Discovering the Unknown Landscape: A History Of America's Wetlands

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Discovering the Unknown Landscape

A History Of America's Wetlands

Ann Vileisis

Copyright © 1997 Ann Vileisis

First paperback edition published in 1999.

All rights reserved under International and Pan American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher: Island Press, Suite 300, 1718 Connecticut Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20009.

ISLAND PRESS is a trademark of The Center for Resource Economics.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Vileisis, Ann.

Discovering the unknown landscape : a history of America’s wetlands / Ann Vileisis.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

9781610912648

1. Wetlands—United States. I. Title.

GB624.V55 1997

33.91’8—dc21

97-25654

CIP

Printed on recycled, acid-free paper e9781610912648_i0003.jpg

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

To Tim, my loving partner in all of life’s adventures

Table of Contents

About Island Press

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Preface

ONE - A Landscape on the Periphery

TWO - A Mosaic of Native Swamps, Bogs, and Marshes

THREE - A Nation Founded on Wetlands

FOUR - Exploring the Unknown Landscape

FIVE - The Drainage Imperative Codified

SIX - Wetlands Portrayed and Envisioned

SEVEN - Machines in the Wetland Gardens

EIGHT - New Voices for the Wetlands

NINE - The Double Agenda

TEN - In the Path of the Boom

ELEVEN - Citizens and Lawmakers Enlist in the Wetlands Cause

TWELVE - Federal Bulldozers and Draglines

THIRTEEN - With New Tools in Hand

FOURTEEN - The Reagan Agenda Challenges Wetland Gains

FIFTEEN - Making and Breaking the Farm Connection

SIXTEEN - A Contentious Era for Wetlands

SEVENTEEN - The Promise of Restoration

EIGHTEEN - The Lessons of History

Notes

Appendix - Some Common and Scientific Names of Wetland Plants

Acknowledgments

Index

Island Press Board of Directors

Preface

wetland—a lowland area, such as a marsh or swamp, that is saturated with moisture, especially when thought of as the natural habitat of wildlife.

—The American Heritage Dictionary

In the past fifteen years, reports have chronicled the extensive loss of wetlands in America. Coverage of this once little-known landscape has been ratcheted up in newspapers and magazines. More and more people have wetland stories: They couldn’t build a shopping plaza there because it’s a wetland, or We have a wetland park in our town; the kids love to go and see the ducks. Despite all the talk, however, many people still wonder: What exactly is a wetland?

Wetlands are places where water saturates or floods the soil much of the time so that only plants specially adapted to wetness can thrive. In Southern swamps, baldcypress trees flourish in standing water. In New England salt marshes, tides wash over spartina grasses twice a day. Although cypress swamps and coastal marshes look very different, they fall under the same wetland umbrella along with other distinctive and biologically rich landscapes. All wetlands share the feature of wetness and, accordingly, have long shared human disdain associated with muck and mosquitoes.

Over the past five decades, scientists have studied wetlands and compiled a sizable body of fact on why these ecosystems are important to people. Wetlands filter pollutants; they reduce flooding; they buffer coasts; and they provide habitat for fish, waterfowl, and wildlife. With this information, Americans have shed much of their scorn and made great strides toward conserving wetlands through new laws and programs. Yet at the same time, in spite of toppling scientific evidence, our houses, roads, and farms have continued to encroach upon millions of acres of wetlands. The matter of wetlands and their conservation is not a matter of science alone—but one of culture as well.

To understand wetlands, we must know not only the science that proves their values but also the society that struggles to accommodate those values amid myriad pressing others. Such understanding has never been more urgent because Congress is currently reconsidering the laws and programs designed to protect wetlands. The outcome will have consequences for everyone who drinks water, watches or hunts birds, fishes or eats seafood, lives near a river or coast, or cares about the natural world. The final fate of wetlands must be decided not by default, ignorance, short-term convenience, personal gain, or vested interests but by careful, conscious consideration of the public values at stake.

