12.1  
Journals link Search link Partners link Information link
January, 2007
Previous
Next
Environmental History

Table of Contents
List journal issues
Home
Get a printer-friendly version of this page
 
 
 

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

MART A. STEWART

 

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 3
      Narratives of environmental change for the earlier South have tended to focus on soils rather than changes in the flora that grow in them. Indeed, an argument about "soil exhaustion" and environmental change, first elaborated by Avery Craven in 1926 in Soil Exhaustion as a Factor in the Agricultural History of Virginia and Maryland, 1606–1860, has become a scholarly chestnut in Southern history. Craven studied the problem of "exhaustion" of soil in the older parts of the eastern South, especially Virginia—the parts that had been subjected first to the skimming practices of frontier farmers, who then moved to fresher lands in Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and other parts west. The first farmers in Virginia merely mined the soil, Craven argued, and thereby created an environmental problem that undermined the social and economic order of early Virginia. He joined with his antebellum Virginia heroes, John Taylor and Edmund Ruffin, in roundly condemning the farming practices of frontier farmers and in celebrating the problem-solving skills and practices of progressive agriculturists. By the 1850s, he argued, Ruffin's soil-improvement system had been adopted by a significant number of Chesapeake planters, who laid the groundwork for a revivified Chesapeake agriculture. 4
      Craven's claim about "soil exhaustion" was a linchpin for the influential argument Eugene Genovese made in the 1960s about the political economy of slavery: He claimed that slavery and the kind of agriculture it supported encouraged poor land use practices and did not support good ones (like crop rotation and the use of manure or marl). More recently, several scholars have engaged the problem of soil decline yet again and have revised the Craven thesis without fundamentally challenging it.2 5
      The concept of soil exhaustion is essentially and narrowly an agricultural one. In spite of the expanded considerations of the concept as an environmental problem by recent scholars, the focus on soil exhaustion has marginalized other parts of the story of environmental change in the early South. Cane goes missing or is merely a sideshow. The expansion of cane in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century South to a range that one modern scientist estimates was at least 10 million acres and then the sustenance that these enormous patches and corridors of cane provided to Spanish and English cattle is also part of this story. The significance of cane for open-range cattle raising is acknowledged in passing by most studies of the cattle industry, but cane was in fact essential to this history. The tale of the rise and fall of cane is integral to the long history of soil skimming and soil exhaustion in the South as well. In terms of scale alone, the rise and fall of canebrakes has few counterparts in this period, and deserves to be more fully noticed by historians. 6
      As a plant of the margins, the story of cane also illuminates the history of the relationship between humans and nature in the South. Even the rejection of a model of history that aligns peripheries against cores does not diminish the fact that socially marginal peoples—hunters, drovers, canebrake crackers, runaway slaves—were often comfortable in and around habitats of cane. More importantly, the early history of cane was of a plant that sometimes thrived and sometimes did not in a dynamic relationship with humans. Humans sometimes over-exploited cane, but the extensive brakes of the region began to disappear in the late eighteenth century, not because humans were harvesting too much cane, but because they began to destroy cane systematically in order to replace it with something else. In general, the history of cane challenges what has become the master environmental narrative—the long tale of extraction and decline—of the of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century South.3 7
      Cane was everywhere in the colonial South, and was so common that it was rarely described in detail. But winter travelers noticed it as a marker for evening camp sites and as a revivifying browse for stock. Edward Mease's journal incantations at the end of each day of travel during a winter journey through West Florida in 1770 and 1771, for example, are typical. They often included a nod to cane like the one he made on March 28: "Proceeded, came to a Cane Break and encamped." Travelers and their livestock recognized in cane a plant that was at once valuable and ubiquitous.4 8
      Brakes of both giant cane and the smaller "switch cane" were extensive in the colonial Southeast, at the edges of savannas, along streams and rivers, and in damp places throughout the region; most accounts emphasize their ubiquity and the quality of their forage for grazing animals of all sorts. They were usually more than patches. John Drayton reported vast corridors of cane just about everywhere in the valleys of upcountry South Carolina: "At the first settlement of this state, the vallies of the middle and upper country, then in the possession of the Indians, encouraged a plentiful growth of cane." John Filson in 1784 reported similar brakes in Kentucky: "many ... so thick and tall that it is difficult to pass through them." Another account of Kentucky two decades later stated flatly that "the whole country was then an entire canebrake." The usually reliable Edmund Ruffin, in a report on the black belt "prairie lands" of central Alabama in 1859, said that "when the first settlements of Alabama were begun, in 1817, nearly all this broad space was covered by a thick under-growth of cane." The first settlers "could scarcely penetrate through the close and general covering of cane on this calcareous and richest land," his sources told him, "and at a later time, the most frequented roads through the richest lands were covered across by a leaning and overhanging and interlocked tops of the tall canes, growing on each side, rendering the passage of travellors slow and difficult." William Bartram, whose sensibilities inclined him to notice most plants, common and not, remarked often on small brakes and large as he traveled through the Southeast and down along the Gulf in the early 1770s. One "immense plain" of a cane swamp that Bartram approached near the headwaters of the Ogeechee was also near a salt lick—and the two together made a paradise for cattle, horses, and deer. The animals licked the "almost white or cinerous coloured tenacious fattish clay ... into great caves, pursuing this great vein," and grazed themselves fat on the nutritious leaves of the cane in the same vicinity. Some brakes were not just large, but vast: he remarked about one enormous canebrake near the "Apalachean Old Fields," about thirty miles from St. Marks in Florida, which rolled out to the horizon "like the ocean," and which was "alive with cattle, deer, and turkeys." The cane grew so thick that "there is no penetrating them without previously cutting a road," and this brake was passable only by an "old Spanish highway." When Henry Hammond later reported about the extent of cane in North Carolina, that there were "vast brakes of cane ... often stretching in unbroken lines of evergreen for hundreds of miles," he may have been exaggerating, but canebrakes across the South usually exceeded the patch in size. Travelers and settlers found them just about everywhere in what eventually became Virginia, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Tennessee, and east Texas.5 9
      Though the French taxonomist, André Michaux, who took a naming expedition throughout the eastern United States in the early nineteenth century, affixed a genus tag (Arundinaria) to cane, the taxonomy of cane is still variously interpreted. Observers less obsessed with lodging canebrakes into their proper place in taxonomic systems commonly recognized two general kinds of cane. These favored different kinds of habitats and grew to different sizes, but had common growing habits. The giant cane—the Arundinaria macrosperma of Michaux, but also called Arundinaria gigantea (Chapman)—formed the stands of cane that most often caught the attention of travelers and cattlemen alike. This giant cane grew to heights of twenty-five feet and higher and to a diameter of several inches. Ob-servers not only re-marked about the density and impenetra-bility of the stands of giant cane when they came up on them, but also on the spectacular size of the cane itself—that it was the thickness of a man's arm, or that it was vessel-sized and a single joint would hold a pint or even a quart of something. Some travel-ers were so impressed with the size of this plant that they collected pieces of large cane to present later for display. When Peter Chester traveled across the Alabama River north of Mobile in 1772, he sent his servant to cut a sample from a brake he found there, "which measure 47 feet from the third joint to its extremity, 13 of its joints I brought down to Mobile and presented to the Honble. John Stuart Esqr. In Janry. 1772. each of them were in length above 20 inches, & above 5 in circumference." He added that this cane was not an extraordinary case, but merely the first his servant cut, and that, by the way, there were about "10,000 head of cattle Horses &c. &c." in the region around Mobile. These cane, which resembled their tropical relatives, the bamboo, in both size and in versatility of uses, were an attractive feed for animals and provided especially good habitat for cattle, deer, and bison as well as a host of smaller animals. They were usually found just above the high-water mark along rivers, sometimes in brakes that stretched miles along the fertile soil of the floodplain, and in wet places where the water table was sometimes close to the surface, and were often mixed with an overstory of hardwoods and sometimes evergreens.6 10


