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  Praise for American Canopy

  “Rutkow is clearly enraptured by his topic and, like another great popular historian, David McCullough, has a knack for making the reader enraptured as well.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “There is much in this book on the prevalence of wood products in our life, but more on their deeper significance. This book is not merely a history, but an eloquent advocate of, as Rutkow writes, ‘how trees change from enemy, to friend, to potential savior.’ ”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “Readers will come away from this, Rutkow’s first book, with a greater appreciation of the role of both forests and trees in our ongoing national story.”

  —The Washington Post

  “A lively story of driven personalities, resources that were once thought to be endless, brilliant ideas, tragic mistakes, and the evolution of the United States. Rutkow has cut through America’s use and love of trees to reveal the rings of our nation’s history and the people who have helped shape it.”

  —The San Diego Union-Tribune

  “An excellent book for both academics and general readers, this is highly recommended.”

  —Library Journal

  “An even-handed and comprehensive history that could not be more relevant . . . The woods, Rutkow’s history reminds us again and again, are essential to our humanity.”

  —Bloomberg Business Week

  “A deeply fascinating survey of American history through a particularly interesting angle: down through the boughs of our vanished trees.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “For those who see our history through the traditional categories of politics, economics, and culture, a delightful feast awaits. In this remarkably inventive book, Eric Rutkow looks at our national experience through the lens of our magnificent trees, showing their extraordinary importance in shaping how we lived, thrived, and expanded as a people. A beautifully written, devilishly original piece of work.”

  —David M. Oshinsky, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Polio: An American Story

  “Right from its quietly shocking prelude—the cavalier and surprisingly recent murder of the oldest living thing in North America—Eric Rutkow’s splendid saga shows, through a chain of stories and biographical sketches that are intimate, fresh, and often startling, how trees have shaped every aspect of our national life. Here is the tree as symbol and as tool, as companion and enemy, as a tonic for our spirits and the indispensable ingredient of our every enterprise from the colonization voyages to the transcontinental railroad to Levittown. The result, both fascinating and valuable, is a sort of shadow history of America. Toward the end of his finest novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald writes that the ‘vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams.’ American Canopy retrieves those trees and does full-rigged (on tall, white-pine masts) justice to the dream.”

  —Richard Snow, author of A Measureless Peril and former editor in chief of American Heritage

  “American Canopy marks the debut of an uncommonly gifted young historian and writer. Ranging across four centuries of history, Eric Rutkow shows the manifold ways in which trees—and woodland—and wood—have shaped the contours of American life and culture. And because he has managed to build the story around gripping events and lively characters, the book entertains as much as it informs. All in all, a remarkable performance!”

  —John Demos, Samuel Knight Professor of History at Yale University and author of Entertaining Satan, winner of the Bancroft Prize in American History, and The Unredeemed Captive, finalist for the National Book Award

  This fascinating and groundbreaking work tells the remarkable story of the relationship between Americans and their trees across the entire span of our nation’s history.

  Like many of us, historians have long been guilty of taking trees for granted. Yet the history of trees in America is no less remarkable than the history of the United States itself—from the majestic white pines of New England, which were coveted by the British Crown for use as masts in navy warships, to the orange groves of California, which lured settlers west. In fact, without the country’s vast forests and the hundreds of tree species they contained, there would have been no ships, docks, railroads, stockyards, wagons, barrels, furniture, newspapers, rifles, or firewood. No shingled villages or whaling vessels in New England. No New York City, Miami, or Chicago. No Johnny Apple-seed, Paul Bunyan, or Daniel Boone. No Allied planes in World War I, and no suburban sprawl in the middle of the twentieth century. America—if indeed it existed—would be a very different place without its millions of acres of trees.

  As Eric Rutkow’s brilliant, epic account shows, trees were essential to the early years of the republic and indivisible from the country’s rise as both an empire and a civilization. Among American Canopy’s many fascinating stories: the Liberty Trees, where colonists gathered to plot rebellion against the British; Henry David Thoreau’s famous retreat into the woods; the creation of New York City’s Central Park; the great fire of 1871 that killed a thousand people in the lumber town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin; the fevered attempts to save the American chestnut and the American elm from extinction; and the controversy over spotted owls and the old-growth forests they inhabited. Rutkow also explains how trees were of deep interest to such figures as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Teddy Roosevelt, and FDR, who oversaw the planting of more than three billion trees nationally in his time as president.