ONE

A Landscape on the Periphery

That man is, in fact, only a member of a biotic community is shown by an ecological interpretation of history. Many historical events, hitherto explained solely in terms of human enterprise, were actually biotic interactions between people and the land. The characteristics of the land determined the facts quite as potently as the chararteristics of the men who lived on it.

—Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac¹

A salt marsh lay behind my grandmother’s beach house, but I never ventured to play in its golden grasses. Somehow, as a child, I already knew the muddy terrain was taboo. I sat on a warm black rock near the gentle surf of Long Island Sound and peered up the glimmering creek that flowed from the marsh. That’s as close as I got.

Twelve years later, a college field trip took me to another wetland near the Connecticut coast. Crossing a highway bridge just out of town, we saw our destination: an expanse of reeds and cattails stretching along the Quinnipiac River, bounded by an industrial park on one end and a shipyard at the other. We abandoned our van in the shadow of six squat oil tanks and pulled on thick rubber boots. I didn’t know what to expect when I took my first step. Would my feet sink into stinking black muck? The wetland mystified me.

Following the lead of our ecology professor, Tom Siccama, I separated the tall reeds with my outstretched arms and entered the marsh. With that first step, my boot crunched brittle stalks. I didn’t get stuck in the mud at all. An earthy spring smell emanated from the rich soil and filled the breezy air. Startling us with their commotion, a pair of blue-winged teal flew from their protected refuge.

Our clas plodded farther into the marsh to discover its inner workings. We examined the stalks and roots of the cattails and searched for signs of muskrats and birds. Digging a pit to investigate the soil, students by chance unearthed axe-hewn stakes that once supported hayricks, the frames used long ago for drying marsh grasses into hay. But now the grasses were gone. When bridges near the river’s mouth were built, Tom explained, much of the marsh was filled in. Without the regular pulse of saltwater, cattails and reeds outcompeted the marsh grasses that had once thrived. I could see that the reeds’ aggressive roots spread in rhizomatous networks, creating a thick, woven floor. Our wetland was typical of many on the eastern seaboard, where the construction of harbors, roads, and bridges had altered the ecology of salt marshes. Although cattails provide less nutritious food than the grasses they replaced, their dense stands still shelter waterfowl and wildlife. As the cattails and reeds draw water for their own biological processes, they also absorb excess nutrients and filter pollutants, helping to preserve the water quality of the urban harbor. Though changed and degraded, the brackish wetland still serves important ecological and hydrological functions.

When my classmates headed back to the van, I lingered for a while, engulfed by marsh. When the wind blew, the reeds rustled and bent in synchrony. I saw only clear sky fringed by the tassels of the swaying reeds. The landscape I’d always avoided turned out to be a veritable sanctuary, not only for ducks but for me too. Here on the city’s edge, I found a place apart, full of the beauty and wild intricacies of nature.

Even though a quarter million city dwellers lived nearby, almost no one noticed the marsh. After learning more about the history of wetlands, I am not surprised. Since colonial settlement, Euro-Americans have generally avoided wetlands. These landscapes have been little explored, little known, and little understood. They boast far fewer poets and champions than other more familiar terrains, such as forests, meadows, and seashores. Consequently, most Americans have held incomplete or mistaken perceptions of these places. Wetlands have long been a landscape on the periphery.

