by Don Healy, B.S. Forest Management, Oregon State University, 1968 Part 1 of 2
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so”— Mark Twain
Preface
The portion of this paper pertaining to the role of the Native Americans prior to the arrival of European explorers and settlers in the management of their ancestral lands was inspired by the work of Dr. Robert T. Boyd, a fellow graduate of Oregon State University, and editor of the book “Indians, Fire, and the Land in the Pacific Northwest” originally published in 1999 and revised in 2021 by Oregon State Press.
In an email exchange with Dr. Boyd he related that the book was not particularly well received initially. The lore passed down in the oral traditions of the native tribes was not believed credible or was simply ignored. In some cases the tribes have been hesitant to disseminate this information after decades of confinement and degradation by the later arrivals. However, over the past 27 years, many new lines of evidence have surfaced proving the veracity of Dr. Boyd’s and the other contributing authors’ work. One of whom was Dr. Frank K. Lake, Research Ecologist with the Pacific Southwest Research Station, USDA who provided very helpful references on this topic.
The recently completed North American Tree Ring Fire Scar Network, a more thorough review of the written works by the early explorers such as George Vancouver and Joseph Whidbey, the botanical studies of David Douglas, the journals of Lewis and Clark, the records of the Hudson Bay Company, the records of the early railroad surveyors and the written documentation of some of the earliest non-native settlers in the region now demonstrate how remarkably benign and beneficial was the resource management employed by the Native Americans for at least the past 10,000 years using fire judiciously.
Fire is both the problem and a part of the solution. The Native Americans used it as a solution. Our fire prevention policy for the past 150 years on the west coast have created a massive fire deficit. At this stage, we cannot use fire as the Native Americans did. The fuel loads are much too high; the results would be catastrophic. The fuel loads need to be reduced to the levels that we can employ fire using the Native American’s principles.
In light of this information, it is now obvious our current forest management, or in many cases non-management, is wrong-headed and needs to be addressed. Continuing on our current path will lead to increased forest fires and further unnecessary degradation of our nation’s forest resource. The solutions are obvious but will not be easy.
- The public needs to be educated in the long-term history, covering the past 10,000 years. This will require the news media to take a very active role in first, themselves becoming educated, then second, passing that knowledge along to their readers and viewers. This currently is a major problem: a tiny percentage of journalists and reporters have even minimal training in any of the sciences, which is painfully obvious when reviewing their current efforts.
- The second major hurdle is our legal system. When applied to forest management situations as has been done for the past 45 years, total anarchy reigns and nothing fruitful is accomplished. As a society, we need to accept final forest management prescriptions developed in a science-based process involving all concerned parties in a democratic, bipartisan fashion. Once those management plans are completed they need to remain inviolate.
Should we not do so now, we will undoubtably have to do so in the future when the wildfire situation becomes unacceptable and we tire of heavy doses of smoke-filled air during our summers.
Section 1
Introduction: The Conundrum of American Forest Management
The United States is in the midst of a deepening wildfire and forest health crisis, yet the federal policies most capable of addressing it remain largely paralyzed — trapped between litigation, ideological conflict, and a failure of political will. Each fire season brings new records: acres burned trending upwards, more communities threatened, more old-growth lost to flame. And yet the management actions that ecologists, silviculturalists, and fire scientists broadly agree are necessary — thinning, prescribed burning, managed wildfire, and active fuel reduction — continue to be delayed, blocked, or abandoned in the face of legal challenge and public controversy. This is the central paradox of American forest management: we understand what our forests need, and we remain unable to provide it.
At the heart of this impasse lies a powerful and persistent myth — the idea of the “pristine wilderness.” According to this narrative, the forests of North America before European contact were ancient, untouched, dense, and self-regulating; vast cathedrals of old growth that sustained themselves without human intervention for millennia. This image has shaped conservation law, federal land management policy, and public sentiment for more than a century. It has inspired genuine love of the land and motivated real conservation victories. But as a description of ecological history, it is deeply and consequentially wrong. The forests that early European explorers encountered were not wilderness in any meaningful modern sense. They were cultural landscapes — actively shaped, managed, and maintained by Indigenous Peoples over thousands of years.
