… Northeastern Indians were generous with fuel. Early observers noted that they heated themselves with fires rather than arm houses and bed clothing. The winter fires kept going all day and all night. The forests near their villages soon had an open, park‐like aspect, and villagers moved every eight to ten years to be near new sources of firewood. Roger Williams’s Indian friends observed that the English must have come to America because the fuel supply in England had become scarce.
Another reason for periodic village moves was to find new garden sites as the old fields lost their fertility. Instead of our laborious cutting and stump hauling, Indians killed the trees with fire and planted gardens in the sunlight between the bare skeletons. In a few years the smaller trees would topple and be used for firewood, and the larger trees would begin shedding branches, thus rendering the gardens more open. In addition, large tracts of forest were selectively fired once or twice a year to create a mosaic of edge‐of‐forest ecology most suitable for large populations of deer, elk, hare, porcupine, turkey, quail and ruffed grouse.

According to Cronon’s Changes in the Land, forest burning “increased the rate at which forest nutrients were recycled into the soil, so that grasses, shrubs and nonwoody plants tended to grow more luxuriantly following a fire than they had before. Especially on old Indian fields, fire created conditions favorable to strawberries, blackberries, raspberries and other gatherable foods. Grasses like the little bluestem were rare in mature forests, but in a forest burned by Indians they became abundant. The thinning of the forest canopy … allowed more light to reach the forest floor and further aided such growth. The soil became warmer and drier and [burning] … also tended to destroy plant diseases and pests.

The Indians, who were seen by the English settlers as wantonly destroying the forests, were actually engaged in a sophisticated cultivation of “wild” animal and vegetable resources.

• David P. McAllester (1916‐2006), a one‐sixty‐fourth Narragansett, was a Navaho scholar and professor of anthropology and music at Wesleyan University. Living in Monterey, Mass., he wrote Indian Notes for the monthly Monterey News from 1981 to 1994. This essay originally appeared in the newsletter June 1985.