Down to Earth_Nature's Role in American History

by Ted Steinberg

  40. Ibid., 61, 82.

  41. Harry M. Caudill, Night Comes to the Cumberlands (Boston, 1962), 151.

  CHAPTER 8: THE UNFORGIVING WEST

  1. Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water (New York, 1986), 37 (1st quotation); John Opie, Ogallala: Water for a Dry Land (Lincoln, NE, 1993), 66 (2d quotation).

  2. Donald Worster, A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell (New York, 2001), 348–349; Reisner, Cadillac Desert, 47 (quotation).

  3. Quotations in Gray Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (Berkeley, CA, 1999), 30.

  4. William Preston, “Serpent in the Garden: Environmental Change in Colonial California,” in Contested Eden: California before the Gold Rush, ed. Ramón A. Gutiérrez and Richard J. Orsi (Berkeley, CA, 1998), 265, 273–274, 278.

  5. Mary Hill, Gold: The California Story (Berkeley, CA, 1999), 18–19, 94–97; Brechin, Imperial San Francisco, 31, 32.

  6. Hill, Gold, 72–73.

  7. Brechin, Imperial San Francisco, 36 (1st quotation); Hill, Gold, 116, 118 (2d quotation).

  8. Quoted in Brechin, Imperial San Francisco, 50.

  9. Ibid., 48; Hill, Gold, 119–120.

  10. Robert Kelley, Battling the Inland Sea: American Political Culture, Public Policy, and the Sacramento Valley, 1850–1986 (Berkeley, CA, 1989), 74, 77, 107–108; Brechin, Imperial San Francisco, 52.

  11. Elliott West, The Way to the West: Essays on the Central Plains (Albuquerque, NM, 1995), 30–32; Hill, Gold, 48.

  12. West, The Way to the West, 15, 17.

  13. Ibid., 21, 24–25, 26, 29 (quotation).

  14. Ibid., 38–40; Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado (Lawrence, KS, 1998), 89.

  15. West, The Way to the West, 43.

  16. Ibid., 45–46; West, The Contested Plains, xv, 233 (quotation).

  17. West, The Way to the West, 47.

  18. Ibid., 11.

  19. Quoted in David D. Smits, “The Frontier Army and the Destruction of the Buffalo: 1865–1883,” Western Historical Quarterly 25 (Autumn 1994): 338.

  20. William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, 1991), 215 (1st quotation); Shepard Krech, III, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (New York, 1999), 124 (2d quotation).

  21. Andrew C. Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison (New York, 2000), 24–25, 106.

  22. Ibid., 39–40, 47; West, The Contested Plains, 49–53.

  23. Krech, The Ecological Indian, 127, 128 (quotation).

  24. Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison, 82 (1st quotation), 83; Krech, The Ecological Indian, 148 (2d quotation), 149.

  25. West, The Way to the West, 61–63.

  26. Quoted in Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison, 112.

  27. Ibid., 99–100, 131; Richard Manning, Grassland: The History, Biology, Politics, and Promise of the American Prairie (New York, 1995), 83.

  28. Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison, 136–137.

  29. Smits, “The Frontier Army,” 316 (1st quotation), 314 (2d quotation); Manning, Grassland, 85 (3d quotation).

  30. Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison, 141–142; Manning, Grassland, 87.

  31. Quoted in Ernest Staples Osgood, The Day of the Cattlemen (Minneapolis, MN, 1929), 83.

  32. Richard White, “Animals and Enterprise,” in The Oxford History of the American West, ed. Clyde A. Milner, II, Carol A. O’Connor, and Martha A. Sandweiss (New York, 1994), 252–253; Terry G. Jordan, North American Cattle-Ranching Frontiers: Origins, Diffusion, and Differentiation (Albuquerque, NM, 1993), 220.

  33. Jordan, North American Cattle-Ranching Frontiers, 222.

  34. Ibid., 237.

  35. Osgood, The Day of the Cattlemen, 99; Jeremy Rifkin, Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture (New York, 1993), 88–91.

  36. Osgood, The Day of the Cattlemen, 190; David L. Wheeler, “The Blizzard of 1886 and Its Effect on the Range Cattle Industry in the Southern Plains,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 94 (1990–1991): 418–419.

  37. Thadis W. Box, “Range Deterioration in West Texas,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 71 (1967–1968): 41 (1st quotation); Osgood, The Day of the Cattlemen, 193 (2d quotation).

  38. Jordan, North American Cattle-Ranching Frontiers, 237, 238 (quotation).

  39. Quoted in Box, “Range Deterioration in West Texas,” 38.

  40. Wheeler, “The Blizzard of 1886,” 426.

  41. Quoted in Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York, 1979), 364–365.

  42. Quoted in ibid., 365.

  43. Richard L. Knight, “The Ecology of Ranching,” in Ranching West of the 100th Meridian, ed. R. L. Knight, W. Gilgert, and E. Marston (Washington, DC, forthcoming).