 
Figure 1
    Figure 1. André Michaux's Flora of North America.

    Image provided by the author.

    The French taxonomist Michaux was the first to apply the genus Arundinaria to cane.
 


 
      The smaller switch cane may be conspecific with the giant kind. Some differences in kind may be instead differences in degree, produced by varying growing conditions. But switch cane was considered by nineteenth-century botanists to be a separate species and was dubbed Arundinaria tecta (Walt.) Muhl. This species, if it is indeed a separate species, is smaller—usually about five to ten feet in height—and also has smaller leaves. The culms themselves were reedier, and did not have the dynamic heartiness of the larger cane, but the leaves and the shoots were also much favored by grazing animals—and the tender new shoots sometimes by humans as well. These canes grew in swampy places—in bogs, along mucky waterway banks, and in the hillside woodland marshes the locals called pocosins. Though both kinds favored wet environments, the switch cane appeared to tolerate more water around its feet than the larger cane. Switch cane, according to some botanists, is more likely to be associated with those kinds of pine that enjoy wetter conditions—like pond pine, for example. Observers also recognized that both kinds of cane varied enormously in size and quality according to the kinds of soil and soil conditions they inhabited. Cane was an especially good marker of soil quality, especially for early Americans who read the quality of the soil almost entirely by what grew in it.7 11


 
Figure 2
    Figure 2. Interior of a Cane Brake.

    From Roland Harper, Economic Botany of Alabama, Part 2 (University, Alabama, 1928).

    This interior of a cane brake (Arundinaria gigantea) was photographed March 4, 1913, on Big Creek, near Northport, Alabama. It was used as an illustration with a description of cane by botanist Roland Harper. Harper reported that the "giant" cane in the remnant brakes of the early twentieth-century South rarely grew more than twenty feet tall and an inch in diameter.
 


 
      Botanists have long understood how cane reproduces from rhizomes. But they have not agreed on how and when cane flowers and produces seed. The certitudes and confusion about reproduction cycles in cane that were registered by Hugh Neisler in an essay in the American Journal of Science and Arts in 1860 have been refined by modern botanists, but not substantially altered or resolved. Neisler explained that cane forms a straight unbranched culm in the first year of growth. In the years after this culm does not increase in height but toughens its main stalk and forms lateral branches. The cane also grows underground—during the first year the cane growing from seed also produces one or more "subterranean culms," or "chain roots"—what are now called rhizomes—just under the surface. Additional canes are produced from buds formed on these rhizomes ; these in turn produce additional rhizomes, which produce additional canes, which produce additional rhizomes, and so on until a few canes become a brake—sometimes all the progeny of a single individual. A patch of canes will continue to reproduce by this method until no room remains for new canes to grow.8 12


 
Figure 3
    Figure 3. Arundinaria Tecta.

    From Roland Harper, Economic Botany of Alabama, Part 2 (University, Alabama, 1928).

    Photographed March 15, 1906. Botanist Roland Harper reported that this cane grew most commonly in "sandy bogs, wet woods, and non-alluvial swamps."
 


