PROMETHEUS IN THE WATERSHED ABSTRACT · PROMETHEUS IN THE WATERSHED by CHRISTA S. FRANGIAMORE B.A., Georgia State University, 1976 A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The

PROMETHEUS IN THE WATERSHED

by

CHRISTA S. FRANGIAMORE

(Under Direction of Laurie Fowler)

ABSTRACT

Two historical eras and two fire-based technologies influenced the landscape of the Southern Appalachians. The long-term impact of humans on the forest composition of the Southern Appalachian forests is examined through anthropological studies and colonial literature. The impact on the Southern Appalachian forests by the introduction of the railroads at the turn of the twentieth century is examined through government publications and private documents. The theme of Prometheus runs through this paper to symbolize the inclination of humans to use technology to over exploit natural resources. The Greek myths associated with Prometheus are compared to similar Cherokee myths.

INDEX WORDS: Cherokee Mythology, Conservation Ethics, Fire, Natural Resource

Exploitation, Forest Resources, Historical Change, Man and Technology, Prometheus, Southern Appalachian.


by


B.A., Georgia State University, 1976

A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial

Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree

MASTER OF SCIENCE

ATHENS, GEORGIA

2002

© 2002

Christa S. Frangiamore

All Rights Reserved


by


Approved:

Major Professor: Laurie Fowler

Committee: C. Ronald Carroll Mary Freeman

Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia December 2002

iv

DEDICATION

To my daughter, Florentina Maria Frangiamore, my inspiration to grow and my

greatest teacher.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to gratefully acknowledge Laurie Fowler, Ron Carroll, Mary

Freeman, Frank Golley and Robert Zahner for their patience with my limitations and faith

in my abilities. Mary Ellen Brooks at the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library at

the University of Georgia, the Science Library at the University of Georgia, Frank Walsh

at Yesteryear Books and Antonio Raimo of Antonio Raimo Galleries provided invaluable

access to and information about maps and images from the works of early explorers and

naturalists in the Southeast. Most of all, I wish to extend many thanks to my family and

friends for every type of support imaginable.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.................................................................................................v

CHAPTER

1 PROMETHEUS IN THE WATERSHED .........................................................1

Human Influence upon the Landscape of the Southern Appalachians..........1

Description of the Savannah River Basin......................................................6

Description of the Upper Chattooga Watershed……………………………7

2 FIRE IN THE WATERSHED .........................................................................10

North American Prometheus .......................................................................10

Indian Resource Management .....................................................................12

Indian Use of Fire…………………………………………………………19

Early Use of Fire in the Chattooga River Headwaters…………………....26

3 PROMETHEUS PROPER IN THE WATERSHED………………………...31

Railroads and Deforestation ........................................................................31

Floods and Forests.......................................................................................34

Last of the Hardwood Forests .....................................................................38

Fire on the Mountain……………………………………………………...41

4 LEGACY OF DEFORESTATION ON THE SOUTHERN

APPALACHIANS.......................................................................................43

Species Lost and Lingering .........................................................................43

vii

Prometheus in Check...................................................................................53

REFERENCES ..................................................................................................................59

1

CHAPTER I


Human Influence upon the Landscape of the Southern Appalachians

This thesis reviews how humans have influenced the forests of the Southern

Appalachians through the use of technology, with an emphasis on fire. Fire is only one

tool humans have used to alter the face of the earth but it has been an influential one

throughout history, and it is a technology that has been used in various forms by humans

to impact the landscape of the Southeastern United States from the Paleo-Indian era into

the present. Fire is also a powerful symbol of mankind’s inclination to utilize

technologies to push the limits of natural resource sustainability.

Understanding the historical impact of humans on the landscape can give us

valuable perspectives as we make research, land-use and related policy decisions in our

own time. Today, humans have a rapidly growing population and an economic and social

structure that allow for flexible lifestyle patterns never before experienced by so broad a

sector of the population. As a result, mountainous areas that were once sparsely

populated are now feeling environmental pressures typical of urban areas.

Accompanying these trends is the use of technologies that can dramatically and

permanently alter natural conditions. The arena is set for the perilous over-utilization and

loss of natural resources. Whereas this tendency, as the early accounts in this study will

demonstrate, is not new to mankind, the permanence, rapidity, and breadth of human

2

actions since the middle of the nineteenth century have no precedence. In addition, the

legacy of nineteenth century policies may now come into conflict with the needs of the

twenty-first century. For example, in the early 1900’s the designers of the National

Forest for the Southern Appalachians purposefully excluded riparian areas from their

proposed plan, areas that today are target tracts for conservation and green-spaces. It

may serve us well to review the legacy of the past as we plan for the future.

The history of land-use in the Southern Appalachians portrays the best and worst

tendencies of our technologically oriented species. A look at the history of the area

shows two historical eras that greatly influenced the landscape of the southern mountains,

one long and nurturing, the other brief and destructive.

Through prehistoric and colonial eras until the late nineteenth century, the human

use of fire was influential in shaping the forest composition of the Southern

Appalachians. Though set in a temperate rainforest, the forests of the Chattooga

River headwaters have historically been composed of a preponderance of fire

tolerant species such as oak and chestnut. Colonial literature and selected studies

by anthropologists and botanists have been examined to document the widespread

and intentional use of applied fire by the Indians previous to and at the time of

European contact.

At the turn of the twentieth century, human fire technology proved to be a

destructive influence upon the natural resources of the Southern Appalachians.

Government publications and Congressional records are the primary documents

used to examine the role that railroads had on the deforestation of and fire damage

to the Southern Appalachian forests between 1870 and 1911.

3

The theme of Prometheus runs through this paper to remind the reader that humans

are not isolated creatures on this planet, but are an integral element of the environment, as

much a part of nature as the chestnut or the humus trapped among the roots of trees.

Prometheus symbolizes the inclination of humans to use technology to exploit natural

resources. As such, Prometheus represents a fundamental aspect of human nature that is

a vital factor in our decision making process. As much as we need good science to

support our chosen activities, we need insight into human nature to guide us if we as a

species are to make a cultural shift toward sustainability.

According to the usual telling of the story, Prometheus incensed the other gods by

giving humans the ability to make fire. A deeper look at the myth, however, shows that

Prometheus also tricked the gods into accepting the inferior remnants of animals as a

valid sacrifice. This may have been the real source of their displeasure. Sacrifice was

originally designed to honor and respect the abundance and blessings of nature. It was a

way to atone for taking life to maintain life. Through this practice, a balance emerged of

respect and equal value to all things on the earth. Mankind’s mentor, Prometheus, told

the humans to present two sacrificial options to the gods. A deceptively attractive bundle

of skin and bones and fat was laid out next to a meager pile of offal and meat. The large

size, rich pelt and succulent fat of the first bundle tempted the gods to choose it over the

small but fine selections of nourishing meat and innards. The real crime was that

Prometheus gave humans a means by which they could by-passed the intent of sacrifice

while going through the motions. Not only, then, did this maverick god give us the

ability to radically change our environment through fire, he added to our culture the

4

devastating concept of over consumption free of guilt. We face the repercussion of that

“gift” today as we confront the reality of ever diminishing natural resources and

expanding human populations.

Applying information and technology with wisdom may be Homo sapiens'

greatest challenge. Certainly at the turn of the Twentieth Century, humans at work in the

Southern Appalachians were caught up in the power of their inventions and had lost sight

of their place in the natural world. This “Promethean” proclivity of humans to push the

technological capacity of their culture to over-utilize natural resources appears to be a

fundamental human characteristic, and if Western European cultures have exploited

natural resources more than those of other cultures, it may reflect more upon their

technological orientation and the power of their tools than upon a greater inclination to

disrupt environmental systems.

According to the Merriam Webster dictionary, technology is the practicable

application of knowledge, especially in a particular area (Merriam Webster’s 1997). In

this sense, applied fire utilized to manage natural resources was a technological

innovation of humans. The use of applied fire in the forests of the Southeast was

practiced by the earliest inhabitants and continued well into the Twentieth century. With

it, they appear to have encouraged over long periods of time the development and

stabilization of large communities of fire tolerant forest species.

In contrast, the introduction of railroads to the Southern Appalachians created

changes that led to the deconstruction of those same forests. As the nineteenth century

came to a close, locomotives provided a new fire based technology with which to shape

the landscape of the Southern mountains. Prior to the 1870s, few railroads had penetrated

5

the steep terrain of the Southern Appalachians. Bringing to the mountains a means to

efficiently remove cut timber, this technology took only fifty years to drastically alter the

forests that had been gradually influenced by thousands of years of applied fire. In 1902

close to 80 percent of the Southern Appalachian forests were considered intact, if not

primeval. By 1908 the status of the forests had flipped almost 180 degrees, with cut or

second growth forests at 83 percent in the same region (Secretary of Agriculture 1908).

As a result of the rapid and thorough deforestation of the Southern Appalachian

forests, agriculture and water resources were adversely affected. In response to these

problematic issues and a growing interest in sustainable forestry, the United States

Agricultural Department published a seminal report on the severe environmental effects

of deforestation in the Southern Appalachians, Message from the President of the United

States, Transmitting: A Report of the Secretary of Agriculture in Relation to the Forests,

Rivers, and Mountains of the Southern Appalachian Region (Secretary of Agriculture,

Price 1902). The scientists involved in the report, brought the best science to bear on the

tough issues of the day. Sadly, the rate of deforestation facilitated by railroads continued

unabated. By the time the Weeks Act in 1911 established a National Forest in the

Southern Appalachians, little original forest was left.

Ours is a forgiving land and climate and we have been given a second chance in the

mountains and throughout the other regions of the Southeast, but we must now consider

the effects of permanent and repeated alterations to the ecosystems of the Southeast. In

view of the impact on the landscape of today’s expanding human population and

diminishing natural resources, understanding the historical propensity for humans to push

the technological capacity of their culture as far as possible to utilize natural resources

6

can bring valuable perspectives to current research, land management, and policy

decisions.

Description of the Savannah River Basin

Wassaw Island lies in the estuary system of the Savannah River Basin. It is

representative of the rich tidewater and sea island ecosystems that anchor the final flow

of this great river to the land before it meets with the Atlantic Ocean. The headwaters of

the Savannah River lie north and west of Wassaw Island where streams gather in the

Southern Appalachians of Georgia and North Carolina. West to east the headwaters carry

names reflective of the Indian tribes that lived along their banks: Tallulah, Chattooga,

Chauga, Toxaway, Keowee. The headwater streams merge into the Tugaloo or the

Seneca, and where these two rivers meet, the Savannah River begins her official stride to

the coast 314 miles away.

