Life was probably much the same for the Algonquians who inhabited the Virginia coastal plain. Although those to the south may have been politically affiliated with their Carolina cousins, many of the villages along the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay were united under powerful chieftains. In fact, by 1607 the Jamestown settlers found one top chief, or mamanatowick, a man they called Powhatan (but whose Algonquian name was Wahunsenacwah), controlling a territory of almost eight thousand square miles known as Tsenacommacah. Inland from Tsenacommacah lay land under the control of non-Algonquians, the Manahoac and Monacan, who spoke a Siouan language. To the north were the Piscataway and, on the eastern shore of the upper Chesapeake, were the Nanticoke, both Algonquian peoples.
The Nanticoke traditionally traced their origin to the Lenape, who occupied much of the Middle Atlantic seaboard. Lenape bands speaking Unami dialects lived along Delaware Bay, in eastern Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey. Those speaking a related dialect, Munsee, lived from about the Delaware Water Gap north and east through the lower valley of the Hudson (a tidal estuary they called muhheakantuck, “the river that flows two ways”), including the slender lozenge of land known as manahatta, “the island of many hills.” Later known as the Delaware, the Lenape moved from summer camps near their cornfields or good fishing rivers to more permanent winter settlements, where they sheltered in longhouses roofed with chestnut bark, each up to a hundred feet in length and housing several families.
Indian warfare tended to be a matter of low-intensity raids for revenge or captives—rarely the kind of wide-scale, all-out war that would later emerge in conflict with Europeans. Lenape villages, like those of many Algonquians, were sometimes built in defensible locations such as hilltops and protected by log stockades. But the Susquehannock to the west specialized in building centralized, heavily fortified settlements. An Iroquoian people, the Susquehannock probably didn’t move from the headwaters of their namesake river to its lower reaches until the sixteenth century. They were either lured south by the promise of easier trade with the first European visitors or, more likely, pushed by pressure from the haudenosaunee, “the people of the longhouse” (the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca, better known as the Five Nations of the Iroquois), who controlled much of what is today upstate New York. (Iroquoian-speaking villages enclosed in triple palisades of log walls also dotted the St. Lawrence Valley, but it is unclear how close a cultural connection, if any, these people had to the Five Nations.)
General Tribal Territories of the Northeast:
This depiction of tribal boundaries in the Northeast shows roughly how they looked in the earliest days of the historical period and is in some cases a simplification of cultural structure. (Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 15, Smithsonian Institution Press)
The Iroquois homeland along the Finger Lakes—bounded by mountains to the south and Lake Ontario to the north, and with rivers flowing to the south and east—lay at the center of continental trade networks that would only increase in importance as the colonial fur trade blossomed. The strategic position of the Iroquois, as well as the politically powerful alliance among the Five Nations, meant that they would exert a profound influence on frontier history for centuries to come.
To the Mohawk—kanien’kehá:ka, “the people of the flint,” the easternmost of the Five Nations—Lake Champlain was “the doorway to the country,” and they were the keepers of the door. But to the Algonquian peoples to the east, such as the Mahican of the upper Hudson, and to the western Abenaki (one branch of the Wapánahki), the lake was a welcome barrier against incessant Mohawk attacks. The Abenaki called it bitawbagok, “the lake between.”
At the northernmost edge of the eastern seaboard—north of the Maliseet-Passamaquoddy in New Brunswick and the Mi’kmaq in Nova Scotia, north of the Innu (whom the French called Montagnais)—lived the Beothuk, in Newfoundland, an island culture about which little is known. Clad in caribou skins, the Beothuk painted themselves liberally with red ocher mixed with animal fat. Because of this, the first Europeans who met the Beothuk dubbed them “red Indians” and thus tagged an entire continent’s population with a misnomer.
