A Brief History of Nature and the American Consciousness

When Frederick Jackson Turner announced in 1893 that "the American character did not spring full-blown from the Mayflower," but that "it came out of the forests and gained new strength each time it touched a frontier," his speech punctuated nearly three centuries of examinations into the American wilderness.¹ From Jamestown and Plymouth Plantation to the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and the subsequent expedition of Lewis and Clark, to Turner's "Frontier Thesis" at the Columbian Exposition of 1893, the geography and ecology of the American continent was the center of debate among Americans. Two primary views of the wilderness were contested: the wilderness either contained savagery and temptation which threatened the authority of the community or it represented a new Garden which could flourish with the proper cultivation by the European settlers. Although these contrasting views of the wilderness shared the goal of establishing a civilization by removing the obstacles presented by the natural environment, the state of wilderness that originally characterized the young nation eventually became the source of national pride and identity for America.

In an essay entitled "The Cultural Significance of the American Wilderness," Roderick Nash notes that early settlers in the New World were not Americans at all, but transplanted Europeans who regarded the land as a spiritual and physical void which had to conquered and civilized in the name of Christianity and progress.² Because it was an unknown entity with bizarre animals, unusual topography, and strange indigenous inhabitants, the wilderness represented a place where community and consensus would be put in peril by the total absence of European law, religion, and civilization. Early New England literature, art, and folklore presents the wilderness as the place where reason succumbs to passion and the devil can seduce and corrupt even the holiest in the community. In other early colonies, particularly Pennsylvania and Virginia, the wilderness represented the Garden--a place to be tamed and cleared for the establishment of a human community. In this outlook, however, the land supplied the raw materials for building a society, and nature was to be used, not feared. Despite the different outlooks, the goal was the same: to destroy the savage wilderness and make it bloom with European civilization.

In this Thomas Cole painting of 1836 entitled The Oxbow (The Connecticut River near Northampton), the tension between wilderness and garden, savagery and civilization, is recorded visually as European conventions of landscape painting are employed to comment on the state of the physical place of America. The savagery of the storm clouds over the wilderness retreats from the advancing cultivated landscape of civilization. And, as Cole scholar William Cronon has suggested,"in the lazy turn of the great oxbow--echoed by the circling birds at the edge of the storm-- we can make out the shape of a question mark: where is all this headed?" The concerns expressed in Cole's painting reflected the debate among Americans. Would the wilderness disappear completely for the sake of civilization, or would the two exist in perpetual tension with one another?

During the Lewis and Clark expedition in the Jeffersonian era, the primary goal of wilderness investigation was to take inventory of the garden and complete a taxonomy of the American continent. Jefferson's interest in taxonomy was supported in Pennsylvania by the Philosophical Society of Benjamin Franklin, a group of scientists that included anthropologist Charles Wilson Peale, botanist Benjamin Rush, and chemist/physicist Joseph Priestley. Jefferson and the men of this society often compared notes and shared the results of individual experiments to assess and quantify the land and its contents. Although these men displayed a genuine curiosity about their environment, they were eager to discover what resources of economic value lay in the land for their use in building a civilized society. Northern strides toward industry and technology led by Franklin, and Southern emphasis on the idealized agrarian society of gentlemen's farms espoused by Jefferson shared a desire to tame and contain the wilderness by imposing upon it a constructed landscape of human civility and divine order. The wilderness exploration of Jefferson's time suggested that America's success as a nation was tied to the cultivation of the wilderness. America could have a rural character, but not a wild one. To achieve our "manifest destiny," Americans had to create a pastoral middle landscape of rolling hills and prosperous farms, much like the terrain of Cole's painting.