One of the biggest US founding mythologies is the idea of an “untouched wilderness.” A core story that almost all of US history is then built upon. The “pilgrims” landed in an untouched wilderness and built something out of nothing. Lewis and Clark “blazed paths” through the “wilderness.” The pioneers went west into a wilderness and “tamed” the wilderness. They shaped the “unused” land the “Indians” had done nothing with and built this “great nation” from the wild.
You’ll find this story in children's books, chapter books, educational resources, textbooks, documentaries, teacher resources and lesson plans, online resources and articles, etc. It is literally everywhere. I see it in basically every single curriculum that I review, so I decided to post this.
It is completely, 100%, a myth. There is no truth to it. It is a foundational US origin story, but it has absolutely no basis in reality.
Where did this myth come from? It comes from a mixture of colonial ideology, romanticism, and legal policies created to erase Indigenous stewardship.
Colonial ideologies - after early Spanish contact and genocide, diseases spread throughout North America far beyond first contacts. Many died from genocide as well, which is usually discounted by the disease narrative. Make no mistake, millions of deaths were caused by genocide and conditions created to destroy people - disruption of food systems and subsistence food production, disruption of trade networks, malnutrition, starvation, loss of land and resources, loss of will to live, and enslavement. All of this also helped the diseases kill more people. All of this caused what has been called the “great dying,” in which so many Indigenous people died that the temperature of the earth cooled. By the time the English began invading and committing genocide, they were witnessing the aftermath of this - seeing previous cities, farms, and towns grown over and thought it was the natural state of things. Indigenous societies, politics, and power still had a MASSIVE influence on the colonies and the formation of the US, but the land the English invaded in the 1600s wasn’t the same as what it had been 100 years earlier.
Romanticism - if early invaders had told their families and friends in Europe the truth about Indigenous people, the land, and the colonies…far less people would have come. They had to “hype” it up quite a bit to sell the idea of coming to the Americas. Think about it...if someone wrote home saying "This place is terrible. We're starving, we have no idea how to farm or build adequate housing, the Natives don't want us here but sometimes they trade with us even though we keep stealing from them, everyone is dying...don't come." of course no one would send their families!
They needed romanticized stories of “virgin land” and “wilderness” to spread throughout Europe to attract more colonists. Later in the 17 and 1800s, people like John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt sold the idea of “virgin land” as central to an “American Identity.” They used the idea of wilderness to not only displace Indigenous people from their lands to create national parks, but also to create a symbol of purity and national pride. It was also used to reinforce racist ideologies and environmental hierarchies.
Policies - The Wilderness Act of 1964 then essentially erased thousands of years of Indigenous land management and legally codified the mythology of “untouched wilderness” into US policy. This is just one example of legal policies that perpetuated this myth.
Now we will examine the realities of this land - This was not an “untouched wilderness.”
The number of people living in the Americas was somewhere between 75 to 112 million! This was about one fifth of the world’s population in the 1400s. There were more people living in the Americas than in Europe during Europe’s Middle Ages. Mesoamerica was one of the most densely populated places on Earth. There may have been over 1 million people living on the island of Hispaniola at one point. Estimates say 10 to 18 million people were living north of what is now called Mexico. We may never know how many people were actually living in North America at the time, but we do know that it was very populated.
We often hear that “the Indians lived in harmony with the land” or we simply “lived off the land” as is, with no mention of Indigenous landscape engineering - shaping the land to meet our needs in a way that doesn’t harm the natural systems. It’s always “the Indians lived with what the land gave them” and not “Indigenous people shaped the land to meet their needs." It should be the latter. Indigenous people were and are stewards of the land, not passive like the myths, but active and working within natural systems.
Agricultural practices covered more than ⅔ of what is now the US. The other ⅓ would be areas that don’t support agriculture like the arctic and areas like Death Valley. Many societies were hunter-farmer societies, rather than the often taught “hunter gatherers.” Around ⅔ of the world’s produce was originally cultivated by farmers and scientists in the Americas (North and South). The rest of the world did not have potatoes, tomatoes, corn, squash, chocolate, vanilla, several types of beans, chili peppers, and many more foods before the 1500s. Foods that were originally grown in the Americas have influenced food in all cultures of the world since then. Think about Thai food without chili peppers, Italian food without tomatoes, and French creme brulee without vanilla.
“But indigenous agriculture didn’t look like European agriculture, so colonizers did not recognize it as such. Indigenous agriculture largely was designed to work as a natural system, with the curves and fluctuations of the land. In Europe, agriculture always left scars on the land and was rigid and structured. Colonizers thought the land they encountered was natural. They had no understanding of indigenous practices and technologies that had shaped it, because they did not recognize indigenous people as capable of landscape engineering.”How is “Wilderness” a Colonial Construct? — Organeyez | by Naira de Gracia | Medium
When the English colonizers invaded the east coast, they noted that they could drive their horse drawn wagons through the forest without obstruction, unlike the untended forests in Europe. They did not recognize the human touch needed to create such conditions due to racism.