The Beothuk traded and even intermarried with the Mi’kmaq and Innu, but their relations with the northernmost people in the East, the Inuit, were generally hostile. The Beothuk called the Inuit “the fourpaws,” and encounters between them usually ended in a fight. Interestingly, the Inuit were quite recent arrivals to the eastern Arctic and subarctic, which had been occupied for more than a thousand years by a very different Eskimo culture known to archaeologists as the Dorset, who specialized in hunting seals through holes in the pack ice.
But by about a.d. 1000, the Arctic was changing. The Arctic Ocean was warming, the ice was breaking up, and large marine mammals such as the bowhead whale were expanding their range. The Dorset, unable to cope, withered away, while the Thule—ancestors of today’s Inuit—found a world perfectly suited to their lifestyle. Communities banded together to hunt whales from large skin boats, and Thule men used bows and arrows (which the Dorset lacked) to kill caribou and bears. From their homeland in western Alaska, the Thule spread east with remarkable speed, either taking over a landscape no longer occupied by the Dorset or assimilating the last survivors of that culture into their own. In just a century or two, they reached Greenland.
The First Frontier was a mind-bogglingly fecund land. An eagle flying anywhere between the northern timberline and the Gulf of Mexico would have seen, reflecting the sky like countless mirrors, the carefully dammed ponds of tens of millions of beavers. There were passenger pigeon flocks, just one of which (more than three centuries later) would be estimated to contain 2.2 billion birds. Sea birds by the hundreds of millions jammed breeding colonies along the northern Atlantic coast, where half a dozen species of great whales breached and blew. In the Gulf of Mexico, green sea turtles swarmed in such numbers that they were later an encumbrance to sailing ships.
Inland lay a mosaic of thousands of unique ecosystems: subarctic tundra and subtropical swamp forests; tidal marshes of cordgrass knitting together land and sea; sphagnum bogs in the North rimmed with tamarack and spruce; longleaf pine forests in the South, where gopher tortoises and armadillos burrowed. Ivory-billed woodpeckers made the ancient cypresses of the southern swamps ring with their hammering, while screeching flocks of orange-and-green parakeets wheeled above sleeping alligators. In the lush forests of the Appalachians, tulip trees twenty-five feet in circumference leafed out in April over carpets of wildflowers. In autumn, American chestnut, butternut, shagbark hickory, and dozens of kinds of oak trees produced an annual bounty on which great flocks of turkeys foraged and black bears grew corpulent.
Fingers of prairie, maintained by fire and among which herds of bison grazed, threaded west into the Allegheny and Cumberland Mountains. An eastern forest race of elk roamed the Appalachians and coastal plain from northern Georgia to at least northern New York. Woodland caribou, pale as the snow, could be found as far south as Vermont and New Hampshire. Moose—gangly-legged, lop-eared, and long-nosed—ranged south to Pennsylvania. Trailing them all were the hunters—lynx, bobcats, fishers, wolverines, several species of wolves, and the widespread, adaptable mountain lion, which left its rounded tracks from the cold forests of New Brunswick to the sawgrass marshes of the Everglades.
The rivers ran black with fish—Atlantic salmon weighing up to thirty pounds, choking waterways from the Housatonic north to Newfoundland, and hundreds of millions of other anadromous fish, including shad, blueback herring, alewives, rainbow smelt, and striped bass. Atlantic sturgeon up to fourteen feet long, plated like alligators and weighing eight hundred pounds, returned each spring from the ocean to spawn—and to dance, the immense fish leaping repeatedly from the water as they gathered to mate. Natives wielding spears hunted them at night by torch light, though it must have been a chancy undertaking. The leaping sturgeon were so abundant that Europeans would later consider them a hazard to navigation.
