Foreword 



The idea for a book such as this originally came to me in Europe thirty years ago. I nursed 

 it during travels in southeast Asia, as a field collector for the British Museum and Cambridge 

 University in the Orient, Africa, and South America, and after World War II brought me per- 

 manently to the New World and to residence in the United States. 



Then, in 1957, two things were brought to my attention. The first was a set of government 

 statistics showing that the number of working farmers in the United States is only some 2 per 

 cent of the population, indicating how urbanized this country has become. The other was a 

 set of magnificent color photographs of North America's natural wonders. Since I had traveled 

 widely during the previous ten years in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, these two 

 items confirmed something that had been disturbing me increasingly. This was the fact that 

 this continent is rapidly being covered by a man-made blight but that no one had as yet made 

 a simple, non-technical record of its appearance as it was before the coming of the white man. 

 or as it is today apart from his influence. 



During the following year I made still another discovery which was, at least to me, aston- 

 ishing; namely, that no one seems ever to have made an "expedition" specifically to inspect 

 North America as a whole and in its purely natural and non-human aspects. I found vast 

 libraries on special aspects or particular parts of this continent, but no over-all. non-technical 

 description written from this point of view and covering the whole continent. 



Because of my training, early work, and research, I regard almost everything in nature in 

 terms of what is known as ecology. This term is derived from roots that mean "the study of 

 nature's houses" and is succinctly defined by Professor Henry J. Costing of Duke University 

 as "the study of organisms, their environment, and all the inter-relationships between the 

 two." I therefore proposed taking a long trip around the continent, the goal being a non- 

 technical description, in pictures and text, that would present it as a whole, but on an 

 ecological framework, with the "environment ' playing as big a part as the "organisms" but 

 excluding man and all his works. 



To accomplish this obviously called for a very broad approach to the project. Although I 

 had already visited and indeed driven through about thirty of the states, half of Mexico, and 

 parts of Canada, I had no real concept of the whole continent. No amount of reading can sub- 

 stitute for firsthand investigation and sight, and, in any case, amazing as it may sound, there 

 are not half a dozen states that have so much as a vegetation map of their territory — and 

 vegetation (as opposed to mere distribution of plants or families of plants) is, as I shall try 

 to make clear, the basis of everything in the world of wildlife. Therefore, it was agreed that 

 I should spend a year traveling the continent. 



This I did. starting in January of 1959 and ending in December of that year. The basic 

 form of transport was a two-year-old station wagon with only a double roof for extra equip- 

 ment and double rear main springs added to take the extra load. It had only six inches 

 clearance under the chassis, but in 57,000 miles it was only once "mired"— -and that in the 

 middle of a desert where there was no road. We ran through eight sets of tires by the halfway 

 mark but then bought eight-ply truck tires which lasted for six months after the trip. There 

 were sixteen holes in our windshield and three other perforated windows by the time we 

 had done with the Alaska Highway and the new road to Great Slave Lake. Side trips were 

 made by plane, by boat, on horseback, and on foot. I had with me as companions at various 

 times three friends: Roy Pinney, the photographer; Wendell Skousen, a young geologist from 

 Arizona; and Robert Christie, a rancher and amateur ornithologist. 



We started out from Washington, D.C.. on the first leg to Florida and thence round the Gulf 

 coast to Brownsville, Texas, with numerous side excursions. Then we proceeded down the east 

 coast of Mexico to the twentieth parallel; up onto the central plateau; and back to Texas. 

 (I had traveled the whole of the western Sierras and coast in previous years.) From there, we 

 covered the south-central prairies, the Tularosa Basin, and the Southern Montane Block, 

 ending in Arizona. We then toured the whole Southwest to Baja California. From there we 

 drove back and forth through the western mountains and coastal regions to Seattle, ranging 

 as far east as eastern Nevada and Idaho. We proceeded to British Columbia, which we criss- 

 crossed by every road possible, and then went on to Alaska, where we made several side trips. 

 Returning to Alberta, we drove up the new road to beyond the Great Slave Lake in the 



