ral and faunal ranges significantly.In Utah, for example, ecologists Walter Cottam and John Wakefield argued half a century ago that the waving grasses that drew the Mormon pioneers to the benches of the Wasatch Front were relict populations maintained by Indian fires. That they so quickly gave way to junipers was the result of substituting one land-use scheme for another.That the West looked and functioned ecologically the way it did 400 years ago had everything to do with the fact that Indians managed it with fire as a great gathering and hunting continent, that tribal wars and hunting based on maximum take for least effort kept buffer zones full of animals across the West, that taboos kept some aspects of nature (beaver among the Blackfeet, for example) sacrosanct, that no clear distinctions were drawn between humans and human-like animals like grizzlies, so that big predators like bears or wolves were not pursued or eradicated.We also have to face squarely that the America we rhapsodize about was populated by no more than about 10 million people (north of Mexico) at the time of Contact. That's 1/30th the present population of the U.S. and Canada. Even so, Denevan figures it probably took the European settlers more than 250 years to produce as much ecological alteration in America as existed on the continent at the time of Contact.To make matters even more complicated, Denevan, along with geographer Martyn Bowden, who calls the pristine wilderness idea "the grand invented tradition of American nature as a whole ... a succession of imagined environments," say much of the natural diversity and richness in our literary accounts reflects a continent that was in ecological rebound as a result of Indian depopulation from European disease.Bison, for example, were never seen in the Southeast by a DeSoto expedition that infected the numerous tribes of the region with disease. Afterward, they were widely reported over the next century or more ...