  As symbols of liberty, community, and civilization, trees are perhaps the loudest silent figures in our country’s history. America started as a nation of people frightened of the deep, seemingly infinite woods; we then grew to rely on our forests for progress and profit; by the end of the twentieth century we came to understand that the globe’s climate is dependent on the preservation of trees. Today, few people think about where timber comes from, but most of us share a sense that to destroy trees is to destroy part of ourselves and endanger the future.

  Never before has anyone treated our country’s trees and forests as the subject of a broad historical study, and the result is an accessible, informative, and thoroughly entertaining read. Audacious in its four-hundred-year scope, authoritative in its detail, and elegant in its execution, American Canopy is perfect for history buffs and nature lovers alike and announces Eric Rutkow as a major new author of popular history.

  ADVANCE PRAISE FOR AMERICAN CANOPY

  “For those who see our history through the traditional categories of politics, economics, and culture, a delightful feast awaits. In this remarkably inventive book, Eric Rutkow looks at our national experience through the lens of our magnificent trees, showing their extraordinary importance in shaping how we lived, thrived, and expanded as a people. A beautifully written, devilishly original piece of work.”

  —David M. Oshinsky, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Polio: An American Story

  “Both delightful and enlightening—a book filled with fascinations and surprises about a subject I had never thought about (much less read about) before. That it’s written with such charm and grace only intensifies its appeal.”

  —Daniel Okrent, author of the bestseller Last Call

  “American Canopy marks the debut of an uncommonly gifted young historian and writer. Ranging across four centuries of history, Eric Rutkow shows the manifold ways in which trees—and woodland—and wood—have shaped the contours of American life and culture. And because he has managed to build the story around gripping events and lively characters, the book entertains as much as it informs. All in all, a remarkable performance!”

  —John Demos, Samuel Knight Professor of History at Yale University and author of Entertain
ing Satan, winner of the Bancroft Prize for American History

  “In American Canopy, Eric Rutkow works a wonderful magic. He takes the most obvious of things—trees—and weaves an astounding and complex narrative that ranges across American history, from Johnny Appleseed to Henry David Thoreau, from Franklin Roosevelt to John Muir. You come away thinking that this country was, well, built out of trees.”

  —S. C. Gwynne, author of the bestseller Empire of the Summer Moon

  “Right from its quietly shocking prelude—the cavalier and surprisingly recent murder of the oldest living thing in North America—Eric Rutkow’s splendid saga shows, through a chain of stories and biographical sketches that are intimate, fresh, and often startling, how trees have shaped every aspect of our national life. Here is the tree as symbol and as tool, as companion and enemy, as a tonic for our spirits and the indispensable ingredient of our every enterprise from the colonization voyages to the transcontinental railroad to Levittown. The result, both fascinating and valuable, is a sort of shadow history of America. Toward the end of his finest novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald writes that the ‘vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams.’ American Canopy retrieves those trees and does full-rigged (on tall, white-pine masts) justice to the dream.”

  —Richard Snow, author of A Measureless Peril and former editor in chief of American Heritage

  Eric Rutkow, a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School, has worked as a lawyer on environmental issues. He splits his time between New York City and New Haven, Connecticut, where he is pursuing a doctorate in American history at Yale. American Canopy is his first book.

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  Copyright © 2012 by Eric Rutkow

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  Book by Ellen R. Sasahara

  ISBN 978-1-4391-9354-9

  ISBN 978-1-4391-9360-0 (ebook)

  Endpaper and chapter opener (pp. 1, 11, 40, 71, 99, 129, 168, 201, 228, 268, 308, 345) art courtesy of the General Research Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. Illustration on p. iii, “The Colonists Under Liberty Tree” (1861), © Duncan Walker/iStock.

  For my mother and father

  Contents

  Introduction: The Death of Prometheus

  Chapter 1: From Discovery to Revolution

  Chapter 2: The Fruits of Union

  Chapter 3: The Unrivaled Nature of America

  Chapter 4: Forests of Commerce

  Chapter 5: A Changing Consciousness

  Chapter 6: New Frontiers

  Chapter 7: Under Attack

  Chapter 8: Trees as Good Soldiers and Citizens

  Chapter 9: Postwar Prosperity

  Chapter 10: The Environmental Era

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Photographs

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Introduction

  The Death of Prometheus

  ON THE MORNING of August 6, 1964, thirty-year-old Donald Currey was leading several men up a trail along Wheeler Peak, the highest mountain in Nevada. One of Currey’s companions wore a U.S. Forest Service uniform, a second lugged a chainsaw, and a third carried a camera to document the event that would follow. They hiked through the thinning air for several hours, past clusters of piñon pines and Utah junipers. Eventually, the men reached the timberline, a point 10,750 feet high on the mountain, where tall plants yielded to the onslaught of nature’s winds and nothing survived beyond scrubby vegetation. There, on the environment’s edge, Currey’s team would encounter one of the world’s more remarkable trees, the bristlecone pine. And there, they would change five thousand years of history.

