Prehistory – CommonPlace Nature

A Pleasant Bit of Natural History: “Knocking About the Rockies” by Ernest Ingersoll (1883)

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Sep 192022

The next fortnight was not productive of many adventures or noteworthy incidents, though it contained plenty of hard work. Our track led across into the head of the San Luis Park, and so on down to Saguache — a Mexican town near the Rio Grande. There was a pleasant bit of natural history picked up along here, though.
The plover of these interior valleys does not seem to care for marshes, like the most of his race, but haunts the dry uplands. It is closely related to the golden plover, and is named in books Aegialitis montanus. A flock of these plovers dropped down on the plain one day, and I determined to get them for dinner, if possible. Jumping off my horse — who would stand stock-still wherever I left him— I approached to where they had dropped, and finally caught sight of one by distinguishing the dark dot of its eye against the light-tinted surface of the ground. Even then I really could not follow with my eye the outline of the bird’s body, so closely did the colors of the plumage agree with the white sand and dry grass. I shot it ; then found another, shot that; and so on until all were killed, none of them flying away, because their ” instinct,” or habit of thought, had taught them that when danger threatened they must invariably keep quiet ; movement would be exposure, and exposure would be fatal. I and my gun formed a danger they had had no experience of, and here their inherited “instinct” was at fault. When I had shot them I was unable, with he most careful searching, to find all the dead birds.

Ernest Ingersol’s early book, Knocking About the Rockies, chronicles two trips he took into the Rockies (1874 and 1877), accompanying scientific and surveying expeditions. His flair for natural history (he would go on to write a dozen works in the “nature” realm, one previously covered in this blog, with several more awaiting reading) led me to this book and his subsequent one about travels by train through the Rockies (The Crest of the Continent, 1885). I eagerly anticipated observations and reflections on the wildlife of the region. And he delivered well, including several allusions to Thoreau. What I had not reckoned on was that many of them would take a culinary turn. Here, “a pleasant bit of natural history” includes identifying a new bird species and then shooting it for dinner. Or not even dinner. Maybe just as a specimen to observe more closely, or possibly just because his gun is handy?

Climbing a high point back of our tents, which were in the midst of a sage-brush flat, close to the river, I had a queer little bit of good luck one evening. It was just at nightfall, and as I reached the top a large owl came swooping down and perched on a crag some distance off. Drawing my revolver, I held it up and walked slowly nearer, expecting neither to get within range nor hit the bird if I fired; but he let me get so near that at last, about thirty yards off, I blazed away, and down came the owl. Rushing up, I could see him lying in the brush a little way below; but it was some time before I got courage enough to reach down and take hold of him, for a bite or talon-grasp from a wounded owl is no joke. He proved to be stone-dead, and it was a long time before I found out the bloodless wound, the bullet having gone in at the base of the skull and out of the open mouth, without tearing any of the feathers. He was a fine barred or “cat” owl, about two feet long.

I am sure the owl did not appreciate this “queer little bit of good luck”.

It is easy, in hindsight, to condemn this behavior in a would-be naturalist. Of course, the great bird illustrator John James Audubon shot all his bird specimens, too, attaching their lifeless bodies to branches in order to draw them. While one or more cameras accompanied these expeditions — several of the illustrations in the book are engravings from photographs — photography had not advanced enough yet to make close-up images of wildlife possible. The understood technique for close study of animals was to shoot them first. This was slowly changing, as birders began carrying opera glasses into the field instead. And Ingersoll, himself, would rein in his hunting proclivities in his later volumes. Finally, it is to be noted that, in order to travel light and save money, the expeditions carried little food, intending that protein needs be satisfied with hunting and trapping.

Now that we have gotten that aspect of this book out of the way, we can sit back and enjoy some lovely late 19th Century prose about the wilds of the Colorado Rockies (including some delightful geological terms). Here is Grand Lake as seen (more like imagined, actually) from a mountaintop, sounding truly grand indeed:

From this pinnacle, in daylight, there is visible a picture of blue mountains whose sharp, serrated outline indicates a portion of the main range in front of Long’s Peak. Among those immutable yet ever-changing bulwarks lies a lake in a circle of guardian peaks whose heads tower thousands of feet above it, and whose bases meet no one knows how far below the surface of its dark waters. It is Grand Lake, a spot taboo among Indians and mysterious to white men. The scenery is primeval and wild beyond description: Roundtop is one mountain at least that has suffered no desecration since the ice ploughed its furrowed sides. The lake itself lies in the trough of a glacier basin, and its western barrier is an old terminal moraine, striking evidences of glacial action occurring on all sides in the scored cliffs and lateral moraines that hem it in. Its extent is about two miles by three, and its greatest depth unfathomable with a line six hundred feet in length. The water is cold, and clear near the shore, but of inky blackness in the middle. In the reflection usually pictured upon its calm bosom all the cloud-crowned heads about it meet in solemn conclave; but not seldom, and with little warning, furious winds sweep down and lash its lazy waters till the waves vie with each other in terrible energy.

Ingersoll clearly had a passion for climbing peaks and gazing out upon the landscape from their heights. Here, he waxes religious in extolling the glories of just such an experience:

However interesting it might prove, time forbids even to suggest all that meets the eye and is implanted in the memory while one is sitting for two or three hours on a peak of the Rocky Mountains — the surprising clearness of the air, so that your vision penetrates a hundred and fifty miles; the steady gale of wind sucked up from the heated valleys ; the frost and lightning shattered fragments of rock incrusted with lichens, orange and green and drab and white; the miniature mountains and scheme of drainage spread before you; the bright blue and yellow mats of moss-blossoms ; the herds of big-horned sheep, unconscious of your watching; the hawks leisurely sailing their vast aerial circles level with your eye ; the shadows of the clouds chasing each other across the landscape; the clouds and the azure dome itself; the purple, snow-embroidered horizon of mountains, “upholding heaven, holding down earth.” I can no more express with leaden types the ineffable, intangible ghost and grace of such an experience than I can weigh out to you the ozone that empurples the dust raised by the play of the antelopes in yonder amethyst valley. Moses need have chosen no particular mountain whereon to receive his inspiration. The divine Heaven approaches very near all these peaks.