If people didn’t shun swamps and marshes, they remade them into different landscapes. Before industrial parks, oil tanks, warehouses, and docks girded the Quinnipiac, its mouth formed a large coastal estuary supporting abundant fisheries. The small piece I ventured into remains as a fragment mirroring the far richer wetland ecosystem that once existed. Throughout Connecticut, people have drained over 50 percent of the original wetlands, including swamps, peat bogs, and salt marshes, for cities, suburbs, and farms. Other states have suffered similar or greater losses. Louisiana has lost half of its native forested bottomlands. In the northern plains states, farmers Scientists estimate that 53 percent of wetlands in the continental United States have been lost either to agriculture or development. With the loss of these ecosystems, there have been many consequences including increased flooding, degraded water quality, and the destruction of habitat for fish, birds, and wildlife. Not until the twentieth century did Americans begin to recognize the important natural values of wetlands. (Courtesy National Wetlands Inventory) have converted 60 to 70 percent of prairie pothole wetlands into farmlands. In Iowa, a state we rarely think of as wet, vast marshes once existed, but 89 percent of them have been drained for cultivation. Ninety-one percent of California wetlands, including much of the San Francisco Bay estuary and the once vast tule marshes of the Central Valley, are gone. Overall, 221 million acres of wetlands once graced our nation’s lower forty-eight states with a rich mosaic of life.² More than half of these important landscapes no longer exist. And plunging acreage estimates don’t address widespread deterioration of ecological functions in the wetlands that remain.

WETLAND LOSSES 1780 AND 1980S.

The sweeping transformation of wetlands has occurred over the course of almost four centuries, much of it happening before people recognized the values that these landscapes offer. Only in the past thirty to forty years have scientists learned that destruction of wetlands undermines natural hydrologic processes, many of them fundamental to people’s lives and economy. By retarding runoff and allowing water to seep back into the ground, many wetlands have played a critical role in recharging the aquifers that people rely on for agricultural and domestic water supplies. With their spongelike capacities, wetlands have absorbed and stored water, providing natural flood control along many rivers. Wetlands have also preserved water quality by filtering excess nutrients and pollutants. But clearing, drainage, and development have compromised these services, resulting in the need for costly dams, levees, and water treatment plants.³

With the loss and degradation of wetland ecosystems, the insects, fish, birds, animals, and plants that depend on these rich landscapes have suffered grim consequences. As development has swallowed coastal salt marshes and estuaries, fish and shellfish populations have plummeted, ruining valuable commercial fisheries. Drainage of the prairie potholes, regarded as the most productive breeding grounds for ducks and geese world-wide, has decimated waterfowl populations that less than two centuries ago were said to blacken the skies. Remaining wetlands still provide critical habitat for 150 bird and 200 fish species, including an estimated one-third of the nation’s threatened or endangered plants and animals.⁴ And only in the past decade have scientists come to realize that wetlands help to preserve the biodiversity essential to our planet’s well-being.

Though significant protection efforts began in the 1960s, wetlands have continued to disappear at a staggering rate. As recently as 1990, eight hundred acres—equivalent to six hundred football fields—were lost on average each day.

The ongoing destruction of wetlands has posed fundamental conflicts for our country. Despite the preponderance of scientific evidence indicating the need to preserve wetlands, efforts at regulation and conservation have been riddled by delays, misunderstandings, loopholes, and discord. As such, wetlands have become the most controversial landscape in America.

The confusion and contention surrounding wetlands did not erupt suddenly but are the products of a long and convoluted history. Americans have an abiding tradition of turning wetlands into farms and cities, yet we also have a lesser-known tradition of appreciating the many natural qualities of wetlands. Some readers may be surprised to learn that the origins of our current conflict over wetland values lie much deeper than the environmental regulatory politics of the recent decades. Only by delving further into this history can we know the very sources of our conflicting beliefs. And only by reevaluating those beliefs can we find a workable vision for the next century.

Several important themes thread this four-hundred-year story. Perhaps the most colorful strand is the way that cultural attitudes have shaped our society’s understanding of wetlands and, consequently, our treatment of them. Over time, these attitudes have generally shifted from negative to positive—especially with the advent of new scientific information. But some attitudes have not changed.

