traders west. In 1720 the first lead mine in the country
was opened in Missouri. As roads and trains improved,
the trickle of pioneers going west became a flood.Caring for The Land and its Resources
The abundance of cheap land worked against the
development of an attitude of respect for the land and
its resources. Early American farmers found it more
expedient to deplete the land and move on than to
maintain their property [see Document 17]. Even farm-
ers such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson,
who were greatly invested in caring for their land,
recognized that the availability of cheap land made it
impractical to spend large sums for fertilizer for their
fields [see Document 25]. It was only when land values
had risen sufficiently to warrant large expenditures on
soil improvement that farmers began to devote energy
and money to the maintenance of the soil’s fertility.
Forests were cleared for farmland with great
abandon, and the only serious efforts to preserve
woodland stemmed from the desire to maintain
stands of trees for the shipbuilding industry or to sat-
isfy local construction and firewood needs [see Docu-
ment 13]. Dr. Benjamin Rush’s call in 1791 for the
preservation of the sugar maple [see Document 24]
was motivated more by social, economic, and politi-
cal considerations than by environmental factors.
At the federal level, there was little evidence of
concern about resources and their conservation dur-
ing the first half-century of the nation’s existence.
The acquisition of new lands, access to Atlantic fish-
eries, and the availability of timber for shipbuilding
were the primary resource issues. The Treaty of 1783,
the Treaty of Ghent (which settled the War of 1812
and which John Quincy Adams helped to negotiate),
and the Treaty of 1818 all stipulated that Americans
would continue to have access to the fisheries off the
coast of Newfoundland.
In 1799, Congress, conscious of the need for
suitable timber for tall ship masts and also aware
that hardwoods were being stolen from public lands
along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, appropriated
$200,000 for President John Adams to purchase two
heavily forested islands off the Georgia coast, Grov-
er’s Island and Blackbeard’s Island. The policy of pro-
tecting timber resources for the fledgling U.S. Navy
was continued under the administrations of Jamesformidable obstacles to the western movement of the
populace was the difficulty of overland transporta-
tion. Even within the former colonies, overland travel
was slow and arduous because there were virtually no
paved roads. Indeed, the nation’s earliest cities—Bos-
ton, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston—were
on the Atlantic coast, and the first inland areas to
develop had easy river access to the Atlantic, since boat
transportation was far more efficient than road travel.
The Indians—abetted at times by Britain, France,
and Spain—also posed a continuous hindrance to the
expansion of the country. In 1829, President Andrew
Jackson proposed that the remaining tribes in the
eastern United States be bodily moved and resettled
west of the Mississippi; this was the beginning of an
official U.S. policy of removing Indians from lands
that whites coveted. In 1832, Indians, under the lead-
ership of Black Hawk, tried to reoccupy their land
in Illinois, but their rebellion was crushed [see Doc-
ument 32] in a bloody battle. In Florida, which the
United States had acquired from Spain in 1819, the
Seminole Indians also fiercely resisted eviction and
white settlement, but by the end of the 1830s, three-
quarters of them had been moved to Oklahoma.
The extensive territorial growth of the country,
along with its increasing industrialization, demanded
the development of an efficient transportation infra-
structure, and by the late 1830s, several hard-surfaced
turnpikes had been constructed, steamboats were ply-
ing some of the nation’s rivers, railroads had begun to
radiate out from major cities, and the Erie Canal had
been completed, connecting the Hudson River and the
East with Lake Erie and the West. Simultaneously, the
occupational base of the country was changing, and
by the 1830s less than three-quarters of the nation’s
workforce was employed on farms. It was a trend that
had disturbed Americans like Thomas Jefferson when
it first became apparent, but as the century progressed,
the increasing industrialization and urbanization of the
United States was recognized as necessary for national
economic development [see Document 20].
Since the end of the seventeenth century, trappers
and traders, eager to obtain furs to ship to Europe, had
been slowly moving into the interior of the country
and encouraging Indians, often against their will, to
join them in hunting and trapping in the furtherance
of trade rather than for mere subsistence. Miners and,
later, loggers and farmers followed the trappers and
22 The Environmental Debate