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American Canopy: Trees, Forests, and the Making of a Nation
American Canopy: Trees, Forests, and the Making of a Nation
American Canopy: Trees, Forests, and the Making of a Nation
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American Canopy: Trees, Forests, and the Making of a Nation

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This fascinating and groundbreaking work tells the remarkable story of the relationship between Americans and their trees across the entire span of our nation’s history.

Like many of us, historians have long been guilty of taking trees for granted. Yet the history of trees in America is no less remarkable than the history of the United States itself—from the majestic white pines of New England, which were coveted by the British Crown for use as masts in navy warships, to the orange groves of California, which lured settlers west. In fact, without the country’s vast forests and the hundreds of tree species they contained, there would have been no ships, docks, railroads, stockyards, wagons, barrels, furniture, newspapers, rifles, or firewood. No shingled villages or whaling vessels in New England. No New York City, Miami, or Chicago. No Johnny Appleseed, Paul Bunyan, or Daniel Boone. No Allied planes in World War I, and no suburban sprawl in the middle of the twentieth century. America—if indeed it existed—would be a very different place without its millions of acres of trees.

As Eric Rutkow’s brilliant, epic account shows, trees were essential to the early years of the republic and indivisible from the country’s rise as both an empire and a civilization. Among American Canopy’s many fascinating stories: the Liberty Trees, where colonists gathered to plot rebellion against the British; Henry David Thoreau’s famous retreat into the woods; the creation of New York City’s Central Park; the great fire of 1871 that killed a thousand people in the lumber town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin; the fevered attempts to save the American chestnut and the American elm from extinction; and the controversy over spotted owls and the old-growth forests they inhabited. Rutkow also explains how trees were of deep interest to such figures as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Teddy Roosevelt, and FDR, who oversaw the planting of more than three billion trees nationally in his time as president.

As symbols of liberty, community, and civilization, trees are perhaps the loudest silent figures in our country’s history. America started as a nation of people frightened of the deep, seemingly infinite woods; we then grew to rely on our forests for progress and profit; by the end of the twentieth century we came to understand that the globe’s climate is dependent on the preservation of trees. Today, few people think about where timber comes from, but most of us share a sense that to destroy trees is to destroy part of ourselves and endanger the future.

Never before has anyone treated our country’s trees and forests as the subject of a broad historical study, and the result is an accessible, informative, and thoroughly entertaining read. Audacious in its four-hundred-year scope, authoritative in its detail, and elegant in its execution, American Canopy is perfect for history buffs and nature lovers alike and announces Eric Rutkow as a major new author of popular history.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherScribner
Release dateApr 24, 2012
ISBN9781439193600
American Canopy: Trees, Forests, and the Making of a Nation
Author

Eric Rutkow

Eric Rutkow is an assistant professor of history at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, and the author of The Longest Line on the Map. His first book, American Canopy: Trees, Forests, and the Making of a Nation (2012), received the Association of American Publishers’ PROSE Award for US history and was named one of the top books of the year by Smithsonian magazine. He earned his BA and PhD from Yale and his JD from Harvard.

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Rating: 3.855263047368421 out of 5 stars
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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Excellent - a must read for anyone interested in history, nature, and the role of trees in America's evolution.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This is a nonfiction book about how the abundance of trees in the U.S. intersected with development of our nation. An interesting topic and one that worked very well for large sections of the book and less well in others. I really enjoyed the first half of this book. Rutkow writes about how valued trees were to European settlers. They were used for housing, fencing, furniture, etc. But also for ship building - especially exciting was the abundance of very tall straight trees that could be used for masts. He talks about trees used for food (apple, orange, chestnut, etc.) He moves into talking about lumber mills and paper mills and the progression of mindset from "the trees are there for us to use in whatever way we need", to conservation, to environmentalism. I also was interested in the section about the American Chestnut and the Elm tree that were decimated by introduced fungi. As you can see, he casts a wide net and covers a lot of topics. I preferred those that really kept trees as the focus. Some of the chapters were too much about politics. And it was also sad, though not a new idea, to delve in to all the ways we've ruined our forests. The long section on paper mills lost my interest. Overall, I am glad I read this book, but it wasn't quite as good as I wanted it to be. Or maybe I just wanted a different focus than the author chose. Either way, it's a soft recommendation from me.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Interesting, but insufficient. Perhaps all histories are notable as much for what they leave out as for what they put in. Retelling American history by looking to the trees is a worthwhile endeavor, however. It skews our perspective just enough to make us look at what we already know in a fresh way. That said, Rutkow doesn't deviate from the traditional approach of viewing history as the consequence of the acts of Great (or at least infamous) White Men. Most of the actors in the drama here have names that will be familiar to most readers: Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, George Washington,Thomas Jefferson, the Presidents Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot, Frederick Law Olmstead, Al Gore, Henry Ford, William Levitt, etc. I do have to give the author credit for, particularly where the earlier figures are concerned, telling stories that we probably haven't heard before. This is the advantage of choosing a fresh point of view. One glaring omission in Rutkow's survey of the impact of the trees upon & their relationship to American history is any mention of the lynching tree, powerful both as symbol & site; another is any serious consideration of the relationship of indigenous peoples to the forests (granted, that might be the subject of another book entirely; nevertheless, even if the author's focus is strictly upon post-Columbian North America, he is delinquent in not mentioning, for example, how the colonists' encounter with American Indian modes of battle impacted how their own Revolution was fought and won). The author has also by and large omitted women from his narrative except for a few nods to women here and there, of foot-note quality in their brevity. How, for example, in a tome already diminished by its lack of inclusion of women, blacks, Mexicans, Indians, etc. could he not have told the story of at least one female activist. Julia Butterfly Hill, for example, whose name became synonymous with preservation of Old Growth Coastal Redwoods in the 1990s. This is, in sum, mostly a top-down telling of the story of Americans & the trees. I would have liked some alternative telling as well.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    As a forester I have an obvious weakness for trees, so reading American Canopy was a natural choice for me. I enjoyed most of the book, especially when it was about trees. I especially liked the true story of Johnny Appleseed and the role apples played in the colonies; the short-lived citrus industry in southern California; and the loss of elms and chestnuts. However, for some reason Rutkow veered into the history of environmentalism in America and lost his way. There are many better books written about the rise of the environmental movement, and the movement is not always about trees nor is it altruistic. He also reveals his political bias, in that democratic politicians did good, while republican politicians did bad things for the environment.. Its never that simple. I think that Rutkow should have finished his book with the following topics: sudden oak death, urban forestry, why we have too many trees due to lack of fire in the west, and the role that trees can play in our switch to green energy (and why using tree biomass for energy is carbon neutral).
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I found this book fascinating, but then I've always been partial (very much so) to trees and wood. It starts off with an account of the intentional destruction, in the name of science, of the world's oldest living tree. The history of man's use and misuse of forests makes up the majority of the book starting with colonial times up to the present. Perhaps if I found any fault with the narrative, it would be that this history entails a bit too much of the political side of the conservation story, though, it is of course important to understanding this long and involved tale. I recommend this book to anyone interested in the history of man's use of forests particularly, but not entirely, as this applies to the western hemisphere.