Agroforestry - forest farming - combines agricultural knowledges and practices with forestry technologies and management. One of the most famous examples in the Americas is the Amazon Rainforest - it is literally a man-made food forest. It did not occur naturally. Another great example is the forest gardens/food forests of the Pacific Northwest, in which these deliberately altered and managed forests promoted a much higher biodiversity than surrounding forest areas. Methods included controlled burns of undergrowth and promoting some forests natural fire cycles, soil enhancement, development of forest gardens which mimics natural ecosystems, and alley cropping. Ancient Wisdom Meets Modern Farming: Indigenous Agroforestry Success Stories - CSA Farm Directory
Pacific Northwest's ‘forest gardens’ were deliberately planted by Indigenous people | Science | AAAS
The great grasslands of the west are also man made. Small pockets of grassland existed naturally, they were expanded by humans and carefully managed over thousands of years to benefit the bison and other animals of the region.
“With careful use of fire they could manage wild herds of bison without needing to domesticate them. In other words they managed the bison’s habitat rather than domesticating the bison. In many ways it was a much superior strategy. This because productive habitat then becomes full of a large variety of useful animals and plants. The most significant type of environmental change brought about by Pre-columbian human activity was the modification of vegetation. … Vegetation was primarily altered by the clearing of forest and by intentional burning. Natural fires certainly occurred but varied in frequency and strength in different habitats. The result of clearing and burning was, in many regions, the conversion of forest to grassland, savanna, scrub, open woodland, and forest with grassy openings.” -William M. Denevan, Imperfect balance: landscape transformations in the Precolumbian Americas
By modifying the vegetation and habitat to favor bison, they insured their food supply without needing to domesticate them.
Urban development also altered and shaped the land. Most Native nations were not historically nomadic, which is a common myth. Most stayed in one place and farmed, developed towns and cities, built roads, etc. Many also worked with metals - including copper, gold, silver, tin, bronze, platinum, and even a little iron from meteorites in Alaska.
Some of the largest cities in the world were in the Americas in the 13 and 1400s. These cities were full of culture, learning, and advancements for society. They were centers of trade for entire regions of the Americas. People developed arts, music, dance, and ceremonies. Cities and communities developed economies as well as political and social structures. There were vast trade networks that spanned both continents. Some cities and towns built road systems. Urban development also included agricultural practices, agroforestry, land management, and animal management. Mound builders built large earthen pyramids and effigy mounds which enhanced the natural landscape and also for utilitarian purposes like avoiding annual flooding (as well as religious, ceremonial, social, and political purposes). Ancestral Puebloans built large cities of adobe, consisting of multi-story buildings like apartments, irrigation canals so they could farm in the desert, and road systems.
Water systems - many nations developed advanced irrigation systems - rain catchment systems, step farming, dug canals (can still see some 1000+ yr old canals in the southwest), built aqueducts, etc. The Maya even developed advanced water purification systems. “Native people had running water when Europeans were still pooping in their bedrooms.” - Laura Martinez, MA
Even nomadic nations shaped the land - many practiced a form of flood plain agriculture - planting at certain times of the year in flood planes with rich soil, leaving the area, and coming back months later to ripe crops. Some practiced controlled burning and animal management as mentioned above.
A few stories from history from a different perspective that show the lack of "wilderness":
After invading Peru, Hernando de Soto decided to invade the southeast part of what is now the United States. He was already known among his men as being a brutal “Indian killer.” In 1539, de Soto came to the area now known as Florida with a fleet of ships and an army of soldiers. Along with soldiers, he brought Catholic priests and average people from Spain. They immediately enslaved people from Timucuan, Muskogean, and Siouan nations. They traveled north through Florida attacking and fighting the nations they came across. De Soto continued to capture people to enslave as he went. They thought that there was gold northeast of where they were, so they traveled up through modern day Georgia. He continued north through South Carolina and North Carolina and then turned west to Tennessee. De Soto came across great mound cities when he invaded the southeast. Some people think that the mound cities had already declined, or been abandoned, before the Europeans came, but de Soto described these cities and the people in his writing. He saw them thriving. These cities did not decline until the 1600s, after Europeans came and did things like De Soto as well as spread diseases. De Soto burnt down whole towns and killed even peaceful people who approached them.
When the English colonized the southeast and created colonies in the 1600-1700s, the area still had many Native nations, but the mound cities were abandoned and the people had dispersed into the Southeastern nations like the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, etc. by that time. What the English saw was what they called "wilderness" because the cities had been forced to disperse before they arrived.