Where they meet is also symbolic of the myriad and vast changes Homo sapiens has

wrought upon the landscape of the Southeast. The Army Corps of Engineers lists the

confluence of the Tugaloo and Seneca Rivers as the beginning of the Savannah River, but

where would today’s traveler find this location? Current road maps bear no reference to

the Seneca River, as it is completely submerged beneath Lake Hartwell. To following

generations this river will not exist. Its tributary, the Keowee, has retained some identity

as Lake Keowee, but the Seneca River has disappeared from this regional landscape as

completely as its namesake, the Seneca Indians. Like so many sites of past civilizations

or of species now extinct, this river has been overwhelmed by Homo sapiens’ penchant to

shape the landscape for the utilization and extraction of natural resources. This strong

7

and continued inclination combined with our facility with technological innovations has

long been applied to the earth by our species. Efforts to conserve, preserve, and rebuild

surviving and threatened ecosystems must grapple with this fundamental tendency.

Between the Sea Islands and the mountains, the Savannah River traverses two other

major landscapes, the Coastal Plain and the Piedmont. The Coastal Plain shares with the

Southern Appalachians a similar history of a landscape extensively influenced by fire and

railroads. Another commonality of these two formerly forested regions is that they were

early on considered fundamentally less compatible for sustained agricultural usage than

the Piedmont (Senate Doc. 91, 1908). In the Nineteenth Century, the Piedmont was a

land suited for sustained agriculture far beyond the capacity of either the porous Coastal

Plain or the steep sloped Southern Appalachians. For that reason, it was settled and

cleared for agriculture before the Coastal Plain or Mountains. The devastating affects of

ruinous agricultural practices on the promising land of the foothills have been well

documented (Trimble 1974).

Description of the Upper Chattooga Watershed

The Tallulah-Chattooga River Basin is comprised of 348,588 acres (141,069

hectares) with altitudes ranging from 5,500 feet (1,914 meters) on Standing Mountain in

Georgia to 1,000 feet (348 meters) at the juncture of the two rivers (Ayers and Ashe

1902). The Chattooga River headwaters originate, in part, on the Highlands Plateau at

the southern range of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Traversed by the Eastern Continental

Divide, the Highlands Plateau spills west half cupped into the Cullasaja River, joining the

Tennessee River Basin in its flow to the Mississippi and finally to the Gulf of Mexico.

8

East and south, the lip of the Divide shears down the heights of Whiteside Mountain to

the headwaters of the Chattooga River and beyond to the Atlantic Ocean.

The mountainous landmass of the Highlands Plateau juts deep into the southern

latitude and at the headwaters of the Chattooga River towers at Whiteside Mountain

4,930 feet (1,503 meters) (AMSL) above the Piedmont and Coastal Plain of Georgia and

South Carolina. This juxtaposition of high altitude at the southerly 35th parallel creates

an environment that allows the Highlands Plateau to hold relicts of arctic species at their

southern-most range next to the tender Carolina Jessamine. The Highlands Plateau along

with the rest of the Southern Appalachians was also spared the scouring of glaciers and

recent upheavals. The position, stable geologic history of the area, and the local climate

combine to create one of the most biologically diverse areas on the North American

continent.

The area has historically had rainfall levels of 80 to 100 inches (2000 to 2540 mm) a

year, placing it in a near temperate rainforest class. Moist air masses from the Gulf of

Mexico swing northeast until they hit the Southern Appalachians where they drop more

precipitation than anywhere east of the Mississippi onto the headwaters of the Chattooga

River. The rainfall for the area is well documented, as the Highlands Biological Station

in Highlands, North Carolina has been a United States Weather Bureau Station since

1961 and, in addition, has consistently collected rainfall data for over one hundred years.

The seeps on the barest of rock outcrops on the Southeastern exposures of the Blue Ridge

Escarpment feeding plants growing from fissures, salamander populations that break

world records, and the perpetual mildew in houses attest more poignantly than a hundred

9

years of water gauges to the wet environment of this area. Yet, this landscape has for

thousands of years supported a forest with a significant composition of fire tolerant trees.

10

CHAPTER II

FIRE IN THE WATERSHED

A North American Prometheus: Indian fire and land-use management

The Western European culture transferred to the continent by colonists changed the

North American landscape in a relatively brief period of time. However, the tendency to

over-use natural resources may not be a trait singular to Western Europeans as much as a

fundamental aspect of human nature. The Cherokee Indians had a myth about the

creation of bears and one explaining how diseases came to curtail human populations

(Mooney 1900). The two myths are intertwined and together have uncanny similarities to

the Greek myths centered on Prometheus and Pandora. In the first Cherokee myth, a

family decides to leave behind the human lifestyle and live a simpler existence in the

woods. Christopher Camuto in Another Country retells the myth and describes the bears

as “profoundly transformed beings, an entire clan that left its human nature behind for

the grace and ease of forest life”(Camuto 1997, p.196, l.9). Looking at it from a slightly

different angle, it appears that this family was not so much looking to leave behind its

human nature but stay in touch with aspects of humanity that were disappearing. Their

desire to stay more attuned to a traditional past from which man was drifting away might

reflect the shift from a predominantly hunting society to an agricultural one. Unlike the

greed displayed by western man and his mentor, Prometheus, in Greek mythology, these

people made a sacrifice to their brethren upon parting ways that brings no shame to the

11

word sacred. The soon-to-be bears bid them“…when you yourselves are hungry come

into the woods and call us and we shall come to give you our own flesh” (Mooney 1900,

p.326, l.25). The family then morphs into bears before the very eyes of the clans-people

they leave behind. It can be argued that this myth is not so much about the creation of

bears as it is about the evolvement of human’s technological abilities and a disruptive

cultural cycle, as people shifted from a hunter-gatherer system of survival to agriculture

and more powerful hunting techniques. This shift would have made them less dependant

on the seemingly random graces of the species they hunted as they gained power over

their food supply through the tools of horticulture and better weapons.

The bears are later given cause to question their magnanimity when humans became

a problem to all the animals through over-population and man’s technological advances

with hunting devices, bows, spears, knives and hooks, that led to the slaughter and

disregard of the other animals. “In the old days the beasts, birds, fishes, insects, and

plants could all talk, and they and the people lived together in peace and friendship. But

as time went on the people increased so rapidly that their settlements spread over the

whole earth, and the poor animals found themselves beginning to be cramped for room.

This was bad enough, but to make it worse Man invented bows, knives, blowguns, spears,

and hooks, and began to slaughter the larger animals, birds, and fishes for their flesh or

their skins, while the smaller creatures, such as the frogs and worms, were crushed and

trodden upon without thought, out of pure carelessness or contempt. So the animals

resolved to consult upon measures for their common safety.”(Mooney 1900, p.250, l.1).

The bears met in council and being closest to humans devised a scheme to kill them with

the bows of their own invention. But the claws that gave the bears an advantage in the

12

wild, made clumsy work of humankind’s bows and arrows. The bears realized that they

were falling into the very ways of man that they disdained in the first place and instead of

participating in a punitive council like the other animals, they again slipped into the

woods. The other species of animals also met and each devised a disease to punish

mankind and hopefully hold human population growth at bay. In the Promethean saga,

Zeus avenges the gods by sending Pandora and her box of hardships and disease to

Prometheus’ brother and so releases the same checks of sickness and death on humans

that the animals of Cherokee myth created in council. Whereas the Greeks were given

hope at the bottom of Pandora’s chest to help them endure the resulting tribulations, the

Cherokee people were saved from annihilation by the good will of plants, which decided

to give them botanical cures for the ills visited upon them by the animals: “Each Tree,

Shrub, and Herb, down even to the Grasses and Mosses, agreed to furnish a cure for

some one of the diseases named,”(Mooney 1900, p.252, l.11). Though the attitudes

reflected in these myths indicate a disparity in the cultures of the Greeks and the

Cherokee, these two cultures were dealing with the same set of fundamental issues: the

human proclivity to over-populate and to over-utilize natural resources by the use of

technology and the ensuing tendency to disregard the value of other elements of the

natural world.

Indian Resource Management

The various Pre-Contact inhabitants of the region were knowledgeable about

managing their habitat through various types of resource manipulation. Accounts by

early writers indicate the Indians used a wide array of resource management techniques,

13

from fish harvesting with artificial constructions and various plant toxins to silviculture.

John White captured on paper in the 1580’s many aspects of Indian culture (Rowse

1986). He portrayed the Indians using fire to fell trees and construct boats, and to

utilizing woven nets for fishing in estuaries. Lawson in 1701 mentions the use of fish

weirs made with hedges: “The Herrings in March and April run a great way up the

Rivers and fresh Streams to spawn, where the savages make great Wares, with Hedges

that hinder their Passage only in the Middle, where an artificial Pound is made to take

them in… This method is used all over the fresh Streams, to catch Trout and other

Species of Fish.” (Lawson 1967, p.218, l.1). Stone fish-traps built by Indians to funnel

fish into baskets are still to be found in creeks throughout the South. Benjamin Hawkins,

another careful observer of Indian habits, recounted in 1796 from North Georgia: “I was

informed that at this place last summer the Indians had dug 3 bushels of the root of the

buckeye, mixed 2 bushels of clay with it, pounded it in a mortar and put it in Limestone

Creek 4 miles above and that it poisoned the fish for eight miles, and 60 or 80 persons

picked up as many as they could carry home.”(Hawkins 1980, p.8, l.10).

Bartram viewed the Southern landscape with the training and sensibilities of a

botanist. He found evidence of extensive silvicultural practices at the ancient Indian

settlements that had been abandoned long before the Indians of his era entered the region.

Persimmon, honey locust, beauty berry, red mulberry, shell-barked hickory, and black

walnut not only survived the people who had cultivated them but continued to provide

sustenance for the new-comers. “I observed, in the ancient cultivated fields, 1.

diospyros, 2. gleditlia triancanthos, 3. prunus chicasaw, 4. callicarpa, 5. morus rubra, 6.

juglans exaltata, 7. juglans nigra, which inform us, that these trees were cultivated by the

14

ancients, on account of their fruit, as being wholesome and nourishing food. Though

they are natives of the forest*, yet they thrive better, and are more fruitful, in cultivated

plantations, and the fruit is in great estimation with the present generation of Indians,

particularly juglans exaltata, commonly called shell-barked hickory”(Bartram 1973,

p.38, l.13). Byrd and Hawkins were also impressed with the stature of the shell-barked

hickories near old settlements. The lists of plants and descriptions of the horticultural

practices of the Indians give an idea of the extent of Indian land management. The early

inhabitants of the region did not just gather the fruits of the wild, but, as Bartram notes in

the quote above, they were actively cultivating native species to enhance production. The

drawings of John White give further evidence of the plants they grew and a feel for the

plantations surrounding their habitations (Rowse 1986). Native species of squash and

sunflowers are prominent in the images of their village gardens. Long considered to have

been introduced to the Southeast, varieties of squash and sunflowers are now known to be

derived from species native to eastern North American and were selected and cultivated

by American Indians as early as 4,500 BP (Smith 1995).