Not that Ingersoll found every experience on his travels filled him with awe and wonder. Here, he expresses quite different sentiments in a dark spruce forest in the mountains:

What a sombre world that of the pine-woods is! None of the cheerfulness of the ash and maple groves — the alternation of sunlight and changing shadow, rustling leaves and fragrant shrubbery underneath, variety of foliage and bark on which to rest the jaded eye, exciting curiosity and delight: only the straight, upright trunks; the colorless, dusty ground; the dense masses of dead green, each mass a repetition of another; the scraggy skeletons of dead trees, all their bare limbs drooping in lamentation. The sound of the wind in the pines is equally grewsome. If the breeze be light, you hear a low, melancholy monody; if stronger, a hushed kind of sighing; when the hurricane lays his hand upon them the groaning trees wail out in awful agony, and, racked beyond endurance, cast themselves headlong to the stony ground. At such times each particular fibre of the pine’s body seems resonant with pain, and the straining branches literally shriek. This is not mere fancy, but something quite different from anything to be observed in hardwood forests. There the tempest roars; here it howls. I do not think the idea of the Banshee spirits could have arisen elsewhere than among the pines ; nor that any mythology growing up among people inhabiting these forests could have omitted such supernatural beings from its theogony.
But do not conclude that the gloom of the pine-woods clouded our spirits. So many trees had fallen where our tents were pitched that the sunshine peered down there, and at night the moon looked in upon us, rising weirdly over a vista of dead and lonely tree-tops. Then, too, the brook was always singing in our ears — absolutely singing! The sound of the incessant tumble of the water and boiling of the eddies made a heavy undertone, like the surf of the sea; but the breaking of the current over the higher rocks and the leaping of the foam down the cataracts produced a distinctly musical sound — a mystical ringing of sweet-toned bells. There is no mistaking this metallic melody, this clashing of tiny cymbals, and it must be this miniature blithe harmony that fine ears have heard on the beach in summer where the surf breaks gently.

While Ingersoll viewed these mountains, forests, and grasslands with rapture, he also saw what would soon be. Observing extensive grasslands at the feet of the mountain peaks, Ingersoll remarked that “Here are the future pastures for millions of cattle, and they are sure to be occupied.” I find it strange that for all the natural beauty he witnessed, he seemed resigned to (or even somewhat enthusiastic about) a future in which the Rockies would be dramatically modified — and the bison would nearly go extinct.

A Degenerate Branch of the Carnivora: “More Little Beasts of Field and Wood” by William Everett Cram (1912)

book review, Books, Natural History, Prehistory 1 Response »

Sep 192022

Clearly, the lynx in the drawing above is looking surprised, perhaps even shocked. Maybe this is because it was drawn in such an odd way — it almost looks like it belongs on ancient Chinese porcelain instead of a page of a nature book from a hundred years ago. Or maybe it is because it has just read the most proposterous attempt at the application of Darwinian evolutionary theory (mixed with Lamarck) imaginable. But I won’t tell you myself — I’ll let William Everett Cram share his rather deranged hypothesis, and you can make of it what you will:

Are hares and rabbits rodents or are they merely a degenerate branch of the carnivora forced by circumstances during some long forgotten period of hardship and poor hunting to adapt themselves to a vegetable diet? I have studied the question from one point of view and another until fully convinced that this is the true solution of many a vexed point concerning them. On more than one occasion I had been asked by people of more than common intelligence if I believed it possible for cats and rabbits to interbreed. My questioner in each instance felt perfectly certain that cases under observation bore sufficient proof to settle the matter beyond all ordinary doubt. Now while classed among the rodents, hares and rabbits have always been in a group by themselves. All other rodents are characterized by their incisors; two pairs of strong, chisel-like teeth for gnawing. In the hares and rabbits the under jaw is furnished in this manner, but in the upper jaw these are replaced by four small and comparatively weak teeth that resemble the front teeth of a flesh eater quite as much as they do the typical incisors of a rodent. In very young specimens there is yet another pair of even smaller teeth both in the upper and lower jaw beside the permanent ones, and it is a fact worth noting that in kittens and very young rabbits the dentition is more nearly alike than in adults. Now in pointing out the most insurmountable barrier to any possible relationship between cats and rabbits one would naturally indicate the distinguishing character of their teeth; yet while classifying animals by dentition we must not lose sight of the fact that the variation of the teeth was undoubtedly caused by the use and disuse of different teeth incident to the nature of the food the animal lived upon, and that we have no way of knowing just how long a period is required to bring about this modification. That the rodents became separated very far back in the history of animal life is a self-evident fact well borne out by sufficient testimony of fossil remains of the different ages, but let us suppose that the ancestors of our hares and rabbits were not included among the earlier rodents. Consider the possibility that at some much later period when the cat family had attained to something like its present stage of development, an island cut off from the mainland, should in the absence of native carnivora become overrun with mice, lemmings, and other small and defenceless animals; then that during a period of excessively cold winters a number of the smaller varieties of wildcats or lynxes driven southward by the cold or scarcity of food should find a way across the ice to this island, where, finding the hunting so good, they would remain until cut off from the mainland by the melting of the ice. Here they would breed and multiply until their numbers were increased to such an extent that at last the small animals that they had been living upon would be completely exterminated. Now in cases of this kind there are two courses which animals may follow according to the laws of Nature, for when the supply of food is cut off no animal will give up its hold on life without a tremendous struggle. The larger and stronger of these cats would begin to prey upon the smaller and weaker ones, while these in their turn would be under the necessity of feeding upon whatever they could get, and long before the last of the mice and insects had vanished would be tasting and nibbling at grass and berries and mushrooms, as cats, weasels and foxes will ever do in times of famine. Now the law of the survival of the fittest works unceasingly and is ever ready at just such an opening to step in and work surprising changes; use and disuse are its most potent factors; only a very small proportion of the cats on the island could possibly survive through many seasons of such privations, and these few would be the ones best able to adapt themselves to the changed conditions, viz. certain of the larger ones that proved strong and active enough to succeed in killing a sufficient number of their weaker brethren, and those among the smaller ones that managed to survive on a vegetable diet and at the same time maintain that swiftness and agility which formerly had enabled them to catch more than their share of the rapidly diminishing supply of mice and insects and “other small deer,” and must now insure their safety from being caught and eaten in their turn. The kittens of these few survivors would unquestionably have a somewhat better chance than their parents, one of Nature’s foremost laws being that the coming generation must be cherished, even at the expense of the one that went before; nourished for a time on milk (though the supply must necessarily be considerably shortened on account of the meager diet of their mothers), they would at a very early age learn to follow the example of the older ones and take to nibbling at such plants as had proved to be most nourishing to their race, in most cases quickly adapting themselves to a wholly vegetable diet. Then the law of use and disuse would step in. As generation succeeded generation of these small, grass-eating cats, the sharp two-edged canine teeth of their race (always inconspicuous in kittens) would grad- ually cease to be developed, while the incisors, which in a full-grown cat you may see as six small teeth set in a row between the projecting canines, would prove the more useful and in time would become the principal cutting or gnawing teeth, following the same law of development through need which ages before, we may suppose, built up the characteristic gnawing teeth of the true rodents. Other changes would of course be going on all the time. From constantly pushing through between the stems of bushes and thick grass (among which they would naturally find their safest hiding places) the round flat head of the cat tribe would give place to a narrow shape, which would have the added advantage of placing the eyes where they could see above and behind and on all sides at any time to forestall the possible approach of an enemy, whereas the eyes of a cat are set to focus directly in front in order better to see the quarry ahead, like those of a bird of prey. Following out along the same line we can see how the ears would grow longer to catch every faintest sound that might come down the wind, the hind legs longer for speed in running away, while the claws would lose their sharp tearing hooks through disuse; for the economy of Nature is such that only those essentials constantly in use may be long retained in perfection. Thus at the end of a few hundred thousand years (more or less) the inhabitants of our island would have evolved two separate types. Darwin says, ” Whatever the cause may be of each slight difference in the offspring from their parents (and a cause for each must exist), it is the steady accumulation, through natural selection, of such differences, when beneficial to the individual, that gives rise to all the more important modifications of structure, by which the innumerable beings on the face of the earth are enabled to struggle with each other, and the best adapted to survive.”