 
      Neisler was less certain about the conditions of flowering. Many observers, several of whom he talked with, had noticed that cane had flowered at irregular in-tervals; observers then and now have registered estimates of flowering cycles that have ranged from three to fifty years. Neisler weighed in on, but also circumvented, this issue by asserting simply that cane blooms at some point after the entire brake has been formed, and that every cane in the brake related to the parent cane will flower, no matter its age. At this point, Neisler said, the seeds are set and the entire stand dies. His assertion about the reproductive cycle of cane may have been mostly right, but modern scientists continue to claim different explanations of it. Stand longevity has varied in studies of the cane, and reports of flowering cycles continue to vary greatly. Some cane seems to flower every year, and others flower as a brake all at the same time and only once before dying. This pattern of seed production in a population of plants, which is synchronous but variable from year to year, is called mast flowering. Most agree that this American bamboo, like most other woody types of bamboo everywhere in the world, is semelparous, meaning that it dies after flowering. In the absence of data that will support a precise explanation, many simply say that flowering is likely stimulated by a combination of internal genetic signals and external factors—temperature, mainly—and leave it at that. 13
      Scientists disagree about the evolutionary purpose of this mast flowering and then demise, at the same time that their explanations share an emphasis on an important quality of cane. Several hypotheses that they have developed to explain mast flowering in bamboo in general also explain it as a complex interaction with other species and as a strategy for maintaining both the species and its habitat. One hypothesis says that by dying after blooming the cane creates a fuel load for a subsequent fire that is certain to kill competing overstory plants, for example, and thereby prepares a habitat for a new brake. In the absence of field studies, any explanation of mast flowering will remain a hypothesis, but all explanations point to a plant that in every stage of its life cycle thrives on and even creates the conditions for disturbance.9 14
      How cane is born and how it dies, however, was not so interesting to those in the South who hunted, ran cattle, or were looking for good agricultural land. They were more interested simply in how to get through a brake, or how cane could be spurred into producing better browse, or in destroying it altogether. They understood that cane enjoyed trouble—whether by flood or fire—but they also learned how to kill it and clear it out when they wished to do so. Canebrakes are invigorated by disturbance—by minor blow-downs, temporary inundations, and light fires; whether they grow in patches or not, they are patchy in their behavior. Before twentieth-century fire-prevention regimes removed fire from most wild lands in America, cane enjoyed regular burning—even cane in poorly drained pocosins rarely went beyond five years without fire, reports one fire scientist. New culms appear soon after a periodic surface fire that is not hot enough to scorch cane rhizomes; these grow more vigorously than the ones they replaced. Fire reduces fuels of dead cane that build up in a canebrake, eliminates competing woody vegetation that is not adapted to fire, and renews the growth of mature stands that otherwise begin to decline and die. Since cane, during the time a brake is maturing, multiplies and establishes itself much more rapidly and vigorously through vegetative reproduction than through reproduction from seed, the regeneration inflamed by periodic light fires keeps a canebrake young and hearty.10 15
      New cane that grows after a fire has cleaned out the brake is also higher in digestible protein than the older cane—a feature of the plant that was noticed by free-ranging cattle in early America and then by the herders who sought to manage them. The history of cane and of cattle became intertwined early in the history of the settlement of the South. Both Carolina "black cattle" and the larger Spanish cattle adapted soon after they were brought to the region for year-round ranging in the southeastern North American environment. Both kinds were durable beasts, with horns to protect themselves against predators, and able to multiply quickly enough in the physical environment to expand their range. The larger Spanish cattle may have already begun to adapt to subtropical heat and humidity and to tolerate a load of the local parasites by the second quarter of the seventeenth century, and may have begun to evolve into the exceptionally hardy breed, the Florida Scrub cattle, that has survived to the present. When herders began to exploit this adaptive relationship and the animals and browse that made it up, open-range cattle raising soon became an important part of the economy of the colonial South. 16
      Livestock were important to the developing plantation economy in the Carolina and Georgia low country. Cattle became commonplace, and a "stock" of cattle and hogs provided part of every plantation's food supply. Cattle and other livestock were also an important form of property in the infant economies, especially for those colonists who did not have large investments in land and slaves. Livestock, especially cattle, was a species that could be exchanged and marketed easily, and one that also paid an "increase" with little investment after the initial—often relatively low—purchase price. Cattle, one of the most fundamental forms of chattel among British colonists, also acquired cultural significance as agents of colonization in the frontier South.11 17
      Soon after the Spanish and English arrived with their cattle, Native Americans also began to raise cattle on the open range, and canebrakes were no less important to them as browse for their animals than they were for European herders. Though the Indians sometimes at first treated cattle like wild animals—these beasts were three times the size of the average white-tailed deer—and killed them in the woods for meat or for hides, they also began herding them at an early date.12 The herds of cattle observed by English travelers in the early eighteenth century on the "Appalachie fields" in what is now north Florida may have belonged to Indians in the area. Even before Spanish settlers arrived in Apalachee in the late seventeenth century, the Indians there were producing enough cattle and hogs to supply St. Augustine. Some of the hides and tallow exported from Apalatchee to Havana during the period may have come from Indian ranches. Though Indians were not able to compete favorably with Spanish ranchers after the Spanish developed the area, they also had cattle on the Florida ranges at the end of the century. When Colonel James Moore and his band of Carolinian and Indian slavers attacked the Apalachee missions in 1704, they eliminated the Spanish presence there and took Indian slaves, and the cattle were left without keepers. Some cattle, however, remained in the possession of Apalachees who escaped the depredations of Moore's band and who joined Upper and Lower Creek towns to the north, and at least one large herd was moved north by Apalachees who established a cattle ranch in the area between the Chattahoochee and Flint rivers.13 18
      According to the Georgia colonist Patrick MacKay, the Creeks also were running cattle on the open range in 1735. By the 1750s and the 1760s cattle had become unique possessions among leading Creeks and Cherokees, important enough that their owners gave them away before their deaths, so that the animals would not be killed.14 By this time, the distinctions between foodways had also been crossed by cattle, and Creeks offered "corned beef" to visitors. Cattle had become a gift the British gave the Creeks as a lubricant to diplomacy, and were part of another kind of exchange further west, along the Lower Mississippi Valley, where Caddoes, Tunicas, and Avoyelles traded in Spanish livestock. The Creek, Cherokee, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw all raised cattle by the end of the eighteenth century.15 When the "Five Civilized Tribes" were compelled into a forced migration from the Southeast to the Indian territory in the nineteenth century, they took well-established open-range cattle herding practices with them to another range.16 19


 
Figure 4
    Figure 4. The Rise of King Cotton.

    From T. B. Thorpe, "Cotton and Its Cultivation," Harper's New Monthly Magazine (March 1854), 456.

    The clearing of cane brakes for cotton cultivation brought an end to cane brakes as a prominent feature of the southern landscape and economy.
 


 
      Cane was so essential to open-range cattle herding in the South, whoever was doing it, that this important agricultural enterprise would not have thrived without it. The small, resilient, and adaptable cattle that were the common stock of early American herds in the South could live year-round on the forage and browse of the marshes, river bottoms, savannas, meadows, and prairies of the Atlantic and Gulf coastal plain and the upcountry without supplemental feed. Cane was not the only browse around. In the late winter, spring, and early summer, the three-awn wiregrass in pine barrens savannas was tender enough to provide feed. In the spring, summer, and fall, cattle could graze on bluestems and other native grasses. Some broad-leafed herbs and browse plants, and near the coast, Spanish moss and "hard feeding marsh," were available to the animals in the winter. But winter feed in most locations throughout the South was not sufficiently nutritious, was low in essential protein, and sometimes was simply indigestible.17 20
      The best food for cattle in all seasons, but especially in winter, came from the ubiquitous patches and dense fields of cane. Modern studies have established that cane foliage was the highest yielding native pasture in the South. It has up to eighteen percent crude protein and is rich in minerals essential for livestock health. Settlers recognized that not only did cattle gain weight when they fed on cane, but also produced superior milk and butter; horses who fed on cane were able to work almost as well as those who were corn-fed. Browsing animals on the open range themselves stated their preferences with their hooves. When the surveyor and historian Bernard Romans noticed, in his account of eighteenth-century Florida, that the savanna known as "Chicasaw old field" had grasses of which cattle were uniquely fond, his evidence for this exception stated the rule, that "in all the circumjacent tract, are abundance of both winter and summer canes to be found, on which they might more luxuriously feed." Most herders recognized, as did Romans, that cane had few such rivals in its attraction to cattle. 21
      Settlers in early Georgia who tried to manipulate their animals to other ranges also had to acknowledge cane both as livestock browse and as habitat, if they were to raise cattle in Georgia. The German Protestant dissidents, the Salzburgers, who settled at New Ebenezer on the Savannah River in the 1730s, learned that cows, calves, and young cattle who had been domesticated and joined with feral herds on the open range usually returned to the village of their own accord. Steers joined the herds permanently when they were about four years old, however, and thereafter were hard to catch and hard to drive. The Salzburgers could not maintain the integrity of their herds, their leader, Johann Martin Bolzius, wrote the Trustees, when their "tame" cattle joined the "wild ones ... which have neither brand or mark." Cane not only fed these cattle, but the dense cane swamps near the Salzburger settlement also gave cover to errant steers and allowed them to behave differently than their owners desired. At the same time the free-ranging cattle in the canebrakes challenged the kind of agriculture and settled community life that the Salzburgers sought to engender. Cattle themselves led, when it came to feed in the winter on an otherwise poor range, and the methods settlers developed for manipulating cattle on the open range were shaped by the cane that cattle sought for food and cover.18 22
      The discovery of canebrakes as reservoirs of browse by cattle and then by cattle owners and herders spelled the beginning of the end for the region's vast canebrakes. Growing herds of cattle themselves did much of the damage. They bunched up in the cane and fed as a group, as cattle tend to do, and "patch grazed"—this meant that they compacted the soil and reduced rhizome reproduction at the same time that they stripped the cane of leaves. Livestock that grazed in the cane regularly ate it out, to the point that it did not regenerate. Herders also damaged brakes by firing them repeatedly during the spring and early summer, when new shoots were growing and the cane was restoring itself. Though regular burning stimulated fresh supplies of digestible protein, cane cannot tolerate annual burning and this practice soon also led to the demise of some brakes. By the early nineteenth century, herders were beginning to complain that the range in some areas was "eaten out" and "burnt out"; overgrazing had destroyed enough of the canebrakes in Creek country that Creek families who raised cattle began to move away from central towns and scatter in smaller settlements and then farmsteads throughout the country to better exploit the cane that remained.19 23
      Because cane was an excellent marker of soil quality and because it often grew on prime bottomland, it became its own signal for destruction when settlers followed herders and cotton followed cattle into cane country. Larger and healthier brakes were the most enticing of all, because of what the vitality of the brake said about the soils in which it thrived. Settlers began to clear bottomland brakes, to convert cane land to cotton and corn, everywhere they went in the South. Observers noticed the relationship between the emergence of permanent settlements and the disappearance of cane in many places as early as the late eighteenth century. 24