The open under story must have been impressive to the early Europeans as it was so

often described, and not only in the Long-leaf Pine-dominated coastal plain where such

an open landscape is expected, but through the Piedmont and into the Mountains of

Georgia and North Carolina. Traveling near Wrightsborough, today’s Wrightsboro,

Georgia on the Little River in 1773, William Bartram described a magnificent forest that

he himself said stretched the bounds of credibility, the trunks reaching eight to eleven

feet in diameter, five feet from the ground: “The ground is a perfectly level green plain,

thinly planted by nature with the most stately forest trees, such as the gigantic black oak

15

(q. tinctoria), liriodendron, juglans nigra, platanus, juglans exaltata, fagus sylvatica,

ulmus sylvatica, liquidambar styraciflua, whose mighty trunks, seemingly of an equal

height, appeared like superb columns” (Bartram 1973, p.36, l.35). His description

projects a sense of wonder that such giants had been “thinly planted by nature”. As well

it may, for this particular stretch of forest lay twenty to thirty feet above the floodplain of

the Little River on a terrace, again Bartram’s words, near a large complex of ancient

ruins. It is possible that given the location the trees had been cultivated to some degree

by the earlier inhabitants. Later in his journey, Bartram conveys the unexpected park-like

quality of a landscape in the mountains near the Tanase River (Little Tennessee River):

“…came near the banks of a large creek or river, where this high forest ended on my left

hand, the trees became more scattered and insensibly united with a grassy glade or lawn

bordering on the river; on the opposite bank of which appeared a very extensive forest,

consisting entirely of the Hemlock spruce (P. abies), almost encircled by distant ridges of

lofty hills.” (Bartram 1973, p.362, l.20). Insensibly is a word that captures the

unexpected nature of those open areas in a heavily forested mountain region. William

Bartram was by this time well traveled in the Southeast and an astute observer of nature.

Again, there is something about his description of the lands he passed through that

implies the hand of something other than normal floral processes. Indeed, Bartram

plainly states that trees were cultivated by the early Indian cultures to improve upon the

quality and quantity of the nuts and fruits of native species: “…these trees were

cultivated by the ancients, on account of their fruit, as being wholesome and nourishing

food. Though they are natives of the forest*, yet they thrive better, and are more fruitful,

16

in cultivated plantations, and the fruit is in great estimation with the present generation

of Indians” (Bartram 1973, p.38, l.17).

Benjamin Hawkins traveled through north Georgia in November 26, 1796 and

recorded: “This little settlement is on the richest lands I have seen, the second low

grounds about eighty feet above the first, with a gentle slope, the lands above by far the

richest, the growth poplar and chesnut very large without any undergrowth…”(Hawkins

1980, p.4, l.28). Near Pine Log, Georgia he describes a scene similar to Bartram’s

description of the ancient Indian orchard: “Then down the creek ½ mile to an old Indian

settlement, deserted, the peach trees thriving, the lands rich, the growth mostly hickory,

tall and large. Here I saw several Indian women from Etowah, gathering hickory

nuts…”(Hawkins 1980, p.5, l.9). These descriptions present a very different forest

structure from today’s forests of monocultures and tangles of multiple successions that

reflect commercial plantings and repeated clearing, and it is a landscape that experienced

human manipulation.

Not only were native plants cultivated, the Indians also appear to have been actively

engaged in the export and import trade. Useful plant species were transplanted from the

Mississippi River to the East Atlantic coast and from the coast to the Appalachian

Mountains. Possibly, some were introduced to the East after the Sixteenth Century as

they filled the void left by prior eastern populations that had been decimated by disease

and war wasted upon them by the Spanish, but others may have arrived earlier through

trading routes. The Osage Orange, Maclura pomifera, is not native to the East Coast but

was carried by western Indians as they migrated east. The Honey Locust, Gleditsia

triacanthos, is another western plant, much revered by the Indians. Lawson in his

17

Natural History of Carolina includes it in his list “Of the Vegetables of Carolina” and

says they were “first brought” by Indian Traders (Lawson 1967). He records in his

journal that he saw it at the Indian town of Sapona, which probably was at the headwaters

of the Cape Fear River near today’s Highpoint, North Carolina. Notably, Mark Catesby,

the famous and prolific naturalist and illustrator of Southeastern fauna and flora, does not

mention the Honey Locust, nor is it represented in his engravings (Catesby 1974).

Instead, the similar but native eastern species the Water Locust, Gleditsia aquatica, is

pared with the American Goldfinch and the Black Locust, Robinia pseudo-acacia, sets

the stage for the American Bison. Possibly they were omitted intentionally if he knew

they were not native to the region. The Indians did not know about honey or sugar before

the Europeans introduced the sweets, but Gleditsia triacanthos has a sweet pod that they

related to the taste of the European products (Zahner 1995). Though not a native of the

East, the numerous streams with the word Sugar in them, especially those outside the

range of the Sugar Maple, reflect the esteem held for the Honey Locust by the Indians.

Honey Locust is a prominent feature in some of the Cherokee myths, the clusters of three

thorns providing a test (Mooney 1900). The Cullasaja River cascading off the Highlands

Plateau in Western North Carolina is testimony to the breadth of its artificial distribution.

Cullasaja means place of the honey-locust and so draws the memory of another culture

into the consciousness of the twenty-first century.

Another important transplant is the Chickasaw Plum. Both Lawson and Bartram

mention the Indian or Chickasaw Plum. Clearly Bartram considered it a transplant: “The

Chickasaw plumb I think must be excepted, for though certainly a native of America, yet I

never saw it wild in the forest, but always in old deserted Indian plantations: I suppose it

18

to have been brought from the S. W. beyond the Mississippi, by the Chicasaws.” (Bartram

1973, p. 38, footnotes). Lawson acknowledges the existence of several types of plums

but calls the most common of them the Indian Plum (Lawson 1967), further

substantiating Bartram’s observation.

In return for these western plants the eastern people provided the very important

plant, Yaupon Holly, Ilex vomitoria, to Indians beyond its normal range. Ilex vomitoria

held ceremonial rather than nutritional value to the Indians and was of great importance

in their rituals (Hudson 1979). The name Yaupon seems to have been used

interchangeably by settlers with Cassine, but the plant used for the ceremonial Black

Drink is Ilex vomitoria. The purgative effects of the drink remain reflected in the

scientific nomenclature. The natural bounds of the Yaupon Holly’s habitat were

extended west and north from its native coastal environment (Merrill 1979). Bartram

observed it growing well outside its normal range in a Southern Appalachian Indian

village near the Jore River, a tributary of the Tennessee River. “We passed through the

Jore village, which is pleasingly situated in a little vale on the side of the mountain; a

pretty rivulet or creek runs through the vale, just under the village: here I observed a

little grove of the Casine Yapon, which was the only place where I had seen it grow in the

Cherokee country; the Indians call it beloved tree, and are very careful to keep it pruned

and cultivated; they drink a very strong infusion of the leaves, buds and tender branches

of this plant, which is so celebrated, indeed venerated by the Creeks and all the Southern

maritime nations of Indians”(Bartram 1973, p.357, l.11).

William L. Merrill noted another historical record of the coastal plant being

cultivated in the Southern Appalachians in his publication The Beloved Tree: “The

19

earliest evidence for the Cherokees’ transplantation of this plant is found on a herbarium

sheet of Ilex vomitoria …On the reverse side of this sheet is the notation, in a very clear

eighteenth-century hand, that this specimen was collected in 1769 by W. V. Turner in

“Cherroke countrey” (Merrill 1979, p.57, l.25). The Creek Indians, too, were

transplanting and growing it north of the plant’s native range in 1796 according to

Hawkins. “At the first site of the town of Hillaubees; at the other one settlement, the

creek margined with cane. At this hut I saw the cassene yupon growing about 8 feet

height. It had been brought from the seacoast and did well.” (Hawkins 1980, p.15, l.21).

Indian Use of Fire

The direct application of fire was arguably Homo sapiens’ first and most powerful

tool in shaping the landscape of what is today the Southeastern United States. Early

written descriptions of the southern mountains describe lofty forests, park-like woods

with solitary trees, open meadows and savannahs. If not created by humans, it is likely

that this open structure was at the least maintained and managed with fire by

Homo sapiens before the arrival of Europeans. Natural fires are not common in the

Southern Appalachians and yet, the forest was traditionally largely composed of fire

tolerant species (Meier and Bratton 1995). Representing over a third of those species,

oaks and chestnuts were important food and mast trees, giving cause to examine the

probability of Indian fire management.

Early colonialists consistently reported the use of fire by Indians. Indeed they

seemed to equate Indians with fire: “We travell’d about twenty Miles, lying near a

Savanna that was over-flown with Water; where we were very short of Victuals, but

20

finding the Woods newly burnt, and on fire in many Places, which gave us great Hopes

that Indians were not far of.” (Lawson 1967, p.31, l.15). Not only did most colonial

writers take note of the fire practices of the Indians, the mention of burning shows up in

the Cherokee myths compiled by James Mooney: “Once when the people were burning

the woods in the fall the blaze set fire to a poplar tree, which continued to burn until the

fire went down into the roots and burned a great hole in the ground.”(Mooney 1900,

p.322, l.1). The casual tone of the reference to burning the woods implies this was a

common practice.

The early reports indicate that fire was used to manage everything from clearing for

cultivation, to encouraging healthy and abundant crops from important mast producing

species such as oaks and chestnuts and fruit bearing plants, to managing pest populations

and hunting. Hunting, however, was the activity that captured the attention of most of the

colonial writers. John Lawson in 1701 noted the use of fire in the winter season for game

management in the Coastal Plain: “Tis then they burn the Woods, by setting Fire to the

Leaves and wither’d Bent and Grass, which they do with a Match made from the black

Moss that hangs on the Trees in Carolina, and is sometimes above six Foot long. Thus

they go and fire the Woods for many Miles, and drive the Deer and other Game into

small Necks of Land and Isthmus’s, where they kill and destroy what they

please”(Lawson 1967, p.215, l.32).

Captain John Smith observed the same hunting technique years earlier in The True

Travels, Adventures and Observations of Captaine John Smith published in 1629. His

account also places these practices in the mountainous headwater regions of the river

basins. “At their huntings they leave their habitations, and reduce themselves into

21

companies as the Tartars doe, and goe to the most desert places with their families,

where they spend their time in hunting and fowling up towards the mountaines, by the

heads of their rivers, where there is plentie of game. For betwixt the rivers the grounds

are so narrow, that little commeth here which they devoure not. …Having found the

Deere, they environ them with many fires, and betwixt the fires they place themselves.

