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Van der Donck believed that North America was only “several hundred miles” across, and apparently assumed that all its inhabitants were exactly like the Haudenosaunee. He was wrong about the first belief, but in a sense correct about the second: from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Hudson’s Bay to the Río Grande, the Haudenosaunee and almost every other Indian group shaped their environment, at least in part, by fire.

Early in the last century, ecologists discovered the phenomenon of “succession,” the more or less well-defined sequence by which ecosystems fill in open land. A textbook example occurred after the eruption in 1980 of Mount St. Helens, in southern Washington State, which inundated more than two hundred square miles with magma, volcanic ash, and mud. Surviving plants sprang quickly to life, sometimes resprouting within weeks. Then colonizing species like lupine appeared, preparing the ground for the return of the grasses. Fifteen years after the eruption, the ravaged slopes were dotted with trees and woody shrubs: red alder, lodgepole pine, willow bush. Here and there gleamed the waxy red boles of madrone. Forest giants like hemlock, Douglas fir, and Sitka spruce waited in the wings. In the classic successional course, each suite of plants replaces its predecessor, until the arrival of the final, “climax” ecosystem, usually tall forest.

If ecological succession were unstoppable, the continents would be covered by climax-stage vegetation: a world of great trees, dark and silent. Early-succession species would have vanished. Luckily for these species, succession is often interrupted—Nature does not move in lockstep. Windstorms, lightning fires, landslides, volcanic eruptions, and other natural calamities knock down trees and open up the forest, or prevent open country from turning into forestland. A few years or decades of tranquility may see grasses replaced by shrubs and trees which are in turn flattened by a violent thunderstorm, permitting the grass to thrive again. After a while, the shrubs and trees return, only to be wiped out by a flood. And so on. Different types of disturbance shape different ecosystems: floods in the Nile, landslides on the steep pitches of the Andes, hurricanes in the Yucatán Peninsula. For more than ten thousand years, most North American ecosystems have been dominated by fire.

In the Greek myth of Prometheus the gift of fire forever severs humankind from the natural world—the burning torch is the icon of the constructed and artificial. On the mundane, factual level, though, this resonant tale is wrong: Nature has always used fire as a mallet to beat landscapes into other forms. Prometheus only helped human beings to pick up the handle. “The earth,” wrote the pioneering fire ecologist Edward V. Komarek, “born in fire, baptized by lightning, since before life’s beginning has been and is, a fire planet.” Set off by lightning, wildfires reset the ecological clock, dialing the array of plants and animals back a few successional stages. Fire benefits plants that need sunlight, while inhibiting those that love the cool gloaming of the forest floor; it encourages the animals that need those plants even as it discourages others; in turn, predator populations rise and fall. In this way fire regulates ecological character.

Fire is a dominating factor in many if not most terrestrial landscapes. It has two main sources: lightning and Homo sapiens. In North America, lightning fire is most common in the western mountains. Elsewhere, though, Indians controlled it—at least until contact, and in many places long after. In the Northeast, Indians always carried a deerskin pouch full of flints, Thomas Morton reported in 1637, which they used “to set fire of the country in all places where they come.” The flints ignited torches, which were as important to the hunt as bows and arrows. Deer in the Northeast; alligators in the Everglades; buffalo in the prairies; grasshoppers in the Great Basin; rabbits in California; moose in Alaska: