10 OUR USE OF THE LAND 



wolf and the deer"? 6 Here was one valley so big it would never 

 be filled with people. 



They treated the land as if it were, an inexhaustible mine. 

 When the fertility of the soil was spent, the timber cut and 

 burned, the fur-bearing animals dead, the ore veins empty, 

 they moved on. 



Everyone expected to get rich in the process; a few did. 

 Those who didn't continued to move. But as the people ex' 

 hausted the land and then went on their way, they always left 

 behind them stranded on some rocky hillside a backwash of 

 those who were less lucky or perhaps not so strong. 



They were spending the savings nature had put into the 

 land over a period of millions of years. But as long as there 

 seemed to be plenty more, no one paid much attention to that. 



There were a few men, however, who understood just what 

 was happening to the land. It is not by chance that they were 

 from the South, where continuous tobacco cropping had ex' 

 hausted much of the soil and left it a prey to erosion. Patrick 

 Henry, for example, is supposed to have said, "Since the 

 achievement of our independence, he is the greatest patriot 

 who stops the most gullies." 7 



In the early days, the South was the great agricultural region 

 of the United States. It was quite natural that all the forces 

 affecting land use should be most strongly felt there. William 

 Strickland, a traveling Englishman, wrote in 1796, "A richer 

 district by nature there cannot be, than are all those counties 

 which lie at the eastern foot of the Blue Ridge; but, like what' 

 ever on this continent has been long cultivated, they are nearly 

 exhausted." 8 "The case is," another observer wrote, "they (the 

 Colonial farmers) exhaust the old as fast as possible till it 



6 J. M. Peck, J^ew Guide for Emigrants to the West, Gould, Kendall and Lin' 

 coin, Boston, 1837, p. 35. 



7 A. R. Hall, Early Erosion Control Practices in Virginia, United States De* 

 partment of Agriculture, Miscellaneous Publication No. 256, 1937, p. 2. 



8 Ibid., p. 5. 



