by Eric Rutkow
But even as a food the apple slowly lost much of its character. In the early twentieth century, the U.S. Department of Agriculture identified more than seventeen thousand varieties of apples in its Nomenclature of the Apple. Many of these still exist, preserved in heirloom and research orchards like the government-run Plant Genetic Resources Unit in Geneva, New York. But for most Americans, apples mean one of a dozen or so commercially produced varieties, like the Granny Smith or Red Delicious, pretty but ineffectual fruits that would have horrified horticulturists like Washington and Jefferson and been an abomination to that great patron saint of apples, John Chapman.
The Backwoodsman
Serene, not sullen, were the solitudes
Of this unsighing people of the woods.
—Lord Byron, Eulogy on Colonel Boon
FROM THE EARLIEST DAYS of colonization, the prevalence of forests and trees caused settlers to face situations unknown to them in Europe. In response, these emigrants developed a new vocabulary to express their culture, an American vocabulary. The word “backlog,” for example, which now means unused excess supply, was originally a seventeenth-century term for the large log that sat in the rear of a fireplace. Its first written reference appeared in a 1684 work by the influential Puritan minister Increase Mather: “The spit was carried up [the] chimney, and came down with the point forward, and stuck in the back-log.” “Log-rolling,” a political term for trading favors to advance legislation, derived from the practice of neighbors teaming together to roll logs off of newly cut land. The “stump speech,” another staple of American politics, was once a campaign oration literally delivered from atop a tree stump, a widespread practice when ever-present stumps formed natural platforms.
One of the most interesting American neologisms, largely forgotten now, was the word “backwoodsman.” The concept emerged comparatively late. Its root, “backwoods,” first appeared in the 1742 Calendar of Virginia State Papers when several frontier explorers petitioned the governor for official recognition: “[S]ettling ye back parts of Virginia which was a veri Great Hassirt [hazard] & Dengrous, . . . has proved hortfull to severil of ous that were ye first settlers of these back woods.” “Backwoods,” then, specifically meant the uncleared forested area to the west of the early settlements, beyond the Alleghenies, a type of woods so broad and remote that no geographical equivalent existed in England. Most of territorial early America, in effect, was backwoods, the domain of savages, wild animals, and mighty trees. And for the first 150 years of settlement, this wilderness saw few visitors aside from fur trappers, traders, and perhaps the occasional botanist. The term “backwoodsman” itself only appeared in 1784, after the Revolutionary War had already concluded.
Few Americans at this point had any idea who or what a backwoodsman was. Culture in this period was oriented decidedly toward the inhabited settlements of the seaboard. Washington was the great hero, relations between the thirteen colonies the order of the day. The connection between western expansion and the American idea, subsequently made famous by such historians as Frederick Jackson Turner, was in its infancy—Michaux’s proposed trip was ten years away; Lewis and Clark’s a decade beyond. While the majority of people lived in and around forests, they were not the unknown forests of the interior. The waves of settlers that poured across the Alleghenies only gained momentum around the turn of the century, the same period when Johnny Appleseed was roaming Ohio. To the extent that Americans thought of men living at the forested frontier it was generally with disdain. Crèvecoeur, for example, described such people as “no better than carnivorous animals of a superior rank,” who, “remote from the power of example, and check of shame, . . . exhibit the most hideous parts of our society.”
The hazy idea of the backwoodsman first received a face when Daniel Boone arrived on the national scene in 1784. That year a version of his “autobiography” appeared in a fifteen-page appendix to John Filson’s well-known work The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke. The narrator—ostensibly a fifty-year-old Boone, but likely Filson, who had used Boone as a guide while traveling through Kentucky—recounted a series of battles that he fought with the Indians while attempting to settle the new territory. It was a bloody narration, though told almost dispassionately: “[They] cut his head off, while [the] little daughter shut the door.” The image of Boone that emerged was of a man predisposed to exist exclusively in the great interior forests, who loved hunting above all else and fought valiantly when circumstances demanded. Reflecting back on his life, the Boone of this history wrote,
Many dark and sleepless nights have I been a companion for owls, separated from the cheerful society of men, scorched by the summer’s sun, and pinched by the winter’s cold, an instrument ordained to settle the wilderness: but now the scene is changed; peace crowns the sylvan shade.