Book preview

American Canopy - Eric Rutkow

Praise for American Canopy

Rutkow is clearly enraptured by his topic and, like another great popular historian, David McCullough, has a knack for making the reader enraptured as well.

Chicago Tribune

There is much in this book on the prevalence of wood products in our life, but more on their deeper significance. This book is not merely a history, but an eloquent advocate of, as Rutkow writes, ‘how trees change from enemy, to friend, to potential savior.’ 

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Readers will come away from this, Rutkow’s first book, with a greater appreciation of the role of both forests and trees in our ongoing national story.

The Washington Post

A lively story of driven personalities, resources that were once thought to be endless, brilliant ideas, tragic mistakes, and the evolution of the United States. Rutkow has cut through America’s use and love of trees to reveal the rings of our nation’s history and the people who have helped shape it.

The San Diego Union-Tribune

An excellent book for both academics and general readers, this is highly recommended.

Library Journal

An even-handed and comprehensive history that could not be more relevant . . . The woods, Rutkow’s history reminds us again and again, are essential to our humanity.

Bloomberg Business Week

A deeply fascinating survey of American history through a particularly interesting angle: down through the boughs of our vanished trees.

The Boston Globe

For those who see our history through the traditional categories of politics, economics, and culture, a delightful feast awaits. In this remarkably inventive book, Eric Rutkow looks at our national experience through the lens of our magnificent trees, showing their extraordinary importance in shaping how we lived, thrived, and expanded as a people. A beautifully written, devilishly original piece of work.

—David M. Oshinsky, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Polio: An American Story

"Right from its quietly shocking prelude—the cavalier and surprisingly recent murder of the oldest living thing in North America—Eric Rutkow’s splendid saga shows, through a chain of stories and biographical sketches that are intimate, fresh, and often startling, how trees have shaped every aspect of our national life. Here is the tree as symbol and as tool, as companion and enemy, as a tonic for our spirits and the indispensable ingredient of our every enterprise from the colonization voyages to the transcontinental railroad to Levittown. The result, both fascinating and valuable, is a sort of shadow history of America. Toward the end of his finest novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald writes that the ‘vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams.’ American Canopy retrieves those trees and does full-rigged (on tall, white-pine masts) justice to the dream."

—Richard Snow, author of A Measureless Peril and former editor in chief of American Heritage

"American Canopy marks the debut of an uncommonly gifted young historian and writer. Ranging across four centuries of history, Eric Rutkow shows the manifold ways in which trees—and woodland—and wood—have shaped the contours of American life and culture. And because he has managed to build the story around gripping events and lively characters, the book entertains as much as it informs. All in all, a remarkable performance!"

—John Demos, Samuel Knight Professor of History at Yale University and author of Entertaining Satan, winner of the Bancroft Prize in American History, and The Unredeemed Captive, finalist for the National Book Award

This fascinating and groundbreaking work tells the remarkable story of the relationship between Americans and their trees across the entire span of our nation’s history.

Like many of us, historians have long been guilty of taking trees for granted. Yet the history of trees in America is no less remarkable than the history of the United States itself—from the majestic white pines of New England, which were coveted by the British Crown for use as masts in navy warships, to the orange groves of California, which lured settlers west. In fact, without the country’s vast forests and the hundreds of tree species they contained, there would have been no ships, docks, railroads, stockyards, wagons, barrels, furniture, newspapers, rifles, or firewood. No shingled villages or whaling vessels in New England. No New York City, Miami, or Chicago. No Johnny Apple-seed, Paul Bunyan, or Daniel Boone. No Allied planes in World War I, and no suburban sprawl in the middle of the twentieth century. America—if indeed it existed—would be a very different place without its millions of acres of trees.

As Eric Rutkow’s brilliant, epic account shows, trees were essential to the early years of the republic and indivisible from the country’s rise as both an empire and a civilization. Among American Canopy’s many fascinating stories: the Liberty Trees, where colonists gathered to plot rebellion against the British; Henry David Thoreau’s famous retreat into the woods; the creation of New York City’s Central Park; the great fire of 1871 that killed a thousand people in the lumber town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin; the fevered attempts to save the American chestnut and the American elm from extinction; and the controversy over spotted owls and the old-growth forests they inhabited. Rutkow also explains how trees were of deep interest to such figures as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Teddy Roosevelt, and FDR, who oversaw the planting of more than three billion trees nationally in his time as president.

As symbols of liberty, community, and civilization, trees are perhaps the loudest silent figures in our country’s history. America started as a nation of people frightened of the deep, seemingly infinite woods; we then grew to rely on our forests for progress and profit; by the end of the twentieth century we came to understand that the globe’s climate is dependent on the preservation of trees. Today, few people think about where timber comes from, but most of us share a sense that to destroy trees is to destroy part of ourselves and endanger the future.

Never before has anyone treated our country’s trees and forests as the subject of a broad historical study, and the result is an accessible, informative, and thoroughly entertaining read. Audacious in its four-hundred-year scope, authoritative in its detail, and elegant in its execution, American Canopy is perfect for history buffs and nature lovers alike and announces Eric Rutkow as a major new author of popular history.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR AMERICAN CANOPY

For those who see our history through the traditional categories of politics, economics, and culture, a delightful feast awaits. In this remarkably inventive book, Eric Rutkow looks at our national experience through the lens of our magnificent trees, showing their extraordinary importance in shaping how we lived, thrived, and expanded as a people. A beautifully written, devilishly original piece of work.

—David M. Oshinsky, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Polio: An American Story

Both delightful and enlightening—a book filled with fascinations and surprises about a subject I had never thought about (much less read about) before. That it’s written with such charm and grace only intensifies its appeal.

