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By Root 1914 0

of indigenous fire faded. By the twentieth century biologists were stoutly denying its existence. The “open, park-like woods” seen by early settlers, Harvard naturalist Hugh Raup asserted in 1937, were not caused by fire; they “have been, from time immemorial, characteristic of vast areas in North America.” Raup’s summary description of the idea that they were due to regular, wide-scale Indian burning? “Inconceivable.” “It is at least a fair assumption,” a widely used college forestry textbook remarked in 1973, “that no habitual or systematic burning was carried out by Indians.” In the western United States, the geographer Thomas R. Vale wrote in 2002, the “modest” Indian population “modified only a tiny fraction of the total landscape for their everyday living needs.”

Vale is in the minority now. Spurred in part by historians like Cronon, most scientists have changed their minds about Indian fire. Using clever laboratory techniques, they have convinced themselves that in most cases the tribal lore and old chronicles were right all along: Indian embers were sparkling in the American night for centuries before the Sumerians climbed their ziggurats.

Carrying their flints and torches, Native Americans were living in balance with Nature—but they had their thumbs on the scale. Shaped for their comfort and convenience, the American landscape had come to fit their lives like comfortable clothing. It was a highly successful and stable system, if “stable” is the appropriate word for a regime that involves routinely enshrouding miles of countryside in smoke and ash. And it was a system that Indians were abandoning in ever-rising numbers at the time when Europeans came.

TEN THOUSAND MOUNDS

Anyone who traveled up the Mississippi in 1100 A.D. would have seen it looming in the distance: a four-level earthen mound bigger than the Great Pyramid of Giza. Around it like echoes were as many as 120 smaller mounds, some topped by tall wooden palisades, which were in turn ringed by a network of irrigation and transportation canals; carefully located fields of maize; and hundreds of red-and-white-plastered wood homes with high-peaked, deeply thatched roofs like those on traditional Japanese farms. Located near the confluence of the Missouri, Illinois, and Mississippi Rivers, the Indian city of Cahokia was a busy port. Canoes flitted like hummingbirds across its waterfront: traders bringing copper and mother-of-pearl from faraway places; hunting parties bringing such rare treats as buffalo and elk; emissaries and soldiers in long vessels bristling with weaponry; workers ferrying wood from upstream for the ever hungry cookfires; the ubiquitous fishers with their nets and clubs. Covering five square miles and housing at least fifteen thousand people, Cahokia was the biggest concentration of people north of the Río Grande until the eighteenth century.

Away from the riverside, Cahokia was hardly less busy and imposing. Its focal point was the great mound—Monks Mound, it is now called, named after a group of Trappists who lived nearby in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Around its sides rushed a flow of men, their body paint and tattoos obscured by dust from the hardened, brick-like mud that lay underneath the entire city. Some built new mounds or maintained the old; others hauled wood for fuel and houses or carried water in leather pouches or weeded the maize fields with stone hoes. Women carried stacks of woven mats, baskets of fish and produce, yowling children. Cooksmoke chimneyed to the sky. Standards made of painted animal skins flapped everywhere. Anyone who has visited Siena or Venice knows how surprisingly noisy a city without engines can be. At peak times, given the right wind conditions, Cahokia must have been audible for miles.

Monks Mound opens onto a plaza a thousand feet long. In its southwest corner is a pair of mounds, one conical, one square. One day I climbed up their grassy sides at sunset. Hardly any other visitors were there. The humped outline of the vast heap of earth emerged from the empty green like a powerful