this time Craven, like many of his historian contemporaries in the United
States, had become consumed with analyzing the origins of the Civil War.
So while the biography provided a brief albeit vivid account of Ruffin’s dis-
covery of soil acidity and advocacy of calcareous manures, it was chiefly a
political narrative in which its subject became destructively obsessed with
other matters. Craven’s first book, the tediously titledSoil Exhaustion as a
Factor in the Agricultural History of Virginia and Maryland, –()
is actually the pioneering exercise in agro-ecological history in which Ruf-
fin’s first celebrity, as agronomic improver, is featured. Craven was certain
that, despite Ruffin’s own repeated protests that hardly anyone followed his
advice, the Chesapeake states were saved by Ruffin’s science and relentless
proselytizing.
Now, however, one must doubt that the Chesapeake country was ever
lost or needed saving. If indeed this and other long-used American land-
scapes were saved late in the antebellum period, it was not progressive
science wisely applied but a new, foreign (albeit organic) agricultural in-
put—guano—that contributed to the East’s relative productive successes.
Alexander von Humboldt was apparently the first European to spot enor-
mous deposits of cormorant droppings below cliffs on a series of islands
off the coast of Peru. The guano (an indigenous word for the droppings)
was eons old yet still accumulating, intact, dry, and laden with nitrogen and
phosphorus. By the s British and American companies had claimed the
islands and organized labor to extract the resource and ships to carry it to
Atlantic ports. By the mid-s, with Peruvian stores diminishing, the U.S.
government sanctioned development of guano operations near the Hawai-
ian group and nearby islands in an emergent American territorial protec-
torate in the Pacific. By this time U.S. consumption of guano had grown to
, tons a year. Guano was expensive—about up to per ton—
before the Civil War, but farmers and agronomists alike conceded that,
compared with local animal manure by weight or cartloads, a small fraction
of guano would ‘‘dress’’ an acre magnificently. So—this conclusion may be
difficult to exaggerate—progressive, ‘‘improving’’ agronomy was short cir-
cuited, and a view of our own era’s big-expense, big-debt, farming-for-the-
few began to materialize.^10
tAvery Craven, meanwhile, had a distinguished career and lived long,
publishing his last book during the s. His rural Iowa youth and espe-
cially his graduate education, beginning at Harvard with Frederick Jackson
Turner, had naturally colored his early work. Like Turner, he hated what