The most revealing theme of this story is how Americans have long regarded wetlands as private property just like all other land. Without a clear hydrologic and ecologic understanding of these lands, early settlers saw no reason to treat them any differently. Following in their footsteps, generations of Americans have continued to misunderstand the essentially liquid nature of wetland landscapes. Although on the surface some wetlands (in the dry season) may look like any other parcel of land, they are connected to subterranean aquifers, rivers, and lakes, and, therefore, they are markedly different. If a wetland is altered, consequences reverberate throughout the watershed. For example, if a wetland is drained or filled, more runoff will flow downstream, and neighbors’ basements may flood. Even beyond the watershed, there may be fewer ducks.

The Lockean tenets of labor and land ownership on which American concepts of property are based failed to account for variances in the nature of land and certainly did not account for water. Traditionally, land has been considered as private property and water as public property. Because wetlands are not only land but land and water, regarding them simply as real property with no other consideration has been a fundamental error in paradigm. This error long misled citizens attempting to drain wetlands and continues to mislead those who seek to conserve wetlands without violating traditional property rights.

The tricky matter is that although by customary law a citizen may survey and purchase a parcel of wetland and consider it private property, the very wetness of wetlands means that there will always be a commons component to them. This commons may be a public nuisance, or it may be a public good. For example, when settlers along the Mississippi River struggled against massive floods, they realized that they had to work in concert to reap the benefits of their properties. It was impossible for an individual landowner to build a single segment of levee or to drain a small parcel of swamp successfully. As engineer Arthur Morgan explained in 1910, Many of the large drainage basins are intricately connected by overflow channels, or by large swamp areas which have served as storage reservoirs for the waters of several streams, and an effort to reclaim a small part of one of the large basins has frequently resulted in damage to some other portion, or has failed to accomplish its purpose because the small area could not be isolated for treatment.⁵ In this historical instance, the wetland commonage created a public nuisance that ultimately had to be dealt with in a public manner, first by the state levee board and then by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. In the past, common problems posed by wetlands generated the most attention, but now the public benefits accorded by wetlands draw the most concern. Although the ways that we’ve understood the commonness of wetlands has changed through history, our response has nonetheless remained tied to the watery nature of these lands.⁶

A third theme of this story is that citizens have long looked to government for help with clarifying individual rights and responsibilities pertaining to wetlands. By their very nature, wetlands have challenged private ownership and generated confusion because many are linked to larger hydrological systems that transcend property lines and even state boundaries. To resolve such confusion, throughout history citizens have demanded that local, state, and federal governments become involved to protect against common nuisances and to preserve common values. For example, nineteenth-century farmers supported state ditch laws to prevent haphazard drainage and flooding. Over a century later, to avert a tragedy of the commons, whereby the destruction of privately owned wetlands would degrade water quality for all, environmentalists pushed for laws to protect these landscapes.⁷ A larger-scale vision, in terms of both geography and purpose, has often been needed to both develop and conserve wetlands. These themes—the role of cultural attitudes, the misunderstanding of wetlands’ watery nature, and the waxing involvement of government—emerge again and again in this history.

What we can now look at as a dramatic transformation of the American landscape—the loss of over half the wetlands in the continental United States—took place in increments. The change was slow at first and then picked up pace as the prospering economy, innovations, and new laws made converting natural wetlands to other landscapes easier. For centuries, the conviction that natural swamps and marshes were worthless and troublesome went hand in hand with people’s actions and government policies: citizens drained swamps, and government land grants and subsidies encouraged even more drainage.

With the striking transformation of these landscapes came a slow change in attitudes toward wetlands. By the 1860s, naturalists and influential Romantic thinkers and artists recognized that the unique beauty of the nation lay in its disappearing natural features. Their art and writing helped to inspire general appreciation and study of nature among literate Americans. Beyond naturalists, artists, and writers, late-nineteenth-century sport hunters secured the most significant attention for swamps and marshes by noticing that waterfowl populations—dependent on wetlands for nesting and breeding—were declining. National interest in migratory birds led to federal protection of wetlands for the first time.