The central argument
The central argument of this manuscript is threefold. First, the forests Europeans encountered across North America between 1500 and 1850 were the product of at least 10,000 years of intentional human management, primarily through the use of fire. Indigenous Peoples were not passive inhabitants of these landscapes — they were sophisticated ecological engineers who used burning, harvesting, transplanting, and other tools to maintain open, resilient, and productive forests. Second, the collapse of those stewardship practices — caused by epidemic disease, displacement, and forced removal — produced the dense, fuel-loaded, insect-vulnerable forests we struggle to manage today. Climate change and industrial logging have amplified the crisis, but they did not create it. The root cause is the abrupt removal of human stewardship from landscapes that depended on it. Third, and most importantly, the only path to restoring resilient forests in the United States is a science-based, historically informed management strategy that learns from the past while applying the best tools of modern silviculture, ecology, and policy.
The evidence supporting this argument is wide-ranging and convergent. Paleoecological charcoal records spanning thousands of years reveal the persistent signature of anthropogenic fire long before European contact. Tree-ring fire-scar networks, including the North American Tree Ring Fire Scar Network, document the frequency and character of historical fire regimes across hundreds of forest types. Early explorer accounts — from Lewis and Clark to George Vancouver to Spanish missionaries and French voyageurs — consistently describe landscapes that bear no resemblance to the dense, closed-canopy forests that dominate the West today. Ethnobotanical studies catalog the sophisticated plant management practices of dozens of Indigenous nations. And modern silvicultural science confirms what these historical records suggest: that frequent, low-severity fire is essential to the long-term health and resilience of most western forest ecosystems.
The sections that follow move through this evidence systematically. We begin with Indigenous populations and their long history of land management, then examine the specific fire regimes and ecological engineering practices they employed. We trace the collapse of Indigenous stewardship and its immediate ecological consequences, document the historical forest conditions those stewardship practices created, and assess the modern crisis that has emerged in their absence. The manuscript concludes with a practical, ecologically grounded national forest allocation and management framework — one designed not for a mythologized past, but for the complex and urgent realities of the present. The forests of the United States can be restored to health. But only if we are willing to engage honestly with what they once were, what they have become, and what science tells us they need.
Section 2
Indigenous Populations and Land Use Over the Last 10,000 Years
Understanding the condition of North American forests prior to European settlement requires looking far deeper into history than the 1500–1850 period typically referenced in environmental debates. (Later we will discuss the changes that have taken place during the last century that further exacerbate the situation.) Archaeological, paleoecological, and anthropological evidence now makes it clear that Indigenous peoples have been shaping the continent’s landscapes for at least 10,000 years, and in many regions even longer. Their influence was not marginal. It was continuous, intentional, and ecologically transformative.
Population estimates for the pre-contact era vary widely, but even conservative reconstructions show that Indigenous populations were large enough — and geographically widespread enough — to exert landscape-level influence. While the estimates for 1500 CE range from roughly 2.1 million to 18 million, earlier periods also supported substantial populations. By 8,000–10,000 years ago, nearly all major ecological regions of North America were inhabited, from the Pacific Northwest to the Great Plains to the Eastern Woodlands.
What matters most for understanding forest conditions is not the absolute population number, but the duration and continuity of human management. Even a smaller population, applying fire and other tools consistently over thousands of years, can maintain open forests, prairies, and mixed mosaics. Paleoecological charcoal records from the Pacific Northwest, California, the Great Basin, and the Plains show persistent, frequent burning long before the rise of large sedentary societies. These records demonstrate that anthropogenic fire was not an occasional or opportunistic activity — it was a defining ecological force.
This long-term human presence means that the “natural” forests often idealized by modern environmental activists — dense, closed-canopy stands with heavy fuel accumulation — are not natural at all. They are the product of a brief, anomalous period following the collapse of Indigenous populations due to disease and displacement. For thousands of years prior, the forests were shaped by people who understood that fire was essential to maintaining ecological balance, wildlife abundance, and food security.