—Daniel Okrent, author of the bestseller Last Call

"American Canopy marks the debut of an uncommonly gifted young historian and writer. Ranging across four centuries of history, Eric Rutkow shows the manifold ways in which trees—and woodland—and wood—have shaped the contours of American life and culture. And because he has managed to build the story around gripping events and lively characters, the book entertains as much as it informs. All in all, a remarkable performance!"

—John Demos, Samuel Knight Professor of History at Yale University and author of Entertaining Satan, winner of the Bancroft Prize for American History

"In American Canopy, Eric Rutkow works a wonderful magic. He takes the most obvious of things—trees—and weaves an astounding and complex narrative that ranges across American history, from Johnny Appleseed to Henry David Thoreau, from Franklin Roosevelt to John Muir. You come away thinking that this country was, well, built out of trees."

—S. C. Gwynne, author of the bestseller Empire of the Summer Moon

"Right from its quietly shocking prelude—the cavalier and surprisingly recent murder of the oldest living thing in North America—Eric Rutkow’s splendid saga shows, through a chain of stories and biographical sketches that are intimate, fresh, and often startling, how trees have shaped every aspect of our national life. Here is the tree as symbol and as tool, as companion and enemy, as a tonic for our spirits and the indispensable ingredient of our every enterprise from the colonization voyages to the transcontinental railroad to Levittown. The result, both fascinating and valuable, is a sort of shadow history of America. Toward the end of his finest novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald writes that the ‘vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams.’ American Canopy retrieves those trees and does full-rigged (on tall, white-pine masts) justice to the dream."

—Richard Snow, author of A Measureless Peril and former editor in chief of American Heritage

Eric Rutkow, a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School, has worked as a lawyer on environmental issues. He splits his time between New York City and New Haven, Connecticut, where he is pursuing a doctorate in American history at Yale. American Canopy is his first book.

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ISBN 978-1-4391-9354-9

ISBN 978-1-4391-9360-0 (ebook)

Endpaper and chapter opener (pp. 1, 11, 40, 71, 99, 129, 168, 201, 228, 268, 308, 345) art courtesy of the General Research Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. Illustration on p. iii, The Colonists Under Liberty Tree (1861), © Duncan Walker/iStock.

For my mother and father

Contents

Introduction: The Death of Prometheus

Chapter 1: From Discovery to Revolution

Chapter 2: The Fruits of Union

Chapter 3: The Unrivaled Nature of America

Chapter 4: Forests of Commerce

Chapter 5: A Changing Consciousness

Chapter 6: New Frontiers

Chapter 7: Under Attack

Chapter 8: Trees as Good Soldiers and Citizens

Chapter 9: Postwar Prosperity

Chapter 10: The Environmental Era

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Photographs

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Introduction

The Death of Prometheus

ON THE MORNING of August 6, 1964, thirty-year-old Donald Currey was leading several men up a trail along Wheeler Peak, the highest mountain in Nevada. One of Currey’s companions wore a U.S. Forest Service uniform, a second lugged a chainsaw, and a third carried a camera to document the event that would follow. They hiked through the thinning air for several hours, past clusters of piñon pines and Utah junipers. Eventually, the men reached the timberline, a point 10,750 feet high on the mountain, where tall plants yielded to the onslaught of nature’s winds and nothing survived beyond scrubby vegetation. There, on the environment’s edge, Currey’s team would encounter one of the world’s more remarkable trees, the bristlecone pine. And there, they would change five thousand years of history.

The bristlecone pine is found only in the mountains of the southwestern United States at altitudes that sustain few other life-forms. The rugged environment sculpts the bristlecones into a dramatic, gnarled form, more horizontal than vertical, the physiognomy of an endless battle against the elements. On the wind-facing side, sand particles sheer away outer bark in a process called die-back. The wood beneath looks almost polished, as though it has been petrified alive. John Muir, the eminent naturalist, wrote that the bristlecone "offers a richer and more varied series of forms to the artist than any conifer I know of." The trees can grow up to thirty feet high and twenty around, but often maintain living needles in only a small section—an indoor Christmas tree’s worth of green—which produces the distinctive prickle-tipped purple cones that lend the conifer its name.

In 1958 the bristlecone pine had created a giant measure of excitement within a tiny segment of the scientific community when a National Geographic article declared that the species produced the oldest trees on earth. Edmund Schulman, the scientist who wrote the piece, explained that he had used tree-ring dating—literally counting up the annual rings in the trunk—to identify multiple bristlecone specimens in California’s Inyo National Forest that were more than four thousand years old. The most impressive find, a tree containing 4,676 rings, was named Methuselah, a nod to the longest-lived figure in the Bible. The National Geographic article asserted that the oldest bristlecones were located at the western limit of their range where Methuselah grew, suggesting that Schulman’s biblically named discovery was quite possibly the world’s oldest tree.

Schulman’s finding held great promise for a variety of reasons. Tree rings recorded climatic activity with remarkable precision—wetter years generated widely spaced rings, drier periods kept them close, and all trees in a given area corresponded. Consequently, these bristlecones were silent but scrupulous witnesses to several millennia of droughts, floods, shifting rivers, and retreating glaciers. Their rings offered scientists, specifically dendrochronologists (those who study tree rings), a chance to reconstruct the local climate to dates contemporaneous with the building of the Egyptian pyramids.

Currey, a graduate student in geography, was hoping to exploit this relationship between trees and history. He wanted to develop a climatic timeline connected to glacier growth and rock settlements in the Southwest as far back as 2000 BCE. His research centered on geological features in eastern Nevada’s Snake Range, a mountain chain capped by the imposing 13,063-foot Wheeler Peak. Bristlecones near the range’s timberline held valuable data within the rings of their trunks.

Currey’s research site was several hundred miles east of the Methuselah find. Thus, he anticipated finding only specimens much younger than those featured in National Geographic. During the summer of 1964, however, he stumbled upon something unexpected. A bristlecone stand in the national forest tract known as the Wheeler Peak Scenic Area appeared to contain trees as old as anything that Schulman had described. An eager Currey began to take samples of the trees using his twenty-eight-inch-long Swedish increment borer, a sophisticated hand tool with an aperture approximately the size of a drinking straw that removed a fragment of the trunk without causing permanent damage. Day after day, he scrambled over the limestone soil and the deposited rock that surrounded the bristlecones, carrying his notebook and Swedish borer alongside, collecting samples that he could later analyze under a microscope.

