Gathering the Bones, XXIV: The Gardener's Problem and Smith's History of Virginia

 

It's been more than two years since I've done a "Gathering the Bones" post, and I can report some progress. I've finished reading Fenimore Cooper's Wyandotte: Or, the Hutted Knoll. It's a really good book, Fenimore Cooper continues to be a fascinating person, and the novel is a lot like Wept of Wish-ton-Wish in that it uses distance from the Leatherstocking Cycle to comment on some of the same themes as Deerslayer while being a bit more willing to admit the crime. (The Wyandotte Patent is assigned to the infant product of a private marriage and baptism and so remains the property of a British general while avoiding confiscation during the Revolution by appearing to belong to a local Dutch New York Patriot family.) On the other hand, the question of mixed marriages is handled even more obliquely than in previous novels, much less being explicitly admitted, as in Wish. The heroine, Maud Meredith (Willoughby) is born to her mother in a British army frontier post in 1758, and so her mother is neither British nor a member of American society, in that she is neither home in the United Kingdom nor in Albany. On the other hand, she has  money. So Maud Yeardley comes out of some kind of irregular circumstances that I'm not going to probe any further here, although obviously she is much better born than Judith Hutter of Deerslayer, and what about all that deerslaying?

 

The deer-in-garden photograph genre is a pretty big one. My  header isn't a stand  out, but I asked Google for one from Port Alice. As between Google and Facebook it might be from the Port Alice group and not the town, but that's not for lack of deer in gardens in my old home town or anywhere else, for that matter. The proximate inspiration for this post wasn't reading Wyandotte, but rather a political blog post about the shortage of hunters these days, but I still might as well focus on Natty Bumppo's old stalking (literally) grounds.

Across upstate New York, 30 deer culling programmes target excess deer populations with Department of Agriculture sharpshooters, police officers, and volunteers armed with firearms, bows and crossbows. USDA sharpshooters sound like the most efficient of these groups, and used elevated stands and parked cars to fire into designated safety zones (more like "kill zones"!) to remove 76 deer from the village of Fayetteville in Onondaga County in the first three months of 2017 alone. Unfortunately, New York State and New York City have longstanding rules about discharging a rifle for hunting purposes. The USDA points out that deer were a vanishing resource when those rules were written a century and a half ago, and that is most certainly not true now. New York City is officially concerned about damage to biodiversity, urban landscaping, demolished gardens, and Lyme disease, obviously not a concern in Nattys' day. It might have added that deer can be dangerous. Natty would have no truck with that, being more worried about "panters," but John Smith, as we shall see, would take the point. 

As for the scope of the problem. a recent aerial survey of Staten Island established a population 763 deer over 19 square miles. This isn't necessarily the apocalypse. A State of Wisconsin explainer notes cities in which humans coexist with deer at densities of  over 100 deer per square mile. My intuition is that these are cities where the human population (and that of their plants and their small, yappy dogs) is much lower than in New York City, and where gardens are more likely to be heavily fenced enclosures than display beds facing the high street.  Also, the Staten Island figure is from several years ago, and the deer population of New York State rose significantly during the pandemic, with the Utica Observer-Dispatch reporting an estimated state population of 1.2 million animals in 2023, or 22 per square mile. . 

Instead of reinventing the wheel, I am going to quote the Observer-Dispatch summarising Severinghaus and Brown. They sort of give away the punchlines of this post, but if there's one thing we're on about here at Bench Grass, it is the importance of getting our feet set in the grass before launching into flights of grand theory. (That is, that my flights of grand theory are best because they take the grass into account.) 

It is not known how many deer lived in New York before the coming of Europeans. However, it is thought that the number was nowhere near what it is today. The state was largely covered by virgin forests, and deer are creatures of the edge – a mixture of forests, other cover and open areas. They don’t do well in mature forests, where the browsing plants they depend on are at a premium because of the constant shade. However, there were some reports in colonial times of huge takes of deer by Native Americans, especially in Western New York and the Southern Tier.

Although it was published long ago, “The History of White-Tailed Deer in New York,” by biologists C.W. “Bill” Severinghaus and C.P. Brown, remains a classic work on the species. Severinghaus and Brown reported that the Dutch and French explorers found Native Americans living mostly in the valleys, near lakes, and in the lake plains south of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie. This is where deer were most likely to live. That was not a coincidence.

The Native Americans, by the way, did not sit in tree stands waiting for a deer to come by, and they didn’t likely do much tracking or still hunting. Severinghaus and Brown said they often organized drives, pushing the deer into rivers and lakes or sometimes constructed long brush funnels that directed deer to small openings, the better to dispatch them. They also employed “burns,” setting fire to the woods and forcing deer and other game into large clearings to be more easily killed. Those burns also resulted in new low growth that attracted deer.

The coming of settlers and their farms benefitted the deer herd in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, but by the time of the Civil War a huge increase in agriculture and lumbering had removed a great deal of habitat, and the deer population was dropping considerably outside of the  Central Adirondacks.

