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Americans and their forests: A historical geography
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245
which are represented, and the diverse nature of tribes, each with necessarily tribal specific histories. Theseproblems to a large degreehave been overcome within the Atlas, and there is exceptional presentation of detail and referencedocumentation to form an excellent resource for geographic research. This Atlas is actually more a compilation of maps and works from Prucha’s extensive research,supplementedwith Palacios’maps, than an “ultimate atlas”. As Prucha stated in the preface, “I have long been fascinated by graphic display of statistical data, especially the presentation of geographical relationships on maps. . . . I intend that the maps themselvesin this atlas should convey useful and interesting information or at least raise questions that will stimulate students to investigate further the material that appearson the maps”. He has succeededin this, and perhaps the only fault is in the title, which suggestsa final product, all-inclusive in nature and presentation. Although it is not the ultimate “Atlas of American Indian Affairs”, it is in fact an extremely valuable baseline document for American Indian research. Eastern Washington University
MICHAEL WILLIAMS, Americans and Their Forests: A Historical
DICK G. WINCHELL
Geography (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989. Pp. xxii + 599. $49.50) The forest lands of the United States have been altered by some 300 years of disruption by European immigrants and their descendants.This book is about that disruption and its relationship to the present American landscape. Williams presents a multi-faceted story of American forests as both a barrier and facilitator of agricultural expansion, a storehouse of industrial raw materials and commercial products, and a fountain of capital accumulation. Greater emphasis is given to the effect of the forests on the American economy, rather than the other way round. Forest conservation is considered primarily within its utilitarian context of sustained timber production, with little attention devoted to forest preservation or the place of environmental ethics in American society. Most of the book is retrospective narrative. The first 160 pagespresentsmovement of the settlement frontier from the Atlantic Coast to the Great Plains as a processof forest clearing motivated by agricultural expansion. Commercial products and industrial uses of trees felled to make room for farmers are covered in detail, with an impressive synthesis of quantitative information on such topics as potash and pearl ash produced from burned hardwoods in the m id-Atlantic states, naval stores of pitch, resin, and turpentine from the pines of the South Atlantic coastal plain, and charcoal for fueling blast furnaces to make pig iron in Pennsylvania. The period from the Civil War to the 1920sreceives193pagesand is broken up into a chronological and regional review of timber exploitation, technology changes, and the economic organization of the lumber business.Williams traces the theme of “cut and get out”, with its various regional variations, from the Lake States to the Southern pineries and on to the last lumber frontier of the Pacific Northwest. Injected at the end of this section is a discussion of agricultural impacts on the forests of the M idwest and tree planting efforts on the Great Plains during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Most material appears to have been gleaned from the writings of other scholars and offers few new insights or interpretations. Small errors of fact leave the reader wondering how much time Williams spent outside the library and in the forests. For example, the coastal rainforest of the Pacific Northwest at the time the loggers arrived from the Great Lakes and the Southern pineries are described as “a narrow belt of Sitka spruce (P&a sitchensis) with admixtures of western juniper (Juniperus occidentalis)“. A casual observer of forests in the Pacific Northwest would quickly recognizethat the diminutive western juniper is a predominate tree only on the arid volcanic rimrock and plateau
246
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country east of the orographic divide presented by the Cascades Range. It has little commercial use, other than for fence posts and aromatic firewood. Williams may be confusing western juniper with western red cedar (Thuja p[icata), a tree of magnificent proportions and highly sought after for lumber. Western red cedar is often assumed to be a juniper by easternersunfamiliar with western trees becauseeastern red cedar is in fact a juniper (Juniperusvirginiuna). The issue of accuracy grounded in field experienceis further clouded when Williams states “the western slopes of the Cascadesfrom Puget Sound to California were clothed in a uniformly thick mantle of Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) and some Jeffery pine (Pinus jefiryi)“. Douglas fir was indeed a major component of those forests, especially in old burns or other areas subject to natural disturbances, but the more shade tolerant western hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla) was undoubtedly more common within the closed canopy. Forests cleared of less commercially valuable hemlock were almost uniformly replaced by the tree preferred by lumber companies-Douglas fir. Clear cutting of the Pacific forests continues to be justified on grounds that it favors regenerationof shadeintolerant Douglas