Not until scientists learned more about the critical importance of wetland ecosystems as habitat for waterfowl, fish, and wildlife did an ecological ideology emerge and a new understanding of wetlands grow in the scientific community. In the 1950s, ecologists coined the term wetland to replace the imprecise and value-laden swamp. Despite scientific knowledge, rampant development following World War II resulted in a blitz of wetlands destruction. All in all, between the mid 1950s and the mid 1970s, 11 million wetland acres were converted to shopping centers, airports, farms, suburbs, and other uses.⁸ When citizens recognized the consequences of this massive wetland transformation in their own communities, they began to organize to restore and protect those landscapes. In response to the growing grassroots environmental movement, several states passed wetland statutes to maintain open space, wildlife habitat, water quality, and flood protection. Citizen concern for environmental quality also spread to Congress, which enacted the Clean Water Act and other laws that benefited wetlands in the early 1970s.

Despite the growing awareness about the values of wetland ecosystems, a traditional and powerful bias favoring agriculture and development persisted in both the institutions and the language of government and politics. While the Fish and Wildlife Service protected wetland remnants as refuges, other federal agencies proceeded to destroy them. When swamps stood in the way of canal projects, the Army Corps of Engineers drained and leveed them. When prairie potholes lay in the way of maximum crop yields, the Department of Agriculture encouraged drainage through subsidy payments. Not until 1975 did a citizen lawsuit compel the Corps to extend Clean Water Act protection to wetlands. And not until 1985 did Congress finally strike from the law federal incentives to drain wetlands for croplands. In the early 1990s, when the Bush administration and then Congress tried to change the legal definition of wetlands, potentially removing thousands of acres from federal protection, it became evident that a universal understanding of wetland ecosystems and their values still did not exist.

Lawmakers’ inexperience and lack of knowledge regarding wetlands reflect the broader spectrum of American attitudes toward these landscapes. Although in the past twenty years more people have come to know these ecosystems better through parks, wildlife refuges, magazines, television, and educational programs, wetlands still remain on the edge of most citizens’ experience. Numerous state and federal laws protecting wetlands now exist, but many individuals still evade regulations without compunction because they don’t understand the aggregate effects of draining and filling small acreages and they don’t want to lose potential profits. Understaffed government agencies cannot provide adequate public education or enforcement of protective laws. Consequently, the surviving patchwork of swamps, marshes, and bogs remains threatened by pollution, by drainage for croplands, and by urban sprawl. While an ecological awareness slowly grows, 117,000 acres of wetlands continue to be whittled away each year.⁹ Only by discovering the story of these lost and beleaguered landscapes can we move wetlands out of the periphery of our experience and into our consciousness.

The histories of farming and city building have been recounted many times before, but in the following chapters, you will find a story of wetlands that reforms traditional understanding of past events and trends by focusing on the interactions between people and the natural environment. Some interactions have been physical; farmers put considerable muscle into draining swamps for croplands. Other interactions have been more cerebral. Thoreau, for example, gained a sense of the richness of life while wading neck-deep through a cranberry bog. Still other, more complex interchanges have involved both the physical and mental. For example, early Bostonians used their natural marshes as dumps. Isolated from cleansing tides after levees were built, the severely degraded marshes repulsed citizens several generations later with odors and insects. The repugnance of the ruined landscape encouraged city leaders to restore the marshes. Such events are part of an ongoing interplay between people and the land that entails many factors including ideology, economics, law, perception, and art as well as ecological processes. Without a grasp of this back-and-forth interplay, it is impossible to know why our landscape looks the way it does today. The story recounted here will clarify our relationship with swamp and marsh landscapes and enable us to comprehend more clearly the context of wetlands loss and protection.

With its historical perspective, Discovering the Unknown Landscape will allow us to see that strides made in wetland conservation over the past twenty-five years are significant yet are rooted in a broader cultural continuum of appreciating wetlands. At the same time, the historical perspective enables us to see that small incremental losses of wetlands over time have become consequential. While people have always altered the lands they live on, the degree of wetland change has been tremendous and, in many cases, absolute.