Alas, poor Darwin — I fear you have been most tragically and wrongfully used. But Cram doesn’t even stop there. He continues with a meticulous comparison of bone structures, offered up as evidence of his bizarre claim. Of course, Lamarck’s peculiar notion of acquired characteristics doesn’t help the situation. Finally, he offers this final tidbit, to sway any remaining disbelievers (though he does at least acknowledge its dubious scientific value):

In this connection it is to be remarked as certainly a little singular (though hardly to be accepted as scientific evidence) that the flesh of cats and rabbits is said to be so very similar in quality, that innkeepers in Europe are not infrequently convicted of substituting the one for the other without any imposition being suspected by their guests.

Tastes like chicken, perhaps? Maybe there is another evolutionary connection there that he missed!

At this point, I feel compelled to recognize my own efforts to maintain a respectful tone and genuine tolerance for scientific speculation in the nature books that I have been reading, given that most of them were written 100 years ago or more. Certainly, our understanding of prehistory has considerably advanced since 1912. However, I cannot escape the fact that this idea is completely nuts.

I find it rather amusing, in light of Cram’s own odd thinking, that he is quite willing to point out the particular failings of other mammals — remarking, for example, on “the well-known stupidity of the individual opossum”. Meanwhile, the porcupine “exhibits both in physique and character the degenerating effects of too easy living.” Cram is particularly aghast at the porcupine’s housekeeping behaviors: “For a home, the porcupine takes possession of any chance cavern among the ledges or some prostrate hollow log, apparently never making the slightest effort towards improving the condition of things as he finds them.”

For all this, late in the book, Cram weighs in on the question of whether animals act entirely out of instinct, or whether they possess intelligence sufficient to act out of reason. Ultimately, he favors reason, offering this haunting image of connecting for a moment with a member of the more-than-human world (as David Abram puts it):

There are times…when to see the thing in the doing has a convincing power greater, to the observer at least, than any conclusion arrived at by the logical balancing of evidence against evidence; when the turn of a neck, the gleam of a woodland eye looking for an instant’s glance straight into your own, leaves you with a sense of “knowing without knowing how you know” that behind the glance that met yours was a thought, and that your image reflected in the eye of the wild thing that looked at you would remain as a memory to be puzzled over.

I will leave Cram here, in this thoughtful moment of poetic reverie, lest I give in to temptations to disparage him further. Suffice it to say that sometimes publishing a sequel to a book can be a grave mistake.

Old-Time Vines: “Travels in a Tree-Top” by Charles Conrad Abbott, M.D., 1894

Agriculture and Husbandry, Birds, book review, Books, Environmental conservation, Native Plants, Natural History, Prehistory No Responses »

Sep 272020

How seldom do we see the coral honeysuckle, and how generally the trumpet-creeper has given place to exotic vines of far more striking bloom, but, as will appear, of less utility! If the old-time vines that I have mentioned bore less showy flowers, they had at least the merit of attracting hummingbirds, that so grandly rounded out our complement of summer birds. These feathered fairies are not difficult to see, although so small, and, if so inclined, we can always study them to great advantage. They become quite tame, and in the old-fashioned gardens were always a prominent feature by reason of their numbers. They are not forever on the wing, and when preening their feathers let the sunshine fall upon them, and we have emeralds and rubies that cost nothing, but are none the less valuable because of this. In changing the botanical features of our yard we have had but one thought, gorgeous flowers; but was it wise to give no heed to the loss of birds as a result? I fancy there are many who would turn with delight from formal clusters of unfamiliar shrubs, however showy, to a gooseberry hedge or a lilac thicket with song-sparrows and a cat-bird hidden in its shade. We have been unwise in this too radical change. We have abolished bird-music in our eagerness for color, gaining a little, but losing more. We have paid too dear, not for a whistle, but for its loss. But it is not too late. Carry a little of the home forest to our yards, and birds will follow it.

THERE IS NOTHING REMARKABLE IN THE ABOVE PASSAGE, UNTIL ONE REALIZES THAT IT WAS WRITTEN IN 1894. That places it almost a hundred years ahead of any other writing advocating gardening with native plants that I have ever read. Perhaps this sentiment was commonplace at the time, and then forgotten completely. But I suspect that Abbott was relatively unusual in observing the tendency of native birds to pollinate native flowers, and realize the implications of planting nonnative plants in our yards. Not surprisingly given the fascination with birds at the time, Abbott focuses here on the impact on ruby-throated hummingbirds. I suspect that the insect pollinators — bumblebees, butterflies, and their kin — were so abundant then that it was not necessary to go out of one’s way to make a flower garden a suitable habitat for them. But at least there is the clear connection between our garden choices and benefits (or harm) to local species. It was a start.

ON THE WHOLE, “TRAVELS IN A TREE-TOP” WAS A PLEASANT BUT UNREMARKABLE READ. I enjoyed returning to the upland and meadows of Abbott’s farm, “Three Beeches”, in the tidal Delaware Valley just south of Trenton, New Jersey. Unlike the previous book, this one did not ramble in the geographical sense — nearly all of his essays (mostly brief ones) took place on his property, and the few exceptions were nearby in New Jersey. This time, he included some essays reminiscing about his rural boyhood, and also a few making reference to his archaeological work (both prehistoric and colonial American sites). For instance, in this passage, Abbott writes about the overgrown ruin of a colonial warehouse, almost entirely returned to nature. While he observes the birds and trees of 1894, he also imagines the time when the warehouse was a busy center of colonial commerce:

Up the creek with many a turn and twist, and now on a grassy knoll we land again, where a wonderful spring pours a great volume of sparkling water into the creek…. An obscure backcountry creek now, but less than two centuries ago the scene of busy industry. Perhaps no one is now living who saw the last sail that whitened the landscape. Pages of old ledgers, a bit of diary, and old deeds tell us something of the place; but the grassy knoll itself give no hint of the fact that upon it once stood a warehouse. Yet a busy place it was in early colonial times, and now utterly neglected.
It is difficult to realize how very unsubstantial is much of man’s work. As we sat upon the grassy slope, watching the outgoing tide as it rippled and broke in a long line of sparkling bubbles, I rebuilt, for the moment, the projecting wharf, of which but a single log remains, and had the quaint shallops of pre-Revolutionary time riding at anchor. There were heard, in fact, the cry of a heron and the wild scream of a hawk; but these, in fancy, were the hum of human voices and the tramp of busy feet.
The scattered stones that just peeped above the grass were not chance bowlders rolled from the hill nearby, but door-step and foundation of the one-time warehouse. The days of buying, selling, and getting gain come back, in fancy, and I was more the sturdy colonist than the effeminate descendant. But has the present no merit? We had the summer breeze that came freighted with the odors gathered from the forest and the stream, and there were thrushes rejoicing in our hearing that the hill-sides were again as Nature made them.

