Green Gold: Alabama's Forests and Forest Industries

GREEN GOLD

GREEN GOLD

Alabama’s Forests and Forest Industries

James E. Fickle

Copublished with the Alabama Forestry Foundation

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

Copyright © 2014 by Alabama Forestry Foundation and James E. Fickle

Copublished with the Alabama Forestry Foundation

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Typeface: Minion and Letter Gothic

Cover photograph: Fall colors of trees bordering the Alabama River; courtesy of Sam Duvall

Cover design: Todd Lape/Lape Designs

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Fickle, James E.

Green gold : Alabama’s forests and forest industries / James E. Fickle.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8173-1813-0 (trade cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8173-8739-6 (e book)

1. Forests and forestry—Alabama—History. 2. Forest products industry—Alabama—History. 3. Timber—Alabama—History. I. Title.

SD144.A2F53  2014

333.7509761—dc23

2013030766

Dedicated to the memory of

Dr. John L. Loos

Dr. Archie P. McDonald

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Alabama’s Early Forests and People, Pioneer Settlers, and the Age of the Early Sawmillers and Naval Stores Producers

2. The Age of Cut Out and Get Out

3. Changing Patterns of Technology and Work in the Alabama Forest Products Industries

4. The Rise of Forestry

5. Rising from the Ashes: The Restoration of the Forests and the Early Resurgence of the Lumber Industry

6. The Rise of the Pulp and Paper Industry

7. The Golden Age of the Forest Products Industry? Into the Future

8. Recent Environmental and Forest Management Issues

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

FIGURES

1. Planing mill of Scotch Lumber Company

2. Peckerwood sawmill

3. Boxing of trees to yield turpentine and resin

4. Trees damaged by turpentining and fire

5. Ditch used to transport logs

6. Moving logs by river

7. Oxen hauling logs for Eufaula Lumber Company

8. Log train, loader, and loggers

9. McGiffert Log Loader used to load logs onto log trains

10. Shay locomotive of Kaul Lumber Company

11. Logging locomotive of W. T. Smith Lumber Company

12. Placing crude gum from tree cup into carrying bucket

13. Turpentine still

14. Bottomland loggers using axes

15. Loggers using crosscut saw

16. Loggers using power equipment

17. Logging camp of Scotch Lumber Company

18. Lumber mill of Kaul Lumber Company

19. Logging camp of Scotch Lumber Company, 1948

20. Busch combine

21. Cutover and burned longleaf pineland

22. Forestry employee, 1899

23. Natural regeneration of longleaf pine, 1899

24. Fire in Alabama forests

25. Scotum Hill Tower

26. Lookout tower and airplane for fire detection

27. Rock ledge in Talladega National Forest

28. Machinery at a paper mill in the 1940s

29. Pulpwood pens, 1937

30. E. N. McCall

31. A forester examines terminal buds on grafted slash pine

32. Short logs outside an Alabama paper mill, 1960s

33. Scott Paper Company mill, 1960s

34. Longwood arriving at paper mill

35. Sipsey River in the Bankhead National Forest

MAPS

1. Alabama Forest Types

2. Alabama Rivers

3. Alabama’s Nonmilitary Federal Lands

Acknowledgments

I wish to gratefully acknowledge and recognize the contributions and support of the following individuals and institutions to the completion of this work. Of course I alone am responsible for any weaknesses or deficiencies of the content. First I would like to recognize Valerie, Steven, Ashley, Shan, Kelsey, Terri, Billy, Matthew, April, and Jean for their support and encouragement. Also my colleagues Dr. Daniel Unowsky and Dr. Charles W. Crawford for their interest and assistance. The office staff of the University of Memphis Department of History, especially Gerry Russo, Karen Jackett, and Karen Bradley, provided tremendous assistance in the mechanical process of producing a manuscript. The university also assisted with a faculty research grant, sabbatical, and travel grant. I am deeply indebted to friends and colleagues who read and provided valuable suggestions for improving the manuscript. They include consulting forester Keville Larson of Mobile; recreational land use expert Dr. Michael G. Huffman of the University of Memphis; former colleague Dr. Donald W. Ellis; and Dr. Chadwick Dearing Oliver of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. I also received invaluable assistance from Sam Duvall of the Alabama Forestry Association, as well as former director Dan Ross, Elizabeth Motherwell, and Vanessa Rusch of the University of Alabama Press. The manuscript was improved by the editorial work of Laurel Anderton. Finally, this project was greatly facilitated by the early research and gathering of source materials by Professor Warren Flick of the University of Georgia forestry school, and by the assistance of Cheryl Oakes and Eben Lehman of the Forest History Society, Meredith McLemore of the Alabama Department of Archives and History, Julie Blankenburg and Sue Paulson of the US Forest Products Laboratory, and the staffs of the University of Alabama Cartographic Research Laboratory and the archives and libraries at Yale University, Louisiana State University, Mississippi State University, the University of Memphis, and the Memphis Public Library.