And some take their stands in the midsts. The Deere being thus feared by the fires, and

their voyces, they chase them so long within that circle, that many times they kill 6, 8, 10,

or 15 at a hunting. They use also to drive them into some narrow poynt of land, when

they find that advantage; and, so force them into the river, where with their boats they

have Ambuscadoes to kill them” (Smith 1819, p.133, l). This early description gives not

only evidence of fire management but also a sense of the cyclical nature of the Indians’

movement within the landscape, an important point that indicates seasonal movements

and resource utilization, as does the following, written more than seventy-five years later.

Thomas Nairne, while traveling to the Mississippi River in 1708, reported: “Of all

hunting diversions, I took most pleasure in fireing rings for in that we never missed 7 or

10 Dear. Three or 4 hours after the ring is fired, of 4 or 5 miles circumferance, the

hunters post themselves within as nigh the flame and smoak as they can endure. The fire

on each side burns in toward to center and thither the Dear gather from all parts to avoid

it, but striving to shun a Death which they might often escape, by a violent spring, they

fall into a Certain one from the Bullets of the hunters who drawing nigher together, as

the circle grows less, find an easy pray of the impounded dear, tho seldom kill all for

some who find a place wher the flame is less Violent, Jump out. This sport is the more

certain the longer the grownd has been unburned. If it has not for 2 or 3 years there are

22

so many dry leaves grass and Trash, that few Creatures within escape, and the men are

forced to go out betimes at some slack place to the leeward” (Nairne 1988, p.52, l).

Again, here is mention of a fire ring, but as interesting is his reference to the build up of

fuel after two or three years. The implication is that the Indians did not return to the

same place each year, but would leave an area alone for periods of time, perhaps to allow

game and fuel to regenerate. It also suggests that as time passed, a wide-ranging area

would have been impacted by their fire strategies as they rotated seasonal migrations

throughout the region over a span of time. This concept is further substantiated by the

work of archaeologists and anthropologists who have seen evidence of wide-ranging

movement of human populations in the Southeast from as early as the Archaic period.

David Anderson and Glen Hanson (Anderson and Hanson 1988) in their study of Archaic

settlement patterns along the Savannah River Valley concluded that people moved

seasonally within river basins, thus utilizing the resources and beneficial climate zones of

each physiographic province within a particular basin. Their interpretation of population

movements in the early Archaic period sound very similar to the description of Indian

hunting habits written in 1629 by John Smith. Anderson and Hanson also note that

groups would not have likely returned to the same exact locations as they cycled through

the year, for resources would have been depleted from their previous stay. Hence,

despite low population numbers, the influence of the early inhabitants of the Southeast to

the region was not insignificant. The extent to which fire was applied by humans in the

Pre-Contact era may never be properly quantified, but the idea of extensive fire use by

them over a large area of the Southeast, including the mountains, does become more

23

credible when seen in the context of these historical accounts and archaeological and

anthropological studies.

Mark Catesby traveled the Southeast from May of 1722 through February of 1725

and wrote the following in his 1731 publication The Natural History of Carolina, Florida

and the Bahama Islands. “Their annual custom of fire hunting is usually in October. At

this sport associate some hundreds of Indians, who, spreading themselves in length

through a great extent of country, set the woods on fire, which with the assistance of the

wind is driven to some peninsula, or neck of land, into which deers, bears, and other

animals are drove by the raging fire and smoak, and being hemm’d in are destroyed in

great numbers by their guns” (Catesby 1974, p.xii, l.19). Catesby credited Lawson as the

source for much of his information on the Indians of the Southeast and a quick

comparison would support that this passage, which is taken from Catesby’s section

entitled Of the INDIANS of Carolina and Florida, was based on Lawson’s writings.

Catesby, however, did travel through much of the same country and would have seen

similar fire events. He has passages in his book, such as the following, that refer to fire

usage not mentioned by other authors, indicating he had some first hand knowledge that

fire was still a widely used land management tool in his era. “In February and March

the Inhabitants have a custom of burning the Woods, which causes such a continual

smoke, that not knowing the cause, it might be imagined to proceed from fog, or a natural

thickness in the air: Like wise the smoke from the Tar-kilns contribute not a little to

deceive Strangers, and possesses them with an ill opinion of the air of Carolina: And to

these, an annual custom of the Indians in their hunting, of setting the Woods on fire many

miles in extent.” (Lawson 1967, p.ii, l.45). The Indians may have either been removed

24

from the area or have changed their lifestyles in response to settlement pressures

introduced by Anglo-Americans during the twenty years between Lawson’s and

Catesby’s experiences. The quote does not clarify whether the inhabitants were settlers

or Indians, but the clear reference to the hunting practices of the Indians suggests the

settlers and, possibly, Indians were burning the woods in the spring around their

homesteads and that the Indians continued to burn for hunts in the fall and winter. This

then leads one to wonder if the same land was burned each year by settlers, in contrast to

Indian rotational habits, and if so, what impact this had on the plant communities.

Another broadly cited account of Indian practices and the natural history of the

Southeast had been credited to William Byrd of Virginia in a 1737 publication by a Swiss

named Samuel Jenner, a Swiss who bought 33,000 acres of land from Byrd and who then

wrote a promotional piece to encourage Swiss immigrants to settle in Virginia. It has

since been exposed as a plagiarism of Lawson’s work, probably by Jenner himself

(Adams 1962). Byrd was most likely only the unwitting supplier of Lawson’s work to

Samuel Jenner. Regardless of who copied Lawson, according to editor Hugh Talmage

Lefler, Jenner’s book, Neu-gefundenes Eden or New Found Eden, was so intent on luring

settlers to the new Eden that it banished the snake from the garden, omitting Lawson’s

category of “Insects”, which included a list of nineteen snakes, from an otherwise

thorough piece of plagiarism.

Byrd, on the other hand, did write an excellent book about his excursion in 1720

from the coast of Virginia to the mountains to survey for the boundary between Virginia

and North Carolina. It contains many valuable and astute observations of the fauna, flora

and landscape of the area. The use of fire by Indians is mentioned several times, but the

25

following passage gives some idea of the complexity of the subject: “The atmosphere

was so smoky all around us that the mountains were again grown invisible. This

happened not from the haziness of the sky but from the firing of the woods by the Indians,

for we were now near the route the northern savages take when they go out to war

against the Catawbas and other southern nations. On their way, the fires they make in

their camps are left burning, which, catching the dry leaves that lie near, soon put the

adjacent woods into a flame” (Byrd 1966, p.257). It is clear that he found nothing

unusual about Indians leaving their campfires to burn out of control, but why they did it

is far from apparent.

One of the difficulties of ferreting out valid information from the colonial writings is

presented by the changes colonization itself triggered in the Indian cultures of the

Southeast. The earliest colonial writers covered in this study consistently mention fire

management. However, William Bartram and Benjamin Hawkins who visited the area

after colonization was well underway and traveled extensively in the South in the late

18th century do not refer to Indian use of fire. Hawkins does take note of a burned area

but in no way indicates it was of human origin. The clearings and open forests that they

describe suggest manipulation of the landscape by Indians but there is no specific

mention of the practice of burning by the Indians.

However, since the earlier colonists rarely visited the Southern Appalachians, we

must rely on the descriptions of people traversing the area at a time of great cultural

upheaval. During the late 18th and early 19th centuries the country was scattered with

vestiges of older, greater, and lost Indian populations, testimony to the changes inflicted

on Indians by European cultural contact through war and disease. Fire may not have

26

been used as much simply because the Indian culture was responding to the new cultural

pressures of their era. Populations were lower because of diseases introduced by

Europeans and conflicts inspired by their arrival. At the time Bartram and Hawkins

visited the Southern Appalachians, the Cherokee were in a constant state of war. Towns

were systematically destroyed, leaving Indians no choice but to scatter their dwellings in

an untraditional fashion. In such an atmosphere it is unlikely that they would be inclined

to draw attention to the areas they lived in with large fires. In addition, many Indians had

given over to European style living patterns. It was not unusual for Cherokee families to

live in log cabins similar to those built by European settlers. Archaeologist who study the

time period just prior to and of the Indian removal look for remains of log cabins and

English porcelain to establish Cherokee dwelling sites. Livestock husbandry, another

European concept, was prevalent by the time Hawkins traveled the Southern

Appalachians in the 1790s (Hawkins 1980).

Early Use of Fire in the Chattooga River Headwaters

The accounts by Europeans and early settlers and visitors to the southeastern region

of the North American continent indicate that the southern landscape had been

influenced, indeed managed, by Homo sapiens long before the coming of the Europeans.

A fine example is the journal entry from 27 October 1811 of Andrew Ellicott, as he was

surveying for the 35th parallel at the headwaters of the Chattooga River “...our

observations were much impeded by clouds forming about the tops of the mountains and

ridges but the greatest inconvenience we experienced arose from smoke occasioned by

the annual custom of the indians in burning the woods. Those fires scattered over a vast

27

extent of country made a beautiful and brilliant appearance at night;...”(Mathews 1908,

p.223, l.22). These early impressions, spanning the 1500s and the 1800’s, have not

always been considered reliable by ecologists (Delcourt and Delcourt 1996, p. 3

Holocene Vegetation History, referring to Russee 1983; McAndrews 1988; Clark and

Royall 1995; Whitney 1995), as there was no objective evidence to support their

accounts. However, they have since been given a greater degree of validity by more

studies that have revisited the question with new techniques of pollen and charcoal

analysis.

Recent studies in archaeology, anthropology and paleo-ecology give new credence

to colonial reports of landscape-scale fire manipulation by Indians in the Southeast. The

Southern Blue Ridge of the Appalachians, in particular, presents an interesting study

case, given the traditionally wet climate of the southern mountains. In the light of the

historical accounts and recent studies, it is likely that the traditional abundance of

fire-tolerant species in the area cannot be attributed alone to natural fires caused by

lightning strikes, but also, and substantially, to the use of applied fire by humans

(Bratton and Meier, 1995; Meier and Bratton 1995). This theory is further enhanced by

the decline of fire-resistant and fire-adaptive species, such as Chestnut, Oak, and Table

Mountain Pine, in the Blue Ridge Mountains since the late nineteenth century when fire

suppression was imposed on the landscape by Forest Service management practices.

Studies by Delcourt and Delcourt and Bratton and Meir have been used extensively in

this paper to sort out the correlation between human activity and forest composition in the

headwater region of the Savannah River Basin. The chestnut tree is discussed in greater

detail than other species, because the history of its emergence, demise and possible

28

survival provide insight into the history of the Southern Appalachians as well as human

nature.