Section 3
Indigenous Fire Regimes and Landscape Engineering
Initially it was thought that Indigenous People were hunter/gatherers much like our more prehistoric ancestors. While not purely agriculturalists like modern society, research has now shown that the Indigenous People were diligent managers of numerous food and material sources, but unlike farmers today who intensively manage a consolidated acreage for the production of one, or at most very few species, the Indigenous People managed the desired crops in situ and traveled to those locations where the crops grew naturally, in many cases following a regular migration each year to fulfill their needs. Farming now involves only a tiny portion of our population, and most people today have only a distant relationship with the natural world. At the other extreme, virtually every member of the Indigenous population had an intimate relationship with their environment and their only significant tool to cultivate and manage the plants and animals upon which they depended was fire.
The following quote from Lara A. Jacobs (Citizen of Muscogee/Creek Nation with Choctaw heritage) best describes this relationship:
“Across many Tribal Nations, fire is medicine. It has the power to heal lands after they have been scarred, to protect beings who dwell within them, and to restore balance in ways both visible and unseen. Fire teaches, reminding us of the ties that sustain our kinship with trees, water, winds, animals, and all our more-than-human relatives who share its warmth and power. To live well with fire is to honor the relationships and responsibilities it carries, with people, with land, and with the living world that breathes through flame.”Landkeeping: Restoring Indigenous Fire Stewardship and Ecological Partnerships, ed. Jared D. Aldern & Theresa Lynn Gregor, Oregon State University Press, 2026
Indigenous Nations across North America used fire as their most important ecological tool. This was not random burning, nor was it destructive. It was a sophisticated, intentional system of land management designed to produce predictable ecological outcomes. As one observer aptly noted of the Pacific Northwest’s First Peoples:
“Indigenous Northwesterners did indeed have a tool — fire — and they knew how to use it in ways that not only answered immediate purposes but also modified their environment.”
The depth and intentionality of this fire management cannot be overstated. Across virtually every ecological region of North America, the physical and biological record tells the same story: human fire was frequent, purposeful, and landscape-shaping.
Fire frequency and scale
In the last several years several excellent, peer-reviewed papers derived from the North American Tree-Ring Fire Scar Network (NAFSN) — which details forest fire history back to 1600 — have been published, including “Evidence for widespread changes in the structure, composition, and fire regimes of western North American forests”. The signature graph from this paper is shown below.
From a more recent paper, “A fire deficit persists across diverse North American forests despite recent increases in area burned”, we have the following graph:
In many regions, Indigenous ignitions were more frequent and more widespread than lightning ignitions. The result was a landscape characterized by:
- Open canopies
- Sparse understories
- Patchy mosaics of age classes
- High biodiversity
- Low fuel continuity
These conditions are the opposite of what we see today.
B. Ecological purposes of burning
Indigenous fire served dozens of functions, including:
- Maintaining berry fields (huckleberry, serviceberry, salmonberry)
- Enhancing root crops (camas, wapato, biscuitroot)
- Improving forage for deer, elk, and bison
- Reducing pests and pathogens
- Maintaining travel corridors and visibility
- Protecting villages by reducing nearby fuels
- Encouraging fresh growth for basketry and medicinal plants
These were not incidental benefits — they were the intended outcomes of a deliberate management system.
In 1845, Samuel Hancock commented on the unusual shape of the oak trees in the Willamette Valley: “very low with bushy tops…(that) reminded me of the apple trees at home.” Regular low-intensity burning of the oak understory apparently produced standardized, well-groomed oak groves that resembled fruit and nut orchards cared for by more complex techniques of arboriculture familiar to the American settlers.
