they hunted, and through which they had 

 trails from village to village, and from 

 one lake or stream to another. 



ALL around the little settlements made 

 by those who first came to this coun- 

 try were these giant forests, and in the 

 forests were Indians, bears, panthers, 

 wolves, and wildcats. Is it any wonder 

 that the settlers cut down the trees 

 around their houses, to clear land for 

 growing crops, and to make open spaces 

 across which the Indians and the beasts 

 could not pass without being seen, so 

 there would be warning if they came as 

 enemies? The forest supplied them with 

 wood for building their houses and their 

 forts, and with fuel to keep them warm 

 and to cook their food. But there were too 

 many trees, so the thing to do was to cut 

 them down. The woods stretched away to 

 the west, almost unbroken from the At- 

 lantic to the Mississippi; then came the 

 great prairies which were treeless then 

 as now, and beyond them the forests of 

 the Rocky Mountains and of the Pacific 

 slope. 



These were the largest and most use- 

 ful forests in the world, and they covered 

 between eight million and nine million 

 acres. You do not know how big a space 

 that is, and I do not know just how to 

 explain it to you; but the main thing is 

 that we have something more than half 

 that many acres still left in forest. Yet 

 it is not the forest that it used to be, and 

 while we have more than half of the land 

 still covered with trees that was covered 

 by the first forests, they have been so 

 cut and burned that there is much less 

 than half of the timber standing than there 

 was then. In other words, we have a lot of 

 waste land now that is not growing either 

 trees or crops, but only scrub stuff. 



AT this point Everett broke in to ask 

 again what all this had to do with the 

 Indians. So I told him that the country 

 all around us had once belonged to the 

 Iroquois Indians, who were a very brave 

 and fine lot of people. They had their 

 corn fields in the valley below where our 

 house stands, but all the hill country was 

 in deep woods, where they could hunt 

 bear and deer. The very beautiful valley 



to the southeast of us, that we know now 

 as Pony Hollow, was the vale where the 

 Saponis lived, another Indian tribe; but 

 most of us have forgotten all about them 

 and even their name has been changed 

 to "Pony" because we are used to that 

 word. 



Rabbits, squirrels, wild turkeys, and all 

 sorts of small animals and birds, as well 

 as the larger ones, furnished them with 

 food, and there were many fine berries. 

 We can still find the arrow heads, large 

 or small, depending on the game to be 

 brought down, and we can still find 

 mounds which marked their villages. 

 Some of these mounds are remarkable, 

 and one that I have seen on the campus 

 of the University of Wisconsin is a clear 

 representation of a bird in flight, with 

 wings outstretched. 



Mr. Harry Knight, one of our neighbors, 

 has worked out the Indian method of 

 making arrow heads, and finds that they 

 did not chip the flints with other stones, 

 nor with cold water suddenly dashed on 

 stones which had been heated in the fire. 

 He can make flint arrowheads that can 

 not be told from the ones the Indians 

 made three hundred years ago, and he 

 does it by flaking off the flint with a piece 

 of bone or even a piece of wood. He 

 says he is sure that this is the way the 

 Indians made them, because it is the 

 only way that he can get the same kind 

 of a chip that shows on the original arrow- 

 heads; more than that, no one has ever 

 found any tool for arrowhead-making, 

 and this seems to prove that the tool 

 must have been of wood or bone, or some 

 substance that would decay with time. 



The children got so interested in the 

 question of arrowheads that I thought 

 they would forget about the clear water; 

 but Everett called us back to it, and I 

 explained that the bare upland fields and 

 the gullied roads were all covered with 

 trees at the time the Indians were here, 

 and that the water flowed clearly from 

 them, just as it does from the oozy 

 places in the sides of the gorge. Most 

 of these steep hillsides ought to be in 

 woods now, and the woods should be fully 

 stocked with healthy trees, instead of 

 being scrubby and fit for little but fire- 

 wood, and a poor grade of firewood at that. 



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