42 The Environmental Debate
Document 34: Thomas Cole’s Lament of the Forest (1841)
A distinguished member of the Hudson River school of landscape painters, Thomas Cole, along with other
adherents of the Romantic movement, viewed the spread of factories across the land not only as a blight
on the natural landscape but also as an encroachment on the human spirit. Cole and other Hudson River
school artists, such as Asher B. Durand, painted pictures of well-dressed people walking in rustic settings (e.g.,
Durand’s “Kindred Spirits,” painted in 1849, depicts William Cullen Bryant and Thomas Cole in a woodland
scene), and these pictures helped to make excursions to rustic areas fashionable.... Our doom is near; behold from east to
west The skies are darkened by ascending
smoke; Each hill and every valley is become
An altar unto Mammon, and the gods
Of man’s idolatry—the victims we.
Missouri’s floods are ruffled as by storm,
And Hudson’s rugged hills at midnight
glow By light of man-projected meteors.
We feed ten thousand fires: in our short day
The woodland growth of centuries is consumed.
* * *A few short years!—these valleys, greenly clad,
These slumbering mountains, resting in our arms,
Shall naked glare beneath the scorching sun,
And all their wimpling rivulets be dry.
No more the deer shall haunt these bosky glens,
Nor the pert squirrel chatter near his store.Source: Thomas Cole, “Lament of the Forest,”
Knickerbocker 17, no. 6 (June 1841), in Robert McHenry
and Charles Van Doren, eds., A Documentary History
of Conservation in America (New York: Praeger, 1972),
p. 175.Document 35: John James Audubon on the Decimation of the Bison Herds (1843)
In the summer of 1843 Audubon traveled to the Great Plains. He was one of the first Americans to become
alarmed by the wanton slaughter of bison.July 21... we could see [the buffalo chase] when
nearly a mile distant.
...
What a terrible destruction of life, as it were
for nothing, or next to it, as the tongues only were
brought in, and the flesh of these fine animals
was left to beasts and birds of prey, or to rot on
the spots where they fell. The prairies are literally
covered with the skulls of the victims, and the
roads the Buffalo make in crossing the prairies
have all the appearance of heavy wagon tracks.
August 2
Buffaloes become so very poor during hard
winters, when the snows cover the ground to the
depth of two or three feet, that they lose their hair,
become covered with scabs, on which the Magpies
feed, and the poor beasts die by hundreds. One
can hardly conceive how it happens, notwith-
standing these many deaths and the immense
numbers that are murdered almost daily on these
boundless wastes called prairies, besides the hosts
that are drowned in the freshets, and the hundreds
of young calves who die in early spring, so many
are yet to be found. Daily we see so many that
we hardly notice them more than the cattle in our
pastures about our homes. But this cannot last;
even now there is a perceptible difference in the
size of the herds, and before many years the Buf-
falo, like the Great Auk, will have disappeared;
surely this should not be permitted.
Source: John James Audubon, “The Missouri River
Journals,” in Maria R. Audubon, Audubon and His
Journals, Vol. II (New York: Scribner’s, 1899), pp. 107, 131.