Although Filson’s Boone never called himself a “backwoodsman,” he set forth many of the elements that later defined the archetype. He was savage enough to both kill Indians and live among them, not a Native American but an American Native. Unlike earlier settlers, he preferred the forest and its trees, which offered him a respite from civilization and fertile hunting grounds. He was self-reliant and a preternaturally good shot. The rifle, not the ax, was his most trusted tool, for his concern was not in taming the woods but in exploiting the habitat without changing it. He was as much a creature of the forest as the bears, bucks, and raccoons whose skin he wore as clothing.
The real Daniel Boone, it will come as no surprise, was more complex than the figure Filson portrayed. He was born on October 22, 1734, in western Pennsylvania to Quaker parents (though he was not religious). During his twenties, he served in both the French and Indian War and the Cherokee Uprising, and when he wasn’t soldiering he earned money as a market hunter, making expeditions into the wilderness that lasted weeks or months. In 1767, one of these long hunts took him to Kentucky for the first time.
Boone was not, as some legends claimed, the first pioneer to explore Kentucky, but he was instrumental in its development, largely as a pawn in the chaotic chess game of land speculation. Boone’s family was among the roughly fifty British settlers who attempted in September 1773 to form the territory’s first permanent settlement. Later he fought with the Virginia militia in Dunmore’s War, a conflict that ended when the Shawnee Indians relinquished their claims to Kentucky. Shortly thereafter, a prominent land speculator hired Boone to lead a survey mission across the territory, and in this capacity Boone literally blazed a famous trail, later known as the Wilderness Road, and also founded the settlement of Boonesborough.
These Kentucky adventures had been the entirety of Boone’s story in the Filson biography, but the historical figure actually lived until September 26, 1820, often in contravention of his own growing mythology as a backwoodsman. He fought in the Revolution, mostly to defend his community from Native American attacks, and was court-martialed for treason but acquitted. After the hostilities ceased, he served three stints in the Virginia state assembly (which included the settled portions of Kentucky) and achieved fleeting prosperity as a speculator, even owning seven slaves at one point. Mounting debts eventually caught up to him, and the already renowned Boone fled from America to Spanish-controlled Missouri in 1799. Of course, by the turn of the century, the veneer of the Boone mythology had already peeled away from the actual man and taken on a life of its own.
Throughout the early decades of the nineteenth century, his legend swelled. An 1816 article asserted that he was “the first settler of Kentucky” and had “taken part in all the wars of America.” Willfully ignorant of Boone’s fleeing from his debts, the author wrote, “he might have accumulated riches as readily as any man in Kentucky; but he prefers the woods.”
The popular Boone myth was actually only one of a number of social and political factors that were pushing the backwoodsman character upward from the lowest rung of society. The western migration that was sustaining Johnny Appleseed’s work had brought millions into t
he backwoods—the population of the trans-Appalachian West, the supposed domain of the backwoodsman, grew from 0.1 million in 1790 to 3.7 million by 1830. Additionally, Jefferson’s ideals of rural democracy had taken root and championed these yeoman farmers, who were perceived to follow in the literal footsteps of the backwoodsmen. The frontier hunters became known as the trailblazers that opened up the interior for farming. They were no longer the antisocial vagrants of Crèvecoeur, but the embodiment of resourcefulness and bravery, an American original.