Introduction

This book is not a natural history. It tells the story of humanity’s continuing economic interaction with the forests in one of the most heavily forested areas in the nation. Over time, Alabama’s forests have been used, abused, restored, and managed in various ways. The overall impression that is left from the entire picture is of the remarkable regenerative powers of the forests. Forests are dynamic. They grow, die, change, and evolve over time, even without human intervention. They have provided food, shelter, recreation, aesthetic enjoyment, income, and employment in varying degrees over the long sweep of time.

In the prehistoric period, Native American societies utilized forested areas for a variety of purposes, including materials for buildings, and also burned forests to clear land for farming and to drive game animals for hunting. The Native Americans had a significant impact on the forests, but due to a historic irony their influence was often ignored or misunderstood by later inhabitants. When the explorers of the de Soto expedition visited the Alabama area in the fifteenth century they brought both European diseases, for which the Indians had no resistance, and swine, some of which escaped from the Spaniards. The pigs became the carriers that enabled disease to enter the food chain, and the native populations were devastated. During the century between the time of de Soto and the return of European explorers and settlers a century later, the forests recovered from Indian use, and what the new settlers saw was a much smaller native population and forests that appeared to them as virgin, unaffected by human usage. An enduring myth was born. Americans from that time on would typically view old-growth forests as virgin.

As Alabama became a territory and then a state, early European settlers and their successors utilized the forests extensively. They were mostly small farmers who regarded the wooded areas as low-value impediments and cleared vast areas for farming. Still, they used the forests for building materials, and in the southern reaches near the coast the pine forests provided timbers for ship and boat building, as well as the tar, pitch, and turpentine that were needed for ship construction and maintenance. Naval stores production had a long and controversial presence in these regions because of competition between lumbermen and the naval stores operators for use of the forests.

To supply the timbers, boards, shingles, and other wood products needed by local farmers, small sawmills began to appear early in Alabama’s history. Typically powered by waterwheels or turbines, they were located along streams and supplied local markets, although significant marketing centers developed in Pensacola and Mobile to ship Alabama forest products to outside customers. Work in the mills and woods was dangerous and labor intensive, and the labor force consisted of local rural people, both whites and, sometimes, black slaves. While forest products manufacturing became significant, Alabama’s economy was dominated by agriculture, particularly cotton production.

In the post–Civil War period of the late nineteenth century, things began to change dramatically in Alabama’s forests. Before this time the nation’s lumber was supplied first by the woods of the Northeast, and then by the upper Great Lakes states. While hardwoods from the upper South were sometimes shipped to northern markets, there was strong prejudice among some consumers against southern pine lumber as being too sappy and hard, too difficult to nail and paint, and tending to warp.

Lumbering at this time was a migratory industry. The prevailing methodology of lumbermen was to cut out and get out, level the forests without replanting or providing for natural reseeding, and then move on to new forests and repeat the process. They believed the nation’s forests were inexhaustible. Scientific forestry and forest management had not yet arrived in this country. By the late nineteenth century the growing nation had a gargantuan appetite for forest products. The northeastern and Great Lakes forests were nearing exhaustion, and the industry looked to new areas for exploitation. The lumbermen jumped to the South and the western states and began to repeat the process.

Alabama in some ways was a part of the typical pattern, but in other important ways it differed. It had abundant forests consisting of hardwoods in the north and pines, especially longleaf pines, in the south, with mixed forests in the middle reaches. There was excellent transportation via rivers feeding into the Gulf of Mexico, and railroads that proliferated and crisscrossed the state by this period. There was an abundant labor force, both black and white, to work in the woods and mills, and there were a few local families with involvement in the lumber industry stretching back in some cases to the antebellum period. This would prove significant, for these people had roots in the state and would thus be interested in long-term operations, in contrast to the cut-out-and-get-out lumbermen who dominated some other southern states. Also, while there were northern operators who came to Alabama, some became industry leaders, put down roots, and stayed.

During this period the technology of lumbering was revolutionized. Steam power in the mills and the woods transformed the industry, making the workers vastly more productive and enabling massive production from the mills. But the impact on the workers and the forests was troublesome. The new machinery and methodology were dangerous for the workers and devastating to the forests, which were rapidly cut over to supply the mills. There was little thought about forest preservation, limited knowledge about silviculture, and no concept of sustainable forest management.