The ethnographic information on burns in oak groves by the Indians of northern California is relatively detailed and provides a model for the practice among the Kalapuya. The Karok reason for burning under the oaks was as follows — Maimie Offield says “the trees are better if they are scorched by fire each year. This kills disease and pests. Fire also leaves the ground underneath the trees bare and clean, and it is easier to pick up the acorns.”Indians, Fire and the Land in the Pacific Northwest, ed. Robert T. Boyd, Revised Edition, 2021, Oregon State Press, p. 116
C. Landscape-scale effects
The cumulative effect of thousands of years of burning was the creation of park-like forests, extensive prairies, and open savannas in regions that would otherwise support dense conifer stands. Early explorers repeatedly described these landscapes as resembling “well-kept parks” — accurate observations of a landscape engineered by human hands, not romantic exaggerations. Accounts from George Vancouver, Joseph Whidbey, and Methow Valley elders all paint the same picture: a continent of open, managed, abundant landscapes.
In May and June of 1792, Captain George Vancouver’s expedition entered Puget Sound expecting a wilderness populated with unsophisticated natives. Viewing the Penn Cove area on Whidbey Island, the following report was written:
“The surrounding country, for several miles in most points of view, presented a delightful prospect consisting chiefly of spacious meadows elegantly adorned with clumps of trees which the oak bore a very serious proportion, in size from four to six feet in circumference. In these beautiful pastures…the deer were seen playing about in great numbers. Nature had here provided the well-stocked park, and wanted only the assistance of art to constitute that desirable assemblage of surface, which is so much sought in other countries, and only to be acquired by an immoderate experience in manual labor.”George Vancouver, A Voyage of Discovery in the Pacific Northwest and Round the World, 1791–1795, Vol. 2, Kaye Lamb ed. (London, 1984), 568
Shortly thereafter, Joseph Whidbey recorded “clear spots or lawn…clothed with a rich carpet of verdure.” The “verdure” of these “lawns” included grass of excellent quality, tall ferns “in the sandy soils,” and several other plants: gooseberries, currants, raspberries, and strawberries were found in many places, and onions were to be found almost everywhere — most likely camas lilies, a major food source.
It was not initially apparent to these early explorers that the landscapes described above were not natural but rather were created by the native population’s use of fire for millennia prior to Vancouver’s arrival.
Section 4
Indigenous Management of Wildlife and Plant Communities
Indigenous Peoples did not simply adapt to their environments — they actively shaped them to support abundant wildlife and diverse plant communities. Their management practices were sophisticated, regionally adapted, and grounded in deep ecological knowledge accumulated over millennia.
A. Wildlife management
Fire was used to:
- Create fresh browse for ungulates
- Maintain edge habitat, which supports high wildlife diversity
- Direct animal movement during hunts
- Reduce cover for predators
- Maintain open grasslands for bison
The result was that wildlife populations at the time of European contact were often higher than they would have been under purely “natural” conditions without human intervention.
B. Plant community management
Ethnobotanical studies document active management of hundreds of plant species, including:
- Root crops: camas, wapato, bitterroot, biscuitroot
- Berries: huckleberry, blackberry, elderberry, serviceberry
- Nuts: acorns, hazelnuts
- Basketry plants: beargrass, willow
- Medicinals: yarrow, Oregon grape, wild ginger
- Wetland plants: tule, cattail
Management techniques included burning, weeding, transplanting, soil aeration, selective harvesting, coppicing and pruning, and irrigation in some regions.
“Native Americans probably knew as much if not more about specific plant sequences in local communities as contemporary forest and rangeland specialists.”
In many cases, this is literally true. The accumulated ecological intelligence embedded in Indigenous land management practices represents knowledge that modern science is only beginning to fully appreciate and document.
C. The resulting landscape
The combined effect of wildlife and plant management was a continent characterized by high productivity, high biodiversity, low fuel accumulation, frequent disturbance, and open structure. This is the ecological baseline against which modern forest conditions must be compared — and against which the magnitude of today’s crisis can be properly understood.
Section 5
What Early Explorers Actually Saw
The historical record left by early European explorers provides powerful, firsthand testimony that directly contradicts the modern myth of a “pristine wilderness.” These accounts are not romantic exaggerations — they are accurate descriptions of a landscape engineered by human hands.
