The Red Man's Continent - Chapters III-IV



CHAPTER III.
THE GEOGRAPHIC PROVINCES OF NORTH AMERICA 

The four great physical divisions of North America--the Laurentian 
highland, the Appalachian highland, the plains, and the western 
cordillera--are strikingly different in form and structure. The Laurentian 
highland presents a monotonous waste of rough hills, irregular valleys, 
picturesque lakes, and crooked rivers. Most of it is thinly clothed with 
pine trees and bushes such as the blueberry and huckleberry. Yet 
everywhere the ancient rock crops out. No one can travel there without 
becoming tiresomely familiar with fine-grained, shattered schists, coarse 
granites, and their curiously banded relatives, the gneisses. This rocky 
highland stretches from a little north of the St. Lawrence River to Hudson 
Bay, around which it laps in the form of a V, and so is known as the 
Archaean V or shield. 

Everywhere this oldest part of the Western Hemisphere presents 
unmistakable signs of great age. The schists by their fine crumpling and 
scaly flakes of mineral show that they were formed deep in the bowels of 
the earth, for only there could they be subjected to the enormous pressure 
needed to transform their minerals into sheets as thin as paper. The 
coarse granites and gneisses proclaim still more clearly that they must 
have originated far down in the depths of the earth; their huge crystals 
of mica, quartz, hornblende, feldspar, and other minerals could never have 
been formed except under a blanket of rock which almost prevented the 
original magmas from cooling. The thousands or tens of thousands of feet 
of rock which once overlay the schists and still more the granites and 
gneisses must have been slowly removed by erosion, for there was no other 
way to get rid of them. This process must have taken tens of millions of 
years, and yet the whole work must have been practically completed a 
hundred or perhaps several hundred million years ago. We know this because 
the selfsame ancient eroded surface which is exposed in the Laurentian 
highland is found dipping down under the oldest known fossiliferous rocks. 
Traces of that primitive land surface are found over a large part of the 
American continent. Elsewhere they are usually buried under later strata 
laid down when the continent sank in part below sea-level. Only in 
Laurentia has the land remained steadily above the reach of the ocean 
throughout the millions of years. 

Today this old, old land might be as rich as many others if climate had 
been kind to it. Its soil, to be sure, would in many parts be sandy 
because of the large amount of quartz in the rocks. That would be a small 
handicap, however, provided the soil were scores of feet deep like the red 
soil of the corresponding highland in the Guiana region of South America. 
But today the North American Laurentia has no soil worth mentioning. For 
some reason not yet understood this was the part of America where snow 
accumulated most deeply and where the largest glaciers were formed during 
the last great glacial period. Not once but many times its granite surface 
was shrouded for tens of thousands of years in ice a mile or more thick. 
As the ice spread outward in almost every direction, it scraped away the 
soil and gouged innumerable hollows in the softer parts of the underlying 
rock. It left the Laurentian highland a land of rocky ribs rising between 
clear lakes that fill the hollows. The lakes are drained by rapid rivers 
which wind this way and that in hopeless confusion as they strive to move 
seaward over the strangely uneven surface left by the ice. Such a land is 
good for the hunter and trapper. It is also good for the summer pleasure-
seeker who would fain grow strong by paddling a canoe. For the man who 
would make a permanent home it is a rough, inscrutable region where one 
has need of more than most men's share of courage and persistence. Not 
only did the climate of the past cause the ice to scrape away the soil, 
but the climate of the present is so cold that even where new soil has 
accumulated the farmer can scarcely make a living. 

Around the borders of the Laurentian highland the ice accomplished a work 
quite different from the devastation of the interior. One of its chief 
activities was the scouring of a series of vast hollows which now hold the 
world's largest series of lakes. Even the lakes of Central Africa cannot 
compare with our own Great Lakes and the other smaller lakes which belong 
to the same series. These additional lakes begin in the far north with 
Great Bear Lake and continue through Great Slave Lake, Lake Athabasca, and 
Lake Winnipeg to the Lake of the Woods, which drains into Lake Superior. 
All these lakes lie on the edge of the great Laurentian shield, where the 
ice, crowding down from the highland to the north and east, was compressed 
into certain already existent hollows which it widened, deepened, and left 
as vast bowls ready to be filled with lakes. 

South and southwest of the Laurentian highland the great ice sheet proved 
beneficial to man. There, instead of leaving the rock naked, as in the 
Laurentian region, it merely smoothed off many of the irregularities of 
the surface and covered large areas with the most fertile soil. 

In doing this, to be sure, the ice-cap scoured some hollows and left a 
vastly larger number of basins surrounded in whole or in part by glacial 
debris. These have given rise to the innumerable lakes, large and small, 
whose beauty so enhances the charms of Canada, New England, New York, 
Minnesota, and other States. They serve as reservoirs for the water supply 
of towns and power plants and as sources of ice and fish. Though they take 
land from agriculture, they probably add to the life of the community as 
much in other ways as they detract in this. Moreover glaciation diverted 
countless streams from their old courses and made them flow over falls and 
rapids from which water-power can easily be developed. That is one reason 
why glaciated New England contains over forty per cent of all the 
developed water-power in the United States. 

Far more important, however, than the glacial lakes and rivers is the 
fertile glacial soil. It comes fresh from the original rocks and has not 
yet been exhausted by hundreds of thousands of years of weathering. It 
also has the advantage of being well mixed, for generally it is the 
product of scrapings from many kinds of rocks, each of which contributes 
its own particular excellence to the general composition. Take Wisconsin 
as an example.(*) Most parts of that State have been glaciated, but in the 
southwest there lies what is known as the "driftless area" because it is 
not covered with the "drift" or glacial debris which is thickly strewn 
over the rest of the State. A comparison of otherwise similar counties 
lying within and without the driftless area shows an astonishing contrast. 
In 1910 the average value of all the farm land in twenty counties covered 
with drift amounted to $56.90 per acre. In six counties partly covered 
with drift and partly driftless the value was $59.80 per acre, while in 
thirteen counties in the driftless area it was only $33.30 per acre. In 
spite of the fact that glaciation causes swamps and lakes, the proportion 
of land cultivated in the glaciated areas is larger than in the driftless. 
In the glaciated area 61 per cent of the land is improved and in the 
driftless area only 43.5 per cent. Moreover, even though the underlying 
rock and the original topography be of the same kind in both cases, the 
average yield of crops per acre is greater where the ice has done its 
work. Where the country rock consists of limestone, which naturally forms 
a rich soil, the difference in favor of the glaciated area amounts to only 
1 or 2 per cent. Where the country rock is sandy, the soil is so much 
improved by a mixture of fertilizing limestone or even of clay and other 
materials that the average yield of crops per acre in the glaciated areas 
is a third larger than in the driftless. Taking everything into 
consideration it appears that the ancient glaciation of Wisconsin 
increases the present agricultural output by from 20 to 40 per cent. 
Upwards of 10,000,000 acres of glaciated land have already been developed 
in the most populous parts of the State. If the average value of all 
products on this area is reckoned at $15 per acre and if the increased 
value of agricultural products due to glaciation amounts to 30 per cent, 
then the net value of glaciation per year to the farmers of Wisconsin is 
$45,000,000. This means about $300 for each farmer in the glaciated area.

(* R. H. Whitbeck, "Economic Aspects of Glaciation in Wisconsin", in 
"Annals of the Association of American Geographers," vol. III in (1913), 
pp. 62-67.)

Wisconsin is by no means unique. In Ohio, for instance, there is also a 
driftless area.(*) It lies in the southeast along the Ohio River. The 
difference in the value of the farm land there and in the glaciated region 
is extraordinary. In the driftless area the average value per acre in 1910 
was less than $24, while in the glaciated area it was nearly $64. Year by 
year the proportion of the population of the State in the unglaciated area 
is steadily decreasing. The difference between the two parts of the State 
is not due to the underlying rock structure or to the rainfall except to a 
slight degree. Some of the difference is due to the fact that important 
cities such as Cleveland and Toledo lie on the fertile level strip of land 
along the lake shore, but this strip itself, as well as the lake, owes 
much of its character to glaciation. It appears, therefore, that in Ohio, 
perhaps even more than in Wisconsin, man prospers most in the parts where 
the ice has done its work.

(* William H. Hess, "The Influence of Glaciation in Ohio," in "Bulletin of 
the Geographical Society of Philadelphia," vol. XV (1917), pp. 19-42)

We have taken Wisconsin and Ohio as examples, but the effect of glaciation 
in those States does not differ materially from its effect all over 
southern Canada and the northern United States from New England to Kansas 
and Minnesota. Each year the people of these regions are richer by perhaps 
a billion dollars because the ice scraped its way down from Laurentia and 
spread out over the borders of the great plains on the west and of the 
Appalachian region on the east. 