The first person to put this newfound national icon to work was an author named James Paulding. He was part of a New York–based community of writers known as the Knickerbocker Group, which was the most influential American literary circle in the early 1800s and included Washington Irving. Irving and Paulding were close friends and collaborators, but had differing views on the direction that American literature should take, with Paulding favoring a more nationalist flavor over the traditional attachment to British culture. Paulding wanted to write literature that captured the ethos of America, reflecting the quality of the landscape and the realities of life in the new country. He once wrote, “[My] object was to indicate to the youthful writers of [my] native country, the rich poetic resources with which it abounds, as well as to call their attention home.” And the first work that he produced in this new style was an epic poem titled The Backwoodsman.
Published in 1818, The Backwoodsman was a landmark in American literature for its patriotic intent, the forefront of the movement to build an artistic style around national tropes, not borrowed European conceits. Unfortunately, the poem hardly survived the barbs of its critics. As Paulding’s son wrote in a biography of his father, the intention behind the work was “hardly admissible as an apology for a total lack of any clear plot.” The backwoodsman of Paulding’s poem was not yet the unflappable hunter of Boone legends, but a poor, landless New Yorker who headed west over the Alleghenies in search of independence and property—someone who settled the backwoods and then devoted himself to farming and clearing trees. (This rival character type, the settler farmer, was also claiming the name “backwoodsman” early on, though the Boone version largely won this logomachy.) Nonetheless, Paulding’s work, when not stalled in the treacle of scenery and confused narration, included many elements of “backwoods” life, such as Indian battles and the hero’s fearing that society was quickly catching up.
The Backwoodsman may have failed as art, but it succeeded in inspiring others, as the author had hoped. One writer in particular, James Fenimore Cooper, took the message to heart. He was the son of William Cooper, the founder of Cooperstown, New York, and a passionate promoter of a domestic maple sugar industry that never took off in New York State. The younger Cooper’s first book, Precaution (1820), had been set in England and, as he later lamented, had “embraced a crude effort to describe foreign manners.” Cooper noted that his friends—Paulding almost certainly among them—reproached him for writing about “a state of society so different from that to which he belonged.” The same year that Cooper published Precaution, Paulding, in fact, had written a seminal essay on his movement for a national literature. It argued that America was on the cusp of literary greatness, when the country’s “early specimens will be sought after with avidity, and that those who led the way in the rugged discouraging path will be honoured, as we begin to honour the adventurous spirits who first sought, explored, and cleared this western wilderness.”
Cooper, as though responding to Paulding’s challenge, in 1823 published The Pioneers. It combined American themes of settling the wilderness with a more realistic approach to his subject matter. The title page featured a quatrain from The Backwoodsman as an epigraph, making Cooper’s influences unambiguously clear. The novel became a critical and commercial success, selling several thousand copies its first day and establishing the career of America’s first great novelist.
In The Pioneers, Cooper introduced America to one of the nineteenth century’s best-known literary characters, the backwoodsman Nathaniel “Natty” Bumppo. He appeared, fittingly, to the sound of a rifle shot that others heard while passing through the woods:
There was a peculiarity in the manner of the hunter. . . . He was tall, and so meagre as to make him seem above even the six feet that he actually stood in his stockings. On his head, which was thinly covered with lank, sandy hair, he wore a cap made of foxskin. . . . His face was skinny, and thin almost to emaciation; but yet it bore no signs of disease; on the contrary, it had every indication of the most robust and enduring health. The cold and the exposure had, together, given it a color of uniform red. . . . On his feet were deerskin moccasins, ornamented with porcupines’ quills, after the manner of the Indians, and his limbs were guarded with long leggings of the same material as the moccasins, which, gartering over the knees of his tarnished buckskin breeches, had obtained for him, among the settlers, the nickname of Leather-Stocking.
Bumppo—or Leatherstocking—was the iconic backwoodsman, a part of the forest and its trees, mistrusting of society, dependent on his rifle for survival, noble in his actions. Cooper explored this definitively American character through five novels, known collectively as The Leatherstocking Tales and, perhaps, the most influential series of nineteenth-century American literature.
