with the world. They were instead common folk subsisting, mostly, and de-
pendent first on their cattle and hogs to feed themselves sufficiently in the
woods and marshes to multiply into surplus meat-on-the-hoof for trade.
How else to pay taxes, support remote churches and schools, and buy cloth,
shot, and powder? But if drought wilted grasses and reduced forest mast
(nuts, root shoots, and berries), there would be no meat surpluses, and hard
times would follow. Apple and other fruit brandies were the standby. The
war on parakeets, then, like the ongoing war to exterminate wolves that
attacked livestock, was a democratic one in the simple sense that nearly
everyone had elemental reason to kill. So for the better part of two cen-
turies, southerners blasted away (and poisoned or netted and clubbed) the
parakeet population. This was hardly binge killing but, to them, grim neces-
sity. One must think, nonetheless, that diminished parakeets corresponded
to more abundant brandy production, which doubtlessly fueled southern
men’s sanguinary rampages in the woods.^8
tAnother celebrated avian, common in Florida and throughout the
lower Gulf territories and states in the Bartrams’ era, was the ivory-billed
woodpecker. Closely resembling the pileated woodpecker, a large, aggres-
sive black creature with a red head and dramatic plume—which thrives still
within a range much larger than the semitropics—the ivory-billed wood-
pecker apparently succumbed, early in the twentieth century, to habitat re-
duction. Relentless amateur birders and ornithologists never gave up on
the ivory-billed, however, and sixty-odd years after the putative last bird
was sighted, trackers sighted another in an eastern Arkansas swamp in
.^9 Critics of the evidence soon publicized plausible doubt, yet whether
or not the ivory-billed’s resurrection ultimately proves real, something mar-
velous began to transpire in the Arkansas wetlands: Federal, state, and pri-
vate interests moved to protect and extend the wetlands, which had once
been much larger, modestly reversing a sorry old story of compromised wild
places.
In northeastern Florida, for example, William Bartram casually de-
scribed riverscapes already long managed and revised by humans. Many
of the aboriginals—some Timucua chiefdoms to the north (before their
eighteenth-century extinction) and later many Seminoles and other peo-
ples to the south—had been farmers, clearing land with fire. Early during
his trip south on the St. Johns, William passed a substantial native settle-
ment with large crop fields and a well-tended orange grove. The natives
also fished from permanent villages and built large shell mounds that were