We have considered the Laurentian highland and the glaciation which 
centered there. Let us now turn to another highland only the northern part 
of which was glaciated. The Appalachian highland, the second great 
division of North America, consists of three parallel bands which extend 
southwestward from Newfoundland and the St. Lawrence River to Georgia and 
Alabama. The eastern and most important band consists of hills and 
mountains of ancient crystalline rocks, somewhat resembling those of the 
Laurentian highland but by no means so old. West of this comes a broad 
valley eroded for the most part in the softer portions of a highly folded 
series of sedimentary rocks which are of great age but younger than the 
crystalline rocks to the east. The third band is the Alleghany plateau, 
composed of almost horizontal rocks which lie so high and have been so 
deeply dissected that they are often called mountains. 

The three Appalachian bands by no means preserve a uniform character 
throughout their entire length. The eastern crystalline band has its chief 
development in the northeast. There it comprises the whole of New England 
and a large part of the maritime provinces of Canada as well as 
Newfoundland. Its broad development in New England causes that region to 
be one of the most clearly defined natural units of the United States. 
Ancient igneous rocks such as granite lie intricately mingled with old and 
highly metamorphosed sediments. Since some of the rocks are hard and 
others soft and since all have been exposed to extremely long erosion, the 
topography of New England consists typically of irregular masses of 
rounded hills free from precipices. Here and there hard masses of 
unusually resistant rock stand up as isolated rounded heights, like Mount 
Katahdin in Maine. They are known as "monadnocks" from the mountain of 
that name in southern New Hampshire. In other places larger and more 
irregular masses of hard rock form mountain groups like the White 
Mountains, the Green Mountains, and the Berkshires, each of which is 
merely a great series of monadnocks. 

In the latitude of southern New York the crystalline rocks are compressed 
into narrow compass and lose their mountainous character. They form the 
irregular hills on which New York City itself is built and which make the 
suburbs of Westchester County along the eastern Hudson so diverse and 
beautiful. To the southeast the topography of the old crystalline band 
becomes still less pronounced, as may be seen in the rolling, fertile 
hills around Philadelphia. Farther south the band divides into two parts, 
the mountains proper and the Piedmont plateau. The mountains begin at the 
Blue Ridge, which in Virginia raises its even-topped heights mile after 
mile across the length of that State. In North Carolina, however, they 
lose their character as a single ridge and expand into the broad mass of 
the southern Appalachians. There Mount Mitchell dominates the eastern part 
of the American continent and is surrounded by over thirty other mountains 
rising to a height of at least six thousand feet. The Piedmont plateau, 
which lies at the eastern foot of the Blue Ridge, is not really a plateau 
but a peneplain or ancient lowland worn almost to a plain. It expands to a 
width of one hundred miles in Virginia and the Carolinas and forms the 
part of those States where most of the larger towns are situated. Among 
its low gentle heights there rises an occasional little monadnock like 
Chapel Hill, where the University of North Carolina lies on a rugged 
eminence which strikingly recalls New England. For the most part, however, 
the hills of the Piedmont region are lower and more rounded than those in 
the neighborhood of Philadelphia. The country thus formed has many 
advantages, for it is flat enough to be used for agriculture and yet 
varied enough to be free from the monotony of the level plains. 

The prolonged and broken inner valley forming the second band of the 
Appalachians was of some importance as a highway in the days of the 
Indians. Today the main highways of traffic touch it only to cross it as 
quickly as possible. From Lake Champlain it trends straight southward in 
the Hudson Valley until the Catskills have been passed. Then, while the 
railroads and all the traffic go on down the gorge of the Hudson to New 
York, the valley swings off into Pennsylvania past Scranton, Wilkesbarre, 
and Harrisburg. There the underlying rock consists of a series of 
alternately hard and soft layers which have been crumpled up much as one 
might wrinkle a rug with one's foot. The pressure involved in the process 
changed and hardened the rocks so much that the coal which they contain 
was converted into anthracite, the finest coal in all the world and the 
only example of its kind. Even the famous Welsh coal has not been so 
thoroughly hardened. During a long period of erosion the tops of the 
folded layers were worn off to a depth of thousands of feet and the whole 
country was converted into an almost level plain. Then in the late 
geological period known as the early Tertiary the land was lifted up 
again, and once more erosion went on. The soft rocks were thus etched away 
until broad valleys were formed. The hard layers were left as a 
bewildering succession of ridges with flat tops. A single ridge may double 
back and forth so often that the region well deserves the old Indian name 
of the "Endless Mountains." Southwestward the valley grows narrower, and 
the ridges which break its surface become straighter. Everywhere they are 
flat-topped, steep-sided, and narrow, while between them lie parts of the 
main valley floor, flat and fertile. Here in the south, even more clearly 
than in the north, the valley is bordered on the east by the sharply 
upstanding range of the crystalline Appalachians, while on the west with 
equal regularity it comes to an end in an escarpment which rises to the 
Alleghany plateau. 

This plateau, the third great band of the Appalachians, begins on the 
south side of the Mohawk Valley. To the north its place is taken by the 
Adirondacks, which are an outlier of the great Laurentian area of Canada. 
The fact that the outlier and the plateau are separated by the low strip 
of the Mohawk Valley makes this the one place where the highly complex 
Appalachian system can easily be crossed. If the Alleghany plateau joined 
the Adirondacks, Philadelphia instead of New York would be the greatest 
city of America. Where the plateau first rises on the south side of the 
Mohawk, it attains heights of four thousand feet in the Catskill 
Mountains. We think of the Catskills as mountains, but their steep cliffs 
and table-topped heights show that they are really the remnants of a 
plateau, the nearly horizontal strata of which have not yet been worn 
away. Westward from the Catskills the plateau continues through central 
New York to western Pennsylvania. Those who have traveled on the 
Pennsylvania Railroad may remember how the railroad climbs the escarpment 
at Altoona. Farther east the train has passed alternately through gorges 
cut in the parallel ridges and through fertile open valleys forming the 
main floor of the inner valley. Then it winds up the long ascent of the 
Alleghany front in a splendid horseshoe curve. At the top, after a short 
tunnel, the train emerges in a wholly different country. The valleys are 
without order or system. They wind this way and that. The hills are not 
long ridges but isolated bits left between the winding valleys. Here and 
there beds of coal blacken the surface, for here we are among the rocks 
from which the world's largest coal supply is derived. Since the layers 
lie horizontally and have never been compressed, the same material which 
in the inner valley has been changed to hard, clean-burning anthracite 
here remains soft and smoky. 

In its southwestern continuation through West Virginia and Kentucky to 
Tennessee the plateau maintains many of its Pennsylvanian characteristics, 
but it now rises higher and becomes more inaccessible. The only habitable 
portions are the bottoms of the valleys, but they are only wide enough to 
support a most scanty population. Between them most of the land is too 
rough for anything except forests. Hence the people who live at the 
bottoms of the valleys are strangely isolated. They see little or nothing 
of the world at large or even of their neighbors. The roads are so few and 
the trails so difficult that the farmers cannot easily take their produce 
to market. Their only recourse has been to convert their bulky corn into 
whisky, which occupied little space in proportion to its value. Since the 
mountaineer has no other means of getting ready money, it is not strange 
that he has become a moonshiner and has fought bitterly for what he 
genuinely believed to be his rights in that occupation. Education has not 
prospered on the plateau because the narrowness of the valleys causes the 
population to be too poor and too scattered to support schools. For the 
same reason feuds grow up. When people live by themselves they become 
suspicious. Not being used to dealing with their neighbors, they suspect 
the motives of all but their intimate friends. Moreover, in those deep 
valleys, with their steep sides and their general inaccessibility, laws 
cannot easily be enforced, and therefore each family takes the law into 
its own hands. 