Currey’s 114th specimen was the most spectacular that he encountered. He measured it as having "a dead crown 17 feet high, a living shoot 11 feet high, and a 252-inch circumference 18 inches above the ground. Such a wide base would have required four men with arms outstretched to encircle it. Currey also noted that the tree’s bark, which was necessary for its survival, was only present along a single 19-inch-wide, north-facing strip." The winds and sand had worn away everything else. But the tree was alive and still producing its compact bunches of needles on a three-inch-wide shoot.

Currey attempted to sample this tree, which he labeled WPN-114, but his borer broke. He tried again and damaged his reserve borer. Without equipment, he was suddenly stymied. This ancient specimen stood before him, its rings holding the secrets to several thousand years of climate change, and he had no way to study it, not with his borers, anyway.

Currey appealed to the district Forest Service ranger, explaining that he wanted to cut down WPN-114 and study the cross-section directly. At the time, sawing down trees for dendrochronological research was not uncommon—even Schulman admitted in National Geographic to felling three samples, though not Methuselah itself. The Forest Service ranger consulted with his supervisor and determined that the tree "was like many others and was not the type that the public would visit and that it would better serve science and education. The supervisor concluded, Cut ’er down."

Shortly thereafter, on that August 6 morning, Currey led the cutting team up Wheeler Peak. When they reached WPN-114, the men took turns sawing away at the tree. Several hours later there was nothing left but an enormous stump.

Currey brought the prepared samples to his microscope and began counting tree rings. Then he made a startling discovery. There were 4,844 rings, nearly two hundred more than in Methuselah. And WPN-114 had been cut down several feet above its true base, losing access to some of the earliest rings. The tree could have easily been five thousand years old. Schulman had been wrong about where the oldest bristlecones lived.

Thirty-year-old Donald Currey had unintentionally felled the most ancient tree ever discovered—an organism already wizened when Columbus reached Hispaniola, middle-aged when Caesar ruled Rome, and starting life when the Sumerians created mankind’s first written language.

The next year, Currey quietly published his discovery in the journal Ecology. The three-page article, written in the scientific passive voice, acknowledged that WPN-114 was the oldest tree on record but postulated that future research would yield many older specimens.

However, the only thing that the future actually yielded was a growing controversy over why WPN-114 was allowed to be cut down in the first place. The forest ranger who had claimed that the tree held no interest for the public had been wrong. Conservationists knew about the bristlecones and had earlier named WPN-114 Prometheus after the Titan who stole fire from Zeus, gave it to man, and then suffered eternally for his action. These conservationists claimed that the Forest Service had acted recklessly in permitting the cutting. Stories that a member of Currey’s team had died carrying a slab of Prometheus down Wheeler Peak left some observers suggesting that the tree had taken a life to remedy the injustice. Several dendrochronologists attacked Currey as an ignorant graduate student who didn’t know how to handle a borer and had little or no scientific reason to fell this particular sample.

Evidence supported both sides of the controversy, depending on which accounts were used, and new perspectives leaked out over the decades. As late as 1996, the Forest Service ranger who authorized the cutting wrote a memo to correct the many rumors, and Currey himself gave the occasional interview up until his death in 2004. The only facts that anyone seemed to agree upon were that WPN-114 was the oldest tree ever discovered and that Americans had intentionally killed it.

THE DEATH OF Prometheus was a tragedy, something to reflect upon with disbelief. Some of us, the more environmentally inclined, may react with anger, even outrage, knowing that scientists discovered such a marvelous tree only to steal it with a hasty and arrogant hand. After all, nothing can bring the elder statesman of the plant kingdom back. Others among us, perhaps more than would admit it in public, may simply shrug. It was one tree hidden on a mountain almost no one visited, whose only distinction was having been there longer than logic would suggest, a literal freak of nature, a sideshow act in wood. There are plenty of other bristlecones.

But to treat the felling of Prometheus in isolation misses much of the story. The controversy was not merely a localized battle between dendrochronologists, conservationists, and the men holding sap-stained chainsaws. It was a tiny chapter in a much larger narrative of trees and America, or trees and Americans, two members of the natural environment who are constantly acting on one another, and over time changing as a result. Trivial details in the Prometheus story represent important shifts in America’s relationship with wood, trees, and nature.

Take the location of the tree, for example. Wheeler Peak Scenic Area was part of a national forest, a type of government-controlled land first created in the late nineteenth century. For much of American history, the idea that the government would control some of the forests seemed ridiculous, an affront to the spirit of individualism and private property that helped build the country.

The controversy itself formed part of a long lineage of Americans realizing that they had abused their great renewable resource when it was too late. Sometimes, this awakening involved a single tree, like the Liberty Tree that the Boston patriots could not protect from the axes of the British redcoats. Other times, it was a single species, such as the American chestnut, which was once the mightiest forest tree and now is little more than a legend due to an imported disease. Often, it was an entire forest, like the white pine belts of New England and the Lake States, which fell victim to America’s logging industry.

The death of Prometheus offers only the tiniest window into this rich and wide-ranging history of Americans and their trees. The tale of how they shaped each other over time is simply too large, too multilayered, too varied for any single bristlecone on a lonesome timberline in Nevada. This larger story, however, forms the subject of American Canopy.

HOW EASY IT is to forget that much of American history has been defined by trees.

Giovanni da Verrazzano, the first European to leave a detailed account of a journey to North America, marveled in 1524 that "the wooddes [were] so greate and thicke that an armye (were it never so greate) mighte have hydd it selfe therein. He labeled this heavily forested land Acadia, meaning idyllic place." The trees, in his opinion, were the most useful thing the land had to offer.

But Verrazzano’s observation is high praise, for there is simply nothing else in nature quite as helpful to man as a tree. Timber is a universal building material, essential for shelter, furniture, tools, and countless types of transport. The initial English efforts to colonize America depended, in no small part, on a desire to secure timber for construction of the great naval fleet that would soon come to define the British Empire. Once European settlers began to infiltrate America’s mighty forests, many would build dwellings that were little more than felled logs, stacked in a pile, sealed with a bit of mud and straw. Even now, most homes are constructed mainly with softwood timbers and sheets of plywood. Trees were also the nation’s essential source of fuel for hundreds of years. Wood was used in the forges and furnaces of almost every American manufacturing industry, every steam engine, and every family hearth. Furthermore, the pulp of trees is the source of manufactured paper, an unsung pillar of advanced society. The transition to inexpensive wood-pulp paper, which began in the 1860s, allowed for an explosion in written materials—daily penny papers, dime novels, low-cost stationery—that would forever alter the culture of the country. The creation of every horseshoe, wagon, carriage, gun, bottle, ship, train, and early airplane required trees. Every mine, corral, stockyard, tannery, mill, refinery, dock, barge, telegraph and telephone line, and early oil derrick required trees. James Hall, the famous American geologist, once said, "Well may ours be called a wooden country; not merely from the extent of its forests, but because in common use wood has been substituted for a number of the most necessary and common articles—such as stone, iron, and even leather."