Take agriculture. Given that fields were cleared by girdling trees and waiting for them to die, then tilled with hoes made from the shoulder blades of deer, one would expect that Native agriculture was a small-scale operation, especially when compared with the modern variety. But by the sixteenth century, farming—especially the cultivation of maize—had transformed much of the eastern seaboard. In 1539, Hernando de Soto’s conquistadors reported fields in northern Florida “spread out as far as the eye could see across two leagues of the plain.” In the Iroquois lands of New York, early Europeans reported seeing both Onondaga and Seneca villages surrounded by roughly six square miles of cornfields, and one missionary in Ontario in 1632 got lost repeatedly—not in deep forest, but in endless fields of maize. Because the soil in such fields eventually wore out, forcing the relocation of entire villages to new sites to be cleared of forest, the impact on the landscape over time must have been nearly universal.
Nor was it a trackless emptiness. The land was seamed with footpaths linking every corner of the continent, funneling trade and warfare—trail systems such as the one known variously by the eighteenth century as the Great Catawba War Path, the Iroquois Path, and the Tennessee Path, which ran from southern New York through Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Carolinas, and which connected with trails stretching into Canada and Florida. Along such heavily used paths, visitors often encountered bark lean-tos spaced roughly a day’s march apart, rebuilt again and again by generations of travelers.
Europeans often found themselves befuddled not by an absence of trails, but by too many from which to choose. A local Indian, however, knew that one path, say, offered the most direct route but entailed several tiring ascents up steep mountains, while another featured easy passage through low passes but wasn’t a good choice in spring because of poorly drained ground. Yet another route might be fine in midsummer, when streams were low and crossings were easy, but not after heavy autumn rains brought up the water level.
The population that laid out and maintained this trail network was immense. Whereas historians once assumed that North America was a continent sparsely inhabited and lightly touched by its original residents, they now speak of tens of millions of pre-Columbian Indians, who had an all-encompassing impact on the landscape and its ecosystems.
Basing their calculations on nose counts given by early settlers, anthropologists once estimated the pre-contact population of North America at about a million—although they often dismissed as exaggerations the firsthand accounts of French, English, and Spanish observers on which they based those estimates. In the early 1900s, for example, Smithsonian ethnographer James Mooney carefully combed through the early records to make the first continental approximation of Indian populations—but time and time again, he rejected his own sources. Typical was Mooney’s reaction to the claim, reported in the 1670s, that the Narragansett in Massachusetts once fielded five thousand warriors; the scientist said that the claim “need not be seriously considered.”
In fact, as Mooney himself knew, those original records largely came after the virulent epidemics of the early seventeenth century, which in most places swept away all but a handful of Indians even before the first European settlements had been founded. Indeed, it’s unlikely that Europeans would have gained a foothold had the immense arable land of the Atlantic coast not been conveniently cleared of its inhabitants by disease.
More recent estimates put the precolonial population of North America at 3.8 million people, with as many as a million of them living between the Appalachians and the Atlantic. Some scholars put the population at almost twice that. The Natives’ impact on the land was profound, in terms of the amount of land converted to agriculture, the species they hunted and fished, and most particularly the way they shaped their world through the use of fire.
The first European explorers, coming from countries where mature, old-growth forests had been cut down centuries earlier, spoke glowingly of the tall, straight, commercially valuable trees of the New World. But behind these descriptions, almost in the spaces between the words, lies the truth about the eastern woodlands: they were not the universally dense, dark, brooding forests of our historical imagining. Those forests certainly existed, but in many cases the newcomers described delightfully open, parklike woods free of undergrowth, intermixed with wide grasslands and savannas—a mosaic of habitats that, it now seems clear, were created and maintained by fire.
In 1524, on Narragansett Bay, Giovanni da Verrazano remarked on the extraordinary extent of Native agriculture, reporting fields extending for more than seventy-five miles from the bay, “open and free of any obstacles or trees,” and the forests beyond so uncluttered that they “could be penetrated by even a large army.” Recall James Rosier’s observation about the forests of Mawooshen having “but little wood” and looking like the pastures of England. William Strachey, who was with the expedition that returned Skicowáros to Maine in 1607, reported a rich land, “the trees growing there on being goodly and great, most oake and walnut with spacious passadges betweene, and no rubbish,” the usual term in those days for underbrush.