  44. Peter Iverson, When Indians Became Cowboys: Native Peoples and Cattle Ranching in the American West (Norman, OK, 1994), 82, 84; Carolyn Gilman and Mary Jane Schneider, The Way to Independence: Memories of a Hidatsa Indian Family, 1840–1920 (St. Paul, MN, 1987), 242–243.

  45. Opie, Ogallala, 67–68 (quotations).

  46. Ibid., 93–95; Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York, 1979), 87–91.

  47. Manning, Grassland, 172.

  48. Worster, Dust Bowl, 4, 32 (quotation), 42.

  CHAPTER 9: CONSERVATION RECONSIDERED

  1. Quotations in Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York, 1979), 372.

  2. Ibid., 382–384.

  3. Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890–1920 (Cambridge, MA, 1959), 1–4, 265–266.

  4. Donald Worster, The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination (New York, 1993), 190–196, 1st quotation from p. 193; John Mack Faragher et al., Out of Many: A History of the American People, 3d ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2000), 634 (2d quotation).

  5. Nancy Langston, Forest Dreams, Forest Nightmares: The Paradox of Old Growth in the Inland West (Seattle, 1995), 93, 106–108, quotation from p. 107.

  6. Gifford Pinchot, The Fight for Conservation (New York, 1910), 42, 43.

  7. Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York, 1987), 298 (quotation).

  8. Michael Williams, Americans and Their Forests: A Historical Geography (New York, 1989), 416, 433, 441 (quotation).

  9. Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (1977; reprint, New York, 1985), 267 (1st quotation); Langston, Forest Dreams, Forest Nightmares, 112 (2d quotation).

  10. Langston, Forest Dreams, Forest Nightmares, 151, 155.

  11. Ibid., 151, 291.

  12. Stephen J. Pyne, Year of the Fires: The Story of the Great Fires of 1910 (New York, 2001), 196–197; Pinchot, The Fight for Conservation, 44–45.

  13. Pyne, Year of the Fires, 80 (Pinchot quotation), 237.

  14. Ibid., 257–258.

  15. Quoted in Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York, 1998), 229.

  16. Peter Steinhart, The Company of Wolves (New York, 1995), 36–37.

  17. Donald Worster, An Unsettled Country: Changing Landscapes of the American West (Albuquerque, NM, 1994), 79; Steinhart, The Company of Wolves, 37–38, 39 (quotation).

  18. Worster, Nature’s Economy, 270–271.

  19. Thomas R. Dunlap, “Values for Varmints: Predator Control and Environmental Ideas, 1920–1939,” Pacific Historical Review 53 (May 1984): 151; Davis, Ecology of Fear, 234–236, quotation from p. 234.

  20. Alfred Runte, National Parks: The American Experience, rev. ed. (Lincoln, NE, 1987), 11, 48.

  21. Chris J. Magoc, Yellowstone: The Creation and Selling of an American Landscape, 1870–1903 (Albuquerque, NM, 1999), 19 (quotation); Runte, National Parks, 53.

  22. Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks (New York, 1999), 37 (1st quotation); Magoc, Yellowstone, 93 (2d quo
tation).

  23. Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness, 4, 59 (quotation).

  24. Magoc, Yellowstone, 141 (1st quotation), 146 (2d quotation).

  25. Quoted in Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness, 56.

  26. Ibid., 45, 48, 50, 63; Karl Jacoby, Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkeley, CA, 2001), 88 (quotation).

  27. Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness, 63 (quotations), 65.

  28. Ward v. Race Horse, 163 U.S. 504, 509, 518 (1896); Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness, 67–68; David E. Wilkins, American Indian Sovereignty and the U.S. Supreme Court: The Masking of Justice (Austin, TX, 1997), 104.

  29. Quoted in Jacoby, Crimes against Nature, 96.

  30. Ibid., 2, 99 (quotation), 106–107, 118–119.

  31. William T. Hornaday, Our Vanishing Wild Life: Its Extermination and Preservation (New York, 1913), 101; idem, Wild Life Conservation in Theory and Practice (New Haven, CT, 1914), 189.

  32. Jacoby, Crimes against Nature, 134, 137 (1st and 2d quotations), 138 (3d quotation).

  33. Mary Meagher and Douglas B. Houston, Yellowstone and the Biology of Time: Photographs across a Century (Norman, OK, 1998), 223–224.

  34. David S. Wilcove, The Condor’s Shadow: The Loss and Recovery of Wildlife in America (New York, 1999), 56; Michael B. Coughenour and Francis J. Singer, “The Concept of Overgrazing and Its Application to Yellowstone’s Northern Range,” in The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem: Redefining America’s Wilderness Heritage, ed. Robert B. Keiter and Mark S. Boyce (New Haven, CT, 1991), 211; Alston Chase, Playing God in Yellowstone: The Destruction of America’s First National Park (San Diego, CA, 1987), 23 (quotation).

  35. Steve W. Chadde and Charles E. Kay, “Tall-Willow Communities on Yellowstone’s Northern Range: A Test of the ‘Natural-Regulation’ Paradigm,” in The Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, 236, 253–257.

