"How many ages may yet elapse before these luxuriant wilds of the Mississippi can enumerate a population equal to the Tartarian deserts! At present all is irksome silence and gloomy solitude, such as to inspire the mind with horror."
--Thomas Nuttall, Jan. 7, 1819
Those words are from "A Journal of Travels into the Arkansas Territory During the Year 1819." The botanist was on the Mississippi River, near the mouth of the St. Francis, having left Philadelphia just three months earlier.
Savoie Lottinville, editor of the modern (1979) edition of Nuttall's journal, notes the absence of "popular tendencies [of] the Romantic period" in Nuttall's observation. How refreshing, for Romanticism still haunts us and corrupts the way we think about nature, wilderness, and the ways people lived on the North American continent before European interference.
The men and women of the 18th-century Enlightenment did not invent representative government or rational, disinterested inquiry, but when we enjoy the benefits of voting rights or vaccination, we are their happy heirs.
"Reason, not faith, created the modern world," Camille Paglia says of the work of the Enlightenment, but "over-stress of any faculty causes a rebound to the extreme." Romanticism was the rebound from the Enlightenment.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau created the Romantic outlook when he turned from society toward nature, exalting feeling and freedom over reason and hierarchy. Romanticism, Paglia writes, "makes a regression to the primeval, the archaic night-world ... it brings a return of the Great Mother, the dark nature-goddess whom St. Augustine condemns as the most formidable enemy of Christianity."
The most dangerous thing about Romanticism is the rebound that it produces: as Paglia writes, "a movement predicated on freedom will compulsively re-enslave itself to imaginative orders even more fixed."
Paglia has earned the right to her dark pronouncements, but I should acknowledge that plenty of good came from the Romantic age (such as the works of Wordsworth and Beethoven, staples of Western culture).
Lottinville's wonderful note that Nuttall did not exhibit the tendencies of his age refers to the Romantic notion that "the wilderness" was a desirable, inspiring place where a man wearied by civilization might encounter the holy.
We have inherited from the Romantics the notion that the wilderness is "a pristine sanctuary where the last remnant of an untouched, endangered, but still transcendent nature can for at least a little while longer be encountered without the contaminating taint of civilization," as William Cronon puts it in his 1995 essay "The Trouble with Wilderness."
Applied to North America, the Romantic notion of wilderness led to the popular misconception that before the arrival of Europeans, American Indians lived in harmony with nature in some sort of ecological utopia, allowing the land to remain essentially virginal.
That was not the case in what we now call Arkansas when the first Europeans arrived in 1541. It was not the case when European settlement began in earnest in 1686, and was not the case when Nuttall made his observations in 1819.
The date of the arrival of the Quapaws in Arkansas is contentious, but it is safe to say that the land they came to was not pristine. Prehistoric settlers had begun to manipulate their environment millenia before. By the time the Quapaws arrived, to borrow another phrase from Cronon, earlier inhabitants of Arkansas had made changes in the land.
In the Winter 2020 issue of the Arkansas Historical Quarterly, Joseph P. Key offers "An Environmental History of the Quapaws, 1673-1803." Key writes that early French explorers often noted "the beauty and productivity" of Quapaw lands in the lower Arkansas River Valley. (In their regard for tamed cultivated land as beautiful land, the explorers give us a glimpse of the pre-Romantic worldview.)
The explorers sometimes committed a common human error: looking at the product of sustained, intense effort and presuming it effortless. As Key says, "they failed to recognize it was the Quapaws' hard work and ingenuity that had made the land so productive."
Through physical effort, Key writes, "the Quapaws drew together what seemed to be different ecosystems and created a larger one. Mountains, woodlands, prairies, and wetlands became one as their products flowed through Quapaw villages."
Quapaw men hunted and fished. That work took them from the four villages through the Grand Prairie and into the Ozark foothills (this part of the journey was by foot); they crossed the Arkansas River above the little rock and entered the Ouachita mountains.
For the journey downriver back to the villages, Quapaw men used fire to topple trees and fashion dugout canoes. They harvested slow-growing bald cypress to make dugouts for their own use; they also made canoes to offer for trade. The practice eventually depleted the supply of bald cypress, and the Quapaws began to use yellow poplars.
The main objects of the hunt were bison and bears. "We shall probably never know exactly how the Quapaws hunted buffaloes," Morris Arnold writes in "The Rumble of A Distant Drum," "not because contemporary French writers did not purport to tell us, but because their reports are altogether untrustworthy."
We do know that bison like to feed in prairies and cane brakes. Key writes that there are not many reports of Quapaws using fire to burn seedlings and keep forests from taking over the Grand Prairie, thus keeping it attractive to bison; it would seem natural that the Grand Prairie would remain a prairie, since its underlayer of clay soil (hardpan) tends to prevent roots from taking hold.
In a fascinating twist, however, Key explains that the remnants of the Grand Prairie in modern times require more burning to maintain than many prairies in western Arkansas, so "it may be that the Prairie was grand because for centuries native peoples, including the Quapaws, set fires that extended the size of the prairie beyond the hardpan area."
The work of Quapaw women in foraging and farming also caused changes in the land, as did new demand from European traders and settlers. We'll consider some of those changes in weeks to come.