Darwin and Primeval Forests

I have just posted a new video in which Darwin speculates on primeval forests. He begins by reciting, from imperfect memory, the beginning of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem Evangeline: something like “This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks, in garments green, indistinct in the twilight, stand like druids of eld…” Evangeline begins in Acadia. Well, Longfellow might have thought that the Acadian forest had always been there, but by the time Longfellow published the poem in 1847 geologists had already begun to understand that the entire northern part of the North American landscape had been covered by glaciers until about ten thousand years ago. The Acadian forest was less than ten thousand years old.

Another place many tourists visit is Walden Pond, where Henry David Thoreau lived in nature (actually only a couple of years, and in a forest profoundly altered by human activity). Many may think that the forest at Walden has always been there, but Thoreau would have been the first to tell you that the forest was always changing, especially as hardwoods grew up underneath pines in the process of ecological succession. He studied tree rings and could give you the evidence that the forest was always changing.

Darwin speaks to you in this video from a forest in Alsace in northeastern France. It looks like an ancient forest. The forest itself may look not too different from when the Empress Josephine saw it in the nineteenth century on the way to her mansion in Strasbourg. But none of the trees were there when Josephine saw them.

We know this because the oldest trees are about a century old. When a big old tree dies and falls over, it frequently blocks hiking paths. Municipal workers (the forest belongs to the town of Bischheim) cut away the trunks and move them off the path. The radial cuts reveal tree rings, one ring for each year of growth. The oldest ones on which I have counted the rings were about a hundred years old when they fell.

This means they started growing about the time of World War I. At this time, most of Alsace was a devastated landscape, in which almost all the trees were dead. (World War II did not have such a severe effect on Alsace.) A few lucky seedlings survived near a ballast mining pit (which is now Lake Balastière) and lived until they fell down and I saw them a century later. The forest looks impressive—lots of big beech, linden, and maple trees—but the whole forest grew in a century.

Every forest is in constant flux—old trees dying, young trees taking their place, sometimes trees of the same species, sometimes of a different species. There is perhaps no primeval forest anywhere. Sorry, Longfellow.

The Thinking, Walking Biped, part ten. Walking and Creativity

Many of the most creative minds have had their greatest inspiration by walking out in nature. There did not have to be an actual correspondence of what the mind saw and the act of creativity; it was simply the inspiration of the mind prompted by the overall beauty of nature. There have probably been more poets who have done this than who have not. It was also a common practice among composers. For example, Antonín Dvořák would walk every morning at dawn while jotting down musical ideas. He did this every morning along the Turkey River when he visited Spillville, Iowa in 1893, and then play the organ at the Catholic church. Gustav Mahler was famous for having a composer’s hut in the Alps away from his summer house during the summer when the opera, which he conducted, was not in session. He did not just hide in this hut, but walked on the surrounding forest trails.

 

Sometimes there was actual nature imagery in the music, aside, that is, from the thunderstorm in Beethoven’s Pastorale symphony (number 6) or in the second part of the Rossini’s William Tell overture. I am thinking again of Mahler. One time, in his childhood, Mahler had been left in the woods alone by a father who forgot about him. His father ran back to rescue him, only to find little Gustav sitting in rapt wonder at the natural world. The memory of this experience did not leave him. According to one documentary, this memory appears at the very beginning of Mahler’s first symphony, where the offstage trumpets represented distant bird calls and the cuckoo call, starting in measure 25 in the oboe, actually was a cuckoo that he heard.

Many other creative people have walked in nature to get at least a general inspiration: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Charles Dickens, Richard Wagner, Victor Hugo, and even Pierre Curie.

Here is an example of what I am not talking about. The great Roman orator Cicero used the natural world to help him remember his speeches, which he presented without notes. Or so I have read once in a speaker’s handbook long ago. He could remember each portion of his speech, but he sometimes had difficulty remembering which portion would come next. But he was very familiar with his garden walking path. So what he would do was to recite each portion of his speech as he went along the path. Then, while speaking, he would imagine himself walking on the path. Each thing he saw reminded him of which topic was next. This is not an example of walking and creativity, since the topics and the objects did not need to have any real correspondence; it was just Cicero’s memory prop.

An experiment at Stanford in 2014 confirmed that walking enhances creative thinking. This is yet another example of how science confirms what we have known, or think we have known, all along.

The Thinking, Walking Biped, part nine. Other famous walks, of varying quality

Other writers, besides those described in earlier essays, have taken extensive nature walks for a variety of creative purposes. Here are just a few examples.

