Forests

When European colonists began to settle in North America, forests covered almost half of the continent. A continuous hardwood forest stretched from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River. These forests supported diverse Native Americans who, in turn, shaped the woodlands. Although forests provided an immense source of raw material, European colonists eventually viewed them primarily as an obstacle to a properly developed landscape of expanding settlements and agriculture. Thus, forests helped fashion everyday life and gave settlers a common cultural project in domesticating the wilderness.

Indians relied on forests for their survival and for various aspects of their cultures. Forests influenced Indian religious beliefs (Iroquois spirits inhabited “false-face” masks carved from living trees) and contextualized their identity in relation to other creatures. Nevertheless, like Europeans, Indians imposed their own will on forests. They harvested trees for a wide range of purposes, including building construction, weapons, canoes, footwear, tools, and firewood. During thousands of years, Indians dramatically shaped the appearance and composition of forests. They burned forests regularly in order to clear out underbrush and promote the growth of berry-producing plants and forage for game animals. They used fire as a hunting tool and in clearing land for small-scale, highly productive agriculture. This periodic burning produced an open, parklike forest in much of eastern North America.

Trees furnished the essential building material in the early colonies, and lumber quickly became a marketable commodity. Colonists fashioned wood into furniture, utensils, tools, and barrels. They built ships, buildings, plank roads, and fences. Trees provided naval stores (turpentine and pitch) and ship masts. They were so important that the British and various colonial governments limited the numbers and types of trees that could be cut, reserving the best white pines with a “broad arrow” mark, although such restrictions generally proved ineffective. Perhaps the greatest use of wood was for fuel, burned to heat homes, cook, and power nascent industrial practices such as blacksmith-ing. Ashes, too, were a resource, used for fertilizer and soap making, and potash became a major New England export. European colonists constructed their towns and their society with forest products.

In the course of colonization, Europeans had a far greater impact on the forests than did Native peoples. In an effort to transform a “wild” landscape into a pastoral one, they tried to replace forests with farms and wildlife with livestock. Exotic animals, most notably pigs, were turned loose to range in the woods. In clearing large fields, farmers chopped down trees or killed them by girdling the bark. Stumps were burned or allowed to rot and then rooted out. This clearing process, along with timber harvests, caused localized scarcities of wood and significant changes in the environment. While forest resources allowed Europeans to prosper in North America, the rapid development of these resources had important consequences. By the mid-18th century, deforestation resulted in soil depletion and erosion, watershed damage, a decline in wildlife, and increasing timber prices.

Further reading: William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill & Wang, 1983); Michael Williams, Americans and Their Forests: A Historical Geography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

—Robert C. Gardner