 
Figure 5
    Figure 5. Bear Hunt in a Southern Cane Brake.

    Harper's Weekly (October 22, 1870), 684.

    Though large canebrakes began to disappear early in the century, the image of canebrakes as patches of wilderness persisted in popular depictions of them. Here, both wilderness and what southern sportsmen (with dogs and attendants) did in it is captured, in an 1870 image of a canebrake bear hunt.
 


 
      The task of clearing cane land became practiced enough that agriculturists developed a method and adapted a tool for it, a round of grubbing with cane hoes and burning that by itself signaled the history of cane destruction. In an account of canebrake-burning on the banks of the Black Warrior River near Tuscaloosa, Alabama, a contributor to Benjamin Silliman's American Journal of Science and Arts, Alexander Olmsted, described the regimen of destruction that by 1851 was a well-established practice in Southern agriculture. A "laborer" with a carpenter's adze or a heavy hoe—the "cane hoe"—would grab the cane with one hand, cut it off at the ground with the tool in the other, and toss it behind him as he went. The dense stack of cane on the ground was pulled up into heaps, where it was allowed to dry for a month or six weeks, and then fired. The vegetation was destroyed by the cane hoe, but the fire then got rid of it and scorched the life out of the remnants of the cane rhizomes at the same time. "In this way," the observer said, "an acre of land is soon cleared . . . and is ready for immediate tillage." Though Olmsted was more interested in the aesthetics and the physics of the fire and its possible effects on the weather—in this case, the whirlwinds caused by a conflagration of several acres of cane—his spare account of the means by which a canebrake was eliminated pointed to one of the two main causes of the destruction of millions of acres of reed cane in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth-century South. He notes the rationale as well: "From the ease with which it is cleared and from the fertility of the soil, (which may be accurately determined by the size of the canes,) cane land is preferred above all others in the region."20 25
      The fine-tuned methods for clearing canebrakes in the Alabama black belt described in this account were the product of a half-century at least of practice. One Yazoo-Mississippi Delta planter, H. W. Vick, described these techniques in more detail and noticed the integral role that canebrake clearing had in the development of cotton agri-culture in his region, in a letter to the editor published in the Southern Planter in 1842. With an attention to time-motion detail that would have made Frederick Winslow Taylor proud, he explained how he maximized the ratio of pro-duction to hand by instructing his slaves to work in pairs, and to move in such a way that both motion and time were saved: "[The swifter slave in each pair] took a strip of four feet, say, and turning his right arm to the body of the cane, which was kept invariably in that position, caught with his left hand (the palm out) the reed (or two if very close) next to the road or opening, and bending it a little, shivered the joint at or just above the ground. The slower hand followed, throwing with his own any cane cut and left standing by his leader entangled at the top with his. By observing the rule of keeping the right arm to the body of the cane they were compelled to move the body laterally, thus saving the time that would have been lost in changing the position frequently to a face or a half-face to the right and back again." 26
      Cutting the cane, again, before burning them, made it likely that the roots and young sprouts would be destroyed as well. This planter acknowledged a common practice in the antebellum South by describing a method to clear cane and make cotton that razed with industrial efficiency. Against this method, cane lands shrank rapidly, until by the late nineteenth century canebrakes above the patch size persisted only in thinly settled remote river bottoms.21 27
      The tale of the demise of canebrakes is not a simple declensionist one of oceans of pristine vegetation shrinking rapidly against the skimming practices of settler societies. The story of cane complicates and even challenges this narrative of decline. Like the weedy opportunistic exotic species from Europe that did so well in American environments, it thrived on disturbance—but not too much of it, and within certain ecological limits, and in specific locales. Cane is a plant of the margins, thriving and surviving in relationship to other land uses and the people who practiced them. The extensive reaches of cane in the early South may have themselves been relatively new, and the product of another kind of disturbance. In the century after the arrival of Europeans, the rapid population decline of Native Americans who grew maize and other crops on bottomland fields meant that large acreages of potential—and in many cases, previous—cane habitat were abandoned. Some fields may have had portions of potential cane-producing rhizomes scattered throughout them already. In any case, canebrakes were important enough to Indians as a source of materials for baskets, blowguns, reeds for daub-and-wattle huts, and food, that canebrakes on the village and field perimeters were preserved—and these brakes likely colonized the fallow fields. Burning practices by Indians who survived—to drive and attract game, to clear land, and to create browse for livestock—also complemented the early burning practices of colonists, as burns that were not too frequent invigorated the cane. Indians may have burned cane stands with fire in some areas to manage bison populations—bison were common east of the Mississippi in the Southeast in the early eighteenth century.22 Other uses of canebrakes—by slaves who hunted in them or hid out in them for a break from field labor or to escape Civil War depredations, by bear hunters of various stripes, and by assorted hooligans who found a haven in these dense thickets of the margins, also did more to stimulate the action of cane than destroy it.23 28


 
Figure 6
    Figure 6. "The Refuge of Hunted Things."

