landform features of considerable interest to both Bartrams, to Marjorie
Kinnan Rawlings, and to tourists even now, although many mounds have
been plundered, reduced, or removed for modern agricultural operations
and road paving. The Indians made trails, too, permanent roads for trade
and commuting to hunting grounds as well as for transport to once-perma-
nent native towns. Towns, the highest expression of what is called civiliza-
tion, were common throughout most of Florida and the greater Southeast
as well. (More on these later.) By the time William Bartram navigated the
St. Johns, most Indian settlements were gone, and surviving natives had
become lively traders with the Spanish, then the English and Americans.
They persisted in year-round settlements by the river, incorporating Euro-
pean introductions of plants and animals with their own.
The orange, for example, seemed utterly ubiquitous by . The culti-
var of the fruit the Spanish brought to Florida (so that seamen might con-
sume it and avoid scurvy) came originally from eastern Asia. Arabs adopted
oranges via the Indian Ocean trade more than a thousand years ago and
then, as Muslim conquerors, introduced them to Spain, probably by the
tenth or eleventh century. Valencia, especially, is associated with oranges,
and English speakers used the name of the Spanish city to label several vari-
eties of orange in Florida. Here, whites and natives alike tended them in
groves, but birds spread the plant indiscriminately. William Bartram often
camped in unsettled places with mixed assemblages of trees—huge live
oaks (under which William preferred to camp), palms, bay, longleaf pine
(in northern Florida), magnolia grandiflora, and many other species—vir-
tually always including the stray orange. These were handy even if the juice
was sometimes bitter, typical of the variety called Seville after yet another
Spanish city. William packed oil for cooking but lacked vinegar or other sea-
sonings. So when he caught and cleaned fat fish for roasting on his fire, he
usually pulled an orange or two and squeezed juice on his catch, rhapso-
dizing about the effect.^10
Of introduced animals—horses, asses, mules, cattle, and hogs—Bar-
tram saw few in the deep swamps. Elsewhere, by the coast and in the open
pine forests and plains of Alachua, for instance, natives and whites alike
adopted and used all these creatures, plus dogs, the one (relatively) tame
animal natives possessed before the Europeans came. The riverine land-
scape was too boggy, for the most part, to support beasts of burden, and
riverside ridges that might easily be cultivated with draft animals were few.
In , too, the swamps still harbored too many large predators for the
safe ranging of domesticated dairy and meat creatures. Bears singly and in