And it's all being going downhill since. The modern deer epidemic has three main causes. The first, and most important, is the lack of deer hunters. Hunting is a hobby in steady decline. Anything more to be said about that I leave to political times and spaces.

Second, the liminal domestic/wild divide is a canopy break, where the succulents that deer love, abound. Suburban lived spaces turn that boundary into a vast liminal space. In Wyandotte, the "hutted knoll" (it is hard to believe that this isn't an answer to Winthrop's "city on a hill") sits in the middle of 700 acres of naturally clear, former beaver pond where the trees and even their roots are long since gone after decades (Centuries? Millennia?) of watery beaver impound. The hard line of the forest boundary is kept clean by Captain Willoughby's insistance on clearing the woods back into the woods, with cut foliage and downed trees piled in the forest margins. A classic modern suburb cuts stripes of roads and boulevards and lawns through isolated plantings, surrounding and engulfing islands big enough for something of a canopy to form.

Third, deerslaying is hard. Fenimore Cooper opens Pioneers with Judge Temple shooting his "blunderbus" at a stag which has broken across the road down into Templeton on Christmas Eve and wounding Oliver [spoiler] Effingham, a particularly lethal way of arranging a "meet cute." Natty finishes the wounded animal with a clean shot from Killdeer, the Pennsylvania rifle that is the American Excalibur. But Oliver, Natty and [spoiler] Chingachgook are chasing the stag for a reason. It might be that they are sensitive to the risks of overpenetration by a rifleshot so close to the road --in fact, knowing them, it probably is. However, it might also be because shooting and stalking a deer is hard. Hunters prefer rifles because taking edible venison requires a clean killshot, ideally to the throat, at worst to head --a small target that risks the trophy-- or upper third of the torso, where an instant fatality is far from guaranteed, meat can be spoiled, and a slight deviation downwards risks an abdominal penetration, ruining the meat. A rifle allows an accurate shot from a hundred yards or more away, at the risk, again, of overpenetration and accidental injury, while bow and crossbow requires an approach to 30 yards or so, virtually guaranteeing a long and arduous stalking. 

https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3479&context=thesesdissertations

Suborder Ruminanta is comprised of hoofed "grazing or browsing" animals which digest plants by fermenting the biomass in a specialised stomach prior to secondary alimentation and final digestion. Bovidae, which includes the North American bison and the incoming settlers's cows, but not sheep notwithstanding similar dietary habits, evolved twenty million years ago in the early Miocene, the beginning of the modern glacial epoch. (Personally I would consider a connection and suggest an extension of "anthropogenic climate change" to zoogenic climate change," but that is because I am a crackpot who always favours the "secret" endogenous cause to historical change.) I also wonder just how far the modern Chernozem grasslands predate the rise of Bovidae. In other words, I am suggesting that the Bovidae can curate their own grazing territories by following fire onto cleared land and keeping the saplings down in favour of their preferred browse, creating a vast global expanse of "native" grasslands across lower-precipitation climate zones. The advance and retreat of the North American bison in successive glaciations, illustrated by finds of the  marks the  "natural" extent of prehistoric bison range, indicating that the extension of modern bison into the Eastern Woodlands was supercharged by something or other --I am going with anthropogenic intervention. 

Deer, Cevidae, do not necessarily need human help, although "firestick agriculture" used to maintain their range. Although deer eat grass, their stomachs are small and unspecialised compared with Bovidae. They feed selectively and require an ion-rich diet to grow antlers in season. Which is another way of saying that they raid gardens. 

In dealing with historic deerslaying in North America, we are pitched into an ongoing controversy over the "invention" of the bow and arrow in this hemisphere. The most ambitious attempt to write a general history of North America pre-contact, Colin Calloway's One Vast Winter Count, takes for granted an Athabaskan ethnolinguistic expansion "powered" by the introduction of the bow and arrow into the Western Hemisphere from northeast Siberia about 500AD.  I am underwhelmed by such an exogenous account of invention and transformation (that's it, this post gets a "Magic Aeroplanes" tag!), and would pitch into dusty old notes of archaeologists arguing about when a "spear point" is actually an "arrow head" or even "atlatl," as waged in American Antiquity if I really wanted to explore the question. I eventually found an "endogenous" explanation emphasising a relationship between Eastern Woodlands monument building and bison range expansion --the big cursusses, enclosures, and mounds were built at least in part as platforms for harvesting bison along migratory routes to and from upland salt pastures, and the finds of small weapon heads in these contexts marks the first economic use of arrows as ambush hunting weapons from these platforms. I'd like to cite an author, but, again, dusty old notes, long uncollated. Again, this depends pretty heavily on accepting the conventional interpretation of point finds. 