From the late nineteenth century until World War I the South led the nation in lumber production, and Alabama was among the most important producers. However, by the 1920s the forests were largely cut over, and many lumbermen were fearing a looming timber famine and looking toward the Pacific Northwest and the Intermountain West as the next places to move. However, in the early twentieth century the profession of forestry arrived in the United States, with the establishment of forestry schools at Biltmore, Cornell, and Yale. People began to learn about the growth cycles and other characteristics of trees, and about techniques of forest management that would allow for long-term sustainable operations, in contrast to the old cut-out-and-get-out methodology. The keys to sustainable management were fire control, exclusion of root-destroying hogs from young forests, and replanting or protection of seed trees in harvested areas. Selective cutting joined clear-cutting as an acceptable commercial practice. Pioneering foresters like the US Forest Service’s Austin Cary and Yale’s H. H. Chapman became promoters and demonstrators of the new techniques in Alabama and other parts of the South. Consulting forestry firms like Alabama’s Pomeroy and McGowin helped to spread the word. Fire policy became more sophisticated, moving from total exclusion toward controlled burning, especially in longleaf pine areas.

Alabama lumber firms headed by local people like the McGowins of the W. T. Smith firm, the Millers of the T. R. Miller Mill Company, and the Harrigans of the Scotch Lumber Company moved to incorporate the new techniques and struggled to survive the Great Depression, as did the Kauls of the Kaul Lumber Company, who came from Pennsylvania but put down roots in Alabama.

Times were hard during the 1930s, but people survived and the forests began to recover, displaying greater resilience than most had believed possible. While casual observers today focus mostly on Alabama’s forest products companies and their staffs of industrial foresters, they should not forget that a large part of the state’s forested acreage is privately owned by people and organizations with a diverse set of backgrounds, financial circumstances, objectives, and values. Much of this land is managed with the guidance of consulting foresters, who have had a significant impact on Alabama’s privately owned forests. Some lumber companies and private landowners started to practice responsible forest management, just as another major development began to impact the southern forests.

By the 1930s the pulp and paper industry, which had been centered in the Northeast, was rapidly depleting the forests there. Southern pines had not been considered capable of producing commercial-quality paper because of their high resin content. However, researchers in Europe had developed chemical processes to produce kraft paper from southern pines, and the research of Charles Holmes Herty of Savannah, Georgia, had perfected the methodology to produce newsprint and other grades of paper from southern pine pulp. The fast-growing pine forests of Alabama and the South were green gold, perfect raw material sources for the paper industry, whose mills were critically dependent on a reliable and abundant wood supply.

Although there were some earlier small paper mills in Alabama, the industry moved into the state in a major way in the 1920s and 1930s, led by the Southern Kraft Division of International Paper, which established mills and administrative headquarters in Mobile. The Westervelts moved their operations from Illinois to Louisiana and then Alabama, finally establishing the large operations of the Gulf States Paper Company at Tuscaloosa. Numerous other companies migrated or were established, and the paper industry became a critical part of the Alabama forest scene. The paper companies acquired vast timbered acreages and negotiated timber leases with an enormous number of private landowners. They utilized younger timber than the lumber companies and practiced intensive industrial forestry, clear-cutting the forests, replanting with new varieties of genetically superior super trees, and replacing many of Alabama’s natural multispecies and various-aged forests with tree plantations, single-aged forests of one species, commonly loblolly pine.

With occasional interruptions, the Alabama forest products industry boomed from the immediate post–World War II era until nearly the end of the twentieth century. By the latter part of this period Alabama had more trees than at the time of European discovery, and forest products had become a central part of the state’s economy and life. Both industrial and privately owned forestland managed by or for the lumber and paper producers by industrial and consulting foresters had become ever more productive by any measure of growth rate or timber volume per acre. The companies had also developed a revenue source by leasing hunting rights in many of their forests. However, controversy was developing in the midst of their many successes.

Many consider Gifford Pinchot, first chief of the US Forest Service and founder of the Yale Forestry School, to be the nation’s first professionally trained forester. Trained in forestry in Europe, Pinchot defined conservation as wise use. In other words, one should use natural resources, including forests, responsibly, providing for their continued preservation and replenishment. This was the foundation of the professional forester’s creed of sustainable forestry, which was practiced by the lumber and paper company foresters. Foresters liked to think of themselves as the nation’s first conservationists, not only supplying the country’s timber needs, but also restoring and maintaining its forests at the same time.