fir, which has come to be presented as the original forest dominant in timber industry publications. The final section of the book devotes 66 pages to development of federal control of logging practices and fire suppression in national forests up to 1933. Only 23 pages discuss forest regrowth and change in the timber supply since the New Deal. It is at this point that Williams fails to link clearly current concerns and developmentsin the forests with their past history. The general tone of the discussion is that the forests are returning to the American landscape. Large private timber companies have seenthe folly of their past practices and adopted tree planting programs to restock their commercial forest lands, while the federal government subsidizes forest replanting on national forests logged by small scale “gypo” logging operations. Shifts in agricultural land associated with abandonment of exhausted former forest lands and changing cropping patterns is also returning acresto the stock of forests. But a simple comparison of acreagein forests between time periods shedslittle light on the question of what kind of forest is emerging and how it differs from the forest originally encountered by European colonists. Williams’ treatment of those questions is confusing. At one point old growth of the Pacific Northwest is described as “the last great remnant of temperate forest on earth”, followed by well known timber company arguments that emotional concern over losses of old growth forests is groundlessbecausethe harvestedtrees can quickly be replaced by “a younger and more vigorous forest, the annual rate of growth of which would well exceed that of the original forest”. The old growth debate goes much further than concern over future lumber supplies and deservesmore balanced treatment in a book about Americans and their forests. University of North Carolina, Greensboro
MICHAEL
E. LEWIS
MICHAEL P. CONZEN (Ed.), The Making of the American Landscape (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990. Pp. xiv+433. $24.95)
This book is intended, as the title suggests,to be a recasting of W. G. Hoskins (London 1955), The Making of the English Landscape for the United States. Editor Conzen’s introduction, conclusion, and chapter on ethnicity are supplementedby D. W. Meinig’s foreword and S. W. Trimble’s survey of physical geography. Chapters on early settlement include: K. W. Butzer on Native American archaeology and early history, D. Hornbeck on Spanish settlement, C. Harris on French landscapes,P. F. Lewis on the Northeast, S. B. Hilliard on the plantation South, and H. B. Johnson on the General Land Survey. Environmentally oriented chapters are by M. Williams on deforestation, J. C. Hudson on the grasslands,and J. L. Westcoat, Jr. on arid lands water development. J. E. Vance, Jr. discussesAmerican utopian ideals. Later chapters are by D. R. Meyer on
REVIEWS
245
which are represented, and the diverse nature of tribes, each with necessarily tribal specific histories. Theseproblems to a large degreehave been overcome within the Atlas, and there is exceptional presentation of detail and referencedocumentation to form an excellent resource for geographic research. This Atlas is actually more a compilation of maps and works from Prucha’s extensive research,supplementedwith Palacios’maps, than an “ultimate atlas”. As Prucha stated in the preface, “I have long been fascinated by graphic display of statistical data, especially the presentation of geographical relationships on maps. . . . I intend that the maps themselvesin this atlas should convey useful and interesting information or at least raise questions that will stimulate students to investigate further the material that appearson the maps”. He has succeededin this, and perhaps the only fault is in the title, which suggestsa final product, all-inclusive in nature and presentation. Although it is not the ultimate “Atlas of American Indian Affairs”, it is in fact an extremely valuable baseline document for American Indian research. Eastern Washington University
MICHAEL WILLIAMS, Americans and Their Forests: A Historical
DICK G. WINCHELL
Geography (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989. Pp. xxii + 599. $49.50) The forest lands of the United States have been altered by some 300 years of disruption by European immigrants and their descendants.This book is about that disruption and its relationship to the present American landscape. Williams presents a multi-faceted story of American forests as both a barrier and facilitator of agricultural expansion, a storehouse of industrial raw materials and commercial products, and a fountain of capital accumulation. Greater emphasis is given to the effect of the forests on the American economy, rather than the other way round. Forest conservation is considered primarily within its utilitarian context of sustained timber production, with little attention devoted to forest preservation or the place of environmental ethics in American society. Most of the book is retrospective narrative. The first 160 pagespresentsmovement of the settlement frontier from the Atlantic Coast to the Great Plains as a processof forest clearing motivated by agricultural expansion. Commercial products and industrial uses of trees felled to make room for farmers are covered in detail, with an impressive synthesis of quantitative information on such topics as potash and pearl ash produced from burned hardwoods in the m id-Atlantic states, naval stores of pitch, resin, and turpentine from the pines of the South Atlantic coastal plain, and