Because wetlands are connected to each other across broad geography by flyways, this history considers wetlands nationwide. Delighted parents and children who watch ducks dabbling in a neighborhood pond may not realize that those same ducks depend on threatened prairie pothole wetlands seven hundred miles away. Waterfowl that breed in North Dakota’s potholes have been identified in forty-six other states, ten Canadian provinces, and twenty-three other countries.¹⁰

To enlarge our perspective, this history also considers the nature of wetland losses over a long time span. Most of us are too young—even our grandparents are too young—to remember the true abundance of this continent, with its skies laced by endless flocks of ducks and geese, its bays filled with enormous fish and lobsters, and its estuaries embedded with succulent oysters. Because we honestly do not know the natural world that we’ve traded away, we settle too easily for compromised protection of what remains. As former Maryland state senator and Chesapeake Bay activist Bernie Fowler reflected, I guess it’s like sitting in a room and the oxygen is being consumed; you don’t notice it until most of it is gone.¹¹ Although we need not revere the past landscape as a dreamy goal, we must know it well as a benchmark to guide decisions about the future.

Furthermore, understanding the history of cultural attitudes toward wetlands can help us to recognize the potency of traditional beliefs, which seldom change, even when scientific knowledge revises how we view reality. By illustrating the stark contrast between centuries of beliefs and laws encouraging wetland drainage and recent attempts to turn those attitudes and policies around, it is hoped that this history will provide insights into modern-day conflicts. For example, knowing that federal policies long encouraged farmers to drain wetlands helps us to understand the difficulty of convincing them not to drain.

The farmer’s knowledge of wetlands is different from the biologist’s. The ways that each of us understands wetlands fundamentally spring from some source within this story. To better understand the root of my own attitudes, when I began to write this book, I asked my mother and grandmother why our family never ventured into the marshes behind the summer beach house. No one else went there, my grandmother explained. It would have been buggy and muddy, my mother reasoned. We just never even considered it. Their answers were the answers of our mainstream culture, a culture that has long despised and avoided wetlands. Slowly, these responses are changing as we all learn more about wetlands and come to understand that the bugs and mud play fundamental roles in nature’s economy.

When a people’s stories are well known, individuals lay claim to a heritage that gives them an identity and place in the broader society. The same can be true for natural landscape features. Perhaps when Americans better know the story of their wetlands, they will understand why remaining swamps and marshes at the edges of their fields, their subdivisions, their shopping malls, and their industrial parks need protection. They may even walk into such places with curiosity and wonder about the complex and beautiful workings of nature. Perhaps a newfound awareness of wetlands can inspire and nourish a vision of stewardship for these long-abused and misunderstood landscapes.

TWO

A Mosaic of Native Swamps, Bogs, and Marshes

Before we present to you the matters of fact, it is fit to offer to your view the Stage whereon they were acted, for Geography without History seemeth a carkasse without motion, so History without Geography wandereth as a Vagrant without a certaine habitation.

—John Smith ¹

With these words, Captain John Smith, in one of the earliest histories written about the land that would become the United States, explained the necessity of describing the incomparable landscape of the New World. Without presenting a literal grounding—a sense of the nature of the little-known landscape—to his English readers, Smith knew that his story would lack the force and authenticity it deserved. Over 370 years later, his words still ring true. Though as Americans we are no longer separated from this continent by a tempestuous ocean, an equally formidable gulf of time and change separates our familiar modern landscape from the one Smith found when he arrived in 1607. As such, a geographic survey of our nation’s vast historic wetland estate is in order. Relying on the accounts of early European travelers and the insights of modern ecologists and anthropologists, we can begin to understand just what our country’s native wetlands looked like, how they functioned, and how they were used. All told, scientists estimate that 221 million wetland acres (an area more than twice the size of California) once formed a vast life-support system for the continental United States.²

