decade of the twentieth century is a pleasure to listen to. Mary Austin’s descriptions of the desert country east of the southern Sierra Nevada are beautifully clear, evoking the harsh land, the hardy plants and animals and the various humans who live among them. My favorite was the pocket hunter, a prospector traveling with his burros and a gold pan that is cleaner than his cooking pots, and who dreams of finding a strike rich enough to allow him to set up as a middle class Londoner. Twice, he made enough to visit England, but each time he returned, with only a pair of elegant green canvas traveling bags to show for the trips. He told how once in a blinding snowstorm he sought shelter with what he thought were a flock of domestic sheep. Looking about in the morning, he saw he had slept among wild mountain bighorns. They bounded away through the drifts like God’s own flock. Breathtaking.

Whether it is the denizens of a mining town or the native Paiute, among them the blind basket weaver and the Shoshone exile medicine man, who must be killed when he can’t prevent an epidemic of pneumonia from taking away a third of the band, Austin tells the stories simply and with evident deep compassion.

She has a soft spot for the coyote, that butt of Warner Brothers cartoons, but in her view far from a fool. She gives loving descriptions of the numerous desert rodents and the jackrabbits whose tracks lead to the waterholes like the spokes of giant wheels, along with their enemies the birds of prey and the scavengers who watch all that goes on from far above, waiting for the predator’s kill or the dying gasp of the starving.

Plants get just as careful attention, some of the best botanical description I’ve read. Whether in her neighbor’s field or on the mesa, she evokes the marvels of the California desert flora with its tough shrubs and delicate ephemerals that blossom only in years when enough rain falls to waken the seeds out of dormancy.

Everything about this book makes me want to visit this land.

Thoreau’s Maine Woods

Thoreau, Henry David. The Maine Woods. I listened to the excellent Librivox recording by “Expatriate.”

This is the posthumously published account of three trips Thoreau took between 1846 and 1857 to the vicinity of Mount Katahdin, all by canoe or bateau, on two of which he employed native guides. The land he saw was thinly settled, but it had already been greatly changed by cutting of the white pine and the construction of numerous dams to facilitate floating the large logs down to the sawmills. They frequently visited or slept at vacant lumber camps. The descriptions match very closely the reconstructed one I visited years ago near London, Ontario.

Thoreau was of course, an unmatched observer of nature, whose journals are still a valuable resource for modern ecologists seeking to understand the New England landscape as it existed in the first half of the nineteenth century. He gives many detailed descriptions of the landscape, from the forbidding slopes of Mount Katahdin to the falls and rapids of the Penobscot River. He gives the scientific names of the plants he saw, most of which were familiar to me, like jack pine, Pinus banksiana, and Lilium canadense. He mentions many birds, including the shelduck, which I take to mean the common merganser, Mergus merganser, the cat owl (probably the great horned owl) and bald eagles along the rivers. He has some excellent descriptions of the geology of the routes, such as Mount Kineo, in Moosehead Lake, whose flint-like rhyolite was sought by the natives for toolmaking. His accounts of the difficulties of walking along the rocky, timber strewn banks of the streams and through the boggy ground at the divide between the major drainages evoke memories of similar hikes. The photo by KD Swan, river driving in 1937 in Kaniksu National Forest, from the US Forest Service Northern Region, gives an idea of the challenge.

Thoreau the transcendentalist’s belief in the spirit lodged in every person is evident in his narrative of these trips. Some of the best descriptive passages are of the the solitary hunters and the timber scouts, who spent months in the wilderness, searching out the uncut stands and the routes for bringing logs to the mills, or the ones engaged in piling up hay and other stores in the camps, to feed men and beasts over the winter of timber cutting. His descriptions of camping out, under simple cotton tents, next to roaring fires, cowering under veils and blankets from mosquitoes and black flies, fishing, hunting and skinning moose and dressing the huge, heavy hides are vivid. Best are his accounts of his native Penobscot guides, particularly Joe Polis, who accompanied him on the third trip to the St. John’s and Penobscot. His interest in Native American language and woodcraft is evident in his careful accounts of Joe and his ways. He gives a detailed and nuanced description of this man, who had travelled to Washington D.C. To pay his respects to Daniel Webster and who had led the pro-education faction of his village against the Catholic priest, who wanted to tear down their “liberty pole” and shut the school. This struggle included a simulated attack on the priest and his party, as they tried to lay hands on the pole, by a gang of painted, naked young men. Despite his tendency to keep his communication minimal and to refuse to answer a question more than once, Joe was a superb teller of tales. He was also a superb handler of his canoe, shooting dangerous falls and rapids, handling the heavily laden craft on stormy lakes and portaging over rough trails. Thoreau tells how Joe taught him the techniques of paddling, which sounded very similar to what I practiced when I earned canoeing merit badge. Joe Polis knew the properties of most plants, could make numerous varieties of tea from them, and yet he was not as familiar as Thoreau with the arrowheads and other flint tools that Thoreau found and showed to him. Overall, Thoreau’s portrait is of a man successfully bridging two cultures.

The Maine Woods joins books by Ruben Gold Thwaites, Mark Twain, Richard Bissel, and, continents away, Eric Newby, on my short but growing list of great river narratives. I’m about to post on a fine account of three British naturalists, Bates, Wallace and Spruce on the Amazon.