His fascination for evidence of the past extended to geology, as well. Here he ponders the ancient landscape evoked by fossilized footprints:

Difficult as fossil footprints may be to decipher, they call up with wonderful distinctiveness the long ago of other geologic ages. It is hard to realize that the stone of which our houses are built once formed the tide-washed shore of a primeval river or the bed of a lake or ocean gone long before man came upon the scene.

I will close this scattered collection of brief scenes with one from the opening essay in the book, conventently entitled Travels in a Tree-top. It seems fitting, after all, to include at least one scene in which the author observed his domain from a treetop on the property. Here, he looks out over the marshland along the shoreline of the Delaware River:

The meadows are such a comprehensive place that no one knows where to begin, if the attempt is made to enumerate their features. There is such a blending of dry land and wet, open and thicket-grown, hedge and brook and scattered trees, that it is bewildering if you do not choose some one point for close inspection. From the tree-top I overlook it all, and try in vain to determine whether the azure strip of flowering iris or the flaunting crimson of the Turk’s cap lilies is the prettier. Beyond, in damper soil, the glistening yellow of the sunflowers is really too bright to be beautiful; but not so where the water is hidden by the huge circular leaves of the lotus. They are majestic as well as pretty, and the sparse bloom, yellow and rosy pink, is even more conspicuous by reason of its background. How well the birds know the wild meadow tracts! They have not forsaken my tree and its surroundings, but for one here I see a dozen there. Mere inky specks, as seen from my point of view, but I know them as marsh-wrens and swamp-sparrows, kingbird and red-wings, that will soon form those enormous flocks that form so marked a feature to the autumn landscape. It needs no field-glass to mark down the passing herons that, coming from the river-shore, take a noontide rest in the overgrown marsh.

MY COPY OF THIS BOOK WAS BOUND IN KELLY GREEN CLOTH, AND GILT WITH THE TITLE IN AN ORNAMENTAL FRAME. The title on the title page was likewise decorated in a manner evocative of a medieval illuminated manuscript; in keeping with the motif, the copyright date on the title page was in Roman numerals: MDCCCXCIV. I might add that the paper the book was printed on is of exceptional quality ( sturdy bond with watermarked parallel lines). Alas, it is without illustrations. On the inside cover is a gift inscription: “Mary dear, from Mother and daddy / Christmas 1934”. I assume the parents obtained the book in a used bookstore. Unfortunately, there is no other writing anywhere in the volume, so I can say little else about its past.

What, Then, Are We?: “The Do-Nothing Library” by Charles M. Skinner, 1899

Backyard Nature, book review, Books, Landscape History, Natural History, Night, Prehistory 4 Responses »

Sep 232020

Night on the house-top frees the way to a solitude that can be terrifying; and as your mind swims away through the star-frosted deeps, you check it, now and again, with a gasp, and bring it back to earth, just as you clutch the shrubbery when you look down into a Western cañon, lest your body make excursions to the bottom likewise. This earth is a bubble of cooling lava circling its parent sun; the sun is one luminous drop in a flood of suns that we see as the Milky Way; that, again, is but an episode in the unthinkable vastnesses that extend beyond, beneath, around it. What, then, are we? But be calm. Nature is so. Be at one with it. In the multitude of lights out there, not one is varying from its course, not one falters or hastnes, seldom does one brighten or grow dull: therefore, know that we are sheltered and saved by law; that we are parts of an infinite order; and we dream that somewhere in the universe, whose sun-clouds roll about the throne of it, dwells Mind.

IN 1899, CHARLES MONTGOMERY SKINNER PUBLISHED “DO-NOTHING DAYS” ALONG WITH A SECOND EDITION OF “WITH FEET TO THE EARTH”, OFFERING THE TWO AS A BOX SET ENTITLED, “THE DO-NOTHING LIBRARY.” Skinner’s volumes are highly uneven compilations of landscape (and seascape) vignettes, Thoreauvian aphorisms (often semi-paradoxical or at odds with societal norms), fragments of memory, and shreds of advice to travellers. Having finished the first volume (“With Feet to the Earth”), I decided to read the second and author a single blog post on the pair. To my surprise and delight, the second one proved to have a richer trove of insights. I also discovered more of the cosmic wonder that (briefly) graced his book I had previously read, “Nature in a City Yard”. There were clearly moments in his life (and writing) in which Skinner confronted the vastness of the universe, and struggled with its implications for humanity. For instance, at the close of his essay, In the Desert, he reflected on the work the Mormons had accomplished, founding Salt Lake City and turning the desert landscape into a fertile plain, and pondered how that same transformation could someday be accomplished throughout the arid lands of the West. The result was a literary journey into the depths of that most haunting question of being, “Why?” — a journey that portends the existential angst of the mid 20th century and beyond.

Men make little impress upon the earth, yet we look for the time when the salt shall be washed or neutralized out of this soil, its flintiness assuaged, trees and grass mde to grow where nothing larger than willow nor more succulent than sage can be found at present, melted snow brought from the mountains and sent abroad in cooling streams, lakes and reservoirs created to hold the overflow, roads cut across the hills, and cities summoned out of the rocks. Onward and ever onward to physical conquest, if not more, the race portends. This lifeless empire will yet be peopled, must be peopled, for the race of man will presently lack room on this globe; and the lonely ones, the asking ones, looking from their chambers or their peaks upon the transmuted plain and its ondrawing multitudes, will ask again, “To what end is life? What is the gain that makes these men so desperate to keep foothold or lawhold on the earth, to win the wilderness to fertility? Is this race sufficient to itself, and no more? If to something else, what can that something be, that profits by our homage or our striving? Had men been uncreated, the globes would still have rolled through space, as bald of life as if these fields were when they were desert; yet, had suns and planets never been, what then? Would space have listened for us, questioned, expected, wished, or set in action the sleeping world germs? We come: is earth the richer save for the moment? We go: do we gain by leaving? What can these crowds advance that would not as well be left without beginning? Of what use to live through eternity, even to advance ourselves?”
Time passes. The cities of all lands increase and multiply, each a builded paradise, where temples, museums, and halls shine amid groves and gardens, and towering phalansteries overlook a nature as green, as wild, as sweet, as friendly, as it is to-day. The people are strong, large, beautiful, and wise. Their minds are fed by contact with strong schools and lofty arts. Yet among them the same questioners walk apart and ask, “Why do we build, and why is the earth fair? How are time and space the better for our world and us, and how are we better for the world, the void, eternity?”
The ages roll solemnly along. The world is dead and frozen, its stony peaks and blasted plains still more a desert than these wilds are in our day. The sun hangs like a fading coal. No thing remains alive. Traces of men are gone. An aged ghost wanders about the globe that used to be its home, and asks again, “Why was the earth made? Since men came only to vanish, how were they the better for having lived?” He sees that, with the dying of the sun, the stars and comets are shining brighter. A wind, the last of the air, moves by and whispers, “Wait!”