All this is a bit beside the point in that it is clear enough that arrows were in general use on the Atlantic shore at the time of European contact. What remains surprisingly unclear, I learn on exploring the trove of archaeological masters theses published online by the University of Massachusetts Boston (example) is the extent to which agriculture was. At this point we are far past the old Draper "skinny continent/fat continent" argument recycled by Jared Diamond. Maize corn was clearly available for cultivation to the coastal Algic peoples of Massachusetts and Virginia by 1600. Here I am heavily informed by the preliminary discussion of the historic context of an excavation of a "Seventeenth Century native cornfield" near Great Yarmouth on Cape Cod, written up here by Craig Chartier with the objective of understanding the full local subsistence system. Interestingly, the immediate Pre-Contact period does not just show an increased archaeological presence of maize corn, beans, squash, and sunflower, but also a buildup of middens, elsewhere associated with a late Paleolithic, potentially coastwise expansion around the Old World which might well be associated with the initial settling of the Americas. a global subsistence model perhaps explains the lack of evidence for intensive use of any given resource, whether garden or littoral. These humans were creatures of the forest/clearing margin just as much as were the deer they hunted, and moved through their subsistence zone harvesting seasonal abundances of a wide variety of resources. Increasing population correlates with reduced foraging territory and a rise in specialisation based on a "logistical" analysis in which the favoured resources were the ones that absorbed the least time, and balanced ease of collection and processing with distance to base camps. 

Archaeologically speaking, late prehistoric populations moved from seaside camps in spring and early summer to interior lakeside communities that they were more likely to treat as "home," and by the Contact period, planted maize in each area, creating a more complicated harvesting round that would have brought them back to each site about four months after initial settlement/planting, harvesting and then burying seed corn on site. This probably has a great deal to do with the "abandoned" status of Patuxet when the Mayflower arrived, but, whatever, you guys go right on wading through tomes about obscure diseases.  However, just because the Mayflower only arrived in 1621 does not mean that the "Contact period" began in 1621, and aggressive planting might still be a product of a Contact period extended to a Peri-Contact period going back either a few generations, or to the days when Vikings were building Vinland/Norumbega in Providence, R.I. 

In short, there's no doubt that farming is later and less prominent in coastal Algic contexts than we might reasonably expect, and it is not an innovation problem. The crops worked in a New England context --at least as far as we have already established. Now, farming might be problematic. In the Old World, we have a lot to say about the simultaneous beginnings of an agricultural complex along the hilly flanks of the Fertile Crescent, involving several primordial types of wheat, perhaps barley, domesticated sheep and goats, and ancillary legumes and fibre crops. All of this took place about 8000BC, genetic analysis suggests simultaneous innovation in situ with local strains of the founder crops. And since the domestic animals in the founders' set were used solely for meat and hides, we are launched into a subsidiary discussion of the activities on a spectrum from "distant herding" to "close hunting." Individual groups were "curating" these animals, in much the same way as they had been "curating" garden plants and landscapes for millennia by this point; but at some point we can talk about sedenterisation and domestication. Ideology? Patriarchy? Population pressure? Much theorising has been done.

 

 When Captain John Smith was invited out on a deer hunt with Wahunsenacawh (Powhatan), he was not being invited to a stalking. Smith instead describes a classic animal drive. The forests of Virginia, he tells us, are so open that a wagon and team could be driven through the trees. Taking deer efficiently involved a cordon of warriors numerous enough to beat an entire copse, and a receiving line capable of taking the dear with hunting spears, not ranged weapons. It was a largescale activity, taking deer on an equally largescale, and therefore implying a concentration of labour to process the kills as well as to take them. It is an impressive display of organisation, in other words, and requires a paramount leader capable of gathering a large retinue of warriors, who would be a challenge to feed unless these things were brought off efficiently. (And, even then, presented difficulties for his leadership in other seasons.) 

In other words, clearing an open forest with a peak population of deer is a huge challenge for a pre-gunpowder society. Now, the fundamental challenge for a deer population facing a zone of closed forest is developing alternative resources  so that they can sustain the numbers needed to make a successful attack on the forest margins and clear out the undergrowth. Coastal zones are likely to have large deer populations for this reason, and, perhaps, open forests for zoogenic reasons alone. Otherwise, human curation will create open forests through burnings. So the question is, is gardening even worth the effort in this setting? Can humans protect their gardens from the deer? It is not clear to me that they can. It is not an issue in the Old World, where domesticated ruminants clear away the browse, effectively starving the deer out and outpopulating them. It is a problem in the New World. A problem that the arrival of Old World domesticates, as much as muskets, solved.

 It might also have been a problem open to solution by the final extension of bison ranges down to the Atlantic coastline within a few centuries around 1500, with or without European contact. Or, never mind this fantastic alternative history. Was the incipient arrival of the bison an aspect of the development of the Atlantic world precisely when it happened? If the Age of Discovery happened because the East Coast was finally ready to host explorers, we need an explanation that extends the necessary changes to the Caribbean, Gulf Coast and Spanish Main. But perhaps there is one?