Human Use of Fire in History (1540s to 1900s)
Major changes in fire regimes, linked to monumental social and environmental changes, occurred during the historical era. The historical era began in the 1540s when Hernando DeSoto led the first European explorers through the South. Although the dates are somewhat arbitrary, the end of the historical era – in relation to the ways people use fire to manage the landscape – is the early 1900s when the fire exclusion era began.
Many southern Indian groups continued to use fire for farming and hunting during the historic period. They used fire to clear swidden gardens (places where plants are raised by cutting the vegetation, burning the brush, and planting in the ashes) and permanent fields for their maize crops. In their journals, European explorers wrote about the maize they were given by Indian horticulturalists in the 1500s and 1600s. Their stories, together with other types of evidence, suggest that Indians were growing a lot of maize implying that they created a lot of farmland with fire and other horticultural techniques. Settlers at Jamestown wrote about Indians in the Piedmont who used fire drives (low-intensity fires to trap game in a central arena or against a natural barrier) as a hunting technique (Hammett 1992). Powhatan’s Confederacy and other large Indian groups on the Piedmont may have used fire drives prior to European contact. Smaller groups in the Piedmont regions of Virginia and North Carolina were also using fire drives. It has been proposed that fire drives became more frequent after European contact in response to the European fur trade.
Native Americans used fire to manage prairies and forests in the Southern Appalachians during the historic period. It is believed that Native Americans periodically burned the prairies in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley (Brown 2000). In 1671 Robert Fallam described the “brave meadows with grass about a man’s height” that he saw in the Shenandoah Valley (cited in Brown 2000). Brown (2000) writes, “Daniel Boone blazed the Wilderness Trail in 1769 on a well-trodden bison path through the Cumberland Gap, suggesting that grassland corridors once reached from southwestern Virginia into the Piedmont and Shenandoah Valley.” In North Carolina, there were grasslands – presumably maintained by Indian fires – in the Asheville Basin at the end of the Mississippian period. Also at that time there were grasslands and canebrakes along the French Broad River and its tributaries (DeVivo 1991). Another example of regularly burned areas in the Southern Appalachians are the floodplains along rivers and creeks where low-intensity Indian fires maintained the park-like woods witnessed by European explorers. In 1728 William Byrd wrote that Indians used annual fires to clear travel routes in their network of trails that extended throughout the Southern Appalachians. In 1624 John Smith wrote, “[The Indians] cannot travel but where the woods are burnt” (cited in Brown 2000).
The Impacts of Migration on Fire Regimes
The fire history of the Ozark-Ouachita highlands makes it clear that migration affects fire regimes. The migration into the Ozark-Ouachitas by Native Americans in the 1700s and by Europeans in the 1800s caused initial increases and subsequent decreases in fire frequencies. During the late 1700s, Cherokee Indians migrated into the Ozarks after European settlers displaced them from their homelands in the Southern Appalachians. Between 1760 and 1820, the number of sites that were burned in the Current River watershed in Missouri increased by 21% (Guyette and Dey 2000). The number of annually-burned sites in the Current River watershed almost doubled as population density increased between 1810 and 1850. By 1803 there were about 6,000 Cherokee living in southeast Missouri and northeast Arkansas. In 1838 more Cherokee settled in the Ozark region when the United States government forced them to leave the Southern Appalachians and march westward on the “Trail of Tears”. The Cherokee may have transferred their Southern Appalachian burning practices to their new territories. This migration process would have altered vegetative communities in their old and new homelands.
Fire Regimes and Conflict
Conflict and war between Indians groups and between Indians and Euro-Americans may also have caused changes in fire regimes. In the 1820s Euro-Americans and Scotch-Irish from Tennessee began settling the Ozarks. Other Euro-American settlers began immigrating to the region in the 1830s. Fire regimes changed because the landscape management practices of new settlers differed from those of Native American communities. The new immigrants began applying prior burning traditions (from Europe) and designing new regimes in their settlements
Fire Use by European Settlers Compared to Native American Fire Use
There may not have been much difference between early European and Native American fire regimes in the early historic period. Like Native Americans, European settlers used fire to shape southern landscapes. Also like Native Americans, the use of fire by early European settlers and its effects on southern landscapes varied from place to place. The burning practices of European settlers in many parts of the South was a combination of European traditions adapted to the New World by colonial settlers, practices learned from Native Americans, and experimentation with fire in new environments. In the early settlement period, Europeans burned the landscape for many of the same reasons as Indians: to collect wild foods, to hunt, to produce forage for wild game and grazing animals, to clear farming land, to support their aesthetic preferences, and to entertain themselves. One of the reasons Cherokee Indians in the Southern Appalachians burned the woods in the autumn was to clear the litter on the forest floor so that it would be easier to collect chestnuts. James Mooney (1995), an ethnologist who studied the Cherokee in 1897 and 1898, recorded a Cherokee myth that relates to the tradition of burning: “When the Cherokee went out in the fall, according to their custom, to burn the leaves off from the mountains in order to get the chestnuts on the ground, they were never safe, for the old witch was always on the lookout, and as soon as she saw the smoke rise she knew there were Indians there and sneaked up to surprise one alone” (cited in Stewart 2002). Euro-Americans who settled in Cherokee territory adopted the Indians’ technique for collecting chestnuts according to Mooney (1995) who wrote: “The burning of the fallen leaves in the autumn, in order to get at the nuts upon the ground below, is still practiced by the white mountaineers of the southern Alleghenies. The line of fire slowly creeping up the mountain side upon a dark night is one of the picturesque sights of that picturesque country” (cited in Stewart 2002).
