Wilderness and American Identity, Nature Transformed


The Puritan Origins of the American Wilderness Movement
J. Baird Callicott, University of North Texas
Priscilla Solis Ybarra, Rice University
National Humanities Center
July 2001


". . . each town should have a park, or rather a primitive
forest, . . .
a common possession forever, for instruction and
recreation." - Thoreau, "Huckleberries," 1862

In an essay titled "Huckleberries" written shortly before his death in
1862, the first clear clarion call for wilderness preservation was
trumpeted by Henry David Thoreau, a lifelong contrarian who regularly
ridiculed the conventional attitudes and values of his New England
contemporaries. After complaining about the penchant of his fellow
citizens to make private property out of virgin forests, river banks,
and mountain topsand to exploit them for commerce, lumber, and
pasturehe insisted "that each town should have a park, or rather a
primitive forest, of five hundred or a thousand acres, either in one
body or severalwhere a stick should never be cut for fuelnor for the
navy, nor to make wagons, but stand and decay for higher usesa common
possession forever, for instruction and recreation." Thoreau goes on to
propose as local wilderness preserves "All Walden Wood, with Walden
[Pond] in the midst of it, and the Easterbrooks country, an uncultivated
area of some four square miles in the north of the town." By
twentieth-century standards, Thoreau's notion of a wilderness preserve
was small potatoesthat is, small in spatial scale, as contemporary
conservation biologists would put it. But here in a nutshell he captured
the essence of American wilderness preservationpublicly owned,
undespoiled land set aside in perpetuity for "higher uses."

Moran, "Valley of Babbling Waters," 1876
[Utah]

Library of Congress

"going to the mountains is going home
. . . wilderness is a necessity"

Muir, Our National Parks, 1901


John Muir took up the wilderness cause later in the nineteenth century
and, early in the twentieth, transformed it into a popular movement.
Born in Scotland and raised in Wisconsin, Muir wound up in California.
Compared with the big, rugged, wild country of the West, Thoreau's
"wild" haunts appeared to be less like real wilderness and more like the
fringes of suburbia. Muir extolled the value of big wilderness in a
prose more accessible and less judgmental than Thoreau's: "Thousands of
tired, nerve-shaken, overcivilized people are beginning to find out that
going to the mountains is going home; that wilderness is a necessity;
and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as
fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but fountains of life."
In 1935, Aldo Leopold, Robert Marshall and other activists formed the
Wilderness Society. In league with other conservation organizations,
such as the Sierra Club, which Muir helped to found and served as
president, they campaigned for federal wilderness protection. In 1964,
President Johnson signed Public Law 88-577 creating a "National
Wilderness Preservation System." The "Wilderness Act of 1964," as this
law is now known, was, thus, the culmination of a century of
conservation philosophy, propaganda, and political struggle. According
to the Act, "wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his
own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where
the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man
himself is a visitor who does not remain."

University of Southern Maine, Portland

John Smith, "New England,"
1635 (detail)

"It was their God-ordained destiny to transform the dismal
American wilderness into an earthly paradise, governed
according to the Word of God."

The classic history of this movement is Wilderness and the American Mind
(1967/1982). Author Roderick Nash notes that wilderness is an important
biblical theme, the "antipode," on the spectrum of good, bad, and
indifferent places, to the paradisical Garden of Eden. According to
Nash, the Bible consistently characterizes wilderness as "cursed" land,
"the environment of evil," a "kind of hell" on earth. The Puritan
settlers of New England, steeped in the Old Testament biblical
worldview, believed they found themselves in such a "wilderness
condition" of continental proportions. It was their God-ordained destiny
to transform the dismal American wilderness into an earthly paradise,
governed according to the Word of God. To hear Nash tell it,
"seventeenth century [Puritan] writing is permeated with the idea of
wild country as the environment of evil." Certainly one finds Puritan
fear and loathing of wilderness in William Bradford's Of Plymouth
Plantation, 1620-1647, and many other seventeenth-century Puritan
writings, such as Michael Wigglesworth's God's Controversy with New
England (1662), and Cotton Mather's Decennium Luctuosum: An History of
Remarkable Occurrences in the Long War Which New-England Hath Had with
the Indian Salvages (1699). While it would be an exaggeration to claim
that a celebration of the American wilderness and its indigenous peoples
could be found in Thomas Morton's New English Canaan (1637), one does
find there a much more sympathetic portrayal than in its contemporaries.