But to speak of timber or fuel or pulp is to flatten trees into a single dimension. They also provide sustenance: sap into sugar, seeds into nuts and fruits. Their foliage brings life to desolate landscapes, their roots stability to shaky soils. Finally, on a hot summer day, there are few pleasures that rival hiding in the shade beneath the boughs of a noble oak.

Over the years, technology has obscured the vital role that trees have played in shaping society. Steel and plastic replaced timber. Coal and oil substituted for firewood. Digital screens are crowding out paper copies. Industrial food chains have left almost no one relying directly on the forests for dinner. Sometimes it seems like this was always the way, man’s dominion over nature. Americans interact with trees that have been circumscribed, commoditized. Our furniture is a thin veneer of wood placed over synthetic materials. The wooden supports of our homes are tucked away from view with drywall and vinyl siding. Forests are cordoned off in carefully delimited regions, far away from the cities and suburbs. The juice from the fruit of trees has been pasteurized and homogenized.

This separation from nature makes it easy to forget just how important trees are to our lives today. Each year, the average American consumes roughly 250 board feet of timber, 200 square feet of plywood and other structural panel products, and 700 pounds of paper and paperboard. More than 2.5 million Americans hold jobs directly dependent on the country’s woodlands. Nearly 20 percent of the nation’s freshwater originates in the national forests. And these same national forests provide more than seven billion activity days for vacationers, hunters, fishermen, and hikers. But these are just the most obvious dependencies. Trees also provide raw materials for countless medicines, plastics, technological devices, and artificial food.

Additionally, some believe that our trees will hold the key to the country’s future, as they have the past. Our illimitable forests, which extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store much of it as wood and other plant matter, may provide an opportunity to combat global warming. The same is imagined of tree planting. Scientists are also working to develop new processes that might turn trees into sources of renewable energy.

Thus, even as we have found many ways to replace trees, they remain as important as ever.

AMERICAN CANOPY explores this remarkable evolution. How trees changed from enemy, to friend, to potential savior. How forests morphed from obstacles to timber reserves to tree farms to sanctuaries of nature. How wood built the country, and apples united it, and trees imbued its great cities with life. How trees became part of the political calculus for westward settlement, as necessary as water and air, valued by settlers, speculators, surveyors, and soldiers. Americans started as people frightened of the woods, transitioned into a nation that consumed these woods for profit—along the way turning the tree into a lifeless, deracinated object—and finally arrived at the present point. Today, few of us understand where timber comes from or what to call any given tree species, but most of us share a sense that to destroy trees is to destroy part of ourselves.

This story is uniquely American. No other country was populated because of its trees quite like the United States. Nowhere else has the culture been so intimately associated with wood. Entire states were peopled specifically for their trees: lumbering in the Northwest; orange growing in Florida and Southern California. Such great American cities as Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, and Seattle would have looked completely different without the early commercial opportunities that trees provided. The industrial advance of the late nineteenth century—America’s great surge forward—may have been exploiting steam trains, telegraphs, and electricity, but it depended on cheap, abundant wood for rail ties, fuel, buildings, and utility poles. The nation’s military might also owed its fair debt to trees, unsung heroes of both world wars—for forests were recruited alongside soldiers. And after World War II, when a fast-rising population needed new housing, it was cheap timber that allowed for the sudden emergence of the suburbs, where, it should be noted, a tree could be found in every yard.

It is no surprise that trees would shape America more than other nations. After all, America has some of the most spectacular tree resources on the planet. Forests once covered almost half of the contiguous states, a staggering 950 million acres. The diverse geography across the country gives America ideal soil for almost any type of tree, from the palms of Southern California to the pines of New England. The United States is home to the world’s biggest trees (the giant sequoias), the world’s tallest trees (the coastal redwoods), and the world’s oldest trees (the bristlecone pines). The biggest single organism on earth is also a tree species—and is also American—a stand of quaking aspens in Utah, known as Pando; it reproduces clonally, weighs sixty-six hundred tons, and is tens of thousands if not millions of years old.

American Canopy takes these magnificent American trees as its subject, but the story is most often one of personal drama. Americans, after all, are half the equation. The Sons of Liberty used a famous tree as a center for popular protest that helped spark the American Revolution. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were avid horticulturists who traded tree specimens as they negotiated the Constitution—Jefferson even considered the introduction of the olive tree to South Carolina as one of his greatest achievements. John Chapman, a man most Americans know as Johnny Appleseed, sold his trees to settlers looking to establish residence in the Ohio Valley. Henry David Thoreau helped awaken a nation to the beauty of woodlands. John Muir then used his passion for trees and unbounded nature to champion the creation of national parks. J. Sterling Morton, one of the first settlers in Nebraska, tried to turn the Great Plains into a forest by creating Arbor Day. Later, President Theodore Roosevelt, with his close confidant Gifford Pinchot, struggled to save the great western forests from industrial ruin. And in the following generation, President Franklin Roosevelt—a tree lover if there ever was one—looked to the nation’s woody resources as a way to ameliorate the Great Depression. Each man’s story tells a small fragment of a much larger tale, a tale that becomes the story of America.

This relationship with trees has been one of the great drivers of national development. It belongs in a conversation with other forces that helped to forge American identity: the endless frontier, immigration, democracy, religion, slavery and its legacy, the struggle for labor rights, the expansion of civil rights, and free market and state capitalism, to name a few. And like all useful cicerones, the trees show us a picture of America at its best and at its worst.

History has lost or buried many of the episodes highlighted in American Canopy. To learn about trees is to discover a side of the nation’s past that is rarely told. No one has ever treated America’s trees in all their dimensions as a subject for historical study. Pieces of the story for certain, but not the story itself. Perhaps it is because trees have been so integral to American history that it becomes easy to overlook them. People notice the unusual, not the ubiquitous. Like so many Americans, historians are guilty of taking trees for granted.

But trees are the loudest silent figures in America’s complicated history.

