brown and gray in streaks and blotches—is one of the most conspicuous features about the grounds of many old homesteads.
V.
Adventurous men who wandered beyond the Appalachian Mountains into the Ohio country found, west of the Wabash River, the forest giving place to open grassland or "prairies." These were great meadows with little or no tree growth, save along the bottomlands of rivers. The edge of the broad-leaved forest along this prairie border thinned out into those scattered, open woods known to the early pioneers as "oak openings." It may have been that this prairie country was at one time more extensively wooded and its later deforested condition a result of the persistent burning of the undergrowth by the hunting tribes of Indians to increase the pasture area for the vast herds of bison that roamed over the grass country of the Mississippi Basin. The late Professor Shaler advanced this view some years ago, stating that it was his belief that had the discovery of the continent been delayed for another five centuries much of the original forest to the east would probably have been burnt off in this way and the land changed into a prairie country. This burning of the woods seems to have been a wide-spread custom in aboriginal times. William Wood, in his "New England's Prospects," speaks of it as follows:
For the Indians burning it [the ground] to suppresse the Underwood, which else would grow all over the Countrey, the Snow falling not long after, keepes the ground wanne, and with his melting conveighs the ashes into the pores of the earth, which doth fatten it.
Mention is also made of this custom by numerous writers at a later period. Richard Smith,[1] of Burlington, New Jersey, who made a survey about the headwaters of the Susquehanna and the Delaware, in the spring of 1769, speaks of the appearance of these burnt tracts, and I have been told on reliable authority that in the lower Delaware region the Indians burned the tops and slopes of the hills, leaving the land along the river bottoms" untouched.
The clearing of land in the progress of settlement had the same effect as the burning off of the forest—it virtually converted a wide area of primitive forest-covered country into prairie, though interspersed with tracts of woodland. Our pastures are in reality prairies so far, at least, as their faunal and floral features are concerned. This fact suggests a very interesting question. When the country was almost entirely forest-covered, as in the period before settlement, what was the manner of life of such plants and animals as now inhabit our fields and meadow pastures? Were they originally forest-dwellers which have altered their habits to meet the new conditions, or are they migrants from the western prairie country? In the case of certain birds I think that the last view embodies what has actually taken place. A large
- ↑ "Journal of Richard Smith," edited by F. W. Halsey.