In another passage from the same book, but this time in an essay On the Roof, Skinner confronts mortality again — this time, not death of humanity and the Earth, but individual death, and the hope for a gift of insight at the moment of passing, to make it all worthwhile:

Death and beauty; they are nearly as close as death and life. And what are those disclosures that are made to the dying? Why do so many go to their rest with smiling wonder? The materialist says that there is no future for us; were it so, it might still be worth a life to gain one glimpse of the great mystery, just as we are giving back the spirit to its source — to hear one chord of the great symphony, to see one ray of creation’s light.

WOULD THAT SKINNER HAD CRAFTED A BOOK WOVEN OUT OF VISIONS AND WONDERS LIKE THESE; I SUSPECT IT WOULD HAVE BECOME A CLASSIC FOR THE AGES. But alas, the same book grappling with these cosmic questions included essays on Some Cheap Delights and A Few Dollars’ Worth of Europe. Some of his essays were a barrage of thoughts to live by, with occasional morsels, like this one:

When you say that you must have “life”, you commonly mean noise, bluster, effort, crowd. Why, friend, the woods are full of life; it shines on you out of the sun, stirs in the earth beneath you, falls on you in the rain, talks to you in the wind. Hear birds, see squirrels, fish, snakes, flies, and the voiceless yet whispering trees. Learn the ways and speech of wild things, and you will know life.

IN ONE ESSAY, MENTIONED BEFORE , SKINNER VIVIDLY EVOKED THE EXPANSIVE BARREN SPACES OF THE WESTERN DESERT. At a time when most nature writers focused their essays on the commonplace and rural East, Skinner’s In the Desert is a powerful testament to the dusty Western wilds:

Distance is a factor in our enjoyment of the desert. Indeed, the ocean-like vastness of the plains is the reason for the vastness of imagination and spirit that may beset us there. The human soul craves room. It has it in these wastes. Down in the hollows the desert is less impressive, and bodily discomforts are multiplied. It is hot, and sharp dust enters your eyes, mouth, nose, and ears. The ground is full of the old sea salt, and in the wind, that always blows as gloriously as on the sea, stinging the blood and inflaming the sense of liberty so that we want to rush about and yell — in this wind the white dust rises and stalks in columns across the earth. You see it in Nevada, spiring up and up, as water-spouts rise on the ocean, whiling as it advances, and finally breaking in a dry rain against the purple hills.

Two years later, John Charles Van Dyke would publish his largely fictionalized volume, “The Desert: Further Studies in Natural Appearances” and go down in history as the first writer to write positively and evocatively about the desert landscape.

ONE OTHER WAY IN WHICH SKINNER WAS A BIT AHEAD OF HIS TIME WAS IN HIS REJECTION OF ANTHROPOCENTRISM. In an age in which many people still viewed animals as mechanical and without intelligence or individuality, most everyone thought of nature as being there for humans to use and abuse at will. Gifted with a cosmic perspective, Skinner was able to see that the unfolding story of evolution was not just about human beings.

One of [nature’s] lessons is hard for us to learn, for it is the lesson of modesty, or reserve. There are men so made that they look patronizingly over the mountains, the sea, the prairies, the sky, all those symbols of the infinite, and say, “How nice it is that these things were created especially for us!” For them! little accidents of evolution; insects of a day, bumbling over this brief globe. Nay, truly, the bird, the bat, the tree, the flower, have the same right, cause, and purpose here as men. We are, happily, come in time to enjoy this beauty that is the world.

I will close with Skinner’s invitation to his readers to engage deeply and sensorially with nature, and thereby receive the energy of the cosmos:

When weather and disposition permit, …sprawl on the grass, inhale its acid fragrance, note the life the wriggles and scuttles beneath it…. Thus to rest between earth and sky, the sun ninety-three million miles over your head and warming it, eight thousand miles of rock beneath you, and life leaving darkness to meet the sun, is to be yourself penetrated by the vital currents that shape creation out of chaos.

TO CLOSE, I OFFER A QUICK WORD ABOUT THE VOLUMES I READ. Both of them were identical, apart from their different titles. Both volumes were, alas, heavily foxed, though otherwise in excellent condition for being over 120 years old. Violet Oakley’s cover is stunning; Holloway’s scattered watercolors lose quite a bit for being in black and white, I think. Neither volume had any owner’s signatures or other traces of its past.

Face to Face with Eternity: “Nature in a City Yard” by Charles M. Skinner, 1897

Backyard Nature, book review, Books, Natural History, Prehistory, Sense of Place 4 Responses »

Sep 022020

Looking skyward one is face to face with eternity. How futile, yet inevitable, to put the questions suggested to himself and to unanswering space and time by that vision! He tries to think back to the time in eternity when matter did not exist, and concludes it always did exist. And he wonders if the universe is evolution or creation. And is order mind, or has mind developed from order? And in the future suns burn out, only to have their ashes swept up by comets, scouts and scavengers of space, and hurled together with such fury that they become gaseous with heat, condense, reform into suns and planets, and the drama goes on again, endlessly. With a spectator? Ah, useless to ask and wonder. Truth is in a well, so deep she cannot come to us, nor we descend to her. Let us be content to love and admire, create and maintain, live and improve. It is all — and the best — we can do.

I CONFESS THAT I ALMOST GAVE UP ON WRITING A BLOG POST ON THIS BOOK. Charles Montgomery Skinner’s book is pleasant, yes, but at first glance there was precious little in his writing that really caught my eye. Perhaps the most significant thing about the book, from the standpoint of American environmental writing, is that way back in 1897, someone living in a Brooklyn home with a “common city yard, about eighteen feet by fifty” opted to write an entire book about encountering nature right there, at his back doorstep. I always imagined that early nature writers looked to wild places for inspiration, but the more I read of the more unknown exemplars, the more I find them encountering nature anywhere and everywhere. (Another example of a writer encountering nature in a city, in this case Cambridge, is Frank Bolles, in “Land of the Lingering Snow”.) The result is a book mostly about gardening, though here gardening extends to finding weeds in neighboring lots — even dandelions — and placing them in the backyard, along with more distinguished cultivars. Four chapters cover his garden through the seasons, with another chapter on Flowers and Insects. Skinner also uses the book to rail, on practically every other page, about a highly destructive, horribly obnoxious neighbor boy, Reginald McGonigle. The author strikes me as one compelled by employment to live in the city (he states that at the opening), doing his best to appreciate what nature it still offers. The sky, for instance, is still accessible to view from a backyard hammock, and that becomes the subject of a chapter, also. Indeed, in a couple of moments in the book, Skinner transcends his yard and the city to engage in cosmic wonder, and I found those passages most striking. From my viewpoint as a geologist, his finest one is this one, connecting stones in his yard to geologic ice ages and roping in an inaccurate interpretation of Milankovitch Cycles. Or at least, that is what I thought he was doing, based upon his reference to astronomical processes in the passage. But it turns out that the concept of Earth’s orbital cycles affecting the timing of ice ages was not actually proposed by Milutin Milanković until 1924. I can only guess that the notion of some sort of link between Earth’s orbit and ice ages had been identified much earlier.