The challenge to this view came from others who viewed conservation differently and, in fact, rallied around the tenets of environmentalism, as opposed to conservation. They saw all natural entities as interconnected and were inspired by the ideas of pioneer thinkers and practitioners like John Muir and Aldo Leopold. They believed that some areas should be preserved and off limits to economic exploitation and bemoaned the replacement of natural forests by tree plantations. They viewed commercial forest operations as inimical to the maintenance of both plant and animal species diversity. They lamented the impact of woods and plant operations on water and air quality.

The forest products industry nationally and in Alabama responded to the criticisms by adopting various certification programs that encouraged the practice of sustainable forestry in accordance with green standards. They protected streams from pollution and damage from logging operations, protected endangered species such as red-cockaded woodpeckers, and implemented processes to protect air and water quality from plant operations. In some cases industry lands were donated for public use as nature preserves. In Alabama some areas of national forests were set aside as wilderness areas and protected from commercial use. Still, the industrial and consulting foresters and land managers on one side and the environmentalists on the other often talked past one another and refused to recognize any validity in the other side’s positions.

As the end of the twentieth century approached, the old fears of a timber famine were far in the past, and the Alabama forest community was rocked by another development, as the large forest products companies began to massively dispose of their forested lands, moving toward supplying their timber needs through timber leases with private landowners and through the acquisition of operations in other parts of the world such as Bolivia, Siberia, and New Zealand. Investment trusts acquired much of the land and planned to manage it in a variety of ways, as did the other private, nonindustrial forestland owners who collectively controlled the largest percentage of the state’s forests. The immediate prospects for Alabama’s forests were unclear, but their demonstrated resilience gave hope for the future.

1

Alabama’s Early Forests and People, Pioneer Settlers, and the Age of the Early Sawmillers and Naval Stores Producers

Long before European settlement in this country, Native Americans used and managed the forest to serve their own needs. European Americans, when they arrived, viewed forests as an encumbrance to agriculture or as a virtually inexhaustible resource to be mined. They first used the forest—its wildlife, wood products, and land—to meet their subsistence needs for food and energy, much as Native Americans had done.

—Brad Smith, John S. Vissage, David R. Darr, and Raymond M. Sheffield, Forest Resources of the United States

I. Alabama’s Early Forests and People

We all long to return to the idyllic worlds of our childhood, or imagination, or both. Country curios at flea markets and antique shops remind us of days with our parents and grandparents in a simpler and more leisurely time. Trips to Colonial Williamsburg with its meticulously maintained buildings and grounds reflect our concept of an orderly and rational colonial world where everyone and everything were in their proper places. So too do the prints of Currier & Ives represent the way we want to see agrarian America in the nineteenth century, while the painters of the Rocky Mountain School give us a suitably heroic depiction of the natural world of the trans-Mississippi West. We visit national parks and marvel at pristine nature, the forest primeval, scarcely aware that many of the areas we explore have been logged, farmed, or mined by those who came before us.

Our concepts of primeval forests and wilderness are intellectual constructs, amalgams of folklore and mythology, historical manipulation, and wishful thinking. We conquer wildernesses that have long been occupied by other humans and gleefully accept the myth that squirrels could once travel for hundreds of miles through the canopies of vast unbroken forests. We also believe that forests are static and unchanging in their natural state, and that we can protect and preserve them in a steady state that mimics their condition centuries ago.¹

As Stephen Spurr has noted, There is no such thing as an original forest, or even a virgin forest. He goes on to note that the terms ‘virgin forest’ and Longfellow’s ‘forest primeval’ conjure up an image of great and old trees standing undisturbed and changeless for centuries. Specifically, any disturbance by man is ruled out. They must be uncut and unharmed by human-set fires, and the understory must be ungrazed by domestic stock. In other words, we conceive of the virgin forest as being simply an unharmed old-growth forest. Such stands simply do not exist. . . . Forests of any age are in a constant state of change. . . . It is a meaningless semanticism to try to distinguish between ‘natural’ disturbances and ‘artificial’ disturbances caused by man. To the tree it makes little difference if a fire is set by lightning or by a human incendiary.² The common view of American forests was presented in 1906 by James Elliott Defebaugh, the editor of American Lumberman, a leading trade journal, in his History of the Lumber Industry of America. Said Defebaugh, What is now the United States presented an almost solid and continuous forest from the Atlantic to the Mississippi River and in places still farther west.³

Mythology and romanticism are comforting, sometimes even useful. But they can also get in the way of our attempts to use and manage our lands and forests wisely and responsibly. They can also obscure the true history of the forest and of humans, which is in many ways more interesting than the fiction. So it is with the forests of Alabama. Their biological evolution, pre-Columbian changes, and modern use and management constitute a story well worth telling.