In 1534 a French invader named Jacques Cartier traveled down the St. Lawrence River from the Atlantic Ocean. He traveled to the area now known as the city of Quebec, Canada. The king of France wanted him to find gold and “precious things,” because the myths of great lands of gold had spread around Europe by this time. Even though it wasn’t true, Europeans believed there was a great land of gold here and were scrambling to get it. As he traveled down the river, he wrote that he saw big towns full of people and large fields of crops and orchards along the river. He saw great societies of healthy, thriving people. He encountered the Mi’kmaq, Montagnais, Algonquin, Huron and Abenaki nations. He said that he “claimed” the area for France without recognizing to the rights of the nations that he was seeing. He didn’t spend a lot of time interacting with the people he saw. He traded with some Mi’kmaq and captured two Haudenosaunee leaders and enslaved them as guides. He made several trips between France and the eastern part of Canada over the next 10 years. Each time, he was taking land and starting colonies and also looking for riches. On his second trip he came to the Haudenosaunee city of Stadacona where he saw a large thriving city. He captured their leader, Donnacona, and several other people. He took them back to France as slaves and they were never able to return to their homelands. They died in France. On his last voyage the nations fought back against him because he had taken captives and been cruel to them before. They fought the French to defend their nations. The French settlements did not last long and they returned to Europe. The French also brought diseases with them which spread and killed many people in the area. Cartier saw massive towns, not wilderness
Decades later in 1603 another Frenchman named Samuel de Champlain came to invade the same area. By this time, disease had killed many Native people and others fled the area because of the disorder left behind by the previous invaders. Champlain saw overgrown riverbanks and abandoned towns instead of the thriving cities and towns that had been there before. He called it a wilderness and spread stories about it being untouched. This fueled myths in Europe that this was a wilderness.
Jamestown - this colony could not have survived without assistance from the Powhatan Confederacy. They experienced multiple starvation times when they broke promises and Native people cut them off from trade and diplomacy. They resorted to cannibalism during "starving times." If this had been a wilderness, Jamestown would have never survived.
Mayflower - These people were mostly religious extremists (that were NOT called "pilgrims") that came to the Americas to establish their own "holy kingdom" that only allowed one religion. They had already been living in Holland freely with no one persecuting them for over a decade by the time they got on the Mayflower. They were not fleeing persecution, and they were not seeking freedom of religion, as they didn't believe anyone else around them should have different beliefs than them. Patuxet, what they called Plymouth, was their third landing place in the Americas, not the first (and there was no Plymouth Rock). The second was Pamet, or what they called Provincetown Harbor. They sent out an exploratory party to look around the area in November 1620. That party came across an empty farm. It was empty because the Nauset people lived inland in the winter, this was their spring/summer home. The colonizers uncovered buried corn - corn that was in baskets and covered by woven mats, so it obviously belonged to someone and was set aside for a purpose. They stole that corn. Later they came back and stole more corn, pillaged the homes and stole items, and also robbed the nearby graves. You can actually read all of this in their own words, too, they wrote it down.
A month later they decided to move on, got back in the Mayflower, and ended up in Patuxet (Plymouth). Patuxet was empty because of a plague spread by other English people fishing in the area in 1616 to 1619. This plague killed tens of thousands of people and reduced the Wampanoag population by 90%. This is why "Plymouth" was empty when the Mayflower arrived. They colonizers took over existing infrastructure. They took over existing farmland, houses that were already built, traveled paths and roads that already existed, etc. Half of the colony still died that winter because they had no idea what they were doing or how to survive. Had the Wampanoag not stepped in that spring and eventually created a political alliance with them, none of them would have survived. Had this been an actual wilderness, none of them would have survived.
Lewis and Clark - the Corp of Discovery didn't discover anything, and they certainly didn't "blaze" any paths through a "wilderness." This was a military reconnaissance mission with the intention of spying for the purpose of invasion (expansion). They used man-made trails - trails that Indigenous people had used for thousands of years. They didn't make their own. They used maps (yes, Indigenous people had maps!) and detailed directions from Native nations to travel. They would have gotten lost otherwise. They were saved multiple times by different nations because they had no idea what they were doing and would have died without being rescued. Had this been a wilderness, they would not have even made it to the Pacific Ocean.
There are many, many more stories like this, these are just the highlights.
To reiterate - had this actually been an untouched wilderness, NONE of the invaders and colonizers would have survived and there literally would not be a United States. The mythology of wilderness actually negates the existence of the US, and yet stories in US history hinge upon that myth. When teaching about Native peoples it is vital to highlight the development, advancements, and technologies of Indigenous societies. It is also important to discuss these myths openly and honestly to help break down the stereotypes students have learned and internalized and to open their minds to a completely different understanding of history.