  36. Pinchot, The Fight for Conservation, 103.

  37. Quoted in Chase, Playing God in Yellowstone, 125.

  38. Andrew C. Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison (New York, 2000), 179–180; Magoc, Yellowstone, 161.

  39. Quoted in Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison, 181.

  40. Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness, 69; Louis S. Warren, The Hunter’s Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-Century America (New Haven, CT, 1997), 144–145.

  CHAPTER 10: DEATH OF THE ORGANIC CITY

  1. R. Ben Brown, “The Southern Range: A Study in Nineteenth Century Law and Society” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1993), 280–281, quotation from p. 281.

  2. Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1906; reprint, New York, 1981), 24, 25.

  3. Quoted in Oscar Handlin, This Was America: True Accounts of People and Places, Manners and Customs, As Recorded by European Travelers to the Western Shore in the Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and Twentieth Centuries (Cambridge, MA, 1949), 217.

  4. Quoted in Charles E. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 (Chicago, 1962), 103.

  5. Hendrik Hartog, “Pigs and Positivism,” Wisconsin Law Review 1985 (July/August 1985): 905 (1st quotation), 908 (2d and 3d quotations).

  6. Quotations in ibid., 910.

  7. Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York, 1999), 477.

  8. Ibid., 747, 786; Rosenberg, The Cholera Years, 113; Susan Strasser, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (New York, 1999), 30.

  9. Quoted in Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 477.

  10. Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr, “The Centrality of the Horse in the Nineteenth-Century American City,” in The Making of Urban America, 2d ed., ed. Raymond A. Mohl (Wilmington, DE, 1997), 105–106; Silas Farmer, The History of Detroit and Michigan … (Detroit, 1889), 892.

  11. Joel A. Tarr, The Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective (Akron, OH, 1996), 323–324, 326, 331.

  12. Marc Linder and Lawrence S. Zacharias, Of Cabbages and Kings County: Agriculture and the Formation of Modern Brooklyn (Iowa City, IA, 1999), 35 (quotation); McShane and Tarr, “The Centrality of the Horse,” 120.

  13. Linder and Zacharias, Of Cabbages and Kings County, 6 (quotation), 29–31; table 5, p. 306.

  14. Ibid., 45 (1st quotation), 46 (2d quotation).

  15. Quoted in ibid., 4.

  16. Joel A. Tarr, Search for the Ultimate Sink, 295, 299.

  17. Ibid., 9.

  18. Quoted in Norris Hundley, Jr., The Great Thirst: Californians and Water, 1770s–1990s (Berkeley, CA, 1992), 153.

  19. Tarr, Search for the Ultimate Sink, 12; Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 787; Elizabeth Blackmar, “Accountability for Public Health: Regulating the Housing Market in Nineteenth-Century New York City,” in Hives of Sickness: Public Health and Epidemics in New York City, ed. David Rosner (New Brunswick, NJ, 1995), 52 (quotation), 53.

  20. Edward K. Spann, The New Metropolis: New York City, 1840–1857 (New York, 1981), 130–131, 1st quotation from p. 131; Richard A. Wines, Fertilizer in America: From Waste Recycling to Resource Exploitation (Philadelphia, 1985), 32 (2d quotation).

  21. Tarr, Search for the Ultimate Sink, 301–303.

  22. William Ashworth, The Late, Great Lakes: An Environmental History (New York, 1986), 123 (quotation), 132, 134–135; Margaret Beattie Bogue, Fishing the Great Lakes: An Environmental History, 1783–1933 (Madison, WI, 2000), 169.

  23. Charles Hardy, “Fish or Foul: A History of the Delaware River Basin through the Perspective of the American Shad, 1682 to the Present,” Pennsylvania History 66 (Autumn 1999): 507, 518, 522–525, 533n.

  24. Quoted in Judith Walzer Leavitt, The Healthiest City: Milwaukee and the Politics of Health Reform (Princeton, NJ, 1982), 124–125.

  25. McShane and Tarr, “The Centrality of the Horse,” 122; Martin V. Melosi, The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore, 2000), 179.

  26. Melosi, The Sanitary City, 176, 177; Strasser, Waste and Want, 125.

  27. Suellen Hoy, Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness (New York, 1995), 72–75; Joel Tarr, e-mail with author, April 9, 2001.

  28. Strasser, Waste and Want, 121–123.

  29. Leavitt, The Healthiest City, 126 (1st quotation), 127 (2d quotation).

  30. Benjamin Miller, Fat of the Land: Garbage of New York the Last Two Hundred Years (New York, 2000), photo caption, p. 73; Martin V. Melosi, Garbage in the Cities: Refuse, Reform, and the Environment, 1880–1980 (College Station, TX, 1981), 42.

  31. Melosi, Garbage in the Cities, 169–170; idem, “Refuse Pollution and Municipal Reform: The Waste Problem in America, 1880–1917,” in Pollution and Reform in American Cities, 1870–1930, ed. idem (Austin, TX, 1980), 127; Strasser, Waste and Want, 129 (quotation).