The study of Alabama’s early forests is the domain of paleobotanists and archaeologists, who use fossil remains and other sources to reconstruct the story of a time before human habitation and written records. In the distant past the forests of the South were complex and evolved from ferns and enormous club moss trees in swamps to mixed forests of gymnosperms (the ancestors of modern conifers) and angiosperms (broadleaved deciduous species, or hardwoods).⁴ The ancient forests were shaped and affected by climate and geologic change and by the same kinds of natural phenomena that affect their modern counterparts: fire, climate change, windstorms, volcanic lava flows, earthquakes, and so forth. Perhaps most important in the ancient period of North America was the succession of glacial periods, as Canadian ice fields flowed and retreated and altered the range of ancient forests in Alabama and the lower South.

The movement of species back and forth as the ice expanded and melted can by tracked by such archaeological sources as fossil studies, pollen analysis, tree-ring analysis, and carbon dating. This provides ‘irrefutable evidence’ that vegetation has been in an almost constant state of instability and adjustment due to the almost constantly changing climate over the past ten thousand years and even over the past hundred years . . . present vegetational patterns are closely related to events in recent geological history.⁵

Studies of sediment from a pond in St. Clair County tell the story of the forest in central Alabama. Pollen and plant macrofossils from this sediment show that the forest of the early Holocene epoch (twelve thousand to ten thousand years ago) consisted primarily of broadleaved deciduous trees, including beech, hornbeam, oak, hickory, elm, and ash, as well as Atlantic white cedar, eastern white pine, hemlock, striped maple, and mountain maple. By 10,000 years ago oaks and hickories dominated, followed around 8,400 years ago by black gum, southern pines, red maple, sweetgum, and buttonbush. This resulted from the establishment of modern atmospheric patterns, including hurricanes originating in the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic. The major lesson here is that the forest evolved; it was not static. Over time, because of changing natural conditions, the age and species mix of the forests evolved, just as they continue to do today.⁶

By about 10,000 BC humans began to live in and affect the forest environment. Anthropologists join paleobotanists, geologists, and archaeologists in studying this story, but they disagree about when humans appeared and dispersed through North America. They probably reached the tip of South America about ten thousand years ago, pursuing the large mammals of the Ice Age, and were undoubtedly attracted in Alabama by the abundant wildlife, fertile soil, and warm climate of the forested areas. Boreal birds occurred in the upper South, while mastodons and mammals that fed primarily on grasses and sedges dominated the fauna. Early hunters as well as a warming climate probably doomed these massive animals to extinction. The forests probably consisted largely of beech and maple. Early humans brought with them fire, which would be a ceremonial and management tool as they evolved from hunter-gatherers into sedentary hunters and farmers who both used and altered the forests.

The Archaic culture developed from approximately 8000 to 6000 BC as the climate became warmer and large animals disappeared. The Indians hunted deer and smaller animals; gathered nuts, berries, and plants; and began to domesticate and cultivate pumpkins, gourds, squash, and sunflowers in patches that they cleared in the forest. Their diet was supplemented with shellfish, mussels, and freshwater snails gathered from shallow areas along Alabama’s rivers. As the climate became warmer the forests came to be populated by oak-hickory and pine-hardwood stands and had stabilized in these patterns by about 5000 BC. From about 300 BC until 1000 AD the Native Americans had begun to construct permanent homes, often of logs and with mud walls and thatched roofs, and they continued to clear land to grow sunflowers, squash, and gourds.⁷

Between about 700 AD and 900 AD a new culture called the Mississippian developed, probably influenced by trade with and migration from Mesoamerica. The Mississippians settled in fertile river valleys and built their society around staple crop agriculture. Corn, which was cooked in various ways, became a central part of their lives. The Mississippian culture reached its height about 1300 AD and survived until the threshold of European exploration of the Alabama region by the expedition of Hernando de Soto in the 1540s.⁸ Mississippians who occupied the Fort Walton Mound site on the bank of the Chattahoochee River raised flint corn, while Native Americans at the Seaborn Mound site, fifty-six miles up the river, cultivated a different variety. Floodplain areas were popular because the sandy loam soil was fertile and easy to till.⁹ The Native Americans practiced slash and burn agriculture, using fire to clear forest ground to plant corn, and then moving to new areas as corn cultivation depleted the fertility of the soil. They cleared large areas of forest and built cities with mounds, structures, ceremonial fields, and crops, such as at Moundville, Alabama.¹⁰