Late fall and early spring are good seasons for the study of geology and mineralogy, as the vegetation is light, and the character of the ground may be seen. And our yard, in common with the other yards of the town and some thousands of miles of unyarded country, has had an interesting history. Had I stood 18,000 years ago where I stand to-day when i weed the hydrangeas and stir the earth about the “pinys,” I should have been facing a wall of ice, the receding glacier of the last Ice Age. And I and certain millions of others live on the debris of that glacier. This enormous mass, over a mile thick, moving sluggishly but irresistibly southward to its melting-point, brought with it millions of tons of sand, soil, gravel, and boulders, and dumped them into the Atlantic, building up from the bottom of that sea an island 120 miles long, and leaving parts of its moraine at other points between here and the Rockies. A conjunction of exterior planets had pulled at the earth by gravitative force, elongating its orbit, so that for some years the winters on the side slanted from the sun were lengthened and the summers shortened. The southern half of the globe will be frozen up in about 75,000 years, when the conjunction is repeated.
And in the light of such portentous events the back yard becomes important. I know the locale of certain fragments that I find there — speaking now of minerals and rocks, instead of the commoner rags, boots, bottles, and other materials of “made land.” The green mica I know comes from Fort George, New York; the green feldspar from a mile or two south of that point; the basalt from the palisades of the Hudson; the jasper from a now extinct reef of it which may be traced beneath the river; the serpentine from Hoboken; but mixed with these are specimens from the Hudson Highlands, the Adirondacks, the Connecticut hills, the Green Mountains, perhaps from those oldest hills of all, the Laurentians — a noble range, no doubt, that the glacier wore down to mere roots and stumps of its old self. When we record or guess upon these things, man and his work appear too trivial to think about, and time, space, mass, force, too great for understanding. There is, too, in the passing of the autumn, some hint of the cold death that must overtake the race of humankind, the world it lives in, and the solar system in which it moves. It is too vast and lonely a theme for the imagination. By potting the plants for winter blooming, tearing up the faded annuals, setting bulbs that are to flower in spring, and mulching the beds against the coming of cold weather, one can forget these grandeurs, and his mind is comforted.

WHAT A REMARKABLE PASSAGE! It is, without a doubt, the earliest philosophical exploration of geologic deep time (a term coined by John McPhee in 1981) that I have ever read. It is literally several decades before radiometric dating — back in a time when geologists had precious little knowledge of the age of past Earth events, or the age of the planet itself, for that matter. As such, this text alone makes the book worthy of acknowledgement. The rest of it — well, now at least the reader understands the focus on gardening — to keep at bay a looming sense of cosmic angst.

COMPARED TO SKINNER’S BACKYARD, MY COPY OF HIS BOOK HAS A MUCH LESS DRAMATIC HISTORY. It was once part of the collection of the Young Men’s Library Association in Palmer, Massachusetts, nowadays a town of about 12,000 people a few miles east of Springfield. It was last due back on March 16, 1960, and sometime after that was stamped “Discarded”.

The Great Blue Heron as Dinosaur / The Great Blue Heron as Poetry (Sunday at the Archives #14)

Atlanta Nature Examiner Articles, Natural History, Prehistory No Responses »

Mar 302014

I saw a marvelous image posted on Facebook the other day — a Venn diagram composed of two overlapping circles, one labeled “Science” and the other one “Art”. The intersection region of the two was labeled “Wonder”. Today’s offering from the Examiner archives is a pair of articles about the great blue heron, one from a scientific viewpoint and the other from an artistic one. Both pieces were originally published on June 15, 2010. The left-hand photograph was taken at Sweetwater Creek State Park, Georgia. The right-hand one was taken in White House Beach, a mobile home community on Indian River Bay in Delaware, where my dad was living at the time. He loved watching sunrises and birds from his deck looking out over the open water, I have always share his delight in exploring nature, a trait he encouraged in me from my earliest memories. Gordon F. Blizard, Jr. passed away in December of 2011; this selection from the archives is dedicated to him.

1-Sweetwater Creek 078

1-Delaware 053

THE GREAT BLUE HERON AS DINOSAUR

From as far back as this writer can recall into his childhood, he has always been entranced by great blue herons. This fascination is due partly, no doubt, to the fact that the great blue heron (Ardea herodias) is an immense bird, standing nearly four feet tall, and with a wingspan of about six feet. As such, it would dwarf all of the songbirds he might see at the backyard feeder though the kitchen window of his Pennsylvania home. But down the street from his home there were ponds and a creek, and from time to time he would glimpse a great blue heron there. It was nearly always in flight over the treetops or along the stream, body long and streamlined, legs tucked behind, wings flapping loudly. Once or twice, it even uttered a call sounding like “FRAWNK”, in a harsh and gutteral voice that seemed to emerge from evolutionary prehistory. For reasons he did not have the words to capture then, but will venture to do so now, the great blue heron has always seemed to belong to the time of the dinosaurs.

One explanation for this image of great blue heron as dinosaur is that, in fact, birds are descended from dinosaurs. The split appears to have taken place about 160 million years ago, when small, two-legged dinosaurs like Velociraptor began to develop feathers. Oddly enough, paleontologists have identified feathered, ground-dwelling dinosaurs, indicating that feathers likely evolved from modified scales before they could be used for flight, perhaps as a means of regulating body temperature or displaying during courtship. The oldest bird fossil is that of Archaeopterix, dating back about 155 million years, an odd mix of avian and reptilian attributes. This early bird may have gotten the worm, but it did so using a mouth containing teeth. It also possessed three separately-clawed fingers and a bony tail. Like later birds, however, Archaeopterix had wings, fused clavicles, and feathers.

So in a sense, perhaps our recognition of great blue herons as being like dinosaurs is an instinctive recognition of their actual kinship. Surely, then, great blue herons must be among the most primitive birds alive today, and therefore closest in relation to dinosaurs? Amazingly enough, scientists doing protein sequencing analysis have concluded that the closest living relative of the dinosaurs, and therefore our closest point of contact with the Mesozoic, is actually a chicken! “Kentucky Fried Dinosaur” jokes aside, then, why does the chicken fail to evoke more than vague thoughts of farm life and possibly soup, while the majestic heron transports this author to the geologic past?