Paleo-ecological studies on carbon particles and pollen assemblages support the

concept that human activities may have substantially influenced what is considered to be

the original species composition of the region. Studies conducted by Delcourt and

Delcourt in Horse Cove, North Carolina show a historical relationship between the rise of

human population in the area and a corresponding rise in fire-tolerant species. These

studies took place in Horse Cove, North Carolina not far from the area Andrew Ellicott

was surveying in 1811 when he complained of smoke from fires disrupting his

observations.

The Chattooga River watershed in which Horse Cove lies have historically had rain

fall levels that place it in a near temperate rain forest class. In contrast to this wet

climate, the forest is composed of a large number of fire tolerant species. Starting in the

Archaic Period, B.C. 8000 to B.C. 700, this area began to experience a rise in fire tolerant

tree species and other plant species associated with disturbed soil (Delcourt and Delcourt

1996). These changes in plant communities were deduced from fossil pollen samples

from a study site in Horse Cove. Charcoal deposits from the same location and time

period examined in this study indicate a similar increase in local fires probably caused

primarily by humans. “Based on fossil pollen and charcoal record, use of fire in Late

Archaic and Woodland times apparently also promoted increases in the abundance of

chestnut and oaks, which may have grown in open groves with bracken and grass

understory.”(Delcourt and Delcourt 1996, p.36, l.37).

29

Supporting the correlation between a rise in fire tolerant tree species and human

activities in the area, the Delcourts’ found that chestnut pollen was generally 7% to 18%

from B.C. 1909 to A.D.485, indicating a slow but steady increase during the archaic

period. It then increased to peak values of 36% by A.D. 886 when the Woodland culture

arrived, before diminishing to 20% to 25% where it stabilized from A.D. 1363 to A.D.

1877. A.D. The period from 1363 to A.D. 1877 encompassed the Mississippian culture,

the related Cherokee culture, and the early white settlers who did not enter the area until

the 1830’s (Delcourt and Delcourt 1996). The cultures associated with these time periods

became successively more agriculturally inclined and less migratory in nature. The

management of natural resources by each of these peoples likely became less periodic

and more seasonal on an annual basis. The forests seem to have stabilized for a long

period of time while inhabited by Indians and white settlers. If Indians were actively

managing the forests with fire and other land management techniques, a change in the

forest composition would be expected. The lack of such a shift may be due to the

adoption of colonial culture. The effects on a mature and stabile forest of fire and

grazing by large game species would not be that different from the grazing of cattle and

hogs, though a larger change would probably have taken place at the under-story level. It

is just as likely that settlers displacing the Indians, in turn, adopted some Indian practices

such as fire management.

The one pollen statistic that changes radically is that of the chestnut. By A.D. 1900,

well before the arrival of the chestnut blight in the region, chestnut pollen declined to

14% and thereafter to from 11% to 13% (Delcourt and Delcourt 1996). This indicates

that the chestnut population was decreasing from some cause other than the blight, which

30

did not arrive that far south in the Appalachians until the late 1920’s (Hursh and Barnett

1931). These percentages for chestnut pollen are inclusive of Castanea pumila pollen,

chinquapin, a closely related species, meaning that the percent of Castanea dentata was

even lower than 13%. The precipitous drop in chestnut pollen after 1877 does coincide

with the coming of the fire driven railroads and the deforestation of the Southern

Appalachians.

31

CHAPTER III

PROMETHEUS PROPER IN THE WATERSHED

Railroads and Deforestation

Homo sapiens had certainly over the millennia influenced what we think of as the

original structure of southeastern ecosystems. But nothing as dramatic as the changes

instigated by the railroads altered the face of the southern landscape in so little time.

Once the trains arrived in the South, the destruction was swift. In 1893, the Georgia

timber market suffered from glutted markets caused by deforestation. By the 1930’s little

remained of the magnificent southern crescent of longleaf pine forests, and the hardwood

forests of the Southern Appalachians were forever altered.

Railroads exploded onto the southern landscape in the 1870’s. Before then the

cotton-producing Piedmont was the commercially important target of the railroad

industry in the South. The Central of Georgia, which began in the late 1830’s at

Savannah, is a perfect example. In antebellum times, the Central ignored the vast

timberlands of the Pine Barrens on the Coastal Plain and forests of the Southern

Appalachians to service the rich Piedmont lands favored for cotton production.

Long ignored, the 90,000 million acres of longleaf pines that swept from North

Carolina to Texas on the southern coastal plains and the extensive hardwood forests of

the mountains were not seriously timbered until after 1870 when the forests of the North

were depleted of their timber resources (Sargent 1884). It was at this time that investors,

looking to expand their operations into the economically vulnerable and natural resource

32

rich South, vigorously introduced rail lines to the interior forests beyond the Piedmont.

Maps in the United States Census of 1880 clearly delineate the areas timbered up to that

time in the pine-producing areas of Georgia and the other southern states. Those areas

were confined to the coast and narrow bands along the major river systems fingering

inward to the fall line. Before that, transportation by water was the limiting factor. In

1865 one Robert L. Pell published, via a Wall Street printer, an advertisement to promote

the sale of his “Yellow Pine” timberlands in Georgia, four million acres stretching

between the Savannah and Satilla Rivers (Pell 1865). This small prospective gives a

fascinating appraisal of lands in the Coastal Plain and despite a certain amount of sales

hyperbole, is consistent with other sources, such as the 1880 Census. When assessing the

cost of shipping the timber to market, only water transport is mentioned: the timber had

to be hauled to the rivers or mills at $2.50 per thousand feet; floated to mills via rivers

and streams at $0.25 per thousand feet; rafted to port for shipment at $0.50 per thousand

feet; and shipped to New York or Boston at $8.00 per thousand feet (Pell, 1865). A paper

by Trimble (1974) that examines the human-induced soil erosion on the Southern

Piedmont describes the gradual rise of erosion up to 1860 followed by higher levels of

erosion over the next sixty years as agriculture production, mostly cotton, increased.

During this same time period the Southern Appalachian hardwood forests and the Coastal

Plain longleaf pine system were stripped of trees, accelerating the total loss of soil to

erosion on a statewide level. The innate restrictions of water transportation, as compared

to the versatility of railroad lines, were thus exacerbated by the insult of sedimentation,

which was accelerated by the deforestation made possible by the burgeoning rail

industry.

33

In the Southern Appalachians, the arrival of the railroads in the 1870’s triggered a

mad removal of the nation’s last stronghold of hardwood trees. By 1902 logging

railroads had been in the region for thirty years, adequate time for the best of the

commercially valuable trees that were within easy reach of the lines to have been culled

from the forests and for reasonable stands of second growth to have reestablished

themselves. It comes as no surprise, then, to see that a 1902 report on the forests of the

Southern Appalachians noted that: “A limited portion of that near the railway lines has

been robbed of nearly everything of commercial value, while the remote areas have had

only walnut, cherry, and figured woods cut”(Ayers and Ashe 1902, p.45, L.24). By 1908

less than one fourth of the forests surveyed in the same 1902 report remained. Foresters

in 1902 were already concerned that the deforestation caused by settlers and early

lumbering was being greatly accelerated by the expansion of railroads “The lumberman

attacked this forest several decades ago when he began to penetrate it in search of the

rarer and more valuable trees, such as the walnut and cherry. Later, as the railroads

entered the region to some extent, he added to his list of trees for cutting the mountain

birch, locust, and tulip poplar, and successively other valuable species. During the past

few years he has cut everything merchantable. He is now beginning to extend his

operations to considerable distances beyond the main lines of transportation by the

construction of tramways and even cheap, short rails.” (Wilson 1902, p.24, l.10). They

were also anxious about the increase in fires associated with the increased use of rail lines

in the forests. “Forest fires have been one of the greatest curses of this country. From

the days of Indian occupation down to the present time fires have swept through these

Appalachian Mountain forests. Some of these have preceded the lumberman, others have

34

accompanied him, and still others have followed in his wake, and these last have been far

more destructive because of the tops and other rubbish which he has left behind him

scattered among the remaining growth.”(Wilson 1902, p.24, l.35). Navigation interests

were alarmed at the deposition of sediment in their channels of transport. By 1901

farmers were already burdened by the loss of good agricultural land to scouring by high

velocity floods. Thus, along with a serious concern for the loss of the last standing

hardwood producing forests in the United States, water quality, quantity and navigability

became the driving forces behind the movement to create a National Forest in the

Southern Appalachians. “The streams of the Appalachians are of enormous value to the

nation for water power and navigation. If the forests are removed from the mountains,

this value will be reduced to a fraction, because the soil from the denuded watersheds

will so rapidly fill reservoirs and channels that even the resources of the Government

itself will be insufficient to keep them clear”(Secretary of Agriculture 1908, p.9, l.2).

Floods and Forests

In 1902 a seminal report was written to promote the establishment of a Southern

Appalachian National Forest. A Report of the Secretary of Agriculture in Relation to the

Forests, Rivers, and Mountains of the Southern Appalachian Region was published by

the Agricultural Department at the direction of President Theodore Roosevelt. It was an

important element in a campaign to manage the nation’s natural resources with the

long-term benefit of the public in mind. As such, it was controversial and without many

legal precedents. Congress had to be convinced that federal funds should be used to

purchase private lands and take them out of the private sector, and legal precedents had to

35

be found to enable the government to buy such lands. The culmination of the campaign

was the passage of the Weeks Act in 1911, which was designed to regulate the

navigability of rivers by protecting watersheds. Between the writing of the 1902 report

and the passage of the Weeks Act, lumbering activities continued to rise. An

examination of that publication and other congressional reports written before 1911

provide valuable information on the actual condition of the southern forests at that time

and the forests standing today.

In 1902 the mountain lands identified as forested were not necessarily in virgin

condition. Indeed, only 7.4% of the Southern Appalachian forests were reported in virgin

condition in 1902. Of these virgin forests, most were likely found on ridge tops that

produced less desirable timber, or on slopes too steep and inaccessible to make it worth

the effort to remove them. In the 1902 document the lower forests about the headwaters

of the Tallulah and Chattooga Rivers are said to be in inferior condition to those located

in the highlands of the mountains.

To varying degrees the forests had been lumbered or, along the creeks bottoms,

cleared. Ayres and Ashe, two of the authors of the 1902 report, acknowledged that

woodlands associated with farms were largely culled and partially covered with second

growth stands. The land cleared for agriculture was in the most vulnerable location and

likely added to early erosion and sedimentation problems. The cleared creek bottoms

started the silting of navigable streams that was then exacerbated by the increased

upslope timbering of the region for fresh agriculture lands and ultimately large scale

lumbering.