A. The consistency of early accounts
Explorers across the continent — Lewis and Clark, John Muir, Hudson’s Bay Company traders, Spanish missionaries, and French voyageurs — all described remarkably similar landscapes: open forests, extensive prairies, abundant game, frequent burning, and terrain resembling managed estates. George Vancouver, exploring Puget Sound in the 1790s, described the shores as resembling “a well-kept park.” Joseph Whidbey’s accounts of interior valleys and Methow Valley oral histories describe the same open, fire-maintained mosaics. These were not untouched ecosystems. They were actively maintained cultural landscapes.
In 1979, anthropologist Jay Miller went into the Methow Valley in north-central Washington with a van load of Methow Indian elders, some of whom had not been there for fifty years. “When we had gone through about half of the valley, a woman started to cry. I thought it was because she was homesick, but after a time, she sobbed, ‘when my people lived here, we took good care of all this land. We burned it over every fall to make it like a park. Now it is a jungle.’ Every Methow I talked to after that confirmed the regular program of burning.”Indians, Fire and the Land in the Pacific Northwest, ed. Robert T. Boyd, New edition, 2021, p. 1
B. The collapse of Indigenous stewardship
After 1800, epidemic disease reduced Indigenous populations by as much as 90–95%. This sudden collapse ended millennia-old fire regimes almost overnight. Within a single generation, prairies began converting to forest, understory fuels accumulated, forest density increased, insects and diseases proliferated, and fire severity climbed dramatically.
This transition — not logging, not climate change, not industrialization — is the root cause of the dense, overstocked forests we see today. The “pristine wilderness” romanticized by 19th-century naturalists was not ancient. It was new — the product of a sudden absence of human stewardship.
Section 6
Historical Forest Density, Composition, and Fire Frequency & the Role of Plant Succession
To understand the wildfire crisis facing the United States today, it is essential to recognize that the forests encountered by early European explorers were not “natural” in the sense often implied by modern preservationist narratives. They were the product of millennia of frequent, low-severity fire — both lightning-caused and intentionally set by Indigenous peoples. These fires shaped forest structure, species composition, and fuel dynamics in ways fundamentally different from the conditions we see today.
A. Forest density and structure
Paleoecological records, early explorer accounts, and modern fire-scar data all converge on the same conclusion: historical forests were far more open and less dense than contemporary stands. In many regions of the West, particularly in ponderosa pine and mixed-conifer forests, tree densities were often 10–20% of current levels. Large, fire-resistant trees dominated the canopy, while the understory was sparse, with limited ladder fuels.
This structure was not accidental. It was maintained by frequent fire, which removed small trees and shrubs, reduced surface fuels, limited competition for water and nutrients, and promoted fire-adapted species such as ponderosa pine and oak. The result was a forest that was both resilient and productive — capable of withstanding drought, insects, and fire without catastrophic loss.
B. Fire frequency
The North American Fire Scar Network (NAFSN), which provides the most comprehensive physical evidence of historical fire regimes, documents data from more than 2,562 sites containing more than 37,000 fire-scarred trees. Fire-scarred trees show that many western forests burned every 5–25 years, some grass-forest ecotones burned every 1–10 years, and even moist forests such as parts of the western Cascades burned more frequently than previously believed.
Compared to the contemporary fire record, historical fires burned much larger acreages much more frequently. This finding is supported by a 2025 Nature Communications study demonstrating that even the “record” fire years of the 21st century burn far less area than typical fire years in the 1700s.
C. Species composition
Frequent fire favored ponderosa pine, western larch, oak species, and fire-tolerant shrubs and grasses. It suppressed shade-tolerant firs, dense understory vegetation, and insect-susceptible species. Today’s forests, by contrast, are dominated by species that historically would have been kept in check by fire. This shift in species composition is a major driver of modern insect outbreaks and high-severity fires.