The answer lies, quite possibly, in the great blue heron’s resemblance to a pterosaur. Pterosaurs were an order of reptiles separate from the dinosaurs, which lived throughout the mid to late Mesozoic era (from 220 to 65 million years ago). The first reptiles to take to the air, pterosaurs had hollow bones like birds, and both soared and actively flew on immense membranous wings. Images of a pterodactyl in flight do resemble flying great blue herons. Since pterosaurs evolved about 80 million years before birds split off from the dinosaurs, however, herons and pterosaurs are only distantly related. So the mystery behind the similarity of appearance has to do with the process of convergent evolution, in which two unrelated organisms both evolve similar body forms and structures in order to meet similar environmental requirements. Both have large wingspans and streamlined bodies because those attributes are beneficial for flight.

On the ground, though, any resemblance between pterosaurs and great blue herons quickly vanishes. Tracks of pterosaurs reveal that they were actually quadrupeds, walking on both their hind feet and their wings in a somewhat ungainly manner, possibly as depicted here. While standing in a stream or along the edge of a pond or bay, however, a great blue heron evokes quite different feelings and images for this writer, ones that tend less toward prehistory and more toward poetry. They will be the topic of another article on herons, soon to be written.

THE GREAT BLUE HERON AS POETRY

The great blue heron stands,

Waiting at the water’s edge;

Avian haiku.

There is something about a great blue heron, poised motionless in the shallow waters of a pond, river, or bay, that is profoundly poetic. It gazes outward, waiting for the slightest ripple to betray the presence of a fish. It stands silent, almost blending into the landscape, its long body connecting water and sky. In particular, it evokes haiku, the lean and elemental seventeen syllables of Japanese verse that contains at once both a single instant and the entire universe. Not surprisingly, there is even an online haiku publication called The Heron’s Nest.

The great blue heron’s pose while waiting for a meal has much to teach Westerners. It embodies patience and being in the present moment, waiting for an opportunity to arise rather than trying to make it happen. Just as it awaits the silvery flash of a fish in the shallows, so the poet sits, waiting for words to form themselves into a poem to surface in her consciousness.

The great blue heron also embodies silence and solitude, standing alone against the elements, aloof in the shallows. It may stand in one place for hours, as the sun makes its way across the sky and sets in the west. Approach too closely and it will abruptly take off with a flapping of wings, searching for a place to fish without disruption, further down the coast of the bay or up the river.

The great blue heron is not always a bird of stillness, though. Indeed, despite the haiku publication title, the heron’s nest can be quite a raucus place. Herons build their nests of sticks lined with reeds, mosses, and grasses high in the trees in wet, forested areas. They nest in dense colonies called rookeries, which can be both smelly (from the abundant bird droppings) and loud (from many squawking birds). As herons return to a rookery year after year, eventually their tree stand is killed off, forcing the birds outward, leaving a bulls-eye pattern with a central core of dead trees and an outer ring of nest trees that are slowly dying. In these nest areas, great blue herons take on a nearly opposite personality to that of the quiet fishers that they appear to be at other times in the year. At the rookeries, herons are loud, argumentative, and destructive. But perhaps the aspects of great blue heron behavior encountered in a rookery might be viewed as a necessity. Maybe their nesting behavior is required in order to balance out their other, more poetic, solitary and silent selves.

The Mysterious Stone Piles of Little Mulberry Park, Part Three: Another Explanation

Agriculture and Husbandry, Landscape History, Prehistory 7 Responses »

Dec 302013

Barbed wire emerges from tree stump, Little Mulberry Park. 26 Dec. 2013

Mid 20th Century stacked rock piles, Madison County, North Carolina. From Early Georgia article by Thomas Gresham (1990).

What do the stone piles of Little Mulberry Park in Gwinnett County have to tell us about the past history of the area? If they are not prehistoric burial and ritual sites, what other possibilities remain? In this final blog post in my series about this stone mounds, I will explore another explanation for their origin, one that relates them to the past agricultural history of the area. Evidence that the land was once open pasture can be found in the large pasture trees that follow former fence lines (see my post from 12/28 for an example), and bits of barbed wire that emerge from old tree stumps in the park.

But why would settlers choose to pile up rocks on the property in the first place? Patrick Garrow, the archaeologist who did the initial investigation of the site in 1988, argued that the stone piles locations and structure argued against the stones having been piled up by farmers clearing the ground for planting. Indeed, since the land was never tilled but only used for pasture, that explanation seems unlikely. Perhaps the farmers wanted to clear the ground so that there would be more graze for their animals, or so that the animals would be less likely to injure themselves? Why, then, go to the trouble of stacking the rocks?

It is the fact that the rocks were stacked which convinces many people that the mounds are evidence of a prehistoric origin. Clearly, someone (or someones, plural) went to considerable effort to place the rocks in layers that can still be seen today. In fact, as archaeologist Thomas Gresham argued in an Early Georgia article in 1990, southern farmers have stacked rocks into cylindrical piles like these within recent history. In his paper, entitled, “Historic Patterns of Rock Piling and Rock Pile Problems”, Gresham included photographs of such rock piles. Before 1940, Gresham explained, flat rock and flagstone quarrying in Georgia was “small scale, localized, and done by hand.” Stones found close to the surface of the ground would be pried up with crowbars, sorted, and stacked for temporary storage until being sold for use building chimneys, terraces, foundations, and steps. Why, then, would so many such stone piles have survived in Little Mulberry Park? Perhaps, Gresham proposed, the stone proved inferior for use, and did not sell, or there was some other event that prevented a sale from going forward, or alternative building materials (such as brick) become widely available and prevented the stone from being sold.

Beyond the documented historic occurrence of such piles on North Carolina farms, is there other evidence to support the idea that the structures are historic stone piles rather than prehistoric Indian mounds? In fact, there is archaeological evidence to support this idea. In 1995, Thomas Gresham excavated eight stone piles at the Little Mulberry Park site. He found no prehistoric artifacts, but he did unearth early 19th century artifacts (ceramics, glass, and metal, including an 1838 penny) beneath two of the piles, conclusively showing that both were constructed in historic times. During the excavation, Gresham’s team also found evidence of a former small-scale rock quarry in the vicinity of the piles, lending further credence to the idea that stone was being cleared from the land and stockpiled in the area.

Ultimately, we will probably never know for certain what cultural forces shaped the stone piles at Little Mulberry Park. In my own explorations, both on-ground and via the Internet, I am satisfied that the piles are not prehistoric at all, but were built by settlers gathering field stone for future construction efforts. I suspect that this explanation will be less than satisfactory to many who have visited the park or who read enthusiastically about Mysteries from the Past. There is a certain allure in thinking that the stone mounds were constructed by Native Americans thousands of years ago as part of a mysterious ritual. Many human beings are hungry for the sacred, and find solace in the mythical prospect of a distant time when people lived in harmony with nature, leading lives deeply connected to their communities and to the forces animating the cosmos. To say that the stone piles are actually Indian mounds is, I will admit, a much more enticing story. And maybe that is why the information sign at the park, rather than proposing several different theories behind the stone structures, instead declares to this day that they are “almost certainly associated with native american cultures.”