36

So, yes, vast acres of wooded areas remained but those forests were to varying

degrees intact or degraded. The Seventh Census of 1850 listed a total of 142,519 acres of

farmland in Macon County, in western North Carolina, with 32,436 acres identified as

improved and 110,083 unimproved. The Eighth Census of 1860 listed a total of 336,555

acres of farmland in Macon County, with 32,609 improved and 303, 946 unimproved and

the Ninth Census of 1870 listed a total of 337,238 acres of farmland in Macon County

with 34,795 improved and 280,573 as woodland (U.S. Census 1850,1860 & 1870).

Suitable agricultural land was limited by acreage with slopes of less than 10% in the

mountains, which explains why the “improved” category did not change substantially

over the years. The growing acres of farmland in the 1860 census probably reflect

wooded areas that were used to graze livestock and provide wood for local construction

and heat and energy demands.

Population increases and demands on local farming communities to produce more

crops, along with loss of soil from the already limited suitable farming acreage in

mountain lands forced the upward drift of clearing for corn and staples onto ever steeper

slopes, which in turn eroded ever faster. This destructive cycle looped back on itself

again and again eroding the community as it eroded the land. Combine these conditions

with a dramatic rise in timbering activity and the damage done by the now more frequent

and violent floods was sobering, indeed, to those concerned with the overall economic

health of the country. “ All the soil on the flood plain of Cane Creek, 9 miles in length,

was removed, leaving only large stones and rock…”(Ayres, H. B. and W.W. Ashe 1902,

p.75, l.21). Considering only 24 percent of the forests were heavily cut at that time, it is

hard to imagine the ensuing damage caused by floods over the next few years as

37

deforestation accelerated. Some sense of the magnitude of the problem can be gathered

from the following: the Savannah River at Augusta, Georgia was reported have

experienced an increase in the number of floods from 1876 to 1905 of 94 percent

(Brandegee 1908).

Sedimentation in the streambeds was hampering the navigation industry while

agriculture was harmed by the inundation of valuable floodplain soils with heavy soils or

the scouring of the fertile land from the floodplains. In April of 1908 Mr. Brandegee

from the Committee on Forest Reservations and the Protection of Game reported that the

Government had spent over $41,000,000 upon rivers whose headwaters originated in the

Southern Appalachians, “and because of the continued inrush of sand and silt from

denuded mountain watersheds they are less navigable now than ever before.” (Brandegee

1908, p.4, l.21).

The 1908 reports reflect a level of concern mingled with the bitter knowledge that

the forests left standing were much diminished in value by deforestation. “A great

opportunity presented itself to the Government in the purchase of these lands seven or

eight years ago. The influences which are destroying the mountains were not then so far

advanced. Virgin hardwood timber lands existed in large areas and could have been

bought at from $1 to $5 per acre. Within the past eight years we have crossed the

threshold of a hardwood timber famine, and in consequence the prices of such virgin

hardwood lands as remain have advanced from 300 to 500 per cent.” (Secretary of

Agriculture 1908, p.8, l.10). Despite the loss of the original forests, a stable hardwood

system was still recognized as a necessity to the stability of the region and beyond.

38

Had the proponents of a national forest in the southern mountains had the political

power to actuate their vision in a timely fashion, thousands of acres of trees and many

tons of soil would have been preserved. As it is, one must suspect the timber companies

of exerting tremendous pressure on politicians to stall the creation of the national forests,

for six years passed before the Secretary of Agriculture recommended, though not

without remorse for the forests lost, that the cut over land be the priority purchase tracts.

The overall tone of the 1902 report is one of extreme concern for the condition of the

forests: “The rapid rate at which these lumbering operations have extended during the

past few years and the still more rapid rate at which they are being extended at the

present time, considered in connection with the destructive work of the fires and the

clearing for agriculture, indicates that within less than a decade every mountain cove

will have been invaded and robbed of its finest timber, and the last of the remnants of

these grand primeval Appalachian forests will have been destroyed. Hence the very

possibility of securing a forest reserve such as now contemplated is a possibility of the

present, not the future” (Wilson 1902, p.25, l.20), but here was not the power to stop the

immense timbering operations and the possibility of that moment disappeared.

Last of the Hardwood Forests

For the timber barons the stakes were high. By 1906, Ohio, the Great Lakes and

the lower Mississippi Valley, three out the four hardwood-producing regions of the

United States, had been depleted of valuable timber. This left the hardwoods of the

Appalachians as the last source of raw material for the hardwood dependant industries, a

source that was fast being removed. In 1906 the Appalachians provided 48 percent of the

39

hardwood on the market (Brandegee 1908). Since the other hardwood producing regions

held great potential as agricultural lands, the Southern Appalachians was considered to be

the nation’s most suitable area for on-going hardwood production (Secretary of

Agriculture, 1908). The aspiration of sustainable forestry practices that motivated the

people behind the formation of a National Forest in the Southern mountains, however,

was not a vision shared by the powerful timber and railroad interests of the time. Buying

denuded land, then, appears to have been a legislative loophole that allowed the final

massacre of the eastern hardwood forest to be sanctioned by Congress and one that gave

the timber barons a market on which to unload the spoiled land at a goodly price. Those

cleared lands did come to form the basis of the National Forests of today. If the then

existing forests and attendant ecosystems were sacrificed to a powerful lobby in order to

gain the long-term dream of a national forest, it certainly was a sacrifice in keeping with

the tactics of Prometheus.

Just as Prometheus was a conquering god absorbed into the Greek culture, the

timber companies that stripped the southern forests were not native to the area they so

readily left in shambles while pocketing the riches (Woodward 1971). Investors behind

commercial entities such as the William M. Ritter Lumber Company came from

Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, Michigan and Illinois (Lewis 1998, Lillard 1947). They

had little incentive to protect the soil or sustain the natural resources of an area to which

they held no allegiance. In a sense, these were the spoils of war. “The latter-day

timberland carpetbaggers came largely from New York, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and

even from Kansas. …Northern purchasers between 1880 and 1888 secured deeds to well

over a million acres of Louisiana lands alone. … In 1888 and 1889 Congress moved to

40

restrict purchases, but the cream of the southern public lands, state and federal, had been

skimmed by 1890” (Clark 1984, p.17). In another sense this was simply a landscape so

foreign to the newcomers that they did not understand the repercussions of deforestation

in the Appalachians.

The lands left bare in Ohio and the Great Lakes could be and had been turned into

productive agricultural lands. It was easy to rationalize that the same would happen in

the South. Indeed it did happen in the fertile Delta lands of the lower Mississippi

drainage, but again, not until the railroads came in great numbers to penetrate the interior

beyond the courses of the rivers. The Coastal Plain, land covered with magnificent pines,

was assumed to be the next great agricultural center of the South. Promoters like Pell did

not or would not see that this region was not suited to his projections. The great pine

forests of the Coastal Plain, like the mountains with which they shared the same period of

deforestation, did not possess soils fit for sustainable agriculture. Unlike the mountain

lands, the soil was not prone to slide off a steep incline but eroded into deep gullies, and

it was so porous that nutrients dissolved away with each rain. To keep the land in

production, the very railroads that robbed the land of its trees brought in guano by the

boxcar. Crops did flourish for a brief season or two before the artificial farming methods

and the illusion of abundance encouraged poor tilling practices that led to the washing

away of the level but porous soil. In the mountains, however, they were in it for the

timber assets alone, with agriculture never seriously considered, and once the trees were

gone there was nothing to keep the soils from washing off the mountain slopes. Both the

Coastal Plain and the mountains felt the disruptive impact of technologies introduced too

quickly and by a culture out of sync with the newly entered landscape (Strang 1997).

41

Fire on the Mountain

As we strive to understand the forest dynamics in the Southern Appalachians we might

question how fire tolerant was that forest system prior to the intense timber operations

that took place between 1870 and 1930. This is no easy task. Archaeological evidence

and the reports of early Europeans support the view that fire was widely used from very

early times on to manage the natural resources and yet, experts at the turn of the century

trying to tackle the repercussions of the terrible waste of natural resources viewed fire as

one of the greatest dangers to the forests of the South. This discrepancy between

attitudes could be attributed to two main factors, different goals and different technology.

The needs of these disparate cultures viewed the technology of fire in fundamentally

different ways. For the early inhabitants it was a tool that could be directly applied to the

landscape and used to encourage useful species of fauna and flora or to clear land of

timber for grazing and agricultural uses. However, at the turn of the twentieth century,

fire was a far greater problem because the intense and more frequent fires of that time

destroyed standing timber, regenerative root sprouts and weakened the soil of potential

timber-growing lands on a scale never before experienced. For the interested parties of

the turn of the 20th century fire best served their purposes in secondary forms, tamed to

the confines of the internal combustion engines driving trains and saw mills.

In these fire dependant eco-systems, fire played a role in the destruction of the

habitats it had help to create. Railroads, brought into the region to haul out the once

inaccessible timber resources of the interior, spouted out flames and sparks that caught

the artificially loaded fuels of the forest floors on fire. This time, the results were intense

fires that in the coastal plain destroyed the climax forests standing in long neglected

42

grasslands or those weakened by turpentine production, which made the trees even more

susceptible to fire damage (Olmstead, 1856). In the mountains, the heavy fuel loads from

timber debris fed fires that scorched the unanchored earth, rendering barren what little did

not give to the pull of gravity.

43

CHAPTER IV.

LEGACY OF DEFORESTATION ON THE SOUTHERN APPALACHIANS

“…innocent and gullible, without bowels for avarice or compassion or forethought

either, changing the face of the earth: felling a tree which took two hundred years to

grow, in order to extract from it a bear or a capful of wild honey; Obsolete too: still

felling the two-hundred-year old tree when the bear and the wild honey were gone and

there was nothing in it any more but a raccoon or a possum whose hide was worth at the

most two dollars, turning the earth into a howling waste from which he would be the first

to vanish, not even on the heels but synchronous with the slightly darker wild men whom

he had dispossessed, because, like them, only the wilderness could feed and nourish

him;” William Faulkner (Faulkner 1955, p.4, l. 26)

Species Lost and Lingering

The massive disturbances imposed on the landscape of the Southeast since the

arrival of the Europeans have led to erosion of topsoil, deposition of sediments in stream

beds, and loss of fertile flood plain soils either by inundation of heavy sediments or the

scouring of streambeds. Their arrival triggered the extinction of native elements of the

ecosystems and invasion by foreign fauna and flora. The full effect on species diversity

can probably never be determined since much of the damage was done before accurate

inventories were possible. With Promethean disregard of the natural systems that support

us, we have taken much from the land since our arrival in the Southeast. During the 17th

44

and 18th centuries skinned deer carcasses by the thousands were left to rot by Indian

hunters. “Between 1699 and 1705, Carolina shipped an average of over forty-five

thousand deerskins annually to London. And between 1705 and 1715, the trade in

deerskins was the most valuable business endeavor in the colony” (Braund 1993, p.29,

l.8). The Indian culture in which the taking of a life for food was closely knit with the

hunter’s spiritual well being, in which forgiveness was asked with each kill, had

unraveled under the influence of Western culture and economic demands. The resilient

deer returned to the land, but other species could not survive the radical changes to their

habitat or the pressures of commercial hunting. Gone is the Carolina Parakeet, the only

native parakeet of the eastern United States, gone the vast flocks of Passenger Pigeons,

gone from the wild is the Red Wolf, and gone are the great Chestnut forests.