Today the more rugged parts of the Appalachian system are chiefly 
important as a hindrance to communication. On the Atlantic slope of the 
old crystalline band there are great areas of gentle relief where an 
abundant population can dwell. Westward on the edges of the plateau and 
the plains beyond a still greater population can find a living, but in the 
intervening space there is opportunity for only a few. The great problem 
is to cross the mountains as easily as possible. Each accessible crossing-
place is associated with a city. Boston, as well as New York, owes much to 
the low Mohawk-Hudson route, but is badly handicapped because it has no 
easy means of crossing the eastern crystalline band. Philadelphia, on the 
other hand, benefits from the fact that in its vicinity the crystallizes 
are low and can readily be crossed even without the aid of the valleys of 
the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers. It is handicapped, however, by the 
Alleghany escarpment at Altoona, even though this is lower there than 
farther south. Baltimore, in the same way, owes much of its growth to the 
easy pathways of the Susquehanna on the north and the Potomac on the 
south. Farther south both the crystalline band and the Alleghany plateau 
become more difficult to traverse, so that communication between the 
Atlantic coast and the Mississippi Valley is reduced to small proportions. 
Happy is New York in its situation where no one of the three bands of the 
Appalachians opposes any obstacle. The plains of North America form the 
third of the four main physical divisions of the continent. For the most 
part they lie between the great western cordillera on one side and the 
Laurentian and Appalachian highlands on the other. Yet they lap around the 
southern end of the Appalachians and run far up the Atlantic coast to New 
York. They remained beneath the sea till a late date, much later than the 
other three divisions. They were not, however, covered with deep water 
like that of the abysmal oceans, but only with shallow seas from which the 
land at times emerged. In spite of the old belief to the contrary, the 
continents appear to be so permanent that they have occupied practically 
their present positions from the remotest geological times. They have 
moved slowly up and down, however, so that some parts have frequently been 
submerged, and the plains are the parts that remained longest under water. 

The plains of North America may be divided into four parts according to 
the character of their surface: the Atlantic coastal plain, the prairies, 
the northwestern peneplain, and the southwestern high plains. The Atlantic 
coastal plain lies along the Atlantic coast from New York southward to 
Florida and Alabama. It also forms a great embayment up the Mississippi 
Valley as far as the Ohio River, and it extends along the shore of the 
Gulf of Mexico to the Rio Grande. The chief characteristic of this 
Atlantic and Gulf coastal plain is its belted nature. One layer of rocks 
is sandy, another consists of limestone, and a third of clay. When 
uplifted and eroded each assumes its own special topography and is covered 
with its own special type of vegetation. Thus in South Carolina and 
Georgia the crystalline Piedmont band of the Appalachian province is 
bordered on the southeast by a belt of sandstone. This rock is so far from 
the sea and has been raised so high above it that erosion has converted it 
into a region of gentle hills, whose tops are six hundred or seven hundred 
feet above sea-level. Its sandy soil is so poor that farming is difficult. 
The hills are largely covered with pine, yielding tar and turpentine. 
Farther seaward comes a broad band of younger rock which forms a clayey 
soil or else a yellow sandy loam. These soils are so rich that splendid 
cotton crops can be raised, and hence the region is thickly populated. 
Again there comes a belt of sand, the so-called "pine barrens," which form 
a poor section about fifty miles inland from the coast. Finally the 
coastal belt itself has emerged from beneath the sea so recently and lies 
so nearly at sea-level that it has not been greatly eroded, and is still 
covered with numerous marshes and swamps. The rich soil and the moisture 
are good for rice, but the region is so unhealthy and so hard to drain 
that only small parts are inhabited. 

Everywhere in the coastal plain this same belted character is more or less 
evident. It has much to do with all sorts of activities from farming to 
politics. On consulting the map showing the cotton production of the 
United States in 1914, one notices the two dark bands in the southeast. 
One of them, extending from the northwestern part of South Carolina across 
Georgia and Alabama, is due to the fertile soil of the Piedmont region. 
The other, lying nearer the sea, begins in North Carolina and extends well 
into Alabama before it swings around to the northwest toward the area of 
heavy production along the Mississippi. It is due to the fertile soil of 
that part of the coastal plain known as the "cotton belt." Portions of it 
are called the "black belt," not because of the colored population, but 
because of the darkness of the soil. Since this land has always been 
prosperous, it has regularly been conservative in politics. 

The Atlantic coastal plain is by no means the only part of the United 
States where the fertility of the soil is the dominant fact in the life of 
the people. Because of their rich soil the prairies which extend from 
western Ohio to the Missouri River and northward into Canada are fast 
becoming the most steadily prosperous part of America. They owe their 
surpassing richness largely to glaciation. We have already seen how the 
coming of the ice-sheet benefited the regions on the borders of the old 
Laurentian highland. This same benefit extended over practically the whole 
of what are now the prairies. Before the advent of the ice the whole 
section consisted of a broadly banded coastal plain much older than that 
of the Atlantic coast. When the ice with its burden of material scraped 
from the hills of the north passed over the coastal plain, it filled the 
hollows with rich new soil. The icy streams that flowed out from the 
glaciers were full of fine sediment, which they deposited over enormous 
flood plains. During dry seasons the winds picked up this dust and spread 
it out still more widely, forming the great banks of yellow loess whose 
fertile soil mantles the sides of many a valley in the Mississippi basin. 
Thus glaciers, streams, and winds laid down ten, twenty, fifty, or even 
one hundred feet of the finest, most fertile soil. We have already seen 
how much the soil was improved by glaciation in Wisconsin and Ohio. It was 
in the prairie States that this improvement reached a maximum. The soil 
there is not only fine grained and free from rocks, but it consists of 
particles brought from widely different sources and is therefore full of 
all kinds of plant foods. In most parts of the world a fine-grained soil 
is formed only after a prolonged period of weathering which leaches out 
many valuable chemical elements. In the prairies, however, the soil 
consists largely of materials that were mechanically ground to dust by the 
ice without being exposed to the action of weathering. Thus they have 
reached their present resting-places without the loss of any of their 
original plant foods. When such a soil is found with a climate which is 
good for crops and which is also highly stimulating to man, the 
combination is almost ideal. There is some justification for those who say 
that the north central portion of the United States is more fortunate than 
any other part of the earth. Nowhere else, unless in western Europe, is 
there such a combination of fertile soil, fine climate, easy 
communication, and possibilities for manufacturing and commerce. Iron from 
that outlier of the Laurentian highland which forms the peninsula of 
northern Michigan can easily be brought by water almost to the center of 
the prairie region. Coal in vast quantities lies directly under the 
surface of this region, for the rock of the ancient coastal plain belongs 
to the same Pennsylvanian series which yields most of the world's coal. 
Here man is, indeed, blessed with resources and opportunities scarcely 
equaled in any other part of the world, and finds the only drawbacks to be 
the extremes of temperature in both winter and summer and the remoteness 
of the region from the sea. Because of the richness of their heritage and 
because they live safely protected from threats of foreign aggression, the 
people who live in this part of the world are in danger of being slow to 
feel the currents of great world movements. 

The western half of the plains of North America consists of two parts 
unlike either the Atlantic coastal plain or the prairies. From South 
Dakota and Nebraska northward far into Canada and westward to the Rocky 
Mountains there extends an ancient peneplain worn down to gentle relief by 
the erosion of millions of years. It is not so level as the plains farther 
east nor so low. Its western margin reaches heights of four or five 
thousand feet. Here and there, especially on the western side, it rises to 
the crest of a rugged escarpment where some resistant layer of rocks still 
holds itself up against the forces of erosion. Elsewhere its smooth 
surfaces are broken by lava-capped mesas or by ridges where some ancient 
volcanic dike is so hard that it has not yet been worn away. The soil, 
though excellent, is thinner and less fertile than in the prairies. 
Nevertheless the population might in time become as dense and prosperous 
as almost any in the world if only the rainfall were more abundant and 
good supplies of coal were not quite so far away. Yet in spite of these 
handicaps the northwestern peneplain with its vast open stretches, its 
cattle, its wheat, and its opportunities is a most attractive land. 

South of Nebraska and Wyoming the "high plains," the last of the four 
great divisions of the plains, extend as far as western Texas. These, like 
the prairies, have been built up by deposits brought from other regions. 
In this case, however, the deposits consist of gravel, sand, and silt 
which the rivers have gradually washed out from the Rocky Mountains. As 
the rivers have changed their courses from one bed to another, layer after 
layer has been laid down to form a vast plain like a gently sloping beach 
hundreds of miles wide. In most places the streams are no longer building 
this up. Frequently they have carved narrow valleys hundreds of feet deep 
in the materials which they formerly deposited. Elsewhere, however, as in 
western Kansas, most of the country is so flat that the horizon is like 
that of the ocean. It seems almost incredible that at heights of four or 
five thousand feet the plains can still be so wonderfully level. When the 
grass is green, when the spring flowers are at their best, it would be 
hard to find a picture of greater beauty. Here the buffalo wandered in the 
days before the white man destroyed them. Here today is the great cattle 
region of America. Here is the region where the soul of man is filled with 
the feeling of infinite space. 

