The Delaware Valley The second case, set in the 17th century eastern U.S., is the subject of a recent historical ecological study by Jordan and Kaups (1989). These geographers describe two very different agrarian-settlement systems in the Delaware Valley. The differences in these adaptations trace to their roots in Europe, where there existed what might be called an ecological core and periphery. The fertile Germanic core of Europe, with its stable (and partly intensive) 3-field system of production, had a prosperous, conservative agrarian population. Fringing the core were British hilly areas, the subarctic north, and the infertile Eastern European plain. Population here was sparse, and land productivity low. This area gave us Scotch-Irish, Welsh, Alpine Swiss, and Finnish settlers. Of particular import was an adaptive system originating in Eastern Finland, with its short growing season, thin morainic soils, and pine-spruce forests. In the huuhta farming system, cultivation was very extensive, with rye being grown in the ashes on swidden plots that were abandoned after a single year. The Finns kept open range stock and also hunted and gathered. This system relied on an estimated 2500 acres per family. They lived in 1-room cabins or small multi-structure farmsteads, which were usually abandoned every few years. This highly extensive agrarian-settlement system was banished to America when it started to encroach on the ecologic core. The swiddeners had colonized most of interior Finland and moved into Sweden and Norway in the 1600's. The valleys here supported stable, intensive-farming villages, and the Finns colonized the interfluves very successfully, sticking to the high ground, until "the Germanic Valley folk awoke to find Finns perched in the heights above them, and the new ethnic map of south-central Scandinavia had topographic lines as borders" (Jordan and Kaups 1989:51). Laws were enacted to constrain the wanton destruction of forest and game, and many swiddeners, perceived as landless vagabonds, were rounded up for transport to the rich deciduous Eastern Woodlands of America ("a bit like tossing Br'er Rabbit in the briar patch", Jordan and Kaups [1989:58] note). A Finnish population was in place on the Delaware River in the 1650s, where they thrived -- hunting, farming Indians' land, being imprisoned for wizardry, brewing beer and vodka, and farming very extensively. The agrarian settlement system was preadapted to the woodlands, and it flourished in the backwoods frontiers where European settlement had yet to reach. Farmsteads with a log cabin and sometimes an outbuilding or two were established near old Indian fields which provided forage and attracted deer. The main agricultural job was tree-chopping, a task to which the Finns brought not only technologically superior axes but skill at their use, and an ethic that chopping was preferable to sodbusting. They also chopped trees for wages, and it was Finnish axmen the Dutch hired to clear Harlem in 1661. Influenced by Indian agricultural tactics, they intercropped corn with squash, pumpkins or watermelons in fields where the treestumps were left standing. Vegetables and tobacco were grown in kitchen gardens. The only tree crop was peach, which bore fruit within 3 years, required less care than apples or pears, and produced brandy. They relied significantly on hunting and gathering. An essential component of this adaptation was mobility. The backwoodsmen dispersed rapidly along watercourses, driven by what Jordan and Kaups call a "cultural resistance to intensification of land use". Their explanation is to the point:
The clearings won from the forest by the pioneers served them at best for three to five years. Crops thrived upon the burst of fertility derived from the ash, and regardless of how natively fertile the soil was, yields fell off rapidly after several harvests. In addition, weeds quickly became a problem that could be controlled only by a large investment of labor. The backwoods pioneers had no ability or interest in restoring the productivity of the soil through manuring, and they refused to submit to a season of hard hoeing. Let their Germanic successors accomplish such intensifications of land use; the Midland pioneers preferred to make another clearing in a different place. (1989:100) The Finnish system had in effect "skimmed the cream" from the woodlands; the price had been a high degree of mobility, which bothered them not a whit. In fact, for short moves, cabins could simply be dismantled and reassembled in the middle of a new field. The second wave of settlers was obliged to farm more intensively, to which they too were preadapted, as they came from the ecological core of Europe. These more permanent settlements varied from dispersed farmsteads to small villages, but they shared a key set of characteristics that contrasted with those of the Finns who had come before. Most importantly, when faced with the choice of intensifying production or moving on, they intensified. This meant planting on bush-fallowed land, which meant plowing, which meant the arduous work of stump-clearing that the Finns had disdained. References Jordan, Terry G. and Matti Kaups (1989) The American Backwoods Frontier: An Ethnic and Ecological Interpretation. The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, Baltimore. |