Almost mythic in the imagination of American people today, the American Chestnut

serves well to remind us of our destructive powers, yet inspire us to contain them. As an

ecosystem, the oak-chestnut forest is gone, but individual chestnut trees tenaciously

re-sprout from their roots and inspire efforts to reintroduce them to the Southern

Appalachian forests. Below the high elevation spruce-fir forests, Castanea dentata made

up between a quarter and one-third of the forest of the Southern Appalachians at the time

of European contact. The chestnut-dominated communities stretched for miles in some

areas as Benjamin Hawkins (Hawkins 1980) witnessed in 1796, “…continue thro’ rich

uneven chesnut land for 5 miles and cross the Etowah”. They were documented in 1701

by Lawson (Lawson 1967), “Here are plenty of Chestnut, which are rarely found in

Carolina, and never near the Sea, or Salt-Water; tho’ they are frequently in such Places

near in Virginia”, while Mark Catesby traveling in 1714 to the Appalachians reported

45

that “…chestnuts and small oaks are the trees that principally grow on these mountains,

with some Chinapin, and other smaller shrubs;…” (Catesby 1974, p.v, l.41) William

Byrd’s testimony reinforces other early accounts with the added bonus of a great animal

story. “But bears are fondest of chestnuts, which grow plentifully towards the mountains,

upon very large trees, where the soil happens to be rich. We were curious to know how it

happened that many of the outward branches of those trees came to be broke off in that

solitary place and were informed that the bears are so discreet as not to trust their

unwieldy bodies on the smaller limbs of the tree that would not bear their weight, but

after venturing as far as is safe, which they can judge to an inch, they bite off the end of

the branch, which falling down, they are content to finish their repast upon the ground. In

the same cautious manner they secure the acorns that grow on the weaker limbs of the

oak.” (Byrd 1966, p.246)

The importance of this species as food for game has been acknowledged by the

Cherokee in their myths and documented by the early naturalists in the region, but to the

timber barons and itinerant lumberjacks at the turn of the 20th Century, the American

Chestnut was a commodity to cut and haul, leaving behind a damaged landscape to which

they held no allegiance. They came from the northern states that were already depleted

of the towering white pines and northern hardwoods or were poor immigrants from Italy

or Austria happy to find work of any kind in this land of promise. By 1908 most of the

virgin stands of chestnut were gone.

The American Chestnut Tree held a much more venerable place in the life of the

Indians and settlers as it provided an important source of food for people, game and

livestock. The nuts of the American Chestnut are much smaller than those from

46

European or Chinese species, but they were considered to be more delicious. Mark

Catesby wrote that bears frequented the mountains because of the Chestnuts: “…the

mountains were much frequented by them for the sake of chestnuts with which at this time

these mountains amounted.”(Catesby 1974, p.vi, l.5). They show up in the Cherokee

myths collected by James Mooney: “Food was getting scarce in the mountains, and the

council was to decided what to do about it. They had sent out messengers all over, and

while they were talking two bears came in and reported that they had found a country in

the low grounds where there were so many chestnuts and acorns that mast was knee

deep.” (Mooney 1900, p.328, l.2).

Locals from Horse Cove in the headwaters of the Chattooga River recall collecting

the ripe burrs and hauling baskets to markets in the early 1900’s (Lombard 1972). This

was a practice that Benjamin Hawkins noted in his journal while traveling through the

mountains of Georgia in 1796: “…the woman had just returned from the settlements, a

journey of 17 days. She carried a bushel and a half of chesnuts on her back and gave

them for a petticoat. This little settlement is on the richest lands I have seen, the second

low grounds about eighty feet above the first, with a gentle slope, the lands above by far

the richest, the growth poplar and chesnut very large without any undergrowth…”

(Hawkins 1980, p.8, l.10). In addition to its importance as food, the light yet durable

wood was used for building and fencing. Resistant to decay, even fallen trees found in

the woods today can be trimmed and sawed to recover useable timber. When the

remaining chestnut forests were badly damaged by the blight in the late 1920’s and early

1930’s, the dying and dead trees were in high demand for construction. It was a popular

tree to use for cabins in the Southern Appalachians. Many Civilian Conservation Corps

47

projects used chestnut timbers, including the Nature Center at the Highlands Biological

Station in Highlands, North Carolina.

However, the American chestnut was not the species most desired by the timber

companies for high quality board lumber. Oak, walnut and cherry preceded the chestnut

on the priority list for the timber market and it joined maple in the second rank of

desirable lumber. Between 1899 and 1907 the cut of oak, poplar, elm and ash decreased

by 36.5%, 37.9%, 50.8% and 20.3% respectively, as these species were removed from the

forests of the Southern Appalachians. The same period of time shows an increase in the

cut of maple, chestnut, birch and hickory by 39.4%, 97.1%, 179.4% and 53.4%

respectively. “From some of it has been removed only the best species, such as walnut

and poplar. From most of it the chestnut and oak, which form the main body of the forest,

have also been cut.” (Secretary of Agriculture 1908, p.24, l.16). These percentages and

the quote were taken from a 1908 report to the 60th Congress, Senate Doc. No. 91, but the

research took place in 1907, only five years after the Secretary of Agriculture’s 1902

report on the status of the Southern Appalachian Mountains that estimated the region to

retain over 80% of its forest cover. This cover was not untouched, as only 7.4% was

believed to be virgin forests at that time, but it was apparently a stable, healthy forest that

had been culled to varying degrees.

Another pressure on the chestnut communities was the tanning industry. Oaks and

chestnuts are high in tannic acid, making them a sought after commodity in an era when

leather was widely used. A thorough comparative study of the removal of oak and

chestnut communities could give valuable insights to current chestnut reintroduction

efforts. As oak had value as board lumber, some of the earlier logging operations

48

probably culled the best of the oaks, leaving others behind to regenerate. The Chestnut

communities, however, may have experienced a greater percentage of clear cuts if

tanning, which used the entire tree and for which size was not a factor, was the main

purpose to which they were destined. “The only industry that uses the forest without

much waste is the tannin-extract business, which while using up the mature timber, is

open to objection in that it takes the chestnut and oak forests almost clean, young trees

and all.” (Secretary of Agriculture 1908, p.25, l.16).

Much is said about the loss of chestnut trees to the blight, Crfyphonectria parasitica

(formerly: Endothia parasitica). However, that blight did not reach the Southern

Appalachians until the late 1920’s and early 1930’s. By then most of the primeval

chestnut communities had been cleared out of the forest system leaving only the

inaccessible coves and steepest slopes in possession of the trees that once accounted for

one-third of the trees in the Southern Appalachian forests. The majority of the chestnuts

attacked by the fungus would have been elements of a second growth forest left to

regenerate in the aftermath of logging operations starting as early as the 1870’s and

continuing at least until the passage of the Weeks Act in 1911. This forest would have

been, at best, sixty years old and portions were young second growth forests of

approximately twenty years in age. The following percentages reflect the percent of

forested acres of the respective States in the Southern Appalachian Mountains that had

been cut as of 1907: Georgia 84%; North Carolina 66%; South Carolina 83%; average

78%.

Only five years before, in the 1902 report made by the U.S. Agricultural Department

on the status of the Southern Appalachian Mountains, the 348,588 acres of the

49

Tallulah-Chattooga River Basin was listed as 89% per cent wooded, though probably

culled to some degree (Ayers and Ashe, 1902). The 11 % that had been cleared was

confined to “the creek bottoms and a few mountain coves”. Between 1902 and 1906

deforestation accelerated until an average of 78% of the trees disappeared from the

mountains of Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Roughly one third of them

were chestnuts. Before the passage of the Weeks Act, still five years away, even the

remote Whiteside and Horse Coves in the Chattooga watershed were logged. Frances

Lombard, a local historian from Whiteside Cove, wrote that in 1909 Walter Dunn and

Marcellus Buchannan from Sylva set up a circle saw on Fowler’s Creek in Whiteside

Cove and built a lumber camp for fifty plus men. This timber operation lasted until 1915

until, in her words, “everything was moved away. The men, the mill, the camp and the

tram car”(Lombard 1972, p.94, l.10). The other thing gone was the forest. Again in

Lombard’s words: “In this deep woodland giant hardwoods and native white and

hemlock pine stretched for miles in any direction. Mighty trees that had never known

blight or leaf-eating insects, nor yet the bite of the ax or cross-cut saw. Enormous trees,

sound as a gold dollar throughout. Some scaled up to 18,000 feet one cut.” (Lombard

1972, p.92, l.28).

Ms. Lombard, now well into her eighties, and her family welcomed the lumber

operations that brought jobs and activity to the mountain communities. She speaks with

more longing for the open fields and fences and the excitement of the lumber operations

than for the deep forests, but then, they fell as she came into this world. “In 1924 this

was a humming settlement, about sixty persons strong. Mr. James Farley from East

Tennessee brought a sawmill in, employing most of the local men and good number of

50

outsiders. …Virgin timber- white pine, chestnut and hardwood- was cut (using old-

fashioned cross cut saws) then sawed and hauled a way, the likes of which we will never

see again. Down the narrow, steep, rocky road, with horses and wagons, to the river, and

up the opposite side equally dangerous, on past our schoolhouse, causing great

excitement as we all stretched our necks to see the lumber wagons go by.”

(Lombard 1972, p.29, l.13).

The forest infected by the chestnut blight was not an intact, healthy ecosystem. At

the turn of the twentieth century, the chestnut was living in a radically altered forest.

Periodic burning had been applied to the forests for thousands of years, some of them

probably passed through areas that were burned with a light touch and others burned hard

enough to open large areas to the sun, as described by William Byrd in 1728 and called

poisoned fields (Byrd 1966). Now most of the fires were consistently intense and

damaging, fed by massive amounts of fuel left behind by the lumbering operations. The

earlier fires swept through a shady forest of high trees that would have buffered the

understory plants, but during this period of deforestation the ground was exposed to a

great deal more full sun and understory species were probably stressed by exposure to

unaccustomed sunlight. The chestnut trees in this young forest would likely have

sprouted from their own roots, many with multiple stemmed trunks, possibly making

them more susceptible to fungal pathogens. When the blight arrived, they may well have

been trying to survive in an exposed landscape where much of the original soil, now

unanchored, had recently been swept away by the region’s heavy precipitation.