MEANWHILE, Prometheus turned out to be one of the loudest trees of all, though only in death. With each year that passed and without the discovery of an older bristlecone, the tree’s reputation grew, as did the controversy over its cutting. The felling of Prometheus convinced conservationists to take a more aggressive stand to ensure that such ill-advised chain-sawing was never repeated. Donald Currey even became one of the foremost advocates for greater controls over the region that contained the bristlecones. These efforts helped to create, in 1986, the Great Basin National Park, a heavily protected area that includes Wheeler Peak Scenic Area. And today all bristlecone pines, standing or down, receive federal protection. Thanks to these measures the bristlecones can continue to fight their eternal battle with nature’s wind undisturbed and to silently record America and the world as they change. But for Prometheus, all that remains is an unmarked stump and a footnote in history. It is still the oldest tree ever discovered.

1

From Discovery to Revolution

Wooddes of All Sortes

IN LATE I605, Richard Hakluyt, archdeacon of London’s Westminster Abbey and the preeminent geographer in Europe, sat in his study preparing for a meeting that he had spent a lifetime awaiting. The newly crowned king of England, James I, had granted Hakluyt and his colleagues an audience to discuss overseas expansion. They were seeking a royal charter that would authorize them to establish permanent settlements in a mysterious land known to some as Norumbega, to others as Acadia, and to others still as Virginia. The territory stretched from thirty-four to forty-five degrees north latitude, the present-day location for most of America’s Eastern Seaboard. If King James refused Hakluyt’s appeal, the project of English colonization in North America might wither before it could begin. And the central argument that Hakluyt planned to use with the king of England rested on trees.

Hakluyt viewed North American expansion as the key to his country’s future. Overseas growth had already been a boon for Spain and Portugal, the two states that had most successfully exploited the New World since Christopher Columbus’s famous 1492 voyage. Their western holdings provided mineral wealth and access to raw materials. Spain, in particular, had used these newfound riches to develop the world’s strongest navy and administer an ever-growing empire. England, by contrast, had barely participated in the sixteenth-century land grab. In Hakluyt’s opinion, westward expansion into the one great Atlantic region that remained unclaimed—the North American continent above Spanish Florida—was necessary to contest Spain’s spreading dominion and to boost the English economy.

In the epistle to his first book, a 1582 collection of North American travel literature called Divers Voyages, Hakluyt exhorted his countrymen to remedy the situation: "I marvaile not a little . . . that since the first discoverie of America . . . after so great conquests and plantings of the Spaniardes and Portingales there, that wee of Englande could never have the grace to set fast footing in such fertill and temperate places."

In 1584, Hakluyt first set out his thoughts on the whys and hows of North American expansion in a manuscript titled A Discourse of Western Planting. The work had been commissioned by Sir Walter Raleigh, a friend of the geographer and one of Europe’s most respected explorers. Raleigh had recently received a royal patent from Queen Elizabeth I authorizing him to discover, search, and find uninhabited lands, but he wanted additional royal support for a proposed permanent settlement in North America and felt that Hakluyt could make a compelling case.

Western Planting advocated Britain’s expansion through colonies, often referred to in the sixteenth century as plantations or plantings. The idea was to populate North America with transplanted Englishmen, who would work the land. This approach differed from the early Spanish style of conquest, which focused on precious metal extraction and used native peoples in mining or cash crop production. Hakluyt wanted colonies to be "for the manifolde imploymente of numbers of idle men," a category that had been increasing during the last three decades of the sixteenth century, when England’s population grew from 3.25 million to 4.07 million people. North American colonies would turn these unemployed men into producers and traders. They would harvest raw materials and ship them to England in exchange for woolen clothes and other manufactured goods.

Western Planting’s colonial ideas corresponded with an economic theory in fashion during Queen Elizabeth’s reign. It argued that a country’s balance of trade—exports versus imports—determined prosperity. The key was to import raw materials, so-called marketable commodities, and export manufactured goods. North American colonies, Hakluyt argued, could provide a steady stream of marketable commodities to England and in exchange receive goods that the home country manufactured. And colonial importation was vastly preferable to trading between independent states because there would be no duties and no risk of diplomatic problems.

For this idea to work, however, Hakluyt needed to identify marketable commodities in North America. They would need to be raw materials that were plentiful overseas, easy for settlers to obtain, and scarce in England.

Hakluyt’s years of studying travel literature had familiarized him with North America’s raw materials. The topic appeared frequently in the writings of overseas adventurers, who typically surveyed the land with an eye toward exploitation. John Ribault, one of the first Englishmen to record a voyage to North America, in 1564, wrote "the Contrie . . . is the fairest, frutefullest, and pleasauntest of all the worlde, aboundinge in honye, waxe, venison, wilde fowle, fforrestes, [and] wooddes of all sortes. The potential resource list was long, so much so that Hakluyt suggested, hyperbolically though not insincerely, that the land could yield all the commodities of Europe, Affrica, and Asia, as far as we were wonte to travel."

One raw material, however, stood out above all the rest in Hakluyt’s manuscript: trees. There were certainly others, among them fish and furs, two commodities that different geographers and explorers identified as the most essential resource. And there were the speculative commodities as well, such as gold and silver deposits. But none of these held equal footing with trees for Hakluyt. North America, he wrote, was infinitely full fraughte with sweet wooddes . . . and divers other kindes of goodly trees. Colonists could immediately be put to work settynge upp mylles to sawe them and producing boards ready to be turned into goodly chests, cupboordes, stooles, tables, desks, etc. Trees would be the ideal marketable commodity for a colonial expedition: unlimited in supply, simple to harvest, and able to serve as the raw material for countless manufactured goods. Hakluyt concluded: "So that were there no other peculier commodities, this onely [wood] I say were ynoughe to defraye all the chardges of all the begynnynge of the enterprise, and that oute of hande." Trees, Hakluyt assured, were the guarantee that the colonial venture would succeed financially.

North America’s woody resources, however, fulfilled only the supply half of the economic calculus. For trees to qualify as a marketable commodity, there would also need to be strong demand. And this was the case, because of a problem Hakluyt diplomatically labeled "the present wante of tymber in the Realme." In truth, England was suffering from a severe timber crisis that, at the time of his writing, left the poor literally freezing to death in wintertime for want of firewood.