When considering North American topography, most people envision jutting mountains as the primary landmarks. But the low spaces lying in between form the wetland realm. Here rainwater and snowmelt collect in glacial depressions or in meandering rivers and sloughs. Where trees grow in the soaked soils, the wetlands are called swamps and bottomland forests. Where grasses and sedges dominate, we find interior marshes and potholes; and where wet acidic soils are present, we discover the shrubby heath vegetation of bogs. Eventually, the rivers flow to the sea carrying sediment to build tidal marshes. Despite the tremendous variety in appearance and range, all wetlands support plants specially adapted to life in water or in saturated anaerobic soils. From seaside to mountain pass, the key ingredient to wetlands has always been water.

Coastal Fringe and Eastern Swamps

Our survey begins with the Atlantic marshes, the first American wetlands encountered by Europeans. Like most colonists, Dutch settler Adriaen Van Der Donck found the extent and abundance of the golden marshes impressive. In 1656, he described the marshes fringing tidal flats at the mouth of the Hudson River: There ... are brooklands and fresh and salt meadows, some so extensive that the eye cannot oversee the same.³ In the nearby Hackensack and Canarsie meadows, Native Americans derived a rich subsistence from the marshy landscape, growing maize in small plots, hunting birds, and catching fish at weirs and with nets woven from reeds.⁴

Along the north Atlantic, weighty glaciers had depressed the continent, submerging much of the coastal plain and leaving in its place a rocky shoreline subject to large tidal fluctuations. Along this rugged coast, wetlands sequestered mostly near river mouths and in small inlets, yet sizable marshes existed where sediment could accumulate. In 1524, French sailor Giovanni Verrazzano described the landscape of coastal Rhode Island as having treeless champaigns (meadows) seventy-five to ninety miles wide.⁵ Nearly 20,000 acres of salt marsh lined embayments of the native Connecticut coast as well.⁶ These northeastern marshes were vegetated largely with cordgrasses, well adapted to the rigors of saltwater life. The grasses have special root membranes that prevent most salt from entering and special glands to excrete any salt that passes through.⁷ Forming a base of the food chain, the grasses eventually break down into tiny bits, called detritus, which feed small invertebrates that in turn feed small fish. Well suited to brackish waters of tidal creeks and marsh ponds, these small fish, including minnows and killifish, supplied food for larger fish, herons, kingfishers, and Algonquin Indians, who called them mummichoa. ⁸

South of the Hudson’s mouth, where glaciers had not depressed the land, more coastal plain remained exposed to the rise and ebb of the sea, creating larger tidal wetlands. Still the grandest marshes occurred in estuaries, where large rivers poured into shallow saltwater embayments, such as Chesapeake Bay. Nourished by fresh waters of Appalachian streams, hearty marsh grasses, sedges, and rushes clustered against the shores. Undulant aquatic grasses anchored to the bottom offered food and shelter for juvenile fish, including shad, bass, and herring, and a haven for rusty-headed canvasbacks and other ducks. The abundance of the native Chesapeake ecosystem was aptly described by Robert Beverly in 1702: Both of fresh and salt water, of shellfish and others, no country can boast of more variety, greater plenty or of better. In addition to noting the great hunting potential of the shores, marshy grounds, swamps and savannas, Beverly observed that as in summer, the rivers and creeks are filled with fish, so in winter they are in many places covered with fowl. Overwhelmed by the wetlands’ cornucopia of fish and ducks, he wrote, The plenty of them is incredible.⁹ Just to the south, Roanoke Island colonists had found Albemarle and Pamlico sounds to be similarly full of fish and fowl.¹⁰

South of the Chesapeake, the coastal plain widened and sloped more gently seaward, exposing more area to tidewater influence and making possible an even broader fringe of wetlands—up to fifty miles wide. Rivers flowing from the Appalachians carried alluvial sediment to the coast and deposited it on the shallow continental shelf, where marsh vegetation then took hold. Three-quarters of Atlantic tidal wetlands lay south of Maryland as part of this wide golden band. In some places, offshore barrier islands sheltered marshes from the rough surf.¹¹ Within the expansive marshes, upland islands called hammocks or sea islands supported luxuriant forests of bays, pines, and palms.