    Harper's Weekly (October 12, 1907), cover.

    In a well-publicized bear hunting expedition in 1907 in one of the largest surviving canebrakes in the South, Theodore Roosevelt described the canebrake as "the refuge of hunted things." Here, the tables are turned, as the specters of his office pursue the president.
 


 
      Canebrakes began to disappear only when settlers who had enthroned cotton as a crop replaced this habitat of the margins with relatively permanent agricultural settlements and when they linked cane-lands up to the market. Until then, cane ebbed and flowed in relationship to human practices of all sorts. When humans ceased growing maize on bottomlands, canebrakes expanded into old fields; light burns started by humans to drive game or freshen browse stimulated growth in the brakes that were already there. Cane requires regular incursions of trouble, and without natural and human-made disturbances a canebrake will close in on itself and eventually die. A story about cane that is one only of demise does not recognize that cane has always been a plant of the edges, one that has exploited opportunities created by humans and sometimes flourished when humans did as well as when they did not. The enormous brakes of cane that welcomed early travelers and their livestock have disappeared, but in isolated bottoms throughout the South small brakes of cane survive—and wait. 29


Mart Stewart is a professor in the Department of History and an affiliate professor in the Huxley College of the Environment at Western Washington University and is currently working on a cultural history of climate in America.



NOTES

The author thanks Steve Pyne, Harriet Ritvo, Mikko Saiku, Tim Silver, and the anonymous readers of this journal for comments on this essay. He also thanks Mark Hersey and Peter Coclanis for suggestions about references.

1. Michael Williams, Americans and Their Forests: A Historical Geography (1989, reprint: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 238–88. See, also, Mark Wetherington, The New South Comes to Wiregrass Georgia, 1860–1910 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994); Jack Temple Kirby, Poquosin: A Study of Rural Landscape and Society (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 197–234; Mart A. Stewart, "What Nature Suffers to Groe": Life, Labor, and Landscape, on the Georgia Coast, 1680–1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 197–216; Jeffrey A. Drobney, Lumberman and Log Sawyers: Life, Labor, and Culture in the North Florida Timber Industry, 1830–1930 (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1997); and Ronald Lewis, Transforming the Appalachian Countryside: Railroads, Deforestation, and Social Change in West Virginia, 1880–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). For the history of earlier exploitation of forest resources in the South, see Timothy Silver, A New Face on the Countryside: Indians, Colonists, and Slaves in South Atlantic Forests, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 104–38; and Robert Outland, Tapping the Pines: The Naval Stores Industry in the American South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004). Thomas D. Green, The Greening of the South: The Recovery of Land and Forest (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1984) is a sunny narrative of the reforestation of the South by way of tree-farm forests and fire control programs in the twentieth century.

2. Avery Craven, Soil Exhaustion as a Factor in the Agricultural History of Virginia and Maryland, 1606–1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1926); Eugene D. Genovese, "Cotton, Slavery, and Soil Exhaustion," in The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965), 85–105. Stanley Trimble places Genovese's argument within the long history of problems with soil erosion on agricultural lands in the South: Stanley W. Trimble, "Perspectives on the History of Soil Erosion Control in the Eastern United States," Agricultural History 59 (1985): 162–80. Recent scholarship on soil exhaustion in the South gives reforming planters (and not just Taylor and Ruffin) more attention for recognizing ecological problems and embracing a conservation ethic in their proposals for restoring fertility to exhausted soils—even if they rarely practiced what they preached. The best recent consideration of Virginia planter-reformers, especially Edmund Ruffin, is Jack Temple Kirby's Poquosin, 61–94. Kirby also develops the discussion proposed by Carville Earle in a 1988 article, "The Myth of the Southern Soil Miner: Macrohistory, Agricultural Innovation, and Environmental Change," that also questions the uncritical acceptance of Craven's condemnation of frontier farmers: Donald Worster, ed., The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 175–210. "Hinterland" swidden farming was better adapted to the soils of Virginia, if "sustainability" was the measure, than the improving methods of reformers, Earle suggests. Both Earle and Kirby may underestimate the long cycles of forest regeneration in the region where they say land rotation practices may have been at least moderately sustainable. See also Kirby's introduction to Edmund Ruffin, Nature's Management: Writings on Landscape and Reform, 1822–1859, ed. Jack Temple Kirby (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006). Joan Cashin and Steven Stoll have identified the beginnings of an ecological ethic among Southern planters, though they also noticed that they did not often practice what they preached: Joan E. Cashin, "Landscape and Memory in Antebellum Virginia," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 102 (October 1994): 477–500; Steven Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002), 120–68. On the green paternalism of slave owners, see Stewart, "What Nature Suffers to Groe," 182–88, 323–245, 323–345, n74.

3. The best recent expression of this narrative of extraction and decline (with a back story of small and relatively ineffective conservation efforts), which is also a synthesis of scholarship about environmental change in the South, is Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature's Role in American History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002): 71–88, 99–115.

4. Edward Mease, "Of a Journey Through Several Parts of the Province of West Florida, in the Years 1770 and 1771," in Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society, ed. Dunbar Rowland (Jackson, MS: Mississippi Historical Society., 1925), 5: 87.