The late prehistoric Indians left an imprint on the land. They used fire for ceremonial purposes, for cooking, for clearing, and to construct large surrounds to herd wildlife for hunting. When burning the land for farming, the Native Americans allowed the fire to spread to adjacent woodlands and previous clearings. Trees that survived the fires were then girdled by using stone axes or by burning brush at their base. Vegetables were then planted beneath the dead trees. Fire was also used to open the surrounding forests for hunting and gathering, as well as for defensive purposes. Some have gone so far as to term the early Native Americans pyromaniacs.¹¹

The condition of Alabama’s forests was also determined by natural phenomena, since trees do not distinguish between human and nonhuman activities. Many ecologists once believed that in the absence of human activity forests grew to maturity and remained in a steady state condition, changing only with the death of single trees that were replaced by others.¹² By the late twentieth century scientific evidence challenged this stable, or steady state, perspective in favor of a more dynamic one. In 1990, at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America, the participants acknowledged that the center of mass thinking among ecologists has shifted and described the change in their conceptual framework: Ecologists have traditionally operated on the assumption that the normal condition of nature is a state of equilibrium, in which organisms compete and coexist in an ecological system whose workings are essentially stable. . . . A forest grows to a beautiful, mature climax stage that becomes its naturally permanent condition. They went on to conclude that the concept of natural equilibrium long ruled ecological research and governed the management of such natural resources as forests and fisheries. It led to the doctrine, popular among conservationists, that nature knows best and that human intervention in it is bad by definition. Now an accumulation of evidence has gradually led many ecologists to abandon the concept or declare it irrelevant, and others to alter it drastically.¹³ Thus, even in the absence of human intervention, forests change in structure and composition with growth and natural disturbances. One should not assume that the forests on the eve of human intervention had been unchanged over the eons, or that those discovered in the age of the European explorers represented some kind of steady, unchanging, perfect state of nature.

Among the extreme natural influences on forest evolution are such phenomena as hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and drought. However, nature also operates in less dramatic fashion: The interaction between tree species usually results in one individual’s having an advantage and dominating or killing another. This interaction is termed competition . . . competition . . . is now considered the primary pattern of interaction among holarctic tree species.¹⁴

So, what were the forests of Alabama like on the eve of human disturbance? The earth is divided into six geographically distinct groups of plants, called floristic realms. The Northern Hemisphere is in the Holarctic realm and contains temperate and boreal forests. In this realm pine and oak species often dominate droughty, warmer sites, such as those found in Alabama and much of the American South.¹⁵ So, as we have seen, Alabama’s forests probably originated as large club moss trees and ferns and through climate change and other natural processes evolved into stands of pines and deciduous hardwoods, in various combinations. The forests were not unbroken or characterized by single uniform age classes. Natural fire, tornadoes, hurricanes, and other disturbances created a mosaic of forested areas, open grasslands, and savannas that certainly changed over time. The forests were also affected by species migration and continental drift. By five thousand years ago, coastal plain forests, which had been dominated by oak and hickory, were succeeded by southern pines, possibly resulting from an increase in the frequency of fires and hurricanes and a strengthening of the tropical air mass.¹⁶

By the time of the de Soto expedition the lands and forests of Alabama had been altered by both nature and the Native Americans. The Native Americans of the Southeast were involved in floodplain farming, hunting, fishing, and gathering natural foods and materials. They burned to clear new garden sites, and the fire spread to nearby woodlands and old fields. Natural fire and the use of fire by early Native Americans for hunting and managing the land served to "increase the extent of longleaf (Pinus palustris) and other yellow pines, increase the amount of oak . . . reduce the amount of hardwood midstory and understory, increase the spacing of the trees, increase forage grasses used by game animals, and maintain cleared areas for hunting and farming." Native Americans of the late prehistoric period possibly set fires in sandy upland areas, increasing the carrying capacity for such fauna as the white-tailed deer. Areas that were largely untouched by fire, such as swamps and the wettest river floodplains, produced magnificent stands of bottomland hardwood and cypress, which were probably the only true old-growth forests in the region at the time of the Spanish explorations.¹⁷

Fire had a beneficial impact on some bird species in the South. Fire is crucial in the ecology of longleaf pine, and successional pine warblers, which depend on pine forest habitats, probably benefited from natural and human-made fires in the southern ecosystems.¹⁸ So, too, did Bachman’s warbler, which is affected by canebrakes. Cane is found primarily in floodplains in the South, and canebrakes were common in the river floodplains while pines were dominant in the uplands, and both plants benefit from disturbance, including fire.¹⁹ In fact, the line between gathering and agriculture was blurred, for Indians used fire and other techniques to modify the productivity of the land. Thus berry patches, basket material, nut-bearing trees, and forage for game animals were more prevalent than they would have been without Native American intervention.

