Freeoples ....
Thread 303
Posted on 04/23/2002 7:04:16 PM PDT by Mo1
Freeoples ....
Thread 303
Sweet Dreams .. I'm outta here myself
Reading some of the journals of the EARLY settlers and pilgrims is VERY interesting.
I wish there were a lot more Indians, and a LOT fewer Leftists around here these days.
It seems to me that if the plains were once forested, lightning strikes took out the trees and the Indians had no way of stopping the fires. Lightning is more rare in the Pacific Northwest, and accompanied with heavy rain that lasts a long time, so the forests there were for the most part preserved for hundreds of years, but the lightning in the midwest is a different story. Even in the Northwest, millions of acres of forest burned from lightning.
I find it hard to believe the plains were ever forested. Going back 30,000 years to the Wooly Mamouths the area has been populated by plains animals, not forest animals. The land is largely more suited to grass. In fields that have been essentially abandoned since the depression, trees grow in all the low areas along creeks and rivers, but after 75 years there are still no trees growing on the prarie.
There is a lot of evidence of fire, probably lightning caused, clearing forested areas all round the margins of the prarie.
On the other hand the evidence keeps improving that indian populations were much larger than we thought only a few years ago, and that European disease ran ahead of the European settlers and decimated them.
We won, they lost, end of story.
So9
Indians here on the East Coast, where there WERE plenty of forests, DID burn off the underbrush.
Otherwise, anything bigger than a rabbit would have trouble getting through the woods.
They can clear cut over land here, and if it is not maintained, within 10 years, you can't easily walk through it.
The next time that you or Val find yourself down East, ask one of the natives where the closest patch of pocosin is. I have PERSONALLY hacked through that stuff with a bush axe, when I was surveying down there. It grows so thick that you have to chop it with your bush axe, and it will remain standing where it was cut, so you have to backup, and use your bush axe to lay it down where you had been standing.
I think the Indians have NEVER been given credit for their stewardship of the land. And I DO believe that there were MANY more than we think there were. And I DO believe they were decimated by the communicable diseases brought by the Europeans. An interesting point discussed in that article was the question of why the Indians didn't have ANY unknown diseases to give back to the Europeans.
The Pilgrims came sailing up, and actually LEARNED things about agriculture. And that is 5,000 years after The Fertile Crescent. The Egocentricity and Ethnocentricity modern day know-nothing Americans exhibit sometimes, can EASILY be mistaken for arrogance.
You only have to do a LITTLE BIT of reading on construction techniques and farming techniques of the Ancients to know that they were anything but stupid.
When else did it happen besides during the Dark Days of the Black Death??
I will dig out exact dates if you want, but there has been a plague of some kind about every 400 years for at least the last 3,000 that has wiped out 30% or more of the population
So9
The same thing exists all the way down the East Coast and around most of the Gulf Coast. The thickets are truly impenatrable. Val can go look at the 'Big Thicket' in East Texas if she wants. What is left of it is now a Park.
SO9
Ratty .. I printing that article .. My eyes can't handle reading it on this monitor ..
SO9
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