To the student of land forms there is an everpresent contrast between 
those due directly to the processes which build up the earth's surface and 
those due to the erosive forces which destroy what the others have built. 
In the great plains of North America two of the divisions, that is, the 
Atlantic coastal plain of the southeast and the peneplain of the 
northwest, owe their present form to the forces of erosion. The other two, 
that is, the prairies and the high plains, still bear the impress of the 
original processes of deposition and have been modified to only a slight 
extent by erosion. 

A similar but greater contrast separates the mountains of eastern North 
America and those of the western cordillera--the fourth and last of the 
main physical divisions of the continent. In both the Laurentian and the 
Appalachian highlands the eastern mountains show no trace of the original 
forms produced by the faulting of the crust or by volcanic movements. All 
the original distinctive topography has been removed. What we see today is 
the product of erosion working upon rocks that were thousands of feet 
beneath the surface when they were brought to their present positions. In 
the western cordillera, on the contrary, although much of the present form 
of the land is due to erosion, a vast amount is due directly to so-called 
"tectonic" activities such as the breaking of the crust, the pouring out 
of molten lavas, and the bursting forth of explosive eruptions. 

The character of these tectonic activities has differed widely in 
different parts of the cordillera. A broad upheaval of great blocks of the 
earth's crust without tilting or disturbance has produced the plateaus of 
Arizona and Utah. The gorges that have been rapidly cut into such great 
upheaved blocks form part of the world's most striking scenery. The Grand 
Canyon of the Colorado with its tremendous platforms, mesas, and awe-
inspiring cliffs could have been formed in no other way. Equally wonderful 
are some of the narrow canyons in the broadly upheaved plateaus of 
southern Utah where the tributaries of the Virgin and other rivers have 
cut red or white chasms thousands of feet deep and so narrow that at their 
bottoms perpetual twilight reigns. It is a curious proof of the 
fallibility of human judgment that these great gorges are often cited as 
the most striking examples of the power of erosion. Wonderful as these 
gorges certainly are, the Piedmont plain or the northwestern peneplain is 
far more wonderful. Those regions had their grand canyons once upon a 
time, but now erosion has gone so far that it has reduced the whole area 
to the level of the bottoms of the gorges. Though such a fate is in store 
for all the marvelous scenery of the western cordillera, we have it, for 
the present at least, as one of the most stimulating panoramas of our 
American environment. No man worthy of the name can sit on the brink of a 
great canyon or gaze up from the dark depths of a gorge without a sense of 
awe and wonder. There, as in few other places, Nature shows with 
unmistakable grandeur the marvelous power and certainty with which her 
laws work out the destiny of the universe. 

In other parts of the great American cordillera some of the simplest and 
youngest mountain ridges in the world are found. In southern Oregon, for 
example, lava blocks have been broken and uplifted and now stand with 
steep fresh faces on one side and with the old surface inclining more 
gently on the other. Tilted blocks on a larger scale and much more deeply 
carved by erosion are found in the lofty St. Elias Mountain of Alaska, 
where much of the erosion has been done by some of the world's greatest 
glaciers. The western slope of the Wasatch Mountains facing the desert of 
Utah is the wall of a huge fracture, as is the eastern face of the Sierra 
Nevadas facing the deserts of Nevada. Each of these great faces has been 
deeply eroded. At the base, however, recent breaking and upheaval of the 
crust have given rise to fresh uneroded slopes. Some take the form of 
triangular facets, where a series of ridges has been sliced across and 
lifted up by a great fault. Others assume the shape of terraces which 
sometimes continue along the base of the mountains for scores of miles. In 
places they seem like bluffs cut by an ancient lake, but suddenly they 
change their altitude or pass from one drainage area to another as no lake-
formed strand could possibly do. 

In other parts of the cordillera, mountains have been formed by a single 
arching of the crust without any breaking. Such is the case in the Uinta 
Mountains of northwestern Utah and in some of the ranges of the Rocky 
Mountains in Colorado. The Black Hills of South Dakota, although lying out 
in the plains, are an example of the same kind of structure and really 
belong to the cordillera. In them the layers of the earth's crust have 
been bent up in the form of a great dome. The dome structure, to be sure, 
has now been largely destroyed, for erosion has long been active. The 
result is that the harder strata form a series of concentric ridges, while 
between them are ring-shaped valleys, one of which is so level and 
unbroken that it is known to the Indians as the "race-course." In other 
parts of the cordillera great masses of rock have been pushed horizontally 
upon the tops of others. In Montana, for example, the strata of the plains 
have been bent down and overridden by those of the mountains. These are 
only a few of the countless forms of breaking, faulting, and crumpling 
which have given to the cordillera an almost infinite variety of scenery. 

The work of mountain building is still active in the western cordillera, 
as is evident from such an event as the San Francisco earthquake. In the 
Owens Valley region in southern California the gravelly beaches of old 
lakes are rent by fissures made within a few years by earthquakes. In 
other places fresh terraces on the sides of the valley mark the lines of 
recent earth movements, while newly formed lakes lie in troughs at their 
base. These Owens Valley movements of the crust are parts of the 
stupendous uplift which has raised the Sierra Nevada to heights of over 14,
000 feet a few miles to the west. Along the fault line at the base of the 
mountains there runs for over 9.50 miles the world's longest aqueduct, 
which was built to relieve Los Angeles from the danger of drought. It is a 
strange irony of fate that so delicate and so vital an artery of 
civilization should be forced to lie where a renewal of earthquake 
movements may break it at any time. Yet there was no other place to put 
it, for in spite of man's growing control of nature he was forced to 
follow the topography of the region in which he lived and labored. 

On the southern side of the Mohave Desert a little to the east of where 
the Los Angeles aqueduct crosses the mountains in its southward course, 
the record of an earthquake is preserved in unique fashion. The steep face 
of a terrace is covered with trees forty or fifty years old. Near the base 
the trees are bent in peculiar fashion. Their lower portions stand at 
right angles to the steeply sloping face of the terrace, but after a few 
feet the trunks bend upward and stand vertically. Clearly when these trees 
were young the terrace was not there. Then an earthquake came. One block 
of the earth's crust was dropped down while another was raised up. Along 
the dividing line a terrace was formed. The trees that happened to stand 
along the line were tilted and left in a slanting position on the sloping 
surface between the two parts of the earth's crust. They saw no reason to 
stop growing, but, turning their tips toward the sky, they bravely pushed 
upward. Thus they preserve in a striking way the record of this recent 
movement of the earth's crust. 

Volcanoes as well as earth movements have occurred on a grand scale within 
a few hundred years in the cordillera. Even where there is today no 
visible volcanic activity, recent eruptions have left traces as fresh as 
if they had occurred but yesterday. On the borders of the Grand Canyon of 
the Colorado one can see not only fresh cones of volcanic ash but lava 
which has poured over the edges of the cliffs and hardened while in the 
act of flowing. From Orizaba and Popocatepetl in Mexico through Mount San 
Francisco in Arizona, Lassen Peak and Mount Shasta in California, Mount 
Rainier with its glaciers in the Cascade Range of Washington, and Mount 
Wrangell in Alaska, the cordillera contains an almost unbroken chain of 
great volcanoes. All are either active at present or have been active 
within very recent times. In 1912 Mount Katmai, near the northwestern end 
of the volcanic chain, erupted so violently that it sent dust around the 
whole world. The presence of the dust caused brilliant sunsets second only 
to those due to Krakatoa in 1883. It also cut off so much sunlight that 
the effect was felt in measurements made by the Smithsonian Institution in 
the French provinces of North Africa. In earlier times, throughout the 
length of the cordillera great masses of volcanic material were poured out 
to form high plateaus like those of southern Mexico or of the Columbia 
River in Oregon. In Utah some of these have been lifted up so that heavy 
caps of lava now form isolated sheets topping lofty plateaus. There the 
lowland shepherds drive their sheep in summer and live in absolute 
isolation for months at a time. There, as everywhere, the cordillera bears 
the marks of mountains in the making, while the mountains of eastern 
America bear the marks of those that were made when the world was young. 

The geysers and hot springs of the Yellowstone are another proof of recent 
volcanic activity. They owe their existence to hot rocks which lie only a 
little way below the surface and which not long ago were molten lava. The 
terraces and platforms built by the geysers are another evidence that the 
cordillera is a region where the surface of the earth is still being 
shaped into new forms by forces acting from within. The physical features 
of the country are still in process of construction. 