Living in that soil was another fungus detrimental to Crfyphonectria parasitica that

even today keeps the chestnut blight at bay for a while. Chestnuts emerging from old

51

stumps and root systems still achieve on the rare occasion enough age to thrust a spray of

pale yellow flowers into the early summer skies of the Appalachians. However, most

chestnut trees succumb to the lesions caused by the harmful fungus well before they are

able to reach a reproductive stage. The pale-leaved chinquapin intermingles with

remnant chestnuts on the slopes of the mountains and until recently seemed to thrive

where its towering cousin gave way to the invading fungus. Sadly, it too now is finally

giving way to the disease (Zahner, personal communication).

We might then question the wisdom of total fire suppression in the Southern

Appalachians if we really do wish to give the Chestnut a second chance or reward the

tenacity of the Chinquapin. Studies such as those conducted by the Delcourts suggest

that a temperate rainforest like the Blue Ridge Mountains could sustain fire tolerant

species of trees through human manipulation of fire. This is further substantiated by the

studies of Bratton and Meier that indicate the same forests are losing their fire dependent

communities and shifting towards less fire tolerant species after less than one hundred

years of fire suppression by the Forest Service. The fact that a forest ecosystem had been

intact for thousands of years may give us reason to ponder the vastness of geologic time

or perhaps raise the question of Homo sapiens’ role in sustaining intermediate

successional states in limbo for over 10,000 years.

Albert J. Meir and Susan P. Bratten investigated the frequency and distribution of

natural disturbances in the Chattooga Watershed, an area that encompasses the Upper

Chattooga River. Their study supports the idea that modern fire suppression policies

have impacted the forest composition from fire tolerant to fire sensitive species and

52

suggests that removal of the current forest canopy would continue that trend (Bratton and

Meier 1995, Meier and Bratton 1995).

According to Bratton and Meier, in A.D. 1811 the headwater area of the Chattooga

River had a forest composition of 42% oak, 25.5% pine, 19.5% chestnut, and 2% hickory.

These percentages were estimated from a land-lottery survey conducted within Rabun

County, Georgia. In 1996 the U.S. Forest Service, according to the Delcourts, considered

the area forests to be composed of over 50% oaks and hickory, 25% conifers and the

remaining 25% predominantly a mix of tulip poplars, black gum, elms and maple. From

these numbers it appears that as the chestnut trees were removed from the landscape a

large portion of the niche they left vacant was not filled by oaks that shared a tolerance

for fire, but by less fire tolerant species like tulip poplar, maples and black gum.

Early Forest Service policy is understandable given the ferocity of the fires at the

turn of the 20th century. Fires no longer burned; fed by massive amounts of fuel

negligently left on the ground, they scorched. Layered on these conditions during the era

of large-scale timbering was a landscape largely uninhabited by groups of people that had

traditionally used prescribed burning as a management tool. Gone were the Cherokee,

the cattle drovers, and in large measure the farmers. Under the old fire management

regimes, regular, if not annual, systematic burning would have kept the fuel loads down,

maintaining a relatively clear under-story that would burn quickly and with moderate

heat. Game and, later, livestock foraged under the forest canopy. Accumulatively, these

management techniques would have shaped the landscape. Some, such as grazing, would

have more negative impact than others, but none of these earlier actions resulted in the

dramatic changes wrought by the railroads and commercial timbering.

53

Prometheus in Check

"What havoc the introduction of any new beast of prey must cause in a country, before

the instincts of the indigenous inhabitants have become adapted to the stranger's craft or

power.” (Darwin 1937, p.45, l.23). Darwin’s quote heralded the destructive influence of

new cultures introducing new technologies to the forests of the Southern Appalachians.

Embedded in the dire message is also an element of hope. Ideally, we would become

adapted to the extent that we become a balancing rather than a disruptive force. Our

history as a species can give insight and guidance as people of this era tackle the difficult

issues related to human populations and natural resources. The better understanding we

have of the historical landscape, the better we can judge the repercussions of our actions

today on the same landscape. Research can only improve as we increase our

comprehension of past influences on the forests of the Southern Appalachians. Equally

important to research is a better understanding of the real state of the former forests. The

knowledge gained from the first hand accounts of people in the early days of contact with

this landscape is a valuable tool.

The chestnut, again, provides a useful example. Efforts to reintroduce the American

chestnut have centered on cross breeding programs. The resistant Chinese chestnut is

crossed and re-crossed with the American variety to eventually produce a tree that is

genetically 95 percent or more American chestnut, with the small percent of Chinese

chestnut providing resistance to the blight. Would this worthy endeavor be enhanced by

efforts to create an environment similar to the original fire-adapted system in which it

evolved? The geographic locations that encompass the chestnut’s original habitat do not

have the same forests standing on them today. The American Chestnut not only fell prey

54

to deforestation and introduced diseases but perhaps also to a narrow view of history that

only recognizes itself.

A straight chronological approach to the history of Homo sapiens as an influence on

the landscape cannot do justice to the historical and cultural intricacies that have

influenced the region. History rarely happens in simple chronological layers, nor are the

layers easily peeled away from preceding eras. More geologic in nature, history settles

into pockets left by previous generations; folds back on itself and in the process embeds

particles of other cultures in the sediment of that phase; then cracks, fissures and is

injected with another matrix from again another culture. Thus the current profile of the

Southeast is complex and wrought with a multitude of features introduced by indigenous

and alien cultures alike, with elements such as fire management trickling down through

the ages, belonging to no one culture but adapted by each to suit their survival priorities.

The Horse Cove Bog examined by the Delcourts has been accumulating sediment

since 1890 BC (Delcourt and Delcourt 1996). During those approximately four thousand

years the landscape of the South has seen its share of invading cultures as successions of

Indian cultures followed in the wake of one another and as European explorers and

settlers in turn wrought their changes upon the earthly resources they found in abundance.

Each influx of new people brought with them different agricultural techniques, hunting

methods, diseases and belief systems that together triggered ecological shifts in their new

environment. People have influenced the populations of plants and animals and they

have stabilized ecosystems advantageous to their lifestyle. Fire was not the only

influence on the landscape but historically it has been an important tool applied directly

55

by humans. The vast Chestnut forests of the Southern Appalachians are one

manifestation of a human practice that shaped the landscape.

As we strive to return to an ecological balance and healthier water quality via river

basin management, it is poignant to note that the nation turned away from the logic of

sustainable watershed management at the very point in time when railroads penetrated the

nation’s interior lands. Again humans shaped the landscape, but perhaps for the first time

in the history, mankind’s technological prowess finally exceeded the confines of the

natural world, making possible unimaginable levels of extraction of this continent’s

natural resources. As this human technological prowess increased, the repercussions of

human activity on the landscape intensified. The expansion of the railroads in the

Southeast starting around 1870 facilitated the over-exploitation of the forests of the

Southeast, just as they had the decade before in the northern states. The changes to the

mountain and coastal plain forests of the Southeast were all the more destructive because

of the speed with which they took place and the degree of deforestation. Both factors

lessened the likelihood of regeneration and exacerbated the actual removal of the soil

from extensive areas in the region. This was not the beginning of human influence upon

the landscape, but it was the beginning of an unprecedented human capacity to

permanently alter the landscape of the Southeast.

The latest influx of human activity in the mountainous regions of the Southeast also

has potential widespread change. If the Southern Appalachians are to serve us as a

healthy forest system that provides a protective environment for water quality, a refuge

for biodiversity, a source of hardwood trees, and as a place to refresh our spirits with

quiet and recreation, then the level of development today is overreaching the carrying

56

capacity of that environment. In addition to the intrusion of more human activity in a

fragile landscape, an element of permanence, through pavement and construction, will

have long-term repercussions that deserve careful consideration.

Management efforts are complicated by the new cultural preferences this generation

brings to the area. Suburban style housing developments are spreading out from the

mountain towns. Individual houses, some valued in the millions, are tucked into every

imaginable nook and cranny of the mountains. These isolated but ever increasing pockets

of human dwellings create difficulties for large-scale forest management. It is difficult

enough to balance the many native elements within a forest community among

themselves, and then include introduced species and forest communities. Reintroducing

the human element, which the creators of the Forest Service and National Parks initially

worked hard to reduce, creates a level of conflict between the short term gratification of

human interests and long term management that supports the already habitat deprived

species of the forests.

The forced buy-out by the National Forests from mountain citizens has long been a

bone of contention and resentment for some of the mountain residents, but given the

direction the forests were headed in private hands in 1900, it is hard to disregard the

value of locking up large areas of forest that exclude unlimited human usage. Here again,

history has been colored to some degree by local myth. The precedent setting land

purchase through condemnation was not thrust upon a local farmer, but actively

negotiated by the owner of the land. In 1911 the first acquisition bought under the Weeks

Act was land in the Chattooga River watershed owned by lumber company owner

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Andrew Gennett who willing allowed his land to be condemned in order to escape the

vagaries of Georgia title law (Gennett 2002).

It comes back to sacrifice. What sacrifices would we make to bring back the fabled

Chestnut, the Longleaf Pine or the Panther? Would we accept land-use plans restricting

building permits in areas that would benefit from the occasional burn? Are we willing to

exchange the pleasures of indiscriminate access to public lands for more Wilderness areas

with limited access? As our populations increase, do we need to invade every niche of

every ecosystem or are we approaching a level of cultural development as a species that

is mature enough to prioritize other species as important options on a finite planet?

The actions of Homo sapiens throughout the Southeast indicate that people will push

available technology to its limit in order to maximize natural resources utilization. Given

time, initially harmful technologies may find equilibrium in the system and that culture

will stabilize within its natural environs. If not, the technology will exceed the system’s

ecological carrying capacity and thereby alleviate the problem by its own means. Often

enough, a new culture moves into a previously stable area and disrupts the equilibrium

before nature finds its final balance.

Are we willing to hold in check our Promethean propensity to exploit natural

resources in exchange for a world rich with the potential that a grand diversity of species

represents? Western mankind has raised Prometheus to the status of a hero for giving us

fire, for providing cures for diseases, for giving us unlimited access to natural resources,

in short for all the benefits an egocentric species admires. In truth, it was his

transgressions, and they are our own, of pride and greed and contempt, that brought the

58

ills of the world into our lives. It is time for us to view ourselves as part of the

environment of the Southeast rather than as an invading culture.

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Documents

PROMETHEUS IN THE WATERSHED ABSTRACT · PROMETHEUS IN THE WATERSHED by CHRISTA S. FRANGIAMORE B.A., Georgia State University, 1976 A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The