• Estwick Evans was a New Hampshire lawyer who started a four thousand mile journey in 1818 which took him to Detroit, which was at the time on the deep frontier. Most of this journey was on foot. His purpose was not primarily to learn about the natural, but about the human, world. He visited many Native and white American settlements. He saw what he expected to see: that the westward expansion of America was, by and large, a good thing for everyone.
• Philip Freneau was an American poet who did a lot of walking in nature, though not, as far as I can tell, any one single long journey. His principal motivation was to see the Native viewpoint on the natural world.
• Graham Greene was a British novelist who took a 350-mile trip through Liberia in the early twentieth century, as described in Journey without Maps. But he was not primarily observing Africa. He brought a whole cavalcade of prejudices with him. He had 25 porters, six boxes of food, beds, chairs, and a bathtub. His journey can best be described as imposing itself on Africa. His motivation, he said, was H. Rider Haggard’s She, which was a novel about an almost vanished white African civilization. Greene took an American map that labeled this part of Africa simply as “cannibals.” He wanted to see evidence of white supremacy in Africa, and this is what he saw.

The usual situation, in these journeys, was that the white traveler came with expectations of what he would see, and gathered observations that reinforced them.

Elizabeth's Exile, a Novel of a Cherokee Refugee, part four. How Do You Face Disruption and Tragedy?

Author Stan Rice has just published the second of three novels (Elizabeth’s Exile) in the series Trail of Tears: Novels of Cherokee Identity. Because Kindle has unreliable availability and formatting, the author has also posted a free PDF download. This second novel is about a Cherokee woman, Elizabeth Hilderbrand Pettit who, in middle age, walked with a contingent of other Cherokees on the infamous Trail of Tears from the Appalachians to what is now Oklahoma, after losing their land and possessions. As Rice’s novel explains, this was totally illegal, as the law under which Andrew Jackson prosecuted this Trail of Tears was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

Any event as big as the Trail of Tears cannot be fully presented in a novel. The novel must focus on one or a few people and their experiences. Rice focused on Elizabeth Hilderbrand Pettit, whom he identifies in the author’s notes as his third great grandmother. By focusing on one or a few individuals, we can see the individual disruptions that occurred within the overall Disruption known as the Trail of Tears.

In Elizabeth’s case, the main disruption (aside from losing her home and land) was her husband James, a white man. It turned out that he had misrepresented himself to her when they married: he had a white wife and family just over the border in Mississippi. She sued him (historical fact) and won possession of all property and goods—all of which she lost when she had to get onto the Trail of Tears. In Rice’s novel, James was with her on the entire journey. Though James was probably an evil man, Rice treats him sympathetically as a tragic character who just wants Elizabeth to forgive him, which she never does. Despite this disruption, Elizabeth remains positive and strong on the entire trip.

The same cannot be said of Elizabeth’s daughter Minerva, who came of age on this journey. She is spunky and wise, and seems to be very strong. But then she is violated by a slimy preacher named John Schermerhorn and this, Rice suggests, ruined her ability to trust that anything good could happen in her life. Minerva was—historical fact again—married six times and died at the age of forty. She was married briefly to one of the novel’s main narrators, Lewis Hicks, her second husband, but had a child by her third husband while she was still married to Lewis. Rice uses this story in his novel, but adds in ideas from the Biblical story of David and Bathsheba and Uriah the Hittite.

Rev. John Schermerhorn was a historical figure who was every bit as slimy as Rice portrays him. I think Rice might have had to invent this character, had he not actually existed. He was infamous among all the Cherokee women for trying to hit up on them. They called him Devil Horn. He was the same man who had supervised the Treaty of New Echota in which illegal representatives of the Cherokee tribe signed away their rights to their Appalachian homeland.

Rice includes other historical events such as the murder of the Cherokee leader Doublehead by his fellow Cherokees, as well as the murders of John Ridge and Elias Boudinot. Nobody in the tribe reveres Doublehead, who was also called Babykiller. But to this day some Cherokees despise, and others revere, the efforts of Ridge and Boudinot to protect the Cherokees from white oppression, although their compromises (including the Treaty of New Echota) proved ultimately futile.

Rice also includes Asa Gray, the Harvard botanist. Gray was, in fact, a defender of the rights of free Blacks in the North, but I suspect Rice has invented all the details of Gray being a leader in the Underground Railroad.

Rice ends the novel from the viewpoint of Edd Hicks, one of Minerva Pettit’s grandchildren, who regrets all the oppression in Cherokee history but who has resolved to make the best of whatever situation he is in. He is the focus of the third novel in the series, Edd’s Land, reviewed later in this blog.

Elizabeth's Exile, a Novel of a Cherokee Refugee, by Stan Rice, part three. What Was Andrew Jackson Like?

Author Stan Rice has just published the second of three novels (Elizabeth’s Exile) in the series Trail of Tears: Novels of Cherokee Identity. Because Kindle has unreliable availability and formatting, the author has also posted a free PDF download. This second novel is about a Cherokee woman, Elizabeth Hilderbrand Pettit who, in middle age, walked with a contingent of other Cherokees on the infamous Trail of Tears from the Appalachians to what is now Oklahoma, after losing their land and possessions. As Rice’s novel explains, this was totally illegal, as the law under which Andrew Jackson prosecuted this Trail of Tears was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

 As in any novel written by a Cherokee author, president Andrew Jackson will appear as an evil man. And that is because he was. Rice would have to totally alter the historical background of the novel in order to make Jackson appear even the least bit heroic.