Thomas Morton (c.1579-1647) arrived in New England in 1622two years
after Bradford and the Mayflower contingentwith a group of business
prospectors (rather than Puritan settlers). He soon established himself
as the leader of a trading post at Mount Wollaston (later called "Merry
Mount"). In addition to trading with the "Salvages" as he and his
contemporaries called the Native Americans, he befriended them and
joined them in boisterous festivities on a regular basis. Particularly
infamous in Puritan memory, on one such occasion Morton erected a
Maypole on Merry Mount, around which his motley crew dancedin
transatlantic heathen union. Bradford and others suspected he even
illegally traded guns and alcohol with the natives, and they eventually
exiled him to England on the basis of these suspicions.

BRADFORD______Of Plimouth Plantation

on arriving in 1620

Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate
wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men? and what
multitudes there might be of them they knew not. Neither
could they, as it were, go up to the top of Pigsah, to view
from this wilderness a more goodly country to feed their
hopes; for which way soever they turned their eyes (save
upward to the heavens) they could have little solace or
content in respect of any outward objects. For summer being
done, all things stand upon them with a weather-beaten face;
and the whole country, full of woods and thickets,
represented a wild and savage hew. 1620-1647, Ch. 9.

MORTON______New English Canaan

on arriving in 1622

In the month of June, 1622, it was my chance to arrive in
the parts of New England with 30 servants, and provision of
all sorts fit for a plantation: and while our houses were
building, I did endeavor to take a survey of the country:
The more I looked, the more I liked it. And when I had more
seriously considered of the beauty of the place, with all
her fair endowments, I did not think that in all the knowne
world it could be paralleled . . . . in my eye t'was
nature's Masterpiece; her chiefest magazine of all where
lives her store: if this land be not rich, then is the whole
world poor.
1637, Book II, Ch. 1.

In short, Morton and Bradford were not birds of a feather. Indeed, the
way Morton writes about the native peoples and natural environment of
New England clearly shows how much he distanced himself from Puritan
ideology and its leaders. Morton's friendly relations with the
indigenous peoples starkly contrasts with Bradford's contentiousness.
The two also evinced contrasting attitudes toward the American natural
environment. Because the American peoples and their natural environments
were so closely connected, not only in fact, but in the European
imagination, Bradford's attitudes toward both are closely connected, as
are Morton's. And though sharply contrasting, Bradford's Indian-nature
attitudes and Morton's flow, at a deeper level, from a common source.
They both subscribe to a sort of primitivism. Bradford considered the
Indians to be part of a forbidding wilderness, while Morton considered
them to be noble savages of a bountiful promised land. Consider the
title of Morton's work about his experiences in New England, New English
Canaan. With it he satirizes the Puritans' habit of perceiving
themselves and the New World in terms of the tribulations of the
Israelites in the Old Testament. But also in this work describing New
England, Morton "appeale[s] to any man of judgement, whether it be not a
Land that for her excellent indowments of Nature may passe for a plaine
parallel to Canaan of Israell, being in a more temporat Climat, this
being in 40 Degrees and that in 30." Morton sees New England as a
promised land that may even surpass that of the Israelites and
ironically, to be sure, but also seriously dubs it "Canaan," while
Bradford heroically insists that the wilderness presents the greatest
challenge in human history for God's chosen people.

Reconstruction of
Plimouth Plantation

Plymouth Colony
Archive Project

Worth noting is that seventeenth-century Puritan (and in Morton's case,
anti-Puritan) writing makes a mockery of the twentieth-century idea of
wilderness as a place where "man himself is a visitor who does not
remain." It was, by all early-settlement accounts, teeming with people.
And to the analytic eye of an ecologist, the east coast of North America
was far from being "untrammeled by man." Native hunting, horticulture,
town-building, and burning had created a landscape no less influenced by
man than that bequeathed to their heirs by the pilgrims from Europe, as
historians William Cronon and Carolyn Merchant point out (