permaculture

["Darren Doherty" <ozfx@bigpond.com>]

Hello People,

Tim Flannery's book "The Eternal Frontier" (a great read!!) provides a
general enlightenment as to the state of play in Nth America pre and post
Clovis.

Cheers,

Yours and Growing,

Darren J. Doherty
Senior Designer

Fountainhead Sustainable Farm
51 McCarthy's Rd,
Maleny, QLD, 4552
p. 07 54943494
f. 07 54296121

Begin with the End in Mind
----- Original Message -----
From: "Kirby Fry" <peace@totalaccess.net>
To: <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Sunday, August 11, 2002 12:38 AM
Subject: Re: [permaculture] The Loss of Our Trees


Hi Carla,

>>  At the risk of talking this subject to death: how about 350 to 400 years
ago?  What was it like before the Europeans got ahold of it?   <<

I think it would be impossible to talk this subject to death.  Truth is,
it's not talked about enough and  many facts get swept under the rug.

The Texas Hill Country, wasn't well documented by the Spanish because it was
so steep, rocky, thickety and home to many Apaches.  So it doesn't get well
documented until about 1845, and those first accounts clearly describe an
ecosystem made up mainly of rich woodlands and thickets, side by side with
grasslands.

The earliest accounts by Spanish explorers are mostly of them seeing the
edge of the Hill Country and deciding to turn back or go around.  Below are
a couple of first hand accounts as recounted by Del Winager in, "The
Explorers Texas."

* * * * *

    The written history of the Hill Country started more gradually than that
of much of Texas. Although there were abortive attempts at establishing a
mission and presidio at San Saba, the Spanish involved in these efforts left
few accounts of the country they entered. When the great Spanish
explorations were made and the accounts of them, which constitute the bulk
of the contemporary material on 18th century Texas' natural history, were
written, most of these Spanish explorers very pointedly avoided the Hill
Country, leaving us in the dark about this section. And they seemingly had
good reasons for detours around the Hill Country.

    Father Espinosa, for instance, wrote at length about the site of San
Antonio up to the headwaters of the river, but halted his exploring there
because of "the density of its groves" and "the brushwood."1

    And when Fray Francisco Celiz came to the edge of the hills in Comal
County in 1718, and started upstream along the Guadalupe, "with a desire to
ford it or to reach its source," he soon stopped when his reconnoitering
soldiers came back down, saying that, "it could not be traveled because it
is more wooded and contains more rocks."2 If we recall how ill-equipped
these parties were for traveling rough country and the kind of trappings
they were encumbered with — up to full-sized carriages in some cases — it is
not hard to see why they did not enter the Hill Country.

    But there was an even more compelling reason. In 1722, when traveling
near the border of present Hays and Guadalupe Counties and on into what is
now Travis County with the Aguayo expedition, Juan Antonio de la Pena wrote:
"The Apaches live in Lomeria Grande, a very broken country about a league to
the north . . . Travel in this country was dangerous, for it borders on the
Lomeria Grande inhabited by the warlike Apaches."3 For the early Spanish the
Hill Country was clearly a place of dread and to be avoided.

* * * * *

>>  The first European reports (from Spanish explorers) of all the land
between northern Florida, central and southern Georgia, Alabama,
Mississippi, Louisiana and the eastern half of Texas was that it was covered
in an "impenetrable" thicket.  The establishment of "civilization" over the
next 350 years consisted in clearing and settling greater and greater parts
of this thicket until only patches of it remained.  <<

This tree and prairie grass clearing, unfortunately, occurred everywhere in
the U.S.A.  In a mad dash to open up the New World we cut and burned our way
from coast to coast and all but exterminated the continent's native people
and megafauna.

Now days, rather than face the truth of what the land was like and answer to
the people we stole it from we are feigning a sort of social amnesia where
we only remember it as we selectively choose to remember it - in Texas
that's the period from 1850 to about 1900 after the forests were cleared,
the grasses burned and grazed off, the bison and Native Americans all but
wiped out and all of the domestic cattle, sheep, goats, horses and mules
from the Spanish mission grazing days rounded up and slaughtered.

That left us a very unnaturally open and empty expanse of land to settle and
colonize.  This period is known as, the "Golden Period of the Southwestern
Stockman," and ranchers and prairie enthusiasts alike are all for
maintaining it as such.


Kirby Fry

For the real scoop on environmental and social justice issues check out the
archives of Democracy Now!
http://www.webactive.com/webactive/pacifica/demnow/archive.html

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