An early history of Alabama’s Coosa County brings a local perspective to the situation:

At that time and for years afterward . . . there was but little undergrowth, for the Indians burned off the woods in the spring, which killed the bushes, leaving only the larger timber. The whole country was covered with grass, wild peavines, and cane, making rich pasturage for game, cattle, and horses. The cane which at first grew so profusely along the stream, and in many places on the uplands also, eventually died out, said by the old settlers to have just gone to seed. . . . The whites used to keep up the practice of burning off the woods in the spring, notice being given to interested neighbors when fire would be put out, so they might guard their fences. Keeping down the underbrush made it easy to ride through the woods and to see game, or cattle at a distance.²⁰

Five Spanish expeditions entered Mobile Bay or explored the region now called Alabama during the sixteenth century. The most extensive of these and the first to leave recorded descriptions of the land was Hernando de Soto’s expedition through parts of Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana. There are scholarly disagreements about the precise route the Spaniards traveled, but they left accounts of alternating forest, savanna, fields, and burning and cultivation. . . . Everywhere the forest was open enough for this huge expedition of about 600 men and its ambulant supply of meat in the form of herds of swine to proceed without any difficulty, except for the wetness of the swamps.²¹ In what may have been Talladega County, the Spaniards discovered that in the barbacolas and fields there was a great quantity of maize and beans. The land was very populous and had many large towns and planted fields which reached from one town to the other. It was a charming and fertile land, with good cultivated fields stretching along the rivers. In the open fields were many plums, both those of Spain and those of the land, and grapes along the rivers on vines climbing up into the trees.²²

Farther on they found many fields of maize . . . it was a land very well supplied with maize in abundance.²³ An area in the vicinity of Mobile was described as a very populous and fertile land. Near the Sipsee and Tombigbee Rivers were some towns well provided with maize and beans.²⁴ In fact, they found fields adjacent to many of the rivers, particularly the Coosa, Tombigbee, Alabama . . . and all their tributaries. . . . Along the Coosa the land was ‘thickly settled in numerous towns with fields extending from one to the other, a pleasant place with fertile soil and good meadows along the river . . . many corn fields and an abundance of grain.’²⁵ The explorers observed open agricultural areas of thousands of acres.²⁶

Beyond the picture of the land and forests, two parts of these descriptions are of particular interest, and they are related. The expedition obviously encountered a large native population, which could have made a considerable impact on the forests, while over a century later European explorers in the area found that population considerably reduced. The explanation may be found in the presence of the aforementioned herds of swine that accompanied the Spaniards.

Estimates of the pre-Columbian Native American population of North America have steadily risen over the years, and by the late 1980s many scholars agreed that it was between three and five million, with some estimates considerably higher. The de Soto expedition left descriptions of regions of dense populations and many villages in the midst of vast cultivated fields.²⁷ As Michael Williams has observed, Even if only a half of the estimated pre-conquest population . . . cleared and cultivated forest land, then between 19.8 and 24.50 million acres of forest would have been affected (and that would not have included abandoned clearings) which is approximately 10 percent of a total of 278.6 million acres of land in crops in the 31 easternmost states today. . . . [The] Indians were a potent, if not crucial, ecological factor in the distribution and composition of the forest.²⁸ Apparently the Native Americans also moved frequently for a variety of reasons, thus leaving an impact on the land that produced a mosaic of forested areas with different stand types, ages, and conditions, as well as open prairies. This diversity in turn produced a variety of habitats for wildlife.²⁹

It is commonly accepted by most writers that the members of the de Soto expedition brought to the New World European diseases for which the Amerindians had no immunity. There is no doubt that between the time of the expedition and those of Europeans who came later there were large population decreases. But as de Soto specialist Paul Huffman has written, Clearly, some Old World diseases did reach epidemic levels among the southeastern Indians during the sixteenth century, but whether that was before or after or because of De Soto remains to be tested, as do their full effects on the political and social structures that De Soto’s men recorded. . . . The proposition that De Soto’s expedition, and its presumed diseases, largely if not completely accounts for the transformation of southeastern Indian societies remains a thesis or theory, whose verification awaits the development of archaeological and possibly ethnographic evidence that is better than any currently available for the 1540–1700 period.³⁰

It may also be that the diseases were transmitted not by the Spaniards, but by the swine that accompanied them, some of which escaped to become the progenitors of the South’s wild hogs roaming the woods and forests. As Charles C. Mann points out, Swine . . . transmit anthrax, brucellosis, leptospirosis, trichinosis, and tuberculosis. Pigs breed exuberantly and can pass diseases to deer and turkeys, which can then infect people. Only a few of De Soto’s pigs would have had to wander off to contaminate the forest.³¹ Ironically, the descendants of de Soto’s pigs would again impact Alabama and southern forests significantly nearly four centuries later, when wild hogs rooting up young seedlings threatened the reforestation efforts of lumber companies and their foresters.