In spite of the importance of the constructive forces which are still 
building up the mountains, much of the finest scenery of the cordillera is 
due to the destructive forces of erosion. The majestic Columbia Canyon, 
like others of its kind, is the work of running water. Glaciers also have 
done their part. During the glacial period the forces which control the 
paths of storms did not give to the cordillera region such an abundance of 
snow as was sifted down upon Laurentia. Therefore no such huge continental 
glaciers have flowed out over millions of square miles of lower country. 
Nevertheless among the mountains themselves the ice gouged and scraped and 
smoothed and at its lower edges deposited great moraines. Its work today 
makes the cliffs and falls of the Yosemite one of the world's most famous 
bits of scenery. This scenery is young and its beauty will pass in a short 
time as geology counts the years, for in natural scenery as in human life 
it is youth that makes beauty. The canyons, waterfalls, and geysers of the 
cordillera share their youth with the lakes, waterfalls, and rapids due to 
recent glaciation in the east. Nevertheless, though youth is the condition 
of most striking beauty, maturity and old age are the condition of 
greatest usefulness. The young cordillera with its mountains still in the 
making can support only a scanty population, whereas the old eastern 
mountains, with the lines of long life engraved upon every feature, open 
their arms to man and let him live and prosper. 

It is not enough that we should picture merely the four divisions of the 
land of our continent. We must see how the land meets the sea. In low 
latitudes in both the Old World and the New, the continents have tended to 
emerge farther and farther from the sea during recent geological times. 
Hence on the eastern side of both North and South America from New Jersey 
to Brazil the ocean is bordered for the most part by coastal plains, 
uplifted from the sea only a short time ago. On the mountainous western 
side of both continents, however, the sea bottom shelves downward so 
steeply that its emergence does not give rise to a plain but merely to a 
steep slope on which lie a series of old beaches several hundred and even 
one thousand feet above the present shore line. Such conditions are not 
favorable to human progress. The coastal plains produced by uplift of the 
land may be fertile and may furnish happy homes for man, but they do not 
permit ready access to the sea because they have no harbors. The chief 
harbor of Mexico at Vera Cruz is merely a little nick in the coast-line 
and could never protect a great fleet, even with the help of its 
breakwater. Where an enterprising city like Los Angeles lies on the 
uplifted Pacific coast, it must spend millions in wresting a harbor from 
the very jaws of the sea. 

In high latitudes in all parts of the world the land has recently been 
submerged beneath the sea. In some places, especially those like the 
coasts of Virginia and central California which lie in middle latitudes, a 
recent slight submergence has succeeded a previous large emergence. 
Wherever such sinking of the land has taken place, it has given rise to 
countless bays, gulfs, capes, islands, and fiords. The ocean water has 
entered the valleys and has drowned their lower parts. It has surrounded 
the bases of hills and left them as islands; it has covered low valleys 
and has created long sounds where traffic may pass with safety even in 
great storms. Though much land has thus been lost which would be good for 
agriculture, commerce has been wonderfully stimulated. Through Long Island 
Sound there pass each day hundreds of boats which again and again would 
suffer distress and loss if they were not protected from the open sea. It 
is no accident that of the eight largest metropolitan districts in the 
United States five have grown up on the shores of deep inlets which are 
due to the drowning of valleys. 

Nor must the value of scenery be forgotten in a survey such as this. Year 
by year we are learning that in this restless, strenuous American life of 
ours vacations are essential. We are learning, too, that the love of 
beauty is one of Nature's greatest healers. Regions like the coast of 
Maine and Puget Sound, where rugged land and life-giving ocean interlock, 
are worth untold millions because of their inspiring beauty. It is indeed 
marvelous that in the latitude of the northern United States and southern 
Canada so many circumstances favorable to human happiness are combined. 
Fertile soil, level plains, easy passage across the mountains, coal, iron, 
and other metals imbedded in the rocks, and a stimulating climate, all 
shower their blessings upon man. And with all these blessings goes the 
advantage of a coast which welcomes the mariner and brings the stimulus of 
foreign lands, while at the same time it affords rest and inspiration to 
the toilers here at home. 



CHAPTER IV.
THE GARMENT OF VEGETATION 

No part of the world can be truly understood without a knowledge of its 
garment of vegetation, for this determines not only the nature of the 
animal inhabitants but also the occupations of the majority of human 
beings. Although the soil has much to do with the character of vegetation, 
climate has infinitely more. It is temperature which causes the moss and 
lichens of the barren tundras in the far north to be replaced by orchids, 
twining vines, and mahogany trees near the equator. It is rainfall which 
determines that vigorous forests shall grow in the Appalachians in 
latitudes where grasslands prevail in the plains and deserts in the 
western cordillera. 

Forests, grass-lands, deserts, represent the three chief types of 
vegetation on the surface of the earth. Each is a response to certain well-
defined conditions of climate. Forests demand an abundance of moisture 
throughout the entire season of growth. Where this season lasts only three 
months the forest is very different from where it lasts twelve. But no 
forest can be vigorous if the ground habitually becomes dry for a 
considerable period during which the weather is warm enough for growth. 
Desert vegetation, on the other hand, which consists primarily of bushes 
with small, drought-resistant leaves, needs only a few irregular and 
infrequent showers in order to endure long periods of heat and drought. 
Discontinuity of moisture is the cause of deserts, just as continuity is 
the necessary condition of forest growth. Grasses prevail where the 
climatic conditions are intermediate between those of the forest and the 
desert. Their primary requisite is a short period of fairly abundant 
moisture with warmth enough to ripen their seeds. Unlike the trees of the 
forests, they thrive even though the wet period be only a fraction of the 
entire time that is warm enough for growth. Unlike the bushes of the 
desert, they rarely thrive unless the ground is well soaked for at least a 
few weeks. Most people think of forests as offering far more variety than 
either deserts or grass-lands. To them grass is just grass, while trees 
seem to possess individuality. In reality, however, the short turfy grass 
of the far north differs from the four-foot fronds of the bunchy saccaton 
grass of Arizona, and from the far taller tufts of the plumed pampas 
grass, much more than the pine tree differs from the palm. Deserts vary 
even more than either forests or grass-lands. The traveler in the Arizona 
desert, for example, has been jogging across a gravelly plain studded at 
intervals of a few yards with little bushes a foot high. The scenery is so 
monotonous and the noon sunshine so warm that he almost falls asleep. When 
he wakes from his daydream, so weird are his surroundings that he thinks 
he must be in one of the places to which Sindbad was carried by the roc. 
The trail has entered an open forest of joshuas, as the big tree yuccas 
are called in Arizona. Their shaggy trunks and uncouth branches are 
rendered doubly unkempt by swordlike, ashy-yellow dead leaves that double 
back on the trunk but refuse to fall to the ground. At a height of from 
twelve to twenty feet each arm of the many-branched candelabrum ends in a 
stiff rosette of gray-green spiky leaves as tough as hemp. Equally bizarre 
and much more imposing is a desert "stand" of giant suhuaros, great fluted 
tree-cacti thirty feet or more high. In spite of their size the suhuaros 
are desert types as truly as is sagebrush. 

In America the most widespread type of forest is the evergreen coniferous 
woodland of the north. Its pines, firs, spruces, hemlocks, and cedars 
which are really junipers, cover most of Canada together with northern New 
England and the region south of Lakes Huron and Superior. At its northern 
limit the forest looks thoroughly forlorn. The gnarled and stunted trees 
are thickly studded with half-dead branches bent down by the weight of 
snow, so that the lower ones sweep the ground, while the upper look tired 
and discouraged from their struggle with an inclement climate. Farther 
south, however, the forest loses this aspect of terrific struggle. In 
Maine, for example, it gives a pleasant impression of comfortable 
prosperity. Wherever the trees have room to grow, they are full and 
stocky, and even where they are crowded together their slender upspringing 
trunks look alert and energetic. The signs of death and decay, indeed, 
appear everywhere in fallen trunks, dead branches, and decayed masses of 
wood, but moss and lichens, twinflowers and bunchberries so quickly mantle 
the prostrate trees that they do not seem like tokens of weakness. Then, 
too, in every open space thousands of young trees bank their soft green 
masses so gracefully that one has an ever-present sense of pleased 
surprise as he comes upon this younger foliage out of the dim aisles among 
the bigger trees. 