The Mysterious Stone Piles of Little Mulberry Park, Part Two: The Case for a Prehistoric Origin

Agriculture and Husbandry, Landscape History, Prehistory 2 Responses »

Dec 292013

Partially stacked stone pile, Little Mulberry Park, 26 December 2013

Partially stacked stone pile, Little Mulberry Park, 26 Dec. 2013

Returning home from my visit to Little Mulberry Park in Gwinnett County, I set to work finding out what I could online about the origin and purpose of the mysterious stone piles I had seen. Were they “almost certainly associated with native american cultures” as the information sign in the park indicated? If so, how old were they, and what evidence has been found linking them to prehistory? The more research I did, the more convinced I became that “almost certainly” is, almost certainly, not an accurate phrase to use. Indeed, the Little Mulberry Park Master Plan drafted in 2001 did not offer a definitive explanation for the piles, instead noting that “the stacked stone mounds have been variously attributed to pre-Columbian habitation by Native Americans and to post-settlement agriculture….” Based upon this uncertainty, the master plan added, “it is intended that appropriate interpretive signage will be placed to present the various theories about the mounds” [emphasis added]. Various theories? What do we truly know about these stone piles, and what is conjecture? Where is the evidence?

Clearly, I thought, there must be some fairly strong evidence leading archaeologists to conclude that the mounds are prehistoric. In 1989, the site (officially termed the Parks-Strickland Archaeological Complex) was added to the National Register of Historic Places, where it is listed as a prehistoric site dating from between 499 BC and 499 AD. According to the National Recreation Trails website (hosted by AmericanTrails.org), the site’s “pre-historic stone mounds” date to the Middle Woodland period of Native American prehistory, between 100 BC and 500 AD. Furthermore, “Portions of the stone mounds appear to be patterned to represent a stylized serpent figure which demonstrates careful and consistent techniques of early construction.” It should be noted that this was the only source I could find that claimed some pattern or structure to any of the mounds, beyond observations that many of the mounds show signs of rock stacking and some are roughly cylindrical in shape.

What evidence is there for ascribing a Late Woodland age to the stone structures, and what do archaeologists think they were intended to be? It turns out that the mounds were first investigated by Atlanta archaeologist Patrick Garrow, and he is responsible both for raising awareness of the potential cultural significance of the stone piles, and for proposing and strongly advocating that they are pre-settlement in origin. According to a May 1990 article in the Free-Lance Star, a Fredericksburg, Virginia newspaper, Garrow found over 200 rock mounds, and is quoted in the article as speculating that “I think it was a complex for burial of the dead and a ceremonial complex.” “But,” he added, “I’m guessing here. No one is absolutely sure.” In fact, no Woodland period (or prehistoric in general, for that matter) artifacts were found in or near any of the stone piles, nor were any human remains encountered.

In a 1988 archaeological investigation report by Patrick Garrow and David Chase of Garrow Associates, Inc. (discussed here), the authors gave several arguments as to why the stone piles are likely prehistoric. While some of the mounds are situated parallel to previous boundary lines, others are not. If the piles were formed by farmers removing rocks from a field, wouldn’t they collect the stones along a property line, to keep “wasted” land to a minimum? Also, why would area farmers bother to pile rocks in the first place, since the area was used as pasture and never actually plowed? Why would farmers clearing a field bother to stack the rocks with so much care? Finally, the rock piles are not random; many are located at equal distances from each other. Wouldn’t rock piles formed by farmers clearing their fields be more randomly situated? (Random, that is, if one overlooks the first idea, that the piles should be preferentially parallel to boundary lines.) All of these arguments are based upon the rejection of one alternative explanation for the stone piles: namely, that they could have been the work of post-settlement farmers clearing their land of rocks. By arguing against this scenario, Garrow and Chase somehow managed to conclude that the piles have to be prehistoric because there is no other reasonable explanation for their origin. In short, there is not one single piece of evidence that the stone piles at Little Mulberry Park are actually prehistoric. As we shall see in the final installment of this series, however, there is considerable evidence pointing to a different story behind the stone piles.

The Mysterious Stone Piles of Little Mulberry Park, Part One: Discovery

Agriculture and Husbandry, Day Hikes, Landscape History, Prehistory 13 Responses »

Dec 282013

A few days ago, my wife and I ventured out to a park we had never hiked in before: Little Mulberry Park in northeastern Gwinnett County, Georgia. After circling Atlanta (I hadn’t the courage to attempt the downtown route) and driving for a near-eternity through the northeast suburbs, we arrived at last at the 890-acre park. The property offers a wide variety of trails, including a number of paved multi-use routes, plus a few for horses, bicycles, and pedestrians, and a couple limited to hikers only. We had only a couple of hours before sundown, so I proposed taking the Gorge Trail loop, a 2.16-mile route through an upland hardwood and pine forest and along the edge of a gorge. I was particularly intrigued to read that the trail included over 200 stone mounds, possibly prehistoric in origin.

Setting out on the trail, we soon came to this stunning old oak tree. Its abundant lower branches attest to a time when it stood alone in a pasture, perhaps as recently as 50 to 75 years ago.

This oak tree, perhaps 150 years old, once grew in a pasture. Little Mulberry Park, Gwinnett County, GA.

This oak tree, perhaps 150 years old, once grew in a pasture. It now stands in a mixed hardwood forest in Little Mulberry Park, Gwinnett County, GA.

After going up and down several steep hillslopes, we began seeing stone piles everywhere we looked. Some of them were just scatterings of amphibolite gneiss (a metamorphic rock that outcrops throughout the park), while others seemed to be intentionally stacked. Who constructed them, and why were they there?

Stacked stones on the forest floor, Little Mulberry Park, Gwinnett County, GA.

A stone pile from an unknown era shows evidence of deliberate stacking. But with what intent? Little Mulberry Park, Gwinnett County, GA.

A stone pile in the forest appears deliberately stacked. But for what reason? Little Mulberry Park, Gwinnett County, GA.

We came to an information sign about the stone mounds, offering an explanation for them and urging visitors to treat them with respect.

Information sign regarding the mysterious stone piles, Little Mulberry Park, Gwinnett County. GA.

The text above asserts that “they are almost certainly associated with native american cultures.” But if archaeologists “have failed to uncover artifacts”, then on what basis was the connection made? How do we know that the mounds are prehistoric in the first place? I will explore this mystery further in my next post. The answers, as far as I can determine them, teach us as much about human nature as they do about the landscape history of the upper Piedmont of Georgia.