Smith’s famous observation of Powhatan planting time, hundreds of miles
north of the Guale, represented swidden after all. Whether the swidden
were ‘‘true’’ by Doolittle’s lights remains problematic, of course. None-
theless, late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century white southerners’ much-
publicized difficulties in maintaining permanent fields in the tidewater
country may reflect a virtually timeless condition. During the s, John
Taylor of Caroline perceived a crisis in European-style agronomy on per-
manent fields and prescribed revolutionary ‘‘green manuring’’ as recourse.
The method failed. Three decades later, Edmund Ruffin (with the inspira-
tion of an English chemist) finally discovered and described acidity and the
fixing of nitrogen with fossilized shell (marl) in this same low Virginia land-
scape. Ordinary coastal farmers, however, seem typically to have practiced
an untrue version of swidden within their own property lines, burning and
reburning, say, -odd acres of a -acre farm over the course of a gen-
eration or so. Such is adaptation to local environment, ethnicity and tech-
nology notwithstanding. More of this in a later chapter.^13
tMuch has been made, and properly so, of the transformative, destruc-
tive impact of Europeans, their animals, and plows upon the temperate
landscapes of the Americas. Agriculture is surely the most savage and ele-
mental disturbance of nature, and savagery is compounded elementally
by technological power. Europeans’ ultimately dense populations, their
capitalist-mindedness, and their written system of legal protection of pri-
vate property, as well as their guns, all produced a juggernaut agronomy
that egregiously simplified the natural world, substituting what could jus-
tifiably be called a desert for a jungle. But the natives they supplanted, as
we have seen, were also ambitious disturbers and manipulators of land-
scape—heroically so, one must think, given Mississippians’ lack of draft
animals, wheeled carts, and sharp, durable tools such as axes and plows.
Equally important, one must also think, is Indians’ ancient, preagricultural
manipulations of landscape to produce food, medicines, and creature com-
forts. These explain the development of cultivation but also illustrate in-
genious invention in certain environments that persisted well into the his-
toric epoch alongside sophisticated gardening and extensive farming.
Consider the remarkable prehistorical career of the sunflower. Origi-
nally a wild native of the Colorado plateau (we think), sunflowers were at
some remote time discovered as a valuable food deserving of protection—
that is, they were not to be burned or cut or dug and discarded. Protection
blended with encouragement, which included weeding and perhaps the