Chapter Two:
The Native Americans and the Land (continued)
Native American Impacts on the Land
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Modern Americans tend to believe that the Native
Americans who first inhabited this continent lived in almost perfect
harmony with the environment. There is some truth to this assertion, and
a great deal of dangerous misinformation. A fundamental beginning for
understanding the relationship between precontact Native Americans and
the natural environment is to understand that they would never have
asked the question. Before the arrival of European man in California,
the people who lived here saw themselves as inseparable from the natural
world of plants and animals. The Western Mono lived in a unified world
of predator and prey, of spirits and totemic clan groups. Their
mythology related them to their fellow creatures and to the landscape.
But this does not mean that they had no impact upon their world, for
they certainly did.
Perhaps the most difficult historical question modern
wilderness managers face in California and the Sierra is defining how
preindustrial human beings affected the ecosystems we are now seeking to
preserve. Were early human actions so insignificant that they really are
of no modern consequence? Or were they critical to the development and
maintenance of the landscape that we now call "natural" and that we so
deeply appreciate? The final detailed answers to these problems are
still deeply hidden, but a preliminary picture is emerging, and that
picture suggests that Native Americans were, in many ways, a major
factor in development of the California landscape.
Many Native American impacts on the landscape were
localized. Hale Tharp, apparently the first white man to visit the
Monache village at Hospital Rock, reported in 1858 that he found several
hundred Indians living at the site, that the camp was occupied all year,
and that the campfires were never allowed to go out. [8] Perhaps not all the people Tharp met that day
actually lived at Hospital Rock, but nonetheless even a well-run
collection of camps with this many people would have had significant
local impacts. To support several hundred people through hunting and
gathering involves a great deal of resource manipulation, and keeping
camp fires burning 365 days a year would definitely affect local
vegetation. Without doubt, a camp like Hospital Rock, which according to
the archaeologists had been occupied for at least 500 years prior to
Tharp's arrival, had changed the appearance and biology of considerable
surrounding acreage. Quantifying this change, unfortunately, is as yet
impossible. We simply don't known enough about what the Indians were
taking from the environment, how they were taking it, or even exactly
what the environment was at the time.
Native American impacts were not always local,
however, for at least one of their cultural habits affected the entire
landscape. Throughout North America, anthropological research makes it
clear that Native Americans used a great deal of fire to modify the
landscape. Fires were kindled for various reasons, including improvement
of forage for game animals, encouragement of valuable plants, game
herding, and visibility improvement. From all we can tell, the Western
Mono, the Yokuts, the Tubatulabal, and the Eastern Mono all set fires at
various times for various purposes, and likely a substantial number of
fires. Understanding the impacts of these fires is difficult. Fires
change both the density and composition of vegetation. Frequent fires,
from any cause, can completely change ecosystems. We know that Native
Americans frequently lit fires. [9] We do not
know, however, how many fires burned, or what percentage of those fires
were kindled by Native Americans rather than by natural causes. Thus we
cannot, as did the early European pioneers, separate the land from its
Native American inhabitants.
In the middle nineteenth century, when Europeans
first studied the resources and landscape of the southern Sierra Nevada,
they profoundly misperceived what they saw. Because they refused to take
seriously the technologically simple people they found living there,
they completely missed how significantly the Native Americans had
changed the landscape and its natural systems. Because the early
Europeans missed these crucial relationships, they convinced themselves
that they were looking at a virgin, primeval landscape, the work of God.
The rapid disappearance of the Indians in the 1860s, which we will
detail in the next chapter, only served to reinforce this
perception.
Ultimately, this mistaken idea of a primeval
landscape would be taken up not only by pioneers, but also by
politicians and conservationists and would in time become a subtly
flawed foundation block in the formation of Sequoia and Kings Canyon
national parks.
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