Did Native Americans cause local extinctions of cougars and wolves thru forest burning?

Fire.......................it causes many simultaneous emotions to come pouring through your brain............terror, destruction, fear, loss are the common initial feelings...................For a few of us,  regeneration and rebirth might come to mind when we hear the word fire. Landscape Ecologists and Foresters are very familiar with the regenerating benefits that can result from fire including the scarification of certain  tree, flower and shrub seeds that require the enormous heat of forest and prarie fire to generate their bursting open and taking root.

But how did fire influence the behavior of Native Americans prior to Europeans arriving to our shores at the beginning of the 16th Century? While there is contradictory evidence of how extensively Indians used fire to shape their surroundings, most Researchers have concluded that around their camps and villages, Indians to some extent utilized fire to girdle stands of trees for crop planting as well as creating "forest edges" to encourage Deer browse which improved hunting.

The question that I pose(and examined in some fashion in the 5 previous postings that you perused on this blog) is whether Indian use of fire to drive game increased so dramatically during the Colonial Fur trading period that it exponentially hastened the  destruction of our trophic, keystone Cougar and Wolf predators East of the Mississippi River.

As Calvin Martin comments in his award winning KEEPERS OF THE GAME(U. OF CALIFORNIA PRESS 1978)...."The nature of the relationship between Indian and animal was essentially a contract of mutual obligation and courtesy. When European epidemic disease began to ravage them, destroying perhaps 90 percent of the native population, Indians took it to be a conspiracy that the forest animals were causing their maladies. When their own Medicine Men were unable to cure these diseases, the stage was set for a war of retaliation-the sacred agreement with the Keepers of the Game having been broken.

As Jon T. Coleman concludes in his beautifully written VICIOUS: Wolves and men in America(Yale U. Press 2004)....Indians did not hunt wolves and cougars indiscriminately. Their trapping was a by-product of the Indians hunting deer. The Algonquians snared deer after the harvest in the fall, many times burning a portion of the woods(driving the deer in a certain direction in the process), each man having a 3 or 4 mile responsibility setting 30 or 40 snares per locale. If when coming to a particular snare they found a wolf or cougar feasting on one of the Indians trapped deer, they would smash the cougar and wolves dead, feeling that they were justified to kill  these animal predators as they were "robbing" they, the human animal predators of their sustenance.

The conclusions that many researchers have reached regarding intentional use of fire by Indians can be summed in Kurt Fesenmyer's recently released RECONSTRUCTING HOLOCENE FIRE HISTORY IN A SOUTHERN APPALACHIAN FOREST USING SOIL CHARCOAL(Ecological Society of America 2010)....."Fires appear to have become more frequent and widespread ca. 1000 years ago coinciding with the appearance of Woodland Native Americans in the area.

There are some Landscape Ecologists like my friends Emily Russell and David Foster who strongly feel that Indian set fires were not annual or biannual arrangements..........................."There is no strong evidence that Indians purposely burned large areas  of the forested Northeast frequently. The presence of Indians did, however, undoubtedly increase the frequency of fires above the low numbers caused by lightning. The increase from the "natural fires" was greatest in areas near Indian habitations. In these areas, fires and firewood gathering may have thinned the timber, creating an open forest free of undergrowth. In most areas climate and soils probably played the major role in determining the forests.....in the forest at large, fires accidentally caused by Indians merely augmented the number of natural fires."--Emily Russell......................We do not conclude from our results that Native Americans did not have a significant impact on the local occurrence of fire or vegetation composition in New England. However, their effects may have been to small to be easily detected in the palaeoecological record.--David Foster.........................Raup was no doubt right that the entirety of Southern New England was never regularly burned......I have limited the claims of my argument(indian burning of the forest) to the local vicinity of village sites--William Cronon.

The fur trade, disease, the arrival of garden crops(corn, bean, squash--"the three sisters" as the Indians called them) causing fixed settlements rather than historic nomadic hunting.............these and many more might have heightened the use of fire by Indians when hunting................with the possible conclusion that their totem animal predators(Cougar, Bear, Wolf) were exterminated at a faster pace than would otherwise have been had we Europeans not colonized North America.

click here for Emily Russell's INDIAN-SET FIRES