erners were, after all, deliberate and systematic arsonists. They cleared
countless Mississippian crop fields this way, and they and their Woodlands
ancestors cleared much more land to open deer and bison pastures to sun-
light. Throughout the Appalachians and Ozarks, mountain-ridge ‘‘balds,’’ a
mystery to white travelers later, were almost certainly native fire-managed
hunting spots. And the great Valley of Virginia, scourged by Sheridan’s
troops during the summer of , had already been an ancient—and giant
—pasture and hunting park created by natives. European settlers were
hardly less addicted to fire, employing the torch to create their own crop
fields and, after some years of abandonment—fallow, really—returning to
burn again. As ever, too, sometimes fire got out of hand. Altogether, the
millennium-plus of fire must have yielded landscapes much more conifer-
ous than would be ‘‘natural’’ without human intervention—and this long
before antebellum planters’ complaints that hardwoods were becoming
scarce and expensive because of demands for ‘‘good’’ wood for fencing.
Still, one must be awed by what remained of the South’s forests—de-
ciduous as well as piney—ca. , , up to about . Before an intro-
duced blight doomed American chestnuts, for example, these huge and
noble trees almost dominated the canopies of much of the southern Appa-
lachian chain. Other species of hardwoods still thrived in the foothills and
lower piedmonts, too. And the ongoing destruction of longleaf pines in
the coastal plains notwithstanding, the piney woods remained relatively
healthy and enormous, albeit clearly less diverse than before. The loblolly
pine was doubtlessly the reason. Loblollies are the great weeds of the piney
woods and piedmonts. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they
were more often referred to simply as ‘‘old field pines,’’ reflecting confident
observation that when crop fields were abandoned, the first woody plants to
appear, other than barberry and other shrubs, were prolific loblollies. These
grew quickly and created canopies that discouraged competing plants. Left
alone indefinitely, such old fields might produce taller deciduous species,
too, that could shade out pines; but such fields were usually burned again,
while loblollies still prevailed, the burning perpetuating the cycle of loblolly
dominance. During the twentieth century, loblollies became the principal
raw material for a new southern pulp- and paper-manufacturing industry,
and they were harvested early for this purpose. In the nineteenth century
and even today, however, loblollies may grow to great heights, almost as
tall as longleaves, and make respectable lumber for building. This indeed
was the loblolly’s fate—and that of every other marketable species of tree—
with a vengeance, beginning about .