When I talked about the desperation in academia to prove INdians didn’t kill hte mammoths and giant sloths, Elizabeth added a comment about the “balds” in Appalachia. These are mountain tops that Indians regularly burned off, destroying the trees. She also pointed out that large areas of the East where the “nature-;oving” Indians lived were reduced to prairie.
Here isa comment from Marshall de Bruhl’s 1993 life of Sam Houston. It is a grovelingly politically correct book in general, but he did let this slip. He was discussing hte fact that white settlers of the Shanandoah Valley found it already cleared. He explained htis by the fact that, in order to get herding animals to hunt there, the Indians burned it off every year:
“The standard portrait of the native Amerians as benign ecologists is somewhat marred by this practice. One forester obserrved that had this seasonal burning xontinued, in a few centuries Vorginia would have beomce eitehr a PRAIRIE or a desert.”
You know those temples that are found inthe middle of the Central American jungles? It turned out that the Indians built up civilizations there and destroyed the trees and brought on doughts and flooding that brought down each civilization. The jungle, with its thin, Amazon-like soil, then grew over it.
#1 by Shari on 09/23/2006 - 6:08 pm
Not Spam
Not Spam
We have something near here called the Madison buffalo jump. It was a steep bluff that the Indians stampeded buffalo off of. They then removed such as the tongue which was a delecacy and left whole carcesses of the dead and dying buffalo. They only used the WHOLE buffalo when it suited their purpose and when it didn’t, they wasted. They weren’t ecologists for crying out loud, that’s made up.
#2 by C.E. Whiteoak on 09/23/2006 - 7:31 pm
NOT SPAM
NOT SPAM
There are indeed a number of mountaintops, bald since time immemorial, here in the Appalachians.
As I write this I sit within six miles of one actually named Bald Mountain. There are at leadt a couple more such mountains within this county. I am in agreement that this was probably caused repeated burning by the Indians, and possibly the practice began with whatever tribe(s) the Cherokee displaced and then was continued by the Cherokee.
The North American horse is another animal that went extinct at the end of the last Ice Age, and the most likely theory to explain their disappearance is that Indians drove great herds of them over cliffs and down steep ravines in order to obtain the meat and hides of only a few animals.
There is, if I am not mistaken, a good body of evidence to support this theory.
Of course when the Spanish re-introduced horses to these shores 500 years ago, the Indians didn’t run them over cliffs, but did manage to steal quite a number of them.
By the way, has everyone read Mark Twain’s terse obsevation on the noble savage? Mr. Clemens didn’t have too much patience with the romantic popular view.
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/HNS/Indians/main.html
#3 by Alan B. on 09/24/2006 - 10:52 am
NOT SPAM
NOT SPAM
Seldom will the truth be known, when the PC crowd wants it their way even history and truth will be sacrificed. Indians sacrificed the innocent to please the gods, the Aztecs did this. The indians were always at war with apposing tribes, the U.S. cavalry had little trouble finding indian scouts willing to assist them in the old west. believe me, had the tecnoloy existed that would enable one tribe to exterminate another they would have used it to the fullest.