The Europeans who began settling the Southern Appalachians in the late 1700s often adopted the fire practices of local Indians and took over old Indian fields for farming and grazing. Using mostly low intensity fires, early settlers burned the landscape to clear space for their houses and other buildings (Williams 1998). They burned bottomlands, woodlands, and hilltops – annually in some cases – to prepare them for growing corn and other row crops. Settlers burned grasslands in valleys and floodplains and pastureland to improve the forage for their cows and other grazing animals nearly every year (Van Lear and Waldrop 1989). They also used fire to encourage the growth of early succession plants such as blueberries and to control woody undergrowth. Settlers believed that prescribed fire would reduce insect damage to their crops. Cotton farmers attempted to control boll weevils with an annual burning regime. One major difference between European farmers and Indians in the Southern Appalachians was that Europeans mostly practiced permanent-field agriculture while Indians were mainly swidden farmers.
During the historic era, the decline of Native American populations and the decrease in Indian fires had significant effects on vegetation. European exploration and settlement in the South caused a decline in Indian populations by 90%-95% between the mid-1500s and the 1800s (Carroll and others 2002) due to diseases introduced by Europeans, conflict, migration, change in land ownership, and forced removal. In the absence of Native American land managers, many of the places where they had previously used fire to clear vegetation became “dense and scrubby” with “impenetrable thickets” (Wilson cited in Williams 2002). In the words of Dobs (2002), “The mower had gone from the garden.”
Over time, the ways European settlers used of fire for land management became very different from those of Native Americans. In the early historic period, Native Americans and early European settlers typically lit low-intensity brush fires. Frequent low-intensity burns helped to create and maintain the longleaf pine (Pinus palustris) and wiregrass (Aristida stricta) communities that were typical to the Florida sandhills in the early historic era (Myers and White 1987). Spanish settlers introduced cattle grazing to the St. Johns River basin in the 16th and 17th centuries. In the 1700s, Spanish and Seminole cattle farmers burned the sandhills at least annually to kill old wiregrass and to encourage more desirable forage. In the 18thcentury, Seminole Indians and then English settlers used fire to maintain grazing lands for cattle and for hunting (Myers and White 1987). In the 1800s and 1900s turpentine collectors burned pine forests annually (some evidence suggests that turpentining had an unintended effect of conserving longleaf pine stands). Also in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the logging industry cleared 80-100% (Stanturf and others 2002) of the Coastal Plain region, substantially reducing longleaf pine populations in Florida.
The land management practices of European colonists on the Piedmont caused major changes in vegetation. Before European settlement, some forests on the Piedmont had many fire tolerant pine species, suggesting that fires were frequent in the prehistoric period. After several centuries of European occupation, those same forests had more fire intolerant species, suggesting that fires were not as frequent as they were previously. In the early historic period, European settlers cleared forests for agriculture. After growing row crops on the land for several centuries, the settlers’ descendants abandoned the land and let it revert back to secondary forests that resemble the pre-settlement landscape, with many fast growing pioneer species and pine species that benefit from disturbance (Cowell 1998). During the 1880s and early 1900s, logging, in particular, encouraged the spread of pine forests because it created open canopy areas that pines prefer and changed the character of forest fuels.
Fire Regimes at the Beginning of the Industrial Revolution
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the logging and railroad industries caused even more drastic changes in fire regimes in the Ozark-Ouachitas. Also during this era, Euro-Americans cleared major portions of the region by harvesting timber and establishing cotton farms. In the decades following the timber and cotton booms and busts, secondary growth appeared and forests re-emerged on some of the damaged, abandoned land (Foti and others 1999). Nowadays on some of these sites in western Arkansas, 150-250 year old shortleaf pine stands occur that began growing when settlements were abandoned and people were no longer burning the land (Foti and others 1999).
Fire regimes began to change dramatically across the South in the 1880s as settler populations expanded and the industrial revolution began. Settlers expanded their burning practices into more remote areas as they began harvesting timber for the commercial trade, developing settlements, building agricultural operations, and developing road and railroad systems (Van Lear and Waldrop 1989). Whereas the typical fires during pre-European times and in the early settlement period were low intensity brush fires, the logging-era fire regime was characterized by high intensity, stand replacing fires (Brose and others 2001). Intense, widespread fires occurred in the Southern Appalachians as a consequence of the timber boom that lasted from the 1890s through the 1920s. Many high intensity fires resulted from machinery and flammable leftover logging slash. In West Virginia, wildfires were caused by trains carrying timber (71% of fires) and sawmills (20% of fires) (Brose and others 2001). In the Southern Appalachians, logging may have encouraged the spread of Table Mountain pines and pitch pines that require high-intensity fires to melt the wax coating on the seeds in their serotinous cones. In some cases, people intentionally burned logging slash in attempts to create pasture for grazing animals (Van Lear and Waldrop 1989). The high intensity fires that occurred during this period had many undesirable effects including soil erosion, stream sedimentation, and destruction of montane coniferous forests.
Encyclopedia ID: p841
