When the Pilgrim first landed on the coast of America, the most
remarkable feature of its scenery that drew his attention, next to the
absence of towns and villages, was an almost universal forest. A few
openings were to be seen near the rivers,—immense peat-meadows covered
with wild bushes and gramineous plants, interspersed with little wooded
islets, and bordered on all sides by a rugged, silent, and dreary desert
of woods. Partial clearings had likewise been made by the Indians for
their rude hamlets, and some spaces had been opened by fire. But the
greater part of the country was darkened by an umbrageous mass of trees
and shrubbery, in whose gloomy shades were ever present dangers and
bewilderment for the traveller. In these solitudes the axe of the
woodman had never been heard, and the forest for thousands of years had
been subject only to the spontaneous action of natural causes. To men
who had been accustomed to the open and cultivated plains of Europe,
this waste of woods, those hills without prospect, that pathless
wilderness, and its inhabitants as savage as the aspect of the country,
must have seemed equally sublime and terrible.
But when the colonists had cut roads through this desert, planted
landmarks over the country, built houses upon its clearings, opened the
hill-tops to a view of the surrounding prospect, and cheered the
solitude by some gleams of civilization, then came the naturalist and
the man of science to survey the aspect and productions of this new
world. And when they made their first excursions over its rugged hills
and through its wooded vales, we can easily imagine their transports at
the sight of its peculiar scenery. How must the early botanist have
exulted over this grand assemblage of plants, that bore resemblance to
those of Europe only as the wild Indian resembles the fair-haired Saxon!
Everywhere some rare herb put forth flowers at his feet, and trees of
magnificent height and slender proportions intercepted his progress by
their crowded numbers. The wood was so generally uninterrupted, that it
was difficult to find a summit from which he could obtain a lookout of
any considerable extent; but occasional natural openings exposed floral
scenes that must have seemed like the work of enchantment. In the wet
meadows were deep beds of moss of the finest verdure, which had seldom
been disturbed by man or brute. On the uplands were vast fields of the
checkerberry plant, social, like the European heath, and loaded half the
year with its spicy scarlet fruit. Every valley presented some unknown
vegetation to his sight, and every tangled path led him into a new scene
of beauties and wonders. It must have seemed to him, when traversing
this strange wilderness, that he had entered upon a new earth, in which
nature had imitated, without repeating, the productions of his native
East.
Along the level parts of New England and the adjacent country, wherever
the rivers were languid in their course, and partially inundated their
banks in the spring, were frequent natural meadows, not covered by
trees,—the homes of the robin and the bobolink before the white man had
opened to them new fields for their subsistence. In the borders of these
openings, the woods in early summer were filled with a sweet and novel
minstrelsy, contrasting delightfully with the silence of the deeper
forest. The notes of the birds were wild variations of those which were
familiar to the Pilgrim in his native land, and inspired him with
delight amidst the all-prevailing sadness of woods that presented on the
one hand scenes both grand and beautiful, and teemed on the other with
horrors which only the pioneer of the desert could describe.
The whole continent, at the time of its discovery, from the coast to the
Great American Desert, was one vast hunting-ground, where the nomadic
inhabitants obtained their subsistence from the chase of countless herds
of deer and buffalo. At this period the climate had not been modified by
the operations of man upon the forest. It was less variable than now,
and the temperature corresponded more definitely with the degrees of
latitude. The winter was a season of more invariable cold, less
interrupted by thaws. In New England and the other Northern States, snow
fell in the early part of December, and lay on the ground until April,
when the spring opened suddenly, and was not followed by those
vicissitudes that mark the season at the present era. Such was the true
forest climate. May-day came garlanded with flowers, lighted with
sunshine, and breathing the odors of a true spring. It was then easy to
foretell what the next season would be from its character the preceding
years. Autumn was not then, as we have often seen it, extended into
winter. The limits of each season were more precisely defined. The
continent was annually visited by the Indian summer, that came, without
fail, immediately after the fall of the leaf and the first hard frosts
of November. This short season of mild and serene weather, the halcyon
period of autumn, has disappeared with the primitive forest.
The original circumstances of the country have been entirely
revolutionized. The American climate is now in that transition state
which has been caused by opening the space to the winds from all
quarters by operations which have not yet been carried to their extreme
limit. These changes of the surface have probably increased the mean
annual temperature of the whole country by permitting the direct rays of
the sun to act upon a wider area, while they have multiplied those
eccentricities of climate that balk our weather calculations at all
seasons. There are still in many parts of the country large tracts of
wood which have not been greatly disturbed. From the observation of
these, and from descriptions by different writers of the last century,
we may form a pretty fair estimate of the character and aspect of the
forest before it was invaded by civilized man.
