Old Roots, New Shoots: Early American Environmental History

Some two hundred years before the publication of William Cronon’s Changes in the Land, the widely acknowledged “key text” of early American environmental history, Indians in the Spanish American borderlands were looking to the environment to help interpret the history and legacy of European-Native encounters.¹ In one account, Indians told a hunter who had found a mineral deposit in Spanish Louisiana that the ore was “the white peoples” treasure, “and that amongst these mountains of Oar a noise was often heard like the explosion of a Cannon … which the Indians said was the Spirit of the white people working amongst their Treasure.”² A similar tale recounted how “an uncommon Animal [was] seen by the Natives in a lake in … New Mexico. It is compared to the upper part of the body of a Spaniard with his broad brimmed hat. The Indians express a dislike or abhorrence of the place … and assert that the departed Spirits of the first Spaniards who conquered their Country dwell in the lake.”³ Such stories record Natives’—or, perhaps, the Anglo-American recorders’—enduring associations among death, Spaniards, precious metals, and the environments where all these things converged. These environmental histories, it seems, offered a fitting lens for interpreting key aspects of the early contact era.

Why ought environmental historians to pay more attention to early America and the Atlantic world, and why, in turn, should early Americanists (and we define that term in its broadest terms, hemispherically) become more invested in telling stories about ecologies—about plants, animals, rivers, climates, and all that? This is the question that we asked ourselves as we proposed and organized this special issue of Early American Studies. After all, these are fields that do not necessarily jump to the mind as easy allies. Scholars such as Peter Mancall have commented on the irregular (if undeniably growing) appearance of environmental history in the major journals of early American history and the equally rare sightings of early Americanists at venues such as the annual conference of the American Society for Environmental History.⁴ Covering a time and place before the advent of the sorts of scientifically minded sources that inform a great deal of more modern environmental history and without an obvious stake in the sort of moral project imagined for environmental historians who seek to influence policy and public opinion about natural catastrophes both forecast and already occurred—who seek nothing less than saving the world, according to Donald Worster—studies of early American environments have lacked the energy that has made the field one of the most dynamic today.⁵

Yet the environment mattered to the peoples of early America. At the most obvious level, this was because they realized their health and wealth were caught up in environmental circumstances as diverse as the population of white-tailed deer, winter frosts, urban miasmas, and rising floodwaters. Decades and centuries of privation and suffering created colonial communities attuned to local environments, and millennia of experience created indigenous communities with a deep knowledge of American places. But early Americans’ engagement with the environment was also narrative and historical: they told stories in which the relationship between man and nature was central to explaining the past, present, and future conditions of peoples and places.

This should challenge us as we consider the genealogy of environmental history as a practice, for it suggests that environmental history has deeper roots in early American history than might often be appreciated. The standard historiographical periodization of environmental history tends to place its origins in the twentieth century or, according to some borderlands scholars, Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis of the 1890s. As Alfred Crosby put it, American environmental history got momentum in the mid-twentieth century because the legacy of the Turner thesis had ensured that “the historian of the frontier was … ‘pre-adapted’ for environmental history,” that is, ready to see the influence of nature on society.⁶ But whereas Turner’s encounter between man and nature—and the national significance thereof—was essentially a story about Anglo-Americans...