Except on their southern borders the great northern forests are not good 
as a permanent home for man. The snow lies so late in the spring and the 
summers are so short and cool that agriculture does not prosper. As a home 
for the fox, marten, weasel, beaver, and many other fur-bearing animals, 
however, the coniferous forests are almost ideal. That is why the Hudson's 
Bay Company is one of the few great organizations which have persisted and 
prospered from colonial times to the present. As long ago as 1670 Charles 
II granted to Prince Rupert and seventeen noblemen and gentlemen a charter 
so sweeping that, aside from their own powers of assimilation, there was 
almost no limit to what the "Governor and Company of Adventurers of 
England trading into Hudson's Bay" might acquire. By 1749, nearly eighty 
years after the granting of the charter, however, the Company had only 
four or five forts on the coast of Hudson Bay, with about 120 regular 
employees. Nevertheless the poor Indians were so ignorant of the value of 
their furs and the consequent profits were so large that, after Canada had 
been ceded to Great Britain in 1763, a rival organization, the Northwest 
Fur Company of Montreal, was established. Then there began an era that was 
truly terrible for the Indians of the northern forest. In their eagerness 
to get the valuable furs the companies offered the Indians strong liquors 
in an abundance that ruined the poor red man, body and soul. Moreover the 
fur-bearing animals were killed not only in winter but during the breeding 
season. Many mother animals were shot and their little ones were left to 
die. Hence in a short time the wild creatures of the great northern forest 
were so scarce that the Indians well-nigh starved. 

In spite of this slaughter of fur-bearing animals, the same Company still 
draws fat dividends from the northern forest and its furry inhabitants. If 
the forest had been more habitable, it would long ago have been occupied 
by settlers, as have its warmer, southern portions, and the Company would 
have ceased to exist. Aside from the regions too cold or too dry to 
support any vegetation whatever, few parts of the world are more deadening 
to civilization than the forests of the far north. Near the northern limit 
of the great evergreen forest of North America wild animals are so rare 
that a family of hunting Indians can scarcely find a living in a thousand 
square miles. Today the voracious maw of the daily newspaper is eating the 
spruce and hemlock by means of relentless saws and rattling pulp-mills. In 
the wake of the lumbermen settlers are tardily spreading northward from 
the more favored tracts in northern New England and southern Canada. 
Nevertheless most of the evergreen forests of the north must always remain 
the home of wild animals and trappers, a backward region in which it is 
easy for a great fur company to maintain a practical monopoly. 

Outliers of the pine forest extend far down into the United States. The 
easternmost lies in part along the Appalachians and in part along the 
coastal plain from southern New Jersey to Texas. The coastal forest is 
unlike the other coniferous forests in two respects, for its distribution 
and growth are not limited by long winters but by sandy soil which quickly 
becomes dry. This drier southern pine forest lacks the beauty of its 
northern companion. Its trees are often tall and stately, but they are 
usually much scattered and are surrounded by stretches of scanty grass. 
There is no trace of the mossy carpet and dense copses of undergrowth that 
add so much to the picturesqueness of the forests farther north. The 
unkempt half-breed or Indian hunter is replaced by the prosaic gatherer of 
turpentine. As the man of the southern forests shuffles along in blue or 
khaki overalls and carries his buckets from tree to tree, he seems a dull 
figure contrasted with the active northern hunter who glides swiftly and 
silently from trap to trap on his rawhide snowshoes. Yet though the 
southern pine forest may be less picturesque than the northern, it is more 
useful to man. In spite of its sandy soil, much of this forest land is 
being reclaimed, and all will some day probably be covered by farms. 

Two other outliers of the northern evergreen forest extend southward along 
the cool heights of the Rocky Mountains and of the Pacific coast ranges of 
the United States. In the Olympic and Sierra Nevada ranges the most 
western outlier of this northern band of vegetation probably contains the 
most inspiring forests of the world. There grow the vigorous Oregon pines, 
firs, and spruces, and the still more famous Big Trees or sequoias. High 
on the sides of the Sierra above the yuccas, the live oaks, and the 
deciduous forest of the lower slopes, one meets these Big Trees. To come 
upon them suddenly after a long, rough tramp over the sunny lower slopes 
is the experience of a lifetime. Upward the great trees rise sheer one 
hundred feet without a branch. The huge fluted trunks encased in soft, red 
bark six inches or a foot thick are more impressive than the columns of 
the grandest cathedral. It seems irreverent to speak above a whisper. Each 
tree is a new wonder. One has to walk around it and study it to appreciate 
its enormous size. Where a tree chances to stand isolated so that one can 
see its full majesty, the sense of awe is tempered by the feeling that in 
spite of their size the trees have a beauty all their own. Lifted to such 
heights, the branches appear to be covered with masses of peculiarly soft 
and rounded foliage like the piled-up banks of a white cumulus cloud 
before a thunderstorm. At the base of such a tree the eye is caught by the 
sharp, triangular outline of one of its young progeny. The lower branches 
sweep the ground. The foliage is harsh and rough. In almost no other 
species of trees is there such a change from comparatively ungraceful 
youth to a superbly beautiful old age. 

The second great type of American forest is deciduous. The trees have 
broad leaves quite unlike the slender needles or overlapping scales of the 
northern evergreens. Each winter such forests shed their leaves. Among the 
mountains where the frosts come suddenly, the blaze of glory and 
brilliance of color which herald the shedding of the leaves are surpassed 
in no other part of the world. Even the colors of the Painted Desert in 
northern Arizona and the wonderful flowers of the California plains are 
less pleasing. In the Painted Desert the patches of red, yellow, gray-
blue, white, pale green, and black have a garish, almost repellent 
appearance. In California the flame-colored acres of poppies in some 
places, of white or yellow daisylike flowers in others, or of purple 
blossoms elsewhere have a softer expression than the bare soil of the 
desert. Yet they lack the delicate blending and harmony of colors which is 
the greatest charm of the autumn foliage in the deciduous forests. Even 
where the forests consist of such trees as birches, beeches, aspens, or 
sycamores, whose leaves merely turn yellow in the fall, the contrast 
between this color and the green tint of summer or the bare branches of 
winter adds a spice of variety which is lacking in other and more 
monotonous forests. 

From still other points of view the deciduous forest has an almost 
unequaled degree of variety. In one place it consists of graceful little 
birches whose white trunks shimmering in the twilight form just the 
background for ghosts. Contrast them with the oak forest half a mile away. 
There the sense of gracefulness gives place to a feeling of strength. The 
lines are no longer vertical but horizontal. The knotted elbows of the 
branches recall the keels of sturdy merchantmen of bygone days. The acorns 
under foot suggest food for the herds of half-wild pigs which roam among 
the trees in many a southern county. Of quite another type are the stately 
forests of the Appalachians where splendid magnolia and tulip trees spread 
their broad limbs aloft at heights of one hundred feet or more. 

Deciduous forests grow in the well-balanced regions where summer and 
winter approach equality, where neither is unduly long, and where neither 
is subject to prolonged drought. They extend southward from central New 
England, the Great Lakes, and Minnesota, to Mississippi, Arkansas, and 
eastern Texas. They predominate even in parts of such prairie States as 
Michigan, Indiana, southern Illinois, and southeastern Missouri. No part 
of the continent is more populous or more progressive than the regions 
once covered by deciduous forests. In the United States nearly sixty per 
cent of the inhabitants live in areas reclaimed from such forests. Yet the 
area of the forests is less than a quarter of the three million square 
miles that make up the United States. 

In their relation to human life the forests of America differ far more 
than do either grass-lands or deserts. In the far north, as we have seen, 
the pine forests furnish one of the least favorable environments. In 
middle latitudes the deciduous forests go to the opposite extreme and 
furnish the most highly favored of the homes of man. Still farther 
southward the increasing luxuriance of the forests, especially along the 
Atlantic coast, renders them less and less favorable to mankind. In 
southern Mexico and Yucatan the stately equatorial rain forest, the most 
exuberant of all types of vegetation and the most unconquerable by man, 
makes its appearance. It forms a discontinuous belt along the wet east 
coast and on the lower slopes of the mountains from southern Yucatan to 
Venezuela. Then it is interrupted by the grasslands of the Orinoco, but 
revives again in still greater magnificence in the Guianas. Thence it 
stretches not only along the coast but far into the little known interior 
of the Great Amazon basin, while southward it borders all the coast as far 
as southern Brazil. In the Amazon basin it reaches its highest development 
and becomes the crowning glory of the vegetable world, the most baffling 
obstacle to human progress. 

Except in its evil effects on man, the equatorial rain forest is the 
antithesis of the forests of the extreme north. The equatorial trees are 
hardwood giants, broad leaved, bright flowered, and often fruit-bearing. 
The northern trees are softwood dwarfs, needle-leaved, flowerless, and 
cone-bearing. The equatorial trees are often branchless for one hundred 
feet, but spread at the top into a broad overarching canopy which shuts 
out the sun perpetually. The northern trees form sharp little pyramids 
with low, widely spreading branches at the base and only short twigs at 
the top. In the equatorial forests there is almost no underbrush. The 
animals, such as monkeys, snakes, parrots, and brilliant insects, live 
chiefly in the lofty treetops. In the northern forests there is almost 
nothing except underbrush, and the foxes, rabbits, weasels, ptarmigans, 
and mosquitoes live close to the ground in the shelter of the branches. 
Both forests are alike, however, in being practically uninhabited by man. 
Each is peopled only by primitive nomadic hunters who stand at the very 
bottom in the scale of civilization. 