Originally, the British island had been a woodland. Forests of oak and other hardwoods had filled the southern lands, while conifer stands populated the higher latitudes. Sheepherders over the centuries converted much of this to pastureland, but the domestic wood supply remained great enough to handle timber and firewood demands. Then, beginning in the 1540s, came new manufacturing industries that razed the forests for their fuel. This new wave of deforestation started with the iron industry, an early royal effort to boost manufacturing in accord with the trade-based economic theory—the production of iron required immense amounts of heat and, initially, used charcoal (which is derived from wood) as fuel. In 1543, Parliament first addressed the impending timber shortage with the Act for the Preservation of Woods, which restricted farmers from exploiting woodlands more than two furlongs (440 yards) from their homes. Sherwood Forest was becoming as much a myth as Robin Hood.

The situation worsened during the long reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603). She promoted numerous other wood-fuel-driven manufacturing industries, including copper smelting, salt making, and glass production. (The coal industry, which was beginning, could not meet the skyrocketing demand for fuel.) One writer from this period commented, "Never so much [oak] hath been spent in a hundred years before as is in 10 years of our time." The price of firewood doubled between 1540 and 1570. This pushed some citizens out of the firewood market, and it became commonplace for the poor to shiver through the winters. The timber shortage had commoditized a product once freely available for the cutting.

But fuel needs did not fully account for England’s timber demand. Wood was also necessary in the construction of ships. And Queen Elizabeth, in addition to promoting domestic manufacturing, had championed shipbuilding, part of the Crown’s long-term strategy to contest Spanish sea power and strengthen English commercial trade.

Few industries in history have depended on wood quite like shipbuilding (at least before the conversion to iron and steel hulls in the mid-nineteenth century). A large naval warship, known as a ship of the line and constructed almost entirely from wood, weighed over one hundred tons in Hakluyt’s day. The bodies of such vessels required about two thousand mature oaks, which meant at least fifty acres of forest had to be stripped. While oak supplied the timber for much of the ship, it was too inflexible and heavy for ship masts, the poles that supported the canvas sails. Instead, these required lighter and more shock-resistant softwoods, such as pines and firs. The largest masts were more than three feet wide at their base and over one hundred feet tall—roughly one yard in height per inch in width. To maintain these wooden cathedrals of the sea, shipwrights relied on a range of forest products, known as naval stores, extracted from pines and firs as well. Most notable were the tar, pitch, and turpentine used to condition and preserve the hull, mast, and other components.

The twin demands of shipbuilding and wood-fuel-hungry manufacturing had turned England into a net wood importer. In particular, the country had to trade for masts and naval stores, since it had no suitably commercial conifer forests. The preferred mast trees, called Riga firs or Scotch pines, came from an Eastern European region around the city of Riga (in present-day Latvia), but several northern countries had giant spruce forests that were also exploited for naval stores. The trade centered on ports in Scandinavia and the Baltic Sea—the latter, which included Riga, was accessible only through narrow straits between Denmark and Sweden. Rulers who controlled the various ports and access to the straits knew that England’s sea power depended on forest products and, consequently, kept duties, taxes, and shipping fees high. The Danish, for example, collected tolls for each crossing. If England ever lost access to these ports, it would cripple the entire shipping industry, and with it the Royal Navy.

Hakluyt saw the solution to this potential dilemma in the woods of North America as well. If his travel narratives agreed on anything, they "agreed that the New World was an inexhaustible source of naval supplies," according to historian Howard Mumford Jones. Hakluyt stressed this same point in Western Planting: And England posessinge the purposed place of platinge . . . [will] have plenty of excellent trees for mastes, of goodly timber to builde shippes and to make greate navies, of pitche, tarr, hempe, and all thinges incident for a navie royall, and that for no price and withoute money or request. A foothold in tree-rich North America would shore up the Royal Navy’s greatest vulnerability and seemingly do so at little cost.

Viewed more broadly, Hakluyt’s Western Planting was attempting to translate into economic and political terms a majestic wooded landscape that Europeans could hardly comprehend. Many of the North American tree varieties were unknown on the continent, and even the familiar species possessed inconceivable size and number. Giovanni da Verrazzano, in 1524, wrote of "mightie greate wooddes . . . with divers sorts of trees [as] plesaunte and delectable to beholde as is possible to imagine. The early voyagers simply ran out of adjectives to describe the abundance, grandeur, and range of the virgin forests. Geographers estimate that woodlands covered about 95 percent of presettlement New England and contained three-quarters of a million trees for every ten square miles. The mature specimens in any given stretch generally stood over one hundred feet high and were three feet thick at chest height. They towered above the forest floor, often free of branches for thirty to fifty feet, their leafy crowns floating like green fortresses in the sky. England, by comparison, was a barren wasteland. Sir Thomas Culpepper, a seventeenth-century British economist, lamented that no man can let his Timber stand, nor his Wood grow to such years growth as is best for the Common-Wealth."

In late 1584, Hakluyt met personally with Elizabeth, the virgin queen, to discuss his book and to make an appeal for colonization on behalf of his patron Raleigh. It was Hakluyt’s first royal audience (and the last before his meeting with James I twenty-one years later). During the meeting, the geographer presented the queen a copy of Western Planting. They then almost certainly discussed the various colonial arguments: the economic promise of North American forests, the twin political advantages of a New World check on Spain and of a secure naval supply chain, the religious opportunities to spread the reformed Protestant gospel to the infidels, the possibilities of mineral wealth or a direct passage to China and the East Indies spice trade.

Despite Hakluyt’s best efforts, however, he failed to secure a charter authorizing permanent settlements. The problem seemed to be that equally compelling reasons against colonization existed. To begin with, such an aggressive undertaking was an incredibly dangerous proposition in the early 1580s. Spain still ruled the seas and showed interest in North America. Committing England to a colonization project risked war with the most powerful nation in Europe. But even without the Spanish menace, the project was precarious. In 1578, Elizabeth had granted a six-year exploratory charter to Sir Humphrey Gilbert, but he never returned from the trip, his crew lost at sea. (Hakluyt had turned down an opportunity to travel with Gilbert, a decision that unquestionably saved his life.)

Perhaps Hakluyt’s unwavering enthusiasm struck Queen Elizabeth as zealotry. It was common for colonial propagandists to face charges of exaggeration and mendacity, claims that did not always lack merit. After all, Hakluyt, a man who had never seen North America, was promising the queen resources greater than those of all of Europe. His fantastical-sounding assurances may have outweighed his inchoate reputation for pragmatism and integrity. Still, the geographer must have impressed Elizabeth, for two years later he received a clerical advancement to Bristol Cathedral on her mandate.

