344 FIRST REMOVAL OF THE FOREST. 
First Removal of the Forest. 
When multiplying man had filled the open grounds alcng 
the margin of the rivers, the lakes, and the sea, and sufticiently 
peopled the natural meadows and savannas of the interior, 
where such existed, he could find room for expansion and fur- 
ther growth only by the removal of a portion of the forest 
that hemmed him in. The destruction of the woods, then, was 
man’s first geographical conquest, his first violation of the har- 
monies of inanimate nature. 
grounds that skirt the waters and the woods, and as finding only there the 
aliments which make up his daily bread. The villages of the North American 
Indians were upon the shores of rivers and lakes, and theix weapons and other 
relics are found only in the narrow open grounds which they had burned over 
and cultivated, or in the margin of the woods around their hamlets, 
Except upon the banks of rivers or of lakes, the woods of the interior of 
North America, far from the habitations of man, are almost destitute of animal 
life. Dr. Newberry, describing the vast forests of the yellow pine of the West, 
Pinus ponderosa, remarks: ‘‘ In the arid and desert regions of the interior basin, 
we made whole days’ marches in forests of yellow pine, of which neither the 
monotony was broken by other forms of vegetation, nor its stilmess by the 
flutter of a bird or the hum of an insect.”—Pucific Railroad Report, vol. vi., 
1857. Dr. NEwBeRRY’s Report on Botany, p. 37. 
Cheadle and Milton’s North-west Passage confirms these statements, Val- 
vasor says, ina paragraph already quoted, ‘“‘ In my many journeys through 
this valley, I did never have sight of so much as a single bird.”’ 
The wild fruit and nut trees, the Canada plum, the cherries, the many species 
of walnut, the butternut, the hazel, yield very little, frequently nothing, so long 
as they grow in the woods; and it is only when the trees around them are 
cut down, or when they grow in pastures, that they become productive. The 
berries, too—the strawberry, the blackberry, the raspberry, the whortleberry, 
scarcely bear fruit at all except in cleared ground. 
The rank forests of the tropics are as unproductive of human aliment as 
the less luxuriant woods of the temperate zone. In Strain’s unfortunate ex- 
pedition across the great American isthmus, where the journey lay principally 
through thick woods, several of the party died of starvation, and for many 
days the survivors were forced to subsist on the scantiest supplies of unnutri- 
tious vegetables perhaps never before employed for food by man. See the 
interesting account of that expedition in Harper's Magazine for March, April, 
and May, 1855. 