Aside from the rain forest there are two other types in tropical 
countries--jungle and scrub. The distinction between rain forest, jungle, 
and scrub is due to the amount and the season of rainfall. An 
understanding of this distinction not only explains many things in the 
present condition of Latin America but also in the history of pre-
Columbian Central America. Forests, as we have seen, require that the 
ground be moist throughout practically the whole of the season that is 
warm enough for growth. Since the warm season lasts throughout the year 
within the tropics, dense forests composed of uniformly large trees 
corresponding to our oaks, maples, and beeches will not thrive unless the 
ground is wet most of the time. Of course there may be no rain for a few 
weeks, but there must be no long and regularly recurrent periods of 
drought. Smaller trees and such species as the cocoanut palm are much less 
exacting and will flourish even if there is a dry period of several 
months. Still smaller, bushy species will thrive even when the rainfall 
lasts only two or three months. Hence where the rainy season lasts most of 
the year, rain forest prevails; where the rainy and dry seasons do not 
differ greatly in length, tropical jungle is the dominant growth; and 
where the rainy season is short and the dry season long, the jungle 
degenerates into scrub or bush. 

The relation of scrub, jungle, and rain forest is well illustrated in 
Yucatan, where the ancient Mayas reared their stately temples. On the 
northern coast the annual rainfall is only ten or fifteen inches and is 
concentrated largely in our summer months. There the country is covered 
with scrubby bushes six to ten feet high. These are beautifully green 
during the rainy season from June to October, but later in the year lose 
almost all their leaves. The landscape would be much like that of a thick, 
bushy pasture in the United States at the same season, were it not that in 
the late winter and early spring some of the bushes bear brilliant red, 
yellow, or white flowers. As one goes inland from the north coast of 
Yucatan the rainfall increases. The bushes become taller and denser, trees 
twenty feet high become numerous, and many rise thirty or forty feet or 
even higher. This is the jungle. Its smaller portions suggest a second 
growth of timber in the deciduous forests of the United States fifteen or 
twenty years after the cutting of the original forest, but here there is 
much more evidence of rapid growth. A few species of bushes and trees may 
remain green throughout the year, but during the dry season most of the 
jungle plants lose their leaves, at least in part. 

With every mile that one advances into the more rainy interior, the jungle 
becomes greener and fresher, the density of the lower growths increases, 
and the proportion of large trees becomes greater until finally jungle 
gives place to genuine forest. There many of the trees remain green 
throughout the year. They rise to heights of fifty or sixty feet even on 
the borders of their province, and at the top form a canopy so thick that 
the ground is shady most of the time. Even in the drier part of the year 
when some of the leaves have fallen, the rays of the sun scarcely reach 
the ground until nine or ten o'clock in the morning. Even at high noon the 
sunlight straggles through only in small patches. Long, sinuous lianas, 
often queerly braided, hang down from the trees; epiphytes and various 
parasitic growths add their strange green and red to the complex variety 
of vegetation. Young palms grow up almost in a day and block a trail which 
was hewn out with much labor only a few months before. Wherever the death 
of old trees forms an opening, a thousand seedlings begin a fierce race to 
reach the light. Everywhere the dominant note is intensely vigorous life, 
rapid growth, and quick decay. 

In their effect on man, the three forms of tropical forest are very 
different. In the genuine rain forest agriculture is almost impossible. 
Not only does the poor native find himself baffled in the face of Nature, 
but the white man is equally at a loss. Many things combine to produce 
this result. Chief among them are malaria and other tropical diseases. 
When a few miles of railroad were being built through a strip of tropical 
forest along the coast of eastern Guatemala, it was impossible to keep the 
laborers more than twenty days at a time; indeed, unless they were sent 
away at the end of three weeks, they were almost sure to be stricken with 
virulent malarial fevers from which many died. An equally potent enemy of 
agriculture is the vegetation itself. Imagine the difficulty of 
cultivating a garden in a place where the weeds grow all the time and 
where many of them reach a height of ten or twenty feet in a single year. 
Perhaps there are people in the world who might cultivate such a region 
and raise marvelous crops, but they are not the indolent people of 
tropical America; and it is in fact doubtful whether any kind of people 
could live permanently in the tropical forest and retain energy enough to 
carry on cultivation. Nowhere in the world is there such steady, damp heat 
as in these shadowy, windless depths far below the lofty tops of the rain 
forest. Nowhere is there greater disinclination to work than among the 
people who dwell in this region. Consequently in the vast rain forests of 
the Amazon basin and in similar small forests as far north as Central 
America, there are today practically no inhabitants except a mere handful 
of the poorest and most degraded people in the world. Yet in ancient times 
the northern border of the rain forest was the seat of America's most 
advanced civilization. The explanation of this contradiction will appear 
later.(*)

(* See Chapter 5, Aztecs)

Tropical jungle borders the rain forest all the way from southern Mexico 
to southern Brazil. It treats man far better than does the rain forest. In 
marked contrast to its more stately neighbor, it contains abundant game. 
Wild fruits ripen at almost all seasons. A few banana plants and palm 
trees will well-nigh support a family. If corn is planted in a clearing, 
the return is large in proportion to the labor. So long as the population 
is not too dense, life is so easy that there is little to stimulate 
progress. Hence, although the people of the jungle are fairly numerous, 
they have never played much part in history. Far more important is the 
role of those living in the tropical lands where scrub is the prevailing 
growth. In our day, for example, few tropical lowlands are more 
progressive than the narrow coastal strip of northern Yucatan. There on 
the border between jungle and scrub the vegetation does not thrive 
sufficiently to make life easy for the chocolate-colored natives. Effort 
is required if they would make a living, yet the effort is not so great as 
to be beyond the capacity of the indolent people of the tropics. 

Leaving the forests, let us step out into the broad, breezy grass-lands. 
One would scarcely expect that a journey poleward out of the forest of 
northern Canada would lead to an improvement in the conditions of human 
life, yet such is the case. Where the growing season becomes so short that 
even the hardiest trees disappear, grassy tundras replace the forest. By 
furnishing food for such animals as the musk-ox, they are a great help to 
the handful of scattered Indians who dwell on the northern edge of the 
forest. In summer, when the animals grow fat on the short nutritious 
grass, the Indians follow them out into the open country and hunt them 
vigorously for food and skins to sustain life through the long dreary 
winter. In many cases the hunters would advance much farther into the 
grass-lands were it not that the abundant musk-oxen tempt the Eskimo of 
the seacoast also to leave their homes and both sides fear bloody 
encounters. 

With the growth of civilization the advantage of the northern grass-lands 
over the northern forests becomes still more apparent. The domestic 
reindeer is beginning to replace the wild musk-ox. The reindeer people, 
like the Indian and Eskimo hunters, must be nomadic. Nevertheless their 
mode of life permits them to live in much greater numbers and on a much 
higher plane of civilization than the hunters. Since they hunt the 
furbearing animals in the neighboring forests during the winter, they 
diminish the food supply of the hunters who dwell permanently in the 
forest, and thus make their life still more difficult. The northern 
forests bid fair to decline in population rather than increase. In this 
New World of ours, strange as it may seem, the almost uninhabited forest 
regions of the far north and of the equator are probably more than twice 
as large as the desert areas with equally sparse population. 

South of the tundras the grass-lands have a still greater advantage over 
the forests. In the forest region of the Laurentian highland abundant snow 
lasts far into the spring and keeps the ground so wet and cold that no 
crops can be raised. Moreover, because of the still greater abundance of 
snow in former times, the largest of ice sheets, as we have seen, 
accumulated there during the Glacial Period and scraped away most of the 
soil. The grassy plains, on the contrary, are favored not only by a deep, 
rich soil, much of which was laid down by the ice, but by the relative 
absence of snow in winter and the consequent rapidity with which the 
ground becomes warm in the spring. Hence the Canadian plains from the 
United States boundary northward to latitude 57 degrees contain a 
prosperous agricultural population of over a million people, while the far 
larger forested areas in the same latitude support only a few thousand. 