But there are a significant number of white Americans who idolize Andrew Jackson. Their spiritual leader is Donald Trump, who has a Jackson portrait prominently displayed in the
White House.

I then realized something about Rice’s novel. The way he portrayed Andrew Jackson was, in fact, very much as we know Donald Trump to be. Rice was modeling Jackson after Trump, including his anger, his vanity, and his racism—even his facial expressions. Rice even put some of Trump’s words into Jackson’s mouth.

To this day, most Cherokees resent having the face of Andrew Jackson on the twenty dollar bill. When a new series of twenty dollar bills came out a couple of decades ago, Jackson’s face was still on it, but larger. A Cherokee artist told me that this was fine with him; it just made the target a little larger for Cherokee bullets. He was joking of course, because most Cherokees are poor enough that they cannot waste a twenty dollar bill on target practice.

During the Biden Administration, the opportunity came along to have a different face on this bill. The federal government was planning to issue new currency featuring the face of Harriet Tubman, who was one of the driving forces behind the Underground Railroad. She earned her place in American history. But Donald Trump, offended by the thought of having her on American currency, canceled these plans and insisted on keeping Jackson’s face on the currency.

Elizabeth's Exile, a Novel of a Cherokee Refugee, by Stan Rice, part two. What Was the Motivation for the Trail of Tears?

Author Stan Rice has just published the second of three novels (Elizabeth’s Exile) in the series Trail of Tears: Novels of Cherokee Identity. Because Kindle has unreliable availability and formatting, the author has also posted a free PDF download. This second novel is about a Cherokee woman, Elizabeth Hilderbrand Pettit who, in middle age, walked with a contingent of other Cherokees on the infamous Trail of Tears from the Appalachians to what is now Oklahoma, after losing their land and possessions. As Rice’s novel explains, this was totally illegal, as the law under which Andrew Jackson prosecuted this Trail of Tears was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

As explained in a previous essay, the United States federal government spent a lot of money forcing the Cherokees out of Appalachia and into what is now Oklahoma, while most of the financial and political benefits went to the state of Georgia. Profit may have motivated the Georgians, but if profit was the motivation for the federal government, it was a miserable failure.

The principal reason is that the land now called Oklahoma already belonged to other tribes, mainly the Osage, Caddo, and Comanche. The Cherokees were ordered to move to land already belonging to these other tribes. The Osage, Caddo, and the famously fierce Comanche did not want the Cherokees (and Choctaws, and Chickasaws, and Muskogees) to come. So, at taxpayer expense, the feds had to build forts and supply soldiers to protect the Cherokees from the tribes who already lived there. These forts included Ft. Gibson, Ft. Washita, Ft. Holmes, and Ft. Towson, all in present-day Oklahoma.

It can be argued that the federal government wanted the territory now known as Oklahoma. But this does not explain the Trail of Tears. The federal government could have more cheaply and easily just taken the land from the Comanches. Furthermore, at the time, the land now called Oklahoma was considered practically worthless. They would not have given it to the Cherokees if the soils and forests had been of high quality. Oil was eventually discovered there, but it was too late—the government had already given the land to the Native tribes. This means the federal government had to use other methods, more devious but no less cruel, to take back the Oklahoma land they had given to the Cherokees. This is the main idea of Rice’s third Trail of Tears novel, Edd’s Land, reviewed in a later essay in this blog.

As nearly as I can determine it, after reading Rice’s novel, the federal government was motivated mainly by racism and hatred, and they were willing to spend a lot of taxpayer money to beat the Cherokees into submission.

Darwin in Old Age

I have just posted a video about what Darwin might have thought about old age. He walked on his thinking-path (the sandwalk) every day that he could even in old age. He was pretty much an invalid when he died, but not as much of an invalid as he would have been had he not walked on his thinking path so often.

First, in the video, Darwin speculates on why walking improved his thinking. I have already summarized this in an earlier essay. Gentle walking increases blood flow to the brain. Also, thinking, like walking, is a series of steps.

Second, in the video, Darwin speculates on why old age evolved. Humans are unique among animals in having decades of post-reproductive life span. One explanation is that natural selection has provided us with whatever we need to be young, but not whatever we need to be old. But if old age is just the dumping ground of bad genes and defective body parts, why hasn’t evolution gotten rid of it?

The more likely reason that humans grow old, rather than just dying, is that old people provide important benefits to their offspring and to their tribe. Old people are repositories of knowledge and wisdom (well, knowledge, anyway) especially before books and AI. Us old people know things that young people haven’t even thought to ask about. Also, old people help to take care of the grandkids while the parents are searching for food or status. This is also the time when old people can pass on a lot of culturally important information to later generations. Finally, old people may not travel very far but they can forage for food near the camp.

Old age doesn’t seem quite so bad when Darwin explains it to you.