5. John Drayton, A View of South Carolina (Charleston: W. P. Young, 1802); John Filson, The Discovery, Settlement, and Present State of Kentucke (1784, reprint; Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1966), 23; F. Cuming, Sketches of a Tour to the Western Country through the States of Ohio and Kentucky (Pittsburgh: Cramer, Spear, and Bitchbaum, 1810); Edmund Ruffin, "Notes on the Cane-brake Lands, or The Cretaceous Region of Alabama," in The American Cotton Planter, o.s. vol. 14 (November 1860): 491–92; Francis Harper, ed., Travels of William Bartram: Naturalist's Edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 25–26, 198–99; Harry Hammond, South Carolina: Resources and Population, Institutions and Industries (Charleston: Walker, Evans & Cogswell, 1883), 148; Steven G. Platt and Christopher G. Brantley, "Canebrakes: An Ecological and Historical Perspective," Castanea 62 (March 1997): 11. Hundreds of "cane" place names in the Southeast also point to former abundances of cane: Platt and Brantley, "Canebrakes," 10. One recent source estimates that canebrakes once covered "at least 10 million acres in stream bottom lands and peatlands of the southeastern United States," and that less than 1 percent of these remain: Cecil Frost, "Abstract: Fire Ecology of Marshes and Canebrakes in the Southeastern United States," in The Role of Fire in Nongame Wildlife Management and Community Restoration: Traditional Uses and New Directions, (Newtown Square, PA: USDA Forest Service, 2002). Other notes on the abundance of cane and canebrakes and their value can be found in Timothy Silver, A New Face on the Countryside: Indians, Colonists, and Slaves in the South Atlantic Forests, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 22, 24; Sam Bowers Hilliard, Hog Meat and Hoecake: Food Supply in the Old South, 1840–1860 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972), 136; Mikko Saikku, This Delta, This Land: An Environmental History of the Yazoo-Mississippi Floodplain (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 95–96; Francis Harper, ed., Travels of William Bartram: Naturalist's Edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 147–48, 14, 20–21, 24–25, 238–43, 245, 249, 251, 255, 257–58, 260, 263, 273; E. Merton Coulter, ed., The Journal of William Stephens (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1959) November 19, 1743, 2: 42; Robin A. Fabel and Robert R. Rea, "Lieutenant Thomas Campbell's Sojourn Among the Creeks, Nov. 1764-May, 1765," Alabama Historical Quarterly 36 (Summer 1974): 104; Samuel Cole Williams, ed., Adair's History of the American Indians (New York: Promentary Press, 1930), 241, 304, 385–86; and Francis Peyre Porcher, Resources of the Southern Fields and Forests (Charleston: Walker, Evans, and Cogswell, 1869), 683.

6. Peter Chester, "An Attempt towards a Short Description of West Florida, July 22, 1773," in Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society, ed. Rowland, 5: 172–73.

7. On both kinds of cane, see, Stephen Elliott, A Sketch of the Botany of South Carolina and Georgia (Charleston. SC: J.R. Schenk, 1821): 96–97; John Kunkel, Small Flora of the Southeastern United States (New York: Published by the Author, 1913), 160–61; Grey's Manual of Botany (New York: American Book Co., 1950): 96; Platt and Brantley, "Canebrakes" 8–9; Hugh M. Neisler, "Notes on the Habits of the Common Cane," American Journal of the Science and Arts, 2nd ser., vol. 30 (November 1860): 14–16; and Ralph H. Hughes, "Fire Ecology of Canebrakes," Proceedings of the Tall Timbers Fire Ecology Conference 5 (1966): 151–52. Early observers of the Southeast often called cane land "swamp," but here the contemporary meaning of the English word needs to be acknowledged. Johann Martin Bolzius, the minister of the German religious dissidents who established a settlement in Georgia in the 1730s, observed that canebrake land was often called "swamp" by the English—by which they meant, he said, "low cane-covered regions and valleys in which water does not stand except when it is raining and from which it drains off quickly even then." The connection between cane and rich agricultural soil was expressed by this meaning as well. See George Fenwick Jones, ed., Detailed Reports on the Salzburger Emigrants Who Settled in America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), April 4, 1936, 4: 99. "Pond pine" is Pinus serotina.

8. Neisler, "Notes on the Common Cane," 14–15. Modern studies of cane confirm this profile of cane growth: Platt and Brantley, "Canebrakes," 9.

9. Neisler: 15–16; Platt and Brantley, "Canebrakes," 9. Neisler wrote about Arundinaria macrosperma, Michx., but suggests by way of his admittedly limited examination of the flowers of this one and of "small canes," that the differences between this "variety" or "species" and the smaller one may be produced by "differences in the character of the soil in which they grow"—in modern terms, that they are conspecific: Neisler, 16. For discussions of the mast flowering and semelparity in bamboos, see Daniel H. Janzen, "Why Bamboos Wait So Long to Flower," Annual Review of Ecological Systems 7 (1976): 347–91; and Jon E. Keeley and William J. Bond, "Mast Flowering and Semelparity in Bamboos: The Bamboo Fire Cycle Hypothesis," American Naturalist 154 (September 1999): 383–91.

10. Ralph H. Hughes, "Fire Ecology of Canebrakes," 149–51, 155–57; Platt and Brantley, "Canebrakes": 12. Storm blowdowns also stimulate fresh culm production in damaged areas in a brake: Paul Gagnon and William Platt, "Abstract: Bamboo Demography and Wind Disturbance in an Alluvial Forest," Program for the Ecological Society of America 2004 Annual Meeting, Portland, Oregon.

11. The account book of the Galphinton Trading Post on the Georgia frontier gives some precise evidence attesting to the petite stature of cattle raised on the open range in the region. The "beeves" slaughtered in 1785 and 1786 had net weights between 280 pounds and 333 pounds: Galphinton Trading Post Accounts, October 12, 1785-May 19, 1786, Microfilm, Georgia Department of Archives and History, Atlanta. For Spanish cattle in the region, see John R. Rouse, The Criollo: Spanish Cattle in the Americas (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1977), 10–33, 73–76, 186; and T. A. Olsen, "A History of Spanish Cattle and Sheep in North America," Proceedings of the 1988 Annual Meeting of the American Minor Breeds Conservancy (Pittsboro, NC, 1988), 62. Several scholars, as part of a lively and sometimes tumultuous debate that has important implications for environmental history, have argued that cattle-herding in South Carolina was merely the first application in North America of "pre-adapted" cultural baggage carried by certain ethnic groups, mainly West African and Celtic: Peter Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina (New York: W.W. Norton, 1974), 28–33; John Solomon Otto, "The Origins of Cattle-Ranching in Colonial South Carolina, 1670–1715," South Carolina Historical Magazine 87 (1986): 117–24; and Grady McWhiney and Forrest McDonald, "Celtic Origins of Southern Herding Practices," Journal of Southern History 51 (1985): 165–82. Earlier studies that suggest Spanish (by way of the West Indies and Spanish Florida) origins for herds and herding practices include Lewis Cecil Gray, Agriculture in the Southern United States (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution, 1933) 1: 140, 151, see also 78–79; and Frank Lawrence Owsley, Plain Folk of the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1949), 26–29. Terry Jordan and Matti Kaups claim that the influence of Savo-Karelian culture provided crucial components of "American backwoods" culture in general: The American Backwoods Frontier: An Ethnic and Ecological Interpretation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). Several other studies that describe and analyze cattle-raising in the early South include Gary S. Dunbar, "Colonial Carolina Cowpens," Agricultural History 35 (1961): 125–31; James C. Bonner, "The Open Range Livestock Industry in Colonial Georgia," Georgia Review 17 (1963): 85–92; James S. Maag, "Cattle Raising in Colonial South Carolina"(MA thesis, University of Kansas, 1964); John Solomon Otto, "Traditional Cattle-Herding Practices in Southern Florida," Journal of American Folklore, 97 (1984): 291–309; Otto, "Livestock-Raising in Early South Carolina, 1670–1700: Prelude to the Rice Plantation Economy," Agricultural History 61 (1987): 13–24; Terry G. Jordan, Trails to Texas: Southern Roots of Western Cattle Ranching (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981), 25–58; and Brooks Blevins, Cattle in the Cotton Fields: A History of Cattle Raising in Alabama (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1998). The most comprehensive examination of cattle raising practices in the early South is Terry G. Jordan, North American Cattle-Ranching Frontiers: Origins, Diffusion and Differentiation (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993). Virginia DeJohn Anderson's "Animals into the Wilderness" steps around the debate about "pre-adaptation" by simply ignoring the literature and also by focusing on Virginia, a colony more or less off the trail. She adds to our understanding of the perceptions and cultural predispositions of the colonists who sought to manage cattle in "Animals into the Wilderness: The Development of Livestock Husbandry in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake," William and Mary Quarterly 59 (April 2002): 377–408; and Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). An earlier study that looks at another part of the early South (Georgia) and that examines the behavior of cattle and local ecological conditions as well as the development of institutions and cultural structures for managing cattle raising and assuring their domestic—not wild—status within the colony, is Mart Stewart, "'Whether Wast, Deodand or Estray?' Cattle, Culture, and the Environment in Early Georgia, Agricultural History (Summer, 1991): 1–28.