D. Review of the principles of plant succession
Ecological succession is the process by which the mix of species and the habitat in an area change over time. Gradually, these communities replace one another until a “climax community” — like a mature forest — is reached, or until a disturbance, like a fire, occurs.
Succession in a Pacific Northwest (PNW) westside forest (west of the Cascade Crest) typically follows a predictable trajectory from a cleared area to a complex old-growth ecosystem. Driven by the region’s mild, wet climate, this process of stand development spans hundreds of years and unfolds in distinct structural stages.
1. Stand initiation (0–20 years)
Following a severe disturbance (wildfire, windstorm, or logging), the area is colonized by sun-loving pioneer species. Vegetation shows rapid growth of grasses, shrubs, and hardwood saplings like red alder, while fast-growing, shade-intolerant conifers such as Douglas-fir begin to establish and outpace the hardwoods.
2. Stem exclusion (20–80 years)
The young conifer trees grow rapidly, creating a dense, uniform canopy that blocks out most of the sunlight. Lower branches die off, and the understory becomes relatively sparse due to the lack of light. Fierce competition ensues — weaker trees are “excluded” and die, leaving behind a closed-canopy stand of even-aged Douglas-fir.
3. Understory reinitiation (80–200 years)
As the even-aged Douglas-fir canopy ages, natural mortality and disturbances create gaps in the ceiling. Sunlight penetrates to the forest floor, allowing a lush understory of shrubs and shade-tolerant tree species (like western hemlock and western redcedar) to establish. The forest develops multiple canopy layers, transforming into a mature, multi-generational ecosystem.
4. Old-growth (200+ years)
The forest reaches a late-successional, steady-state structure. The original, towering Douglas-firs begin to die, creating massive “nurse logs” that provide nutrients and a substrate for new seedlings. Shade-tolerant trees like western hemlock and western redcedar dominate the canopy, and the structure becomes highly irregular, featuring standing dead trees (snags), downed wood, and varied canopy heights.
In the west-side forest of the Pacific Northwest this path is generally followed if uninterrupted by fire, landslide, harvesting, or insect and disease epidemics. Should such incidents occur, the affected plant communities simply return to an earlier stage and start the process again. Early successional stages frequently contain more nitrogen-fixing plants and trees, which include alder and many of the legume family. Ironically, our atmosphere is about 80% nitrogen, but most plant and tree species are unable to utilize this source. Plant succession is simply a pathway, and no stage is more or less critical than any other, but some are more prolific than others and some are much more beneficial in providing suitable habitat for certain animal species. The Native Americans were fully cognizant of these relationships and used fire to manipulate the successional process to their benefit.
Let us examine how the Native Americans managed the single largest land area in the U.S., the Great Plains. Without their fire management this entire area would have transformed into forests thousands of years ago.
How Indigenous fire shaped the Great Plains
Multiple lines of evidence show that the Great Plains were historically fire-dependent ecosystems, and Indigenous nations played a major role in sustaining those fire regimes.
- Frequent fire intervals (1–35 years) characterized the plains, with fires ignited by both lightning and humans. Indigenous-set fires were especially common in late spring and summer.
- Native American communities intentionally burned grasslands for many purposes: improving forage for bison and other game, directing animal movement, clearing brush and woody encroachment, maintaining travel corridors, protecting settlements by reducing fuel, and agricultural preparation and maintenance. These uses are explicitly documented across Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, and the broader Plains.
- Fire prevented the spread of trees and shrubs, kept prairies open, and stimulated vigorous regrowth of native grasses and wildflowers, which depend on periodic burning.
- The U.S. Forest Service notes that historical fire regimes were a blend of lightning and human ignitions, and that Indigenous burning was a major contributor to the frequent, landscape-shaping fires that maintained the prairie mosaic.
Why fire was essential
The Great Plains evolved with fire. Without regular burning, leaf litter accumulates, woody plants invade, biodiversity declines, grassland birds lose habitat, and wildfires become more severe due to fuel buildup. Indigenous fire practices kept these systems in balance for thousands of years.
