A History of the American People

naturalist, who explored the forests in the years 1629-32, and published his findings two years
later in New England's Prospects, delightedly listed all the varieties of trees available, virtually
all of which could be used for furniture, though also for charcoal, dyes, and potash for soap. He
too was amazed by the sheer quantity, as well he might be. It has been calculated that the original
forests of what is now the United States covered 822 million acres in the early 17th century. This
constituted a stand of marketable saw-timber of approximately 5,200 billion square feet. Early
America was a timber civilization, growing out of its woods just as Anglo-Saxon England grew
out of its primeval forests. In the first 300 years of their existence, the American people
consumed 353 million acres of this huge area of forests, being over 4,075 billion square feet of
saw-timber. Washington and Lincoln with their axes drew attention to the archetypal American
male activity."
The New Englanders fell upon this astonishing natural inheritance with joy. They were unable
to decide whether the Indians were part of this inheritance or competitors for it. They developed,
almost from the first, a patriarchal attitude towards the Indians, and the habit, to us distasteful, of
referring to them as their children. It is true that the North American Indians, compared to the
Indians of Central and parts of South America, were comparatively primitive. They were
particularly backward in domesticating animals, one reason why their social organizations were
slow to develop. That in turn helps to explain why their numbers (so far as we can guess them)
were small compared to the Indians of the south. Being so few, and occupying so large and
fertile an area, the Indians did not replenish their cultivated land-they had of course no animal
manure-and moved on to fresh fields when it became exhausted. But their agricultural skills, at
least in some cases, were not contemptible. The early French and Spanish explorers-Cartier and
Champlain on the St Lawrence, De Soto on the Mississippi, Coronado in the southwest-all
reported seeing extensive cornfields. Henry Hudson said the Indians built houses of bark and
stored them with corn and beans for winter. When the first settlers reached the Ohio Valley they
came across cornfields stretching for miles. In 1794 General Wayne said he had `never before
beheld such immense fields of corn in any part of America, from Canada to Florida.'
There were wide differences between the various Indian peoples. Most of them farmed a little,
and hunting and fighting tended to be suspended during planting and harvest. The Indians of the
southwest, presumably because they had closer contact with the advanced Indians of South and
Central America, irrigated their crops from reservoirs and had actual towns. The Pueblo Indians
had permanent villages near their fields. The Iroquois villages were semi-permanent. The Indians
the New Englanders came across were usually farmers. The settlers noted the way they cleared
land of trees and grew corn and beans, pumpkins and squash; in some cased they imitated Indian
methods, for instance in the use of fish-fertilizer. The Indians seem to have been low-grade
farmers but produced at least a million bushels of crops a year, drying and storing. They also
produced poor-quality tobacco.
In most cases the New Englanders began by following Indian practice in sowing, growing, and
storing, but then improved on their methods. They also got from the Indians the white potato,
which had arrived from Peru in South America, though this was surprisingly little eaten until the
Irish arrived in New Hampshire. Where the early New Englanders benefited most from the
Indians was in taking over cleared fields, left unclaimed when the tribes were wiped out by
smallpox. The early New England farm, cleared of trees, with rows of corn twined with beans
arranged as vines, and with squash and pumpkins growing in between, was not very different
from the fields of the Indians. William Bradford, for one, testified to the help the Pilgrims