  The bristlecone pine is found only in the mountains of the southwestern United States at altitudes that sustain few other life-forms. The rugged environment sculpts the bristlecones into a dramatic, gnarled form, more horizontal than vertical, the physiognomy of an endless battle against the elements. On the wind-facing side, sand particles sheer away outer bark in a process called die-back. The wood beneath looks almost polished, as though it has been petrified alive. John Muir, the eminent naturalist, wrote that the bristlecone “offers a richer and more varied series of forms to the artist than any conifer I know of.” The trees can grow up to thirty feet high and twenty around, but often maintain living needles in only a small section—an indoor Christmas tree’s worth of green—which produces the distinctive prickle-tipped purple cones that lend the conifer its name.

  In 1958 the bristlecone pine had created a giant measure of excitement within a tiny segment of the scientific community when a National Geographic article declared that the species produced the oldest trees on earth. Edmund Schulman, the scientist who wrote the piece, explained that he had used tree-ring dating—literally counting up the annual rings in the trunk—to identify multiple bristlecone specimens in California’s Inyo National Forest that were more than four thousand years old. The most impressive find, a tree containing 4,676 rings, was named Methuselah, a nod to the longest-lived figure in the Bible. The National Geographic article asserted that the oldest bristlecones were located “at the western limit of their range” where Methuselah grew, suggesting that Schulman’s biblically named discovery was quite possibly the world’s oldest tree.

  Schulman’s finding held great promise for a variety of reasons. Tree rings recorded climatic activity with remarkable precision—wetter years generated widely spaced rings, drier periods kept them close, and all trees in a given area corresponded. Consequently, these bristlecones were silent but scrupulous witnesses to several millennia of droughts, floods, shifting rivers, and retreating glaciers. Their rings offered scientists, specifically dendrochronologists (those who study tree rings), a chance to reconstruct the local climate to dates contemporaneous with the building of the Egyptian pyramids.

  Currey, a graduate student in geography, was hoping to exploit this relationship between trees and history. He wanted to develop a climatic timeline connected to glacier growth and rock settlements in the Southwest as far back as 2000 BCE. His research centered on geological features in eastern Nevada’s Snake Range, a mountain chain capped by the imposing 13,063-foot Wheeler Peak. Bristlecones near the range’s timberline held valuable data within the rings of their trunks.

  Currey’s research site was several hundred miles east of the Methuselah find. Thus, he anticipated finding only specimens much younger than those featured in
National Geographic. During the summer of 1964, however, he stumbled upon something unexpected. A bristlecone stand in the national forest tract known as the Wheeler Peak Scenic Area appeared to contain trees as old as anything that Schulman had described. An eager Currey began to take samples of the trees using his twenty-eight-inch-long Swedish increment borer, a sophisticated hand tool with an aperture approximately the size of a drinking straw that removed a fragment of the trunk without causing permanent damage. Day after day, he scrambled over the limestone soil and the deposited rock that surrounded the bristlecones, carrying his notebook and Swedish borer alongside, collecting samples that he could later analyze under a microscope.

  Currey’s 114th specimen was the most spectacular that he encountered. He measured it as having “a dead crown 17 feet high, a living shoot 11 feet high, and a 252-inch circumference 18 inches above the ground.” Such a wide base would have required four men with arms outstretched to encircle it. Currey also noted that the tree’s bark, which was necessary for its survival, was only “present along a single 19-inch-wide, north-facing strip.” The winds and sand had worn away everything else. But the tree was alive and still producing its compact bunches of needles on a three-inch-wide shoot.

  Currey attempted to sample this tree, which he labeled WPN-114, but his borer broke. He tried again and damaged his reserve borer. Without equipment, he was suddenly stymied. This ancient specimen stood before him, its rings holding the secrets to several thousand years of climate change, and he had no way to study it, not with his borers, anyway.

  Currey appealed to the district Forest Service ranger, explaining that he wanted to cut down WPN-114 and study the cross-section directly. At the time, sawing down trees for dendrochronological research was not uncommon—even Schulman admitted in National Geographic to felling three samples, though not Methuselah itself. The Forest Service ranger consulted with his supervisor and determined that the tree “was like many others and was not the type that the public would visit” and that it would better serve science and education. The supervisor concluded, “Cut ’er down.”