Indigenous burning in the Willamette Valley
In the previous discussions of Indigenous burning practices, we mentioned the purposes of the burning, but not the scope of it. The scale of the fires was quite impressive, as documented in Dr. Boyd’s book in the chapter “Strategies of Indian Burning in the Willamette Valley,” starting on page 94. In 1825 — prior to the massive influx of immigrants over the Oregon Trail which took place in the mid-1840s — the Hudson Bay Company initiated their annual southern trapping expedition to California. Alexander McLeod led the party, and David Douglas, the noted botanist, accompanied them. The party departed Fort Vancouver in early September during the Indians’ burning season. In Yamhill Valley, McLeod noted “several Indian habitations” and a landscape “much overrun by fire.” Near the present site of Salem, Oregon, the party was obliged to ford the river in order to find food for their horses because the land was “burned and destitute of grass.”
Over the next few days, Douglas recorded:
“9/27 — Country undulating; soil rich, light with beautiful solitary oaks and pines interspersed through it and must have a fine effect, but being all burned and not a single blade of grass except on the margins of the rivulets to be seen.”
“9/30 (heading south) — Most parts of the country burned; only on little patches in the valleys and on the flats near the low hills that verdure is to be seen. Some of the natives tell me it is so done for the purpose of urging deer to frequent parts to feed, which they leave unburned and of course they are easily killed.”
“10/2 (McLeod) — Pasture is rarely found in the course of this day; none has been seen, although we traveled good twenty miles and had to put up along a small river that our horses might have the pickings along the margin of the woods, elsewhere the fire destroyed all the grass.”
The Willamette Valley is about 140 miles long and up to 60 miles wide, and from the accounts of McLeod and Douglas it appears that a sizeable portion was managed with fire by Native Americans. So the scope of the burning activity was extensive. The Hudson Bay Company estimated that the native population was about 8,000 at the time of the expedition; however, by 1825, the population had already been greatly reduced, with an estimated pre-contact population of perhaps 15,000.
Douglas separated from the party in Umpqua County and headed back to Fort Vancouver in early November. Where all had been burned heading south, he found “country open, rich, level and beautiful” — fall rains had caused a greening of the prairies. Where he saw deer on the way down, he found newly formed marshes and lakes filled with migrating waterfowl. It is obvious that the Native Americans had finely-tuned land management skills.
Section 7
The Collapse of Indigenous Stewardship and the Rise of Fire Suppression
The transformation of North American forests did not begin with industrial logging or modern climate change. It began with the collapse of Indigenous populations due to disease, displacement, and forced removal from ancestral lands — a collapse that abruptly ended the millennia-old fire regimes that had shaped the continent.
A. The demographic collapse
The Indigenous population of what is now the United States was estimated to have been as much as 20 times greater prior to the introduction of measles, smallpox, and other epidemic diseases.
This represents one of the most rapid and devastating demographic collapses in human history.
B. The immediate ecological consequences
When Indigenous burning ceased, the ecological effects were swift and profound. Prairies began converting to forest. Oak woodlands filled in with fir and maple. Understory fuels accumulated at unprecedented rates. Forest density increased dramatically. Fire severity rose. This transition happened within decades. The “pristine wilderness” described by 19th-century naturalists was not ancient — it was new, the product of a sudden absence of human stewardship.
C. Institutionalized fire suppression
By the early 20th century, federal agencies adopted a policy of total fire suppression. The 1935 “10 a.m. policy” required all wildfires to be extinguished by the morning after detection. This policy, though well-intentioned, was ecologically disastrous. It created unprecedented fuel accumulation, dense multi-layered forests, increased insect and disease vulnerability, and conditions ripe for high-severity, stand-replacing fires.
The beneficial effects of understory and spot burning — effects that Indigenous peoples had relied upon for thousands of years — became timely reminders of an ill-advised, unnatural practice: the complete removal of fire from fire-dependent ecosystems. This is the central paradox of modern forest management: the attempt to “protect” forests by eliminating fire has instead made them far more vulnerable to destruction.
End of Part 1 — Part 2 tomorrow.
