THE LAND 3 



... as from an inherited caution and respect. It was as if the 

 great country were asleep, and they wished to carry on their 

 lives without awakening it; or as if the spirits of earth and air 

 and water were things not to antagonize and arouse. When 

 they hunted, it was with the same discretion; an Indian hunt 

 was never a slaughter. They ravaged neither the rivers nor 

 the forest, and if they irrigated, they took as little water as 

 would serve their needs. The land and all that it bore they 

 treated with consideration; not attempting to improve it, they 

 never desecrated it." 1 But the white man brought with him 

 the seeds of a civilization which has grown by consuming the 

 land, that is, a civilization which has used up the land in much 

 the same way that a furnace burns coal. 



A map showing the progress of early settlement in the United 

 States has a definite, moving pattern not unlike that made by 

 the rising flood waters of a stream. At first the water finds the 

 low places, flowing rapidly in long lines in the natural channels. 

 When these channels are full, the water rises up the sides of the 

 knolls and hillocks until finally the whole surface is covered or 

 a few islands are left here and there. 



The flow of settlement in America followed the same pattern. 

 The channels which the first settlers followed were the areas of 

 rich soils. As the rising tide of migration filled these channels 

 the late comers had to go onto the poorer soils which lay on 

 either side of the channels of rich land. And even today there 

 are islands of unsettled land that stand out on the settlement 

 maps like the island hilltops in a flooded valley. The borders of 

 these islands are the shallow soils on .which a large part of our 

 under-nourished, under-priviledged "sub-marginal" farm popu 

 lation is stranded. 



1 Willa Gather, Death Comes For the Archbishop, Alfred A. Knopf, New 

 York, 1928, pp. 236-7. 



