try of Europeans and Africans, as it would remain. They (at least the Euro-
peans) called it virgin land, a paradise, an Eden enchanting almost beyond
expression. Not so, of course; for the Eden of Genesis was untouched, and
we know that for thousands of years, the South had been both extensively
and intensively managed by the first southerners. They brought their black
tea trees from the coast to the mountains, created enormous granaries,
practiced sophisticated medicine from plants local and exotic, created a
thousand-square-mile deer park of the Shenandoah Valley, and much else.
Now that they were gone, their landscape was, in Krech’s words, ‘‘widowed
—not virgin.’’ In southern Florida, where nearly every human, Europeans
included, was gone after about the s, the landscape so long engineered
by Calusas and their ancestors was, in David McCally’s apt term, simply
‘‘derelict.’’^29