The question is often asked why, in a state of nature, trees are so scarce 
on the prairies--in Iowa, for instance--although they thrive when planted. 
In answer we are often told that up to the middle of the nineteenth 
century such vast herds of buffaloes roamed the prairies that seedling 
trees could never get a chance to grow. It is also said that prairie fires 
sweeping across the plains destroyed the little trees whenever they 
sprouted. Doubtless the buffaloes and the fires helped to prevent forest 
growth, but another factor appears to be still more important. All the 
States between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains receive much 
more rain in summer than in winter. But as the soil is comparatively dry 
in the spring when the trees begin their growth, they are handicapped. 
They could grow if nothing else interfered with them, just as peas will 
grow in a garden if the weeds are kept out. If peas, however, are left 
uncared for, the weeds gain the upper hand and there are no peas the 
second year. If the weeds are left to contend with grass, the grass in the 
end prevails. In the eastern forest region, if the grass be left to 
itself, small trees soon spring up in its midst. In half a century a field 
of grass goes back to forest because trees are especially favored by the 
climate. In the same way in the prairies, grass is especially favored, for 
it is not weakened by the spring drought, and it grows abundantly until it 
forms the wonderful stretches of waving green where the buffalo once grew 
fat. Moreover the fine glacial soil of the prairies is so clayey and 
compact that the roots of trees cannot easily penetrate it. Since grasses 
send their roots only into the more friable upper layers of soil, they 
possess another great advantage over the trees. 

Far to the south of the prairies lie the grass-lands of tropical America, 
of which the Banos of the Orinoco furnish a good example. Almost 
everywhere their plumed grasses have been left to grow undisturbed by the 
plough, and even grazing animals are scarce. These extremely flat plains 
are flooded for months in the rainy season from May to October and are 
parched in the dry season that follows. As trees cannot endure such 
extremes, grasses are the prevailing growth. Elsewhere the nature of the 
soil causes many other grassy tracts to be scattered among the tropical 
jungle and forest. Trees are at a disadvantage both in porous, sandy 
soils, where the water drains away too rapidly, and in clayey soil, where 
it is held so long that the ground is saturated for weeks or months at a 
time. South of the tropical portion of South America the vast pampas of 
Argentina closely resemble the North American prairies and the drier 
plains to the west of them. Grain in the east and cattle in the west are 
fast causing the disappearance of those great tussocks of tufted grasses 
eight or nine feet high which hold among grasses a position analogous to 
that of the Big Trees of California among trees of lower growth. 

It is often said that America has no real deserts. This is true in the 
sense that there are no regions such as are found in Asia and Africa where 
one can travel a hundred miles at a stretch and scarcely see a sign of 
vegetation-nothing but barren gravel, graceful wavy sand dunes, hard wind-
swept clay, or still harder rock salt broken into rough blocks with 
upturned edges. In the broader sense of the term, however, America has an 
abundance of deserts--regions which bear a thin cover of bushy vegetation 
but are too dry for agriculture without irrigation. On the north such 
deserts begin in southern Canada where a dry region abounding in small 
salt lakes lies at the eastern base of the Rocky Mountains. In the United 
States the deserts lie almost wholly between the Sierra Nevada and the 
Rocky Mountain ranges, which keep out any moisture that might come from 
either the west or the east. Beginning on the north with the sagebrush 
plateau of southern Washington, the desert expands to a width of seven 
hundred miles in the gray, sage-covered basins of Nevada and Utah. In 
southern California and Arizona the sage-brush gives place to smaller 
forms like the saltbush, and the desert assumes a sterner aspect. Next 
comes the cactus desert extending from Arizona far south into Mexico. One 
of the notable features of the desert is the extreme heat of certain 
portions. Close to the Nevada border in southern California, Death Valley, 
250 feet below sea-level, is the hottest place in America. There alone 
among the American regions familiar to the writer does one have that 
feeling of intense, overpowering aridity which prevails so often in the 
deserts of Arabia and Central Asia. Some years ago a Weather Bureau 
thermometer was installed in Death Valley at Furnace Creek, where the only 
flowing water in more than a hundred miles supports a depressing little 
ranch. There one or two white men, helped by a few Indians, raise alfalfa, 
which they sell at exorbitant prices to deluded prospectors searching for 
riches which they never find. Though the terrible heat ruins the health of 
the white men in a year or two, so that they have to move away, they have 
succeeded in keeping a thermometer record for some years. No other 
properly exposed, out-of-door thermometer in the United States, or perhaps 
in the world, is so familiar with a temperature of 100 degrees F. or more. 
During the period of not quite fifteen hundred days from the spring of 
1911 to May, 1915, a maximum temperature of 100 degrees F. or more was 
reached on five hundred and forty-eight days, or more than one-third of 
the time. On July 10, 1913, the mercury rose to 134 degrees F. and touched 
the top of the tube. How much higher it might have gone no one can tell. 
That day marks the limit of temperature yet reached in this country 
according to official records. In the summer of 1914 there was one night 
when the thermometer dropped only to 114 degrees F., having been 128 
degrees F. at noon. The branches of a peppertree whose roots had been 
freshly watered wilted as a flower wilts when broken from the stalk. 

East and south of Death Valley lies the most interesting section of the 
American desert, the so-called succulent desert of southern Arizona and 
northern Mexico. There in greatest profusion grow the cacti, perhaps the 
latest and most highly specialized of all the great families of plants. 
There occur such strange scenes as the "forests" of suhuaros, whose giant 
columns have already been described. Their beautiful crowns of large white 
flowers produce a fruit which is one of the mainstays of the Papagos and 
other Indians of the regions. In this same region the yucca is highly 
developed, and its tall stalks of white or greenish flowers make the 
desert appear like a flower garden. In fact this whole desert, thanks to 
light rains in summer as well as winter, appears extraordinarily green and 
prosperous. Its fair appearance has deceived many a poor settler who has 
vainly tried to cultivate it. 

Farther south the deserts of America are largely confined to plateaus like 
those of Mexico and Peru or to basins sheltered on all sides from rain-
bearing winds. In such basins the suddenness of the transition from one 
type of vegetation to another is astonishing. In Guatemala, for instance, 
the coast is bordered by thick jungle which quickly gives place to 
magnificent rain forest a few miles inland. This continues two or three 
score miles from the coast until a point is reached where mountains begin 
to obstruct the rain-bearing trade-winds. At once the rain forest gives 
place to jungle; in a few miles jungle in its turn is replaced by scrub; 
and shortly the scrub degenerates to mere desert bush. Then in another 
fifty miles one rises to the main plateau passing once more through scrub. 
This time the scrub gives place to grass-lands diversified by deciduous 
trees and pines which give the country a distinctly temperate aspect. On 
such plateaus the chief civilization of the tropical Latin-American 
countries now centers. In the past, however, the plateaus were far 
surpassed by the Maya lowlands of Yucatan and Guatemala. 

We are wont to think of deserts as places where the plants are of few 
kinds and not much crowded. As a matter of fact, an ordinary desert 
supports a much greater variety of plants than does either a forest or a 
prairie. The reason is simple. Every desert contains wet spots near 
springs or in swamps. Such places abound with all sorts of water-loving 
plants. The deserts also contain a few valleys where the larger streams 
keep the ground moist at all seasons. In such places the variety of trees 
is as great as in many forests. Moreover almost all deserts have short 
periods of abundant moisture. 

At such times the seeds of all sorts of little annual plants, including 
grasses, daisies, lupines, and a host of others, sprout quickly, and give 
rise to a carpet of vegetation as varied and beautiful as that of the 
prairie. Thus the desert has not only its own peculiar bushes and 
succulents but many of the products of vegetation in swamps, grasslands, 
and forests. Though much of the ground is bare in the desert, the plants 
are actually crowded together as closely as possible. The showers of such 
regions are usually so brief that they merely wet the surface. At a depth 
of a foot or more the soil of many deserts never becomes moist from year's 
end to year's end. It is useless for plants to send their roots deep down 
under such circumstances, for they might not reach water for a hundred 
feet. Their only recourse is to spread horizontally. The farther they 
spread, the more water they can absorb after the scanty showers. Hence the 
plants of the desert throttle one another by extending their roots 
horizontally, just as those of the forest kill one another by springing 
rapidly upward and shutting out the light. 

Vegetation, whether in forests, grasslands, or deserts, is the primary 
source of human sustenance. Without it man would perish miserably; and 
where it is deficient, he cannot rise to great heights in the scale of 
civilization. Yet strangely enough the scantiness of the vegetation of the 
deserts was a great help in the ascent of man. Only in dry regions could 
primitive man compete with nature in fostering the right kind of 
vegetation. In such regions arose the nations which first practised 
agriculture. There man became comparatively civilized while his 
contemporaries were still nomadic hunters in the grasslands and the 
forests.