charcoal for fueling blast furnaces to make pig iron in Pennsylvania. The period from the Civil War to the 1920sreceives193pagesand is broken up into a chronological and regional review of timber exploitation, technology changes, and the economic organization of the lumber business.Williams traces the theme of “cut and get out”, with its various regional variations, from the Lake States to the Southern pineries and on to the last lumber frontier of the Pacific Northwest. Injected at the end of this section is a discussion of agricultural impacts on the forests of the M idwest and tree planting efforts on the Great Plains during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Most material appears to have been gleaned from the writings of other scholars and offers few new insights or interpretations. Small errors of fact leave the reader wondering how much time Williams spent outside the library and in the forests. For example, the coastal rainforest of the Pacific Northwest at the time the loggers arrived from the Great Lakes and the Southern pineries are described as “a narrow belt of Sitka spruce (P&a sitchensis) with admixtures of western juniper (Juniperus occidentalis)“. A casual observer of forests in the Pacific Northwest would quickly recognizethat the diminutive western juniper is a predominate tree only on the arid volcanic rimrock and plateau
246
BOOK
REVIEWS
country east of the orographic divide presented by the Cascades Range. It has little commercial use, other than for fence posts and aromatic firewood. Williams may be confusing western juniper with western red cedar (Thuja p[icata), a tree of magnificent proportions and highly sought after for lumber. Western red cedar is often assumed to be a juniper by easternersunfamiliar with western trees becauseeastern red cedar is in fact a juniper (Juniperusvirginiuna). The issue of accuracy grounded in field experienceis further clouded when Williams states “the western slopes of the Cascadesfrom Puget Sound to California were clothed in a uniformly thick mantle of Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) and some Jeffery pine (Pinus jefiryi)“. Douglas fir was indeed a major component of those forests, especially in old burns or other areas subject to natural disturbances, but the more shade tolerant western hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla) was undoubtedly more common within the closed canopy. Forests cleared of less commercially valuable hemlock were almost uniformly replaced by the tree preferred by lumber companies-Douglas fir. Clear cutting of the Pacific forests continues to be justified on grounds that it favors regenerationof shadeintolerant Douglas fir, which has come to be presented as the original forest dominant in timber industry publications. The final section of the book devotes 66 pages to development of federal control of logging practices and fire suppression in national forests up to 1933. Only 23 pages discuss forest regrowth and change in the timber supply since the New Deal. It is at this point that Williams fails to link clearly current concerns and developmentsin the forests with their past history. The general tone of the discussion is that the forests are returning to the American landscape. Large private timber companies have seenthe folly of their past practices and adopted tree planting programs to restock their commercial forest lands, while the federal government subsidizes forest replanting on national forests logged by small scale “gypo” logging operations. Shifts in agricultural land associated with abandonment of exhausted former forest lands and changing cropping patterns is also returning acresto the stock of forests. But a simple comparison of acreagein forests between time periods shedslittle light on the question of what kind of forest is emerging and how it differs from the forest originally encountered by European colonists. Williams’ treatment of those questions is confusing. At one point old growth of the Pacific Northwest is described as “the last great remnant of temperate forest on earth”, followed by well known timber company arguments that emotional concern over losses of old growth forests is groundlessbecausethe harvestedtrees can quickly be replaced by “a younger and more vigorous forest, the annual rate of growth of which would well exceed that of the original forest”. The old growth debate goes much further than concern over future lumber supplies and deservesmore balanced treatment in a book about Americans and their forests. University of North Carolina, Greensboro
MICHAEL
E. LEWIS
MICHAEL P. CONZEN (Ed.), The Making of the American Landscape (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990. Pp. xiv+433. $24.95)
This book is intended, as the title suggests,to be a recasting of W. G. Hoskins (London 1955), The Making of the English Landscape for the United States. Editor Conzen’s introduction, conclusion, and chapter on ethnicity are supplementedby D. W. Meinig’s foreword and S. W. Trimble’s survey of physical geography. Chapters on early settlement include: K. W. Butzer on Native American archaeology and early history, D. Hornbeck on Spanish settlement, C. Harris on French landscapes,P. F. Lewis on the Northeast, S. B. Hilliard on the plantation South, and H. B. Johnson on the General Land Survey. Environmentally oriented chapters are by M. Williams on deforestation, J. C. Hudson on the grasslands,and J. L. Westcoat, Jr. on arid lands water development. J. E. Vance, Jr. discussesAmerican utopian ideals. Later chapters are by D. R. Meyer on