Cooper’s backwoodsman, unlike that of Paulding, contrasted sharply with the actual farmers and loggers who inhabited the forests of America. Leatherstocking embraced the woodlands, while the others were fighting it. A prototypical logger was even featured in The Pioneers for contrast. He was a friend of Bumppo’s but not his peer—Leatherstocking defeated him in a shooting contest. The logger stood in particularly sharp relief to the backwoodsman when the former described his abilities: “I’ll turn my back to no man . . . for chopping and logging; for boiling down the maple sap; . . . making potash . . . or hoeing corn.” These were the skills of a settler, not a frontier-chasing pioneer who lived free of society.
Leatherstocking shared many qualities with Boone, and this was likely intentional. The myths and legends that started with Filson had inspired Cooper. In The Last of the Mohicans, the fourth book in the Leatherstocking series, Bumppo even mounted a daring raid on an Indian encampment, an episode ripped straight from Boone’s life when he saved his daughter from the Cherokees. To many ears, the names Nathaniel Bumppo and Daniel Boone also held a slight echo.
Boone may have been source material for Cooper’s new universal icon of America, but soon the new Leatherstocking-like archetype overtook and consumed most of the true-to-life substance still left in the Boone mythology. Essentially, the sociohistorical elements of the backwoodsman (pioneer forest hunters; men of quasi-nomadic disposition; blazers of wilderness trails for the incoming waves of settlers) and the fictional-mythological qualities (limitless valor; unrivaled marksmanship; disdain for society; oneness with the forest and its trees) were competing to form a new American hero.
This phenomenon came to fruition in 1833, when Timothy Flint published his biography of Daniel Boone. Much as Washington’s biographer had invented the cherry tree story to popularize the first president, Flint embellished Boone to make him a hero for the adventure-loving soul of American settlers. The old Indian-fighting stories remained, but now Boone was battling a bear with his bare hands and swinging from vines to escape danger. Flint’s book went through fourteen editions between 1833 and 1868, becoming arguably the most widely read biography of the nineteenth century.
By the mid-1830s, the backwoodsman, whether as the literary archetype, the superhero version of Boone, or some quasi-historical frontiersman, had become the corporeal embodiment of westward expansion. The forest and its trees that had so frightened the earliest settlers now hosted the most rugged American warrior. He represented autonomy, mobility, and enterprise for the burgeoning middle-class population of the Jacksonian and antebellum eras, and he appeared in countless works throughout the nineteenth century.
Wooden Technology
WHILE THE BA
CKWOODSMEN captured the imagination of a nation, they represented a small percentage of Americans, and their very existence was somewhat ephemeral—both Boone and Leatherstocking eventually left the forests for less populated territories to the west. By and large, most Americans were small farmers, more concerned with clearing the land than blazing it, dependent on the ax before the rifle. For these men, standing trees were a nuisance to settlement, but their wood was the most useful resource that nature provided, necessary for housing, fuel, fencing, and countless other products. For the urban population as well, wood was paramount, the raw material for artisans and laborers, including carpenters, coopers, tanners, homebuilders, shipbuilders, carriage makers, furniture makers, packing-box makers, cartwrights, and wainwrights.
The historian Lewis Mumford in his landmark work Technics and Civilization (1934) identified three phases of technological development: eotechnic, paleotechnic, and neotechnic. One of the key shifts between the eotechnic and paleotechnic periods globally was the move from economies based on wood, stone, and water to those based on iron, coal, and steam, the materials that facilitated capital-intensive production and commoditized labor. In Europe, the transition was well under way by 1700, but America lagged behind, luxuriating in its illimitable supply of wood, which, according to Mumford, “was the universal material of the eotechnic economy.” Life in America looked much different from that of the Continent as much due to this difference as to any cultural factors, such as immigration, the Puritan work ethic, or religious pluralism. The preponderance of trees encouraged early Americans to become heavy resource consumers, always happy to save a day or dollar by chopping down another trunk. It was, as historian Brooke Hindle observed, a “society pervasively conditioned by wood.”