In the years following the de Soto expedition, when the Indians suffered an imprecise but probably catastrophic population loss, they abandoned the large cleared agricultural areas needed to produce food and reduced their use of fire to maintain the fields. Cleared areas in the bottomlands reverted to forest, first perhaps to cane and then to other woody species that shaded out the canebrakes. Some of the old-growth bottomland forests of today may have originated in this process.³² Over much of the South and Alabama, Indian-cleared lands probably became pure pine stands, which evolved into mixed pine and hardwood stands as hardwoods began to occupy the canopy openings that occurred as the pine stands matured.

In upland areas where there were hardwoods, fires in frequently burned areas created openings that allowed the establishment of pines, again resulting in mixed forests. Fire scars in these stands encouraged decay that caused butt rot, which in turn created den trees that provided a good wildlife habitat. These forests represented a successional stage that occurred in an ever-changing mosaic. Thus, as Edward Buckner has argued, The notion that some ‘natural’ forest condition existed in 1492 in the sense of the broad landscape being composed of climax forest associations that formed independent of a human influence is a myth.³³

Another scholar has noted that it is impossible to overestimate the effect of human activity on the forests . . . whether by civilized or by prehistoric, uncivilized man, including the undoubted effects of Indian burning . . . in particular the effects of this practice on the distribution and abundance of the various pines.³⁴ Some have speculated that the lush three-hundred-year-old forests worked by Alabama lumbermen in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries probably originated at the time the fire-cleared Native American land was abandoned and reverted to forest.³⁵

In the years following de Soto’s expedition there was considerable movement of people, making it difficult for the Europeans who came later to determine exactly where people had been located in the earlier period. However, by the seventeenth century most of the descendants of the Archaic peoples who lived in Alabama were parts of four major groups: the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Cherokees. The Cherokees were in the northeastern corner of Alabama, while the Choctaws had major settlements in present-day Mississippi and also had territory extending into Alabama north of Mobile. The Chickasaw territory covered parts of Kentucky and Tennessee and extended into northern Mississippi and Alabama in an area south of the Tennessee River. The Creeks occupied most of central and eastern Alabama. Divided into upper and lower divisions, the Upper Creeks had settlements around the Tallapoosa and Coosa Rivers, while the Lower Creeks lived along the Flint and Chattahoochee Rivers.³⁶ These native peoples, like their ancestors, utilized fire and other practices that changed the dominantly forested areas in which they lived. However, there were far fewer of them, and their practices could now be directly observed by people who left written records.

While there were differences among the four tribes, all were sedentary and lived by varying degrees of hunting, gathering, and cultivating food. The women were responsible for raising vegetables and gathering nuts and berries, the men for clearing land and hunting. The Scottish trader James Adair observed in 1735 that the Cherokees planted hemp and grapes on small patches of land in the mountains. The Choctaws, who gave Alabama its name (from a Choctaw word meaning clearers of the thicket), lived in widely dispersed houses separated by fields in which they raised beans, squash, melons, pumpkins, and corn. By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the Choctaws were influenced by trade with the French and began to plant European fruits and vegetables, as well as cotton. They also raised chickens for livestock.³⁷

Obviously, with the Native American population greatly reduced, the forests encountered by the Spanish, French, and British during their competition for territory in southeastern North America were much less affected by Indian agricultural and hunting practices, and in fact natural plant succession had increased the quantity and quality of both hardwood and pine forests.³⁸ The Europeans naturally assumed that the forests had grown to their current state without human interference.

It was more than a century after de Soto before Europeans returned to the area of present-day Alabama. During the next century there were struggles between the French, Spanish, and British to control the region. Shifting alliances and trade relationships between the Europeans and Native Americans were part of various equations. Conflict between England and France triggered French efforts to establish a presence on the Gulf Coast. The French Canadian Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville and his brother John-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville were given orders to establish a fortress at the mouth of the Mississippi River. After encountering a force of Spaniards at Pensacola Bay, they sailed on and dropped anchor at Mobile Point on January 31, 1699. Exploring the area, d’Iberville found all kinds of trees, oaks, elm, ash, pines, and other trees I do not know, many creepers, sweet-smelling violets, and other yellow flowers.³⁹

The French eventually established a struggling settlement at Mobile, and later a trading post at Fort Toulouse at the confluence