During this primitive condition of the country, the forest, having been
left for centuries entirely to nature, would have formed a very
intelligible geological chart. If we could have taken an extensive view
of the New England forest, before any considerable inroads had been made
by the early settlers, from an elevated stand on the coast, we should
have beheld a dense and almost universal covering of trees. From this
stand we might also trace the geological character of the soil, and its
different degrees of fertility, dryness, and moisture, by the
predominance of certain species and the absence of others. The
undulations upon this vast ocean of foliage would come from the
elevations and depressions of the ground; for the varying heights of the
different assemblages of species upon the same level could hardly be
perceived by a distant view. The lowest parts of this wooded region were
at that period covered very generally with a crowded growth of the
northern cypress, or white cedar. These evergreen swamps would
constitute the darkest ground of the picture. The deep alluvial tracts
would be known by the deciduous character of their woods and their
lighter and brighter verdure, and the dry, sandy and diluvial plains and
the gravelly hills and eminences by their white birches and tremulous
poplars, their stunted pitch-pines and dwarfish junipers. For a century
past the woods have been cleared mostly from the alluvial tracts; and
the oaks, the hickories, the chestnuts, and other hard-wood trees, the
primitive occupants of the rich and deep soils, have been succeeded in
great measure by trees of softer wood, that originally grew on inferior
land. The wooded aspect of the country cannot any longer be considered,
as formerly, a good geological chart, except in some parts of Maine and
the adjoining British Provinces.
One of the conditions most remarkable in a primitive forest is the
universal dampness of the ground. The second growth of timber,
especially if the surface were entirely cleared, stands upon a drier
foundation. This greater dryness is caused by the absence of those vast
accumulations of vegetable _débris_ that rested on the ground before it
was disturbed. A greater evaporation also takes place under the second
growth, because the trees are of inferior size and stand more widely
apart. Another character of a primitive forest is the crowded assemblage
of trees and their undergrowth, causing great difficulty in traversing
it. Innumerable straggling vines, many of them covered with thorns, like
the green-brier, intercept our way. Immense trunks of trees, prostrated
by hurricanes, lie in our path, and beds of moss of extreme thickness
cover a great part of the surface, saturated with moisture. The trees
are also covered with mosses, generated by the shade and dampness; and
woody vines, like the climbing fern, the poison ivy, and the ampelopsis,
fastened upon their trunks and trailing from their branches, make the
wood in many places like the interior of a grotto. Above all, the
traveller would notice the absence of those pleasant wood-paths that
intersect all our familiar woods, and would find his way only by
observing those natural appearances that serve as a compass to the
Indian and the forester.
In primitive woods there is but a small proportion of perfectly formed
trees; and these occur only in such places as permit some individuals to
stand in an isolated position, and spread out their arms to their full
capacity. When rambling in a wood we take note of several conditions
which are favorable to this full expansion of their forms. On the
borders of a lake, a prairie, or an open moor, or of an extensive quarry
that projects above the soil, the trees will extend their branches into
the opening; but as they are crowded on their inner side, they are only
half developed. This expansion, however, is on the side that is exposed
to view; hence the incomparable beauty of a wood on the borders of a
lake or pond, on the banks of a river as viewed from the water, and on
the circumference of a densely wooded islet.
Fissures and cavities are frequent in large rocks not covered with soil,
allowing solitary trees which have taken root in them to acquire their
full proportions. In such places, and on eminences that rise suddenly
above the forest level, with precipitous sides, overtopping the
surrounding woods, we find individual trees possessing the character of
standards, like those we see by roadsides and in open fields. But
perfectly formed trees can only be produced in openings and on isolated
elevations such as I have described; and it is evident that these
favorable circumstances must be rare. The trees in a forest are like
those human beings who from their infancy have been confined in the
workshops of a crowded manufacturing town, and who become closely
assimilated and lose those marks of individual character by which they
would be distinguished if they had been reared in a state of freedom and
in the open country.
The primitive forest, in spite of its dampness, has always been subject
to fires in dry seasons, which have sometimes extended over immense
tracts of country. These fires were the dread of the early settlers, and
countless lives have been destroyed by their flames often overwhelming
entire villages. At the present time the causes of fire in the woods are
very numerous; but before they were exposed to artificial sources of
ignition it may have arisen from spontaneous combustion, caused by large
accumulations of fermenting substances, or from lightning, or from the
accidental friction of the trunks of half-prostrated trees crossing each
other, and moved by a high wind. The forests in every part of the world
have been subject to conflagrations; and there seems to be no other
means that could be used by nature for removing old and worn-out
forests, which contain more combustible materials than any young woods.
The burned tracts in America are called barrens by the inhabitants; and
as the vegetation on the surface is often entirely destroyed, the
spontaneous renewal of it would display the gradual method of nature in
restoring the forest. The successions of plants, from the beautiful
crimson fireweed, through all the gradations of tender herbs, prickly
bushes, and brambles, to shrubs and trees of inferior stature, until
all, if the soil be deep and fertile, are supplanted by oaks, chestnuts,
hickories, and other hard-wood trees, are as regular and determinable as
the courses of the planets or the orders of the seasons.