Mart A. Stewart

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Mart A. Stewart | From King Cane to King Cotton: Razing Cane in the Old South | Environmental History, 12.1 | The History Cooperative

from king cane to king cotton: RAZING CANE IN THE OLD SOUTH

ABSTRACT

This article explains the ecological history of the brakes of river cane, or "tree grass," that once covered vast areas of the American South and its relationship to the agricultural and economic history of the early South. Cane is a plant of the margins that thrives on disturbance, and the relationship between cane and people in the South was always give-and-take. Ultimately, overgrazing by cattle and systematic clearing to make way for cotton reduced the South's canebrakes to a vestige of their former range.

AS LATE AS THE 1930s, patches of cane still made an appearance in the Mississippi landscapes of William Faulkner's great tangled tales about the South. But these "canebrakes," which provided habitat not only for Faulkner's iconic bear but for many other species as well, and had been in the past a rich source of forage for grazing cattle, were far less extensive in Faulkner's time than they had been a century earlier. This story of the rise and decline of the great brakes of Southern river cane is an important and relatively underappreciated chapter in the environmental history of the region. To understand why the range of cane apparently expanded in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, and why that range diminished radically after the late eighteenth century, it is necessary to explore not only the distinctive biological characteristics of cane, but also the economic, social, and demographic contexts in which canebrakes flourished and then declined. The history of the relationship between cane and people in the South was both long and give-and-take. Ultimately it was overgrazing by cattle and systematic clearing to make way for cotton that reduced the South's canebrakes to a vestige of their former range.	1
Cane also had a history of expansion. It colonized old fields and recovered its range in river bottoms when humans moved on or disappeared. Canebrakes expanded as Native American populations declined, and then these "tree grasses" provided the main source of winter browse for open range cattle herding as this form of agriculture bloomed in this region in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The enormous brakes of cane of the region shrank and expanded in relationship to human uses—and at times flourished because of them. Only when cotton and the humans who found it valuable moved into cane country, when permanent agrarian settlements replaced temporary ones of roving hunters and drovers, did the tale of cane begin to end.	2
The scholarship on the history of vegetation change in the South does not include a chapter on cane, however, and indeed does not pick up steam until the late nineteenth century. According to this scholarship, because of a new technology of exploitation, new forms of economic organization, and rapidly expanding international markets, the forests of the South were attacked and largely destroyed by northern lumber industrialists in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In the early twentieth century, the demonstration by Dr. Charles Herty that the pine trees of the region made excellent newsprint and the concomitant development of an efficient method for pulping them assured that pines of whatever size and sort would continue to be useful. What was not extracted during the first invasion was taken in several smaller ones in the first half of the twentieth century, until post-World War II conservation measures restored Southern forests—or more accurately, a tree plantation shadow of them. Earlier uses of forests, mainly for the extraction of naval stores, damaged or destroyed large swaths of Southern forests, but most of them remained relatively intact before the Civil War. The story of forest decline in the South is mainly one accomplished in the half century after 1880.¹	. . .

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