134 . 
REMOVAL OF THE FOREST. 
First Removal of the Forest. 
As soon as multiplying man had filled the open grounds 
along the margin of the rivers, the lakes, and the sea, and suffi¬ 
ciently peopled the natural meadows and savannas of the 
interior, where such existed,* he could find room for expansion 
raspberry, the whortleberry, scarcely bear fruit at all except in cleared 
ground. 
The North American Indians did not inhabit the interior of the forests. 
Their settlements were upon the shores of rivers and lakes, and their 
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 villages. 
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 
expedition 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 unnutritious 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. 
Clave, as well as many earlier writers, supposes that primitive man de¬ 
rived his nutriment from the spontaneous productions of the wood. “ It 
is to the forests,” says he, “ that man was first indebted for the means of 
subsistence. Exposed alone, without defence, to the rigor of the seasons, 
as well as to the attacks of animals stronger and swifter than himself, he 
found in them his first shelter, drew from them his first weapons. In 
the first period of humanity, they provided for all his wants: they fur¬ 
nished him wood for warmth, fruits for food, garments to cover his naked- 
/ / 
ness, arms for his defence .”—Etudes sur V Economic Eorestidre , p. 13. 
But the history of savage life, as far as it is known to us, presents man 
in that condition as inhabiting only the borders of the forest and the open 
grounds that skirt the waters and the woods, and as finding only there the 
aliments which make up his daily bread. 
* The origin of the great natural meadows, or prairies as they are 
called, of the valley of the Mississippi, is obscure. There is, of course, no 
historical evidence on the subject, and I believe that remains of forest 
vegetation are seldom or never found beneath the surface, even in the 
sloughs , where the perpetual moisture would preserve such remains indefi¬ 
nitely. The want of trees upon them has been ascribed to the occasional 
long-continued droughts of summer, and the excessive humidity of the soil 
