1.5 to 2 million Indians lived in the forests of the southeast when Europeans arrived, mostly in the river valleys, not the pine barrens

•  they used the longleaf forests for wood
• and they burned to keep the forest open
• Steven Pyne, a historian specializing in forest fire, argues that Indian burning modified the ecosystem
• Earley emphasizes more that their abandoned cleared fields and village sites were part of what early settlers and explorers saw
• the tribes who had lived there had been replaced by the 1770s by refugees from a variety of tribes with a modified culture herding cattle on horseback
• so maps of tribes are not reliable, and genetic testing gives still more confusing results
  

Which is the "original" forest?

• 20,000 years ago when the climate was different and fires came from lightening mostly in the summer
  
• 10,000 years ago when Indians set fires in the winter
• Earley leaves it as "we can't know" whether Indian burning was widespread enough to shape the ecosystem
• it doesn't work to divide humans vs. nature, they are interwoven in complex ways
  

The first European settlers in the Piney Woods free-ranged cattle and hogs

• image is from Florida in the 1890s
  
• swamps provided winter food so cattle reproduced with little human attention
• they were rounded up and branded once a year
  
• then some were driven to market in Charleston or other cities
• ranchers did burn the forest to encourage grass growth, but cattle damaged the native grasses
  
• in 1850 the southeastern states had 6 million people, about 6 million cattle, and almost 12 million hogs

Changing exploitation of the forest:
1. Mississipian, farming villages who hunt and gather firewood in the forest
2. ranching and herding cattle, both Europeans and Native Americans
3. naval stores