12. W. J. Hamilton, "Dressed Weights of Some Game Animals," Journal of Wildlife Management 11 (1947): 349–50; George Fenwick Jones, The Salzburger Saga: Religious Exiles and Other Germans Along the Savannah (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984), 23; Harman Verelst to Thomas Causton, May 15, 1735, Colonial Records of Georgia, v. 29, 54. Bolzius complained that the Indians would sometimes kill a cow "for the bell around its neck": Loewald, et al., eds., "Bolzius Answers a Questionnaire," William and Mary Quarterly, 240.

13. John H. Hann, Apalachee, the Land Between the Rivers (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1988), 53–54, 135–38, 143, 232, 239–40, 242, 259, 280–81, 290.

14. The Mico of Coweta, who died in 1756, bequeathed his possessions, which included cattle, to his relations, deeming them more useful to his family after death than to himself: James Adair, History, 187, 242. This included cattle, because Molatchi had many from the prominent Georgia family, the Bosomworths: John Juricek, personal correspondence. The Wolf of Mucklassee Town, an influential Cherokee leader, gave his stock of about two hundred head of "black cattle" to his children so that they would not be killed when he died. See Fabel and Rea, "Lieutenant Thomas Campbell's Sojourn," 108.

15. Fabel and Rea, "Lieutenant Thomas Campbell's Sojourn": 104, 106, 108. Along with "black cattle," the Creeks also had goats and sheep, according to Campbell. Governor James Grant of East Florida, who used cattle as a bribe in diplomacy with the Lower Creeks, called it a "new system," and said the "Indians begin to be fond of cattle": Gov. James Grant to Sec. of Board of Trade, October 3, 1767, P.R.O. 869, CO5/567, Oct. 3, 1767, Microfilm 1592/11, 27–31, Woodruff Library, Emory University; Daniel H. Usner, Jr., "The Frontier Exchange Economy of the Lower Mississippi Valley in the Eighteenth Century," William and Mary Quarterly 44 (1987): 187–88. As Usner explains, livestock and their baggage also came from the other direction, from the Spanish colonies in the Southwest and Mexico. Richard White says intermarried whites introduced cattle to the Choctaw around 1770. By the early nineteenth century, many Choctaw hunters had become pastoralists: Richard White, The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change Among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983): 103–05. For a thoughtful analysis of Indian cattle raising in the Southeast, focused specifically on the Creeks, see Robbie Ethridge, Creek Country: The Creek Indians and Their World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 160–74.

16. Terry Jordan, Trails, 49–50. See also Michael F. Doran, "Antebellum Cattle Herding in the Indian Territory," Geographical Review 66 (1976): 48–58.

17. Dunbar, "Colonial Carolina Cowpens," 127; R. S. Campbell and H. H. Biswell, "Cattle in the Pines," American Forests 50 (1944): 260, 262; Sam B. Hilliard, Hog Meat and Hoecake: Food Supply in the Old South, 1840–1860 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972), 134; J. E. Foster, H. H. Biswell, and E. H. Hostetler, "Comparison of Different Amounts of Protein Supplement for Wintering Beef Cows on Forest Range in the Southeastern Coastal Plain," Journal of Animal Science, 4 (1945): 388. "Hard feeding marsh" was salt marsh, and specifically, saltmeadow cordgrass, saltgrass, and smooth cordgrass. The grazing in the salt marshes was at its best in the winter, because plant growth was more tender and nutritious then, and because insects were less troublesome: A. Sydney Johnson, Hillburn O. Hillestad, Sheryl Fanning Shanholtzer, and G. Frederick Shanholtzer, An Ecological Survey of the Coastal Region of Georgia, National Park Service Scientific Monograph Series, No. 3 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1974), 118. For references to "hard feeding marsh," see advertisements in Georgia Gazette, August 25, 1763, July 12, 1764, August 8, 1765, July 27, and December 21, 1768. Some of these references may also have included freshwater marshes, which provided good feed in spring and summer. For Spanish moss, see Louis De Vorsey, Jr., ed., DeBrahm's Report of the General Survey in the Southern District of North America (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1971), 69–70; and Harper, ed., Travels of William Bartram, 56–57. See also Jordan, North American Cattle Ranching, 105, 115–16, 170, 192, 197. Like the Florida Scrub cattle who still survive in agricultural museums, cattle in the region may have been unusually adapted to forage on plants low in digestible protein in the fall and winter, able to recover quickly from long periods of deficient nutrition, and able to breed soon after recovery. But they still needed to find adequate feed of some kind to survive the winter: see T. A. Olsen, "A History of Spanish Cattle and Sheep in North America," Proceedings of the 1988 Annual Meeting of the American Minor Breeds Conservancy (Pittsboro, NC, 1988), 62.