Around the same time, Captain John Smith was with the Algonquians in Virginia, where “by reason of their burning them for fire,” a man “may gallop a horse amongst the woods any way, but where the creekes or Rivers shall hinder.” Leonard Calvert, arriving along the lower Potomac, reported the land “growne over with large timber trees, and not choaked up with any under-shrubs, but so cleare as a coach may without hinderance passe all over the Countrie.”
Landing on Martha’s Vineyard in 1602 with the Gosnold expedition, the Reverend John Brereton observed forests of “high timbred Oakes,” along with beech, elm, cedar, walnut, hazelnut, and black cherry, but noted that “in the thickest part of these woods, you may see a furlong or more round about.” Elsewhere, he said, “medowes very large and full of greene grasse; even the most woody places . . . doe grow so distinct and apart, one tree from another, upon greene grassie ground . . . as if Nature would shew her selfe above her power, artificall.”
Artificial is exactly what it often was and had been for a very long time. Enough of the Northeast coast was savanna and dwarf oak-pine-blueberry “barren,” a fire-dependent habitat, that one of the most common birds there was the heath hen, an eastern race of the grassland grouse known as the greater prairie-chicken, found from Massachusetts to Virginia. Although the heath hen seems to have been better adapted to shrubbier environments like the barrens than its midwestern cousins (it’s hard to say for sure; the subspecies became extinct in the 1930s), it clearly needed open land.
In 1670, a visitor named Daniel Denton wrote that both sides of the Raritan River in New Jersey were “adorn’d with spacious Medows, enough to maintain thousands of Cattel,” and “where is grass as high as a mans middle, that serves for no other end except to maintain the Elks and Deer . . . then to be burnt every Spring to make way for new.”
Indians set fire for a variety of reasons, besides creating a flush of new vegetation that would attract “Elks and Deer.” Fire could prepare soil for planting, burn away pests such as ticks and chiggers, and drive game into an ambush. Yet this Native dependence on fire was overlooked by modern historians and scientists for years. Even those who first recognized the importance of Indian-set fires in shaping the landscape did not view such management kindly. “The Indian is by nature an incendiary, and forest burning was the Virginia Indian’s besetting sin,” wrote Hu Maxwell, a historian with the U.S. Forest Service in 1910. “The tribes were burning everything that would burn . . . [and] if the discovery of America had been postponed five hundred years, Virginia wou
ld have been pasture land or desert.”
Hardly. Indians had been burning Virginia and much of the rest of North America annually for fifteen thousand years, and it was certainly not a desert. But they had clearly altered their world in ways we are still only beginning to appreciate. The grasslands of the Great Plains, the lupine-studded savannas of northwestern Ohio’s “oak openings,” the longleaf pine forests of the southern coastal plain, the pine barrens of the Mid-Atlantic and Long Island—all were ecosystems that depended on fire and were shaped over the course of millennia by its frequent and predictable application.
Given that Indians and fire were a constant throughout the long postglacial period, when climate change was already rearranging eastern North America’s natural communities, it’s fair to say that the land of the First Frontier coevolved with humans and their ready ally, the flame. If there ever was a “balance of nature” in the East, it was a case of natural systems finding some measure of equilibrium amid the pressures of hunting, agriculture, and fire, as practiced by more than a million hungry, busy human beings.
And that was the face of the East at the moment when the first regular contacts began between the New World and the Old: the close-mouth Basques trading iron kettles for furs while their catch dried in the sun; the Bristol merchants sniffing along behind them to find the source of the cod; the trickle of ships that would soon become a colonizing flood.
There is even one small but tantalizing hint to suggest that exploration was not entirely a one-way street. After all, crossing the North Atlantic from east to west, Europe to America, meant fighting headwinds and contrary ocean currents the whole way—hence the usual route far to the south, picking up the northeasterly trade winds to the Caribbean. But if you were heading in the opposite direction, you’d have the prevailing winds at your back and the Gulf Stream flowing toward Europe.
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