Raleigh, meanwhile, pursued his colonial plans without the royal charter he desired. The year after Hakluyt’s royal audience, the explorer founded a colony in North America called Roanoke (on an island near present-day North Carolina). The project lasted for two years, but the original settlers all disappeared under mysterious circumstances, this doomed adventure remembered by history as the Lost Colony.

Hakluyt, in the period between his two royal audiences, continued his colonial advocacy unabated, as scholar, propagandist, and agitator. In 1589 he published the first edition of a massive compendium of North American travel narratives called Principall Navigations, which reappeared ten years later in a three-volume expanded format. The revised edition of the book remains the definitive text of precolonial exploration. Many consider it one of the most important documents from the Elizabethan age and have dubbed Hakluyt the English Homer. Shakespeare is thought to have referenced one of the maps from Principall Navigations in his play Twelfth Night.

Ever the pragmatist, Hakluyt eventually contributed his unrivaled reputation to a business partnership with seven other men in order to found a permanent settlement in North America. Known as the Virginia Company, they hoped to succeed where Gilbert and Raleigh had failed. And it was with this group that Hakluyt was going to petition King James in 1605.

The circumstances for colonization, meanwhile, had grown more favorable in the two decades since Hakluyt’s first royal audience. In 1585, war had erupted between Spain and England with control of the seas the winner’s prize. Sir Francis Drake, the famed British explorer, defeated a Spanish fleet in a 1587 preemptive strike, proving that the Spanish were not invulnerable upon the seas and could not defend the extensive territories that they claimed. The following year, a coalition of English naval and merchant ships conquered Spain’s great Armada, arguably the most important sea battle in history. In August 1604, King James I signed a peace treaty with Spain, meaning that English-flagged ships could sail through Atlantic waters for the first time without fear of Spanish attack. England suddenly controlled the world’s waterways, a position it would maintain into the nineteenth century.

During this sea change, several English voyages to North America had reinforced Hakluyt’s claim that timber-trade-based colonization could be profitable and benefit the Crown. In 1602, Bartholomew Gosnold—an eventual member of Hakluyt’s Virginia Company—had sailed to North America and returned with a ship weighed down with cuttings of sassafras, a tree that became briefly invaluable amid rumors that its extract cured syphilis. George Weymouth, another English explorer, had traveled to North America two years later and reported that the entire coast was indeed covered with dense woods. He determined, among other things, that the trees produced turpentine in marvellous plenty and so sweet, which would be a great benefit for making Tarre and Pitch.

Against this backdrop, Hakluyt and his Virginia Company met with King James I. The geographer’s arguments, little changed since Western Planting, had gained force, especially since the timber crisis had only deepened and the Royal Navy had grown in power. Hakluyt himself had also gained force, no longer the young novitiate, but an asset to his country, the patriotic expert in a field of self-interested explorers and businessmen. Once again he set forth the manifold reasons for colonization that he had earlier given Elizabeth, this time with twenty more years of reputation, knowledge, and favorable political developments to assist him. And this time he succeeded.

On April 10, 1606, James I issued the First Charter of Virginia. It granted the men of the Virginia Company the right to make habitation, plantation, and to deduce a colony of sundry of our people into that part of America commonly called Virginia. The charter split the Virginia Company into two sections, a London-based group that included Hakluyt (known as the London Company) and a Plymouth-based group (the Plymouth Company). Hakluyt’s team received rights to the southern half of the territory. The northern half went to the Plymouth Company. The geographer had finally persuaded the Crown to support North American colonization, and his long-standing dream was on the verge of being realized.

Of course, the charter was nothing more than a document and a promise of governmental assistance. It would have meant little if the Virginia Company had failed like all of the previous unchartered colonization attempts, such as Roanoke.

Almost exactly one year after James issued the charter, on April 26, 1607, the first colonists from the London Company reached Virginia. They formed a small settlement in the Chesapeake region that they called Jamestown, in honor of the king. Captain John Smith, a man contracted to oversee the adventure, proved a gifted leader, able to manage the settlers and negotiate with the native population. Soon, the colonists started to send shipments back to England, especially trees. A 1608 letter stated, "I heare not of any novelties or other commodities she hath brought more then sweet woode."

The early years nonetheless proved difficult. Of the original 214 colonists, only 60 survived a brutal winter in 1609, known as the Starving Time.

Colonial promotional literature, designed to garner financial support and dampen bad publicity, emphasized the claims Hakluyt had long been making about trees as a commodity. The most famous pamphlet, from the more than twenty the London Company printed, quoted one of the founding company members, who had traveled to the new colony, as swearing under oath that the country yeeldeth abundance of wood . . . which are the materials, of . . . Clap boards, Pipe-staves, Masts and excellent boardes of forty, fifty and sixtie length. The publication concluded, "[N]either the scattered Forrest of England, nor the diminished Groves of Ireland, will supply the defect of our Navy. When in Virginia there is nothing wanting, but onely mens labours, to furnish both Prince, State and merchant, without charge or difficulty."

Despite these claims, the London Company struggled financially for the next fifteen years, largely because exporting the abundant commodities proved more challenging and expensive than anticipated. Jamestown, however, was the first permanent English settlement in North America and became the foundation of present-day Virginia.

Meanwhile, the Plymouth Company was simultaneously working to colonize the northern territories, which roughly correspond to present-day New England. George Popham, a founding member of the Virginia Company, led an expedition that settled on the shore of present-day Maine on August 13, 1607. Problems such as an unexpectedly cold winter and food shortages plagued the new settlement. The colonists put all their efforts toward constructing a ship—a foreshadowing of New England’s future—and produced a thirty-ton vessel named Virginia. But Popham died during that first winter, and all forty-five colonists returned to England the next spring. The Plymouth Company was then inactive until a revival in 1620 when, among other activities, it granted settlement rights to a group of religious dissidents known as the Pilgrims, who had earlier negotiated with the London Company but accidentally landed far north of their intended destination and became New England’s first permanent English colonists.

As for Hakluyt, he never made it to the New World. The man who devoted his life to studying sea voyages refused to be part of one. The reasons for this remain a mystery. He died in 1616, leaving behind a son and two shares in the London Company worth twenty-one pounds. His grave in Westminster Abbey is unmarked. A commemorative plaque in Bristol Cathedral reads: "The ardent Love of my Country devoured all Difficulties."

Hakluyt had realized his patriotic vision of a colonial England, but in doing so he had also planted the seeds of a new nation. And the trees that

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