18. Platt and Brantley, "Canebrakes,"14; Romans, Natural History of East and West Florida, 101. The Salzburgers were indirectly acknowledging that cattle had their own minds on the matter of cane: Social behavior among cattle proceeds from development, rather than instinct, and once it is established it can be very stable: D. G. M. Wood-Gush, Elements of Ethology: A Textbook for Agricultural and Veterinary Students (London: Chapman and Hall, 1983), 43–47. Different wild and semi-wild cattle also have clear, cohesive, and varying social behaviors: Viktor Reinhardt and Annie Reinhardt, "Cohesive Relationships in a Cattle Herd (Bos Indicus)," Behaviour: An International Journal of Comparative Ethology 77 (1981): 121–51; Viktor Reinhardt, "Movement Orders and Leadership in a Semi-Wild Cattle Herd (Bos Indicus)," Behaviour: An International Journal of Comparative Ethology 83 (1983): 251–64; Catherine Reinhardt, Annie Reinhardt, and Viktor Reinhardt, "Social Behaviour and Reproductive Performance in Semi-Wild Scottish Highland Cattle," Applied Animal Behaviour Science 15 (1986): 125–36; A. F. Vitale, M. Tenucci, M. Papini, and S. Lovari, "Social Behaviour of the Calves of Semi-Wild Maremma Cattle, Bos Primigenius Taurus," Applied Animal Behaviour Science 16 (1986): 217–31. Martin Bolzius to Harmon Verelst, July 13, 1747, Colonial Records of Georgia, 25: 190–91; Benjamin Martyn to the President and Assistants in Georgia, May 31, 1748, Colonial Records of Georgia, 31: 101–02. On the average, cattle each required fifteen acres of pasture to forage for the year in the eighteenth-century coastal South. If only pine barrens were available, each animal required twenty-five acres: Manuscripts of the Earl of Egmont: Diary of the Earl of Egmont (London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1923), May 25, 1741, 3: 223. If cane meadows were available, the cattle could find adequate food on acreages as small as two acres on the average: John S. Otto, "The Migration of Plain Folk: An Interdisciplinary Synthesis," Journal of Southern History 51 (May 1985): 94; Foster, Biswell, and Hostetler, "Comparison," 388. Acknowledging that local conditions and adaptations were as least as important as "pre-adaptation" and "cultural hearths" to the history of southern cattle raising does not make an explanation that is "self-contradictory." Terry Jordan's North American Cattle-Ranching Frontiers (177) is unnecessarily combative on this point, as it appears in Stewart, "Whether Wast, Deodand, or Estray?"; his study on the whole in any case attends to both "adaptation" and "pre-adaptation." For those who were actually doing the herding, what they found on the ground for their cattle and by way of their cattle was of more immediate importance than where their herding practices came from, and much more attention needs to be paid to discrete local ecological and cultural factors in the relationship between cattle and humans in the South—this is my point in "Whether Wast," and here.

19.The Georgian, January 31, 1831; Platt and Brantley, "Canebrakes": 14–15; Timothy Silver, A New Face on the Countryside, 179–80. Whether removal of Creeks to farmsteads compromised matrilines, multi-family households, and communal farming practices and encouraged the development of patriarchal nuclear families requires more investigation. But in part because of the changing relationship of cattle and cane in Creek country, the face of Creek farming and ranching had by the early nineteenth century begun to look much like that of white frontier farming. For Creek herding practices, see Ethridge, Creek Country, 160–74.

20. Alexander Fisher Olmsted, "Whirlwinds Produced by the Burning of a CaneBrake," American Journal of Science and Arts 11 (2nd ser.; May, 1851): 181–82.

21. H. W. Vick, "Letter to the Editor," Southern Planter, vol. 1 (September-December, 1842), 17, quoted in Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, Life and Labor in the Old South (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1929), 133; Saikku, This Delta, This Land, 102–03; Platt and Brantley, "Canebrakes," 15. Some conservationists are seeking to restore canebrakes in selected protected habitats in the South, both to bring back cane and to provide nesting habitat for the Swainson's warbler (which prefers brakes for nesting). The Nature Conservancy, for example, is working with federal agencies to restore canebrakes along the Current River in Missouri: http://nature.org/wherewework/fieldguide/projectprofiles/, accessed November 21, 2004. Similarly, the Land Trust for Land Tennessee has been returning cane to floodplains along the Little Tennessee River: http://ltlt.org/newsletter_fall2004, accessed November 21, 2004.

22. Platt and Brantley, "Canebrakes,"13; Silver, A New Face on the Countryside, 26, 51, 56; Saikku, This Delta, This Land, 68. The ecological relationship of canebrakes to other organisms that were also affected by human population change and uses is likely more complicated than suggested here. For example, cane may have expanded in tandem with beaver populations (and beaver ponds) after the decline of Native American populations; one of the factors in the decline of cane may have then been the decimation of beaver populations by the fur trade: Private correspondence, July 18, 2006. Large flocks of passenger pigeons may also have commonly roosted in canebrakes, killing overstory trees and depositing layers of dung that may have favored the growth of canebrakes; the extinction of passenger pigeons may have been one of many historical developments that affected canebrake health: see Platt and Brantley, "Canebrakes," 13–14. Because of the dearth of hard evidence about this kind of ecological complexity, any discussion of it remains speculative.

23. How canebrakes have functioned in the imagination of Southerners as a habitat for feral cattle, runaway slaves and maroon communities, outlaws, rascals, and hooligans, and poor whites on the periphery is yet another story about canebrakes as marginal environments, one that cane itself encouraged. Canebrake inhabitants were, as Theodore Roosevelt explained with unknowing understatement in an account of a bear hunt in one of the last of the large Southern canebrakes in 1907, "the refuge for hunted things": "In the Louisiana Canebrakes" (1908), http://www.theodore-roosevelt.com/trcanebrakes.html. Swamps, canebrakes included, were racialized environments, and usually had more positive connotations for African Americans than for whites—as refuges, as places to procure resources, and as conduits to freedom. For canebrakes as hiding or hunting places for slaves, see: the narrative of Charlie Davis and Heddie Davis, South Carolina Narratives, vol. 15, part 1, 247, 259; Joe Clinton, Arkansas Narratives, vol. 2, part 2, 31; Mag Johnson, Arkansas Narratives, vol. 2, part 4, 108; Victoria Sims, Arkansas Narratives, Vol. 2, part 6, 162; Doc Quinn, Arkansas Narratives, vol. 2, part 6, 2; John Wesley, Arkansas Narratives, vol. 2, part 7, 96; Josh Horn, Alabama Narratives, vol. 1, 210; all in Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives From the Federal Writers' Project, 1936–1938, in http://memory.loc.gov/mss/mesn, accessed March 11, 2005. For a general account of the cultural meaning of swampy marginal environments in the South, see David C. Miller, Dark Eden: The Swamp in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Megan Kate Nelson, "Peculiar Ecology: Swamps and Culture in the Southeastern Borderlands, 1732–1940," (PhD dissertation, American Studies, University of Iowa, 2002), especially 58–78; Anthony Wilson, Shadow and Shelter: The Swamp in Southern Culture (Oxford: University of Mississippi Press, 2006). See also Stewart, "What Nature Suffers to Groe," 135–36, 245–46.

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.

 



January, 2007 Previous Table of Contents Next