In addition to coastal marshes, there were many freshwater wetlands in eastern America. In the Southeast, moving inland and up rivers, salt marshes graded into brackish marshes, and then freshwater marshes, and eventually into bottomland swamp forests that towered along the slow-flowing coastal plain rivers. A magnificent feature of early America, the ancient forest swamps furnished habitat for birds, fish, and animals such as black bears, panthers, and wolves.¹²

On the broad, flat uplands between the large swampy rivers of the Carolina plain, another type of freshwater wetland dominated: pocosins. Named by the Algonquin peoples who lived and hunted in the region, pocosin literally meant swamp on a hill, referring to the fact that pocosins were depressions in the uplands. Often underlain by peat, the pocosins were vegetated by acid-loving shrubs such as fetterbrush, waxmyrtle, and titi. In older, more established pocosins, pond pine, red bay, loblolly bay, and other evergreen trees reached above the shrub layer until fires once again created new clearings. The large lakes in the area, including Lake Drummond and Mattamuskeet, likely formed when raging peat fires burned out giant holes. In North Carolina alone, 2.5 million acres of pocosin wetlands existed, an area twice the size of Delaware.¹³

In swampy pockets from Florida north to New England, Atlantic white cedars stood in austere cathedral stands. Requiring dry soil and lots of light to germinate, these swamp trees generally grew in the aftermath of fires. Because native people routinely burned undergrowth and didn’t suppress natural wildfires, white cedar forests flourished in precolonial America. Growing from fifty to eighty feet, lofty groves of single-age trees shaded the peaty lands below, leaving only filtered light to support a sparse understory. Some of the largest cedar stands grew in the Great Dismal Swamp, located on the border of present-day Virginia and North Carolina.¹⁴

Farther inland, different tree and shrub species dominated the freshwater wetlands of the glaciated Northeast. In New England swamps, red maples grew in thick clumps. When Indians burned forests to clear underbrush for better hunting, the wet swamps often resisted fire, leaving densely vegetated sanctuaries for deer and birds. Early travelers suggested that such swamps were common and extensive, some twenty, some thirty miles in compass, according to one. Red maples shared the seasonally soggy terrain with other water-tolerant species such as swamp white oak and black tupelo. Skunk cabbage, irises, and ferns decorated the lower stories of the swamps with their vibrant green.¹⁵

In interior upland valleys throughout the East, beavers created most of the wetlands. Building their dam lodges in small streams—as many as sixteen lodges per mile—beavers routinely flooded adjacent forests. As a result, many waterlogged trees died, but the forest canopy opened, allowing sunlight to warm the dammed-up water and nourish aquatic plants. Soon sedges and grasses grew along the edges of the pond. Eventually, after beavers abandoned their dam, enough organic debris and silt accumulated that marsh vegetation could colonize the center of the former pond, creating a wet meadow. With an estimated sixty to four hundred million beavers living in American streams before Europeans arrived, this dynamic process occurred in hundreds of thousands of locales, continually forming new wetlands in small valleys all across the country.¹⁶

Beyond providing habitat for the abundant plants, fish, birds, and animals that impressed European settlers, eastern wetlands were also the habitat of many Native Americans. Because the earliest European explorers introduced epidemic diseases that spread before them like wildfire across the continent, it is impossible to know just how many people inhabited the country before colonization.¹⁷ One estimate suggests that 33,000 Indians lived in coastal Maryland and Virginia. Enormous midden heaps of empty oyster shells mounded around the Chesapeake remain their legacy and reveal their dependence on the wetland ecosystem. Farther south along the North Carolina coast, Verrazzano noted many settlements and fires in the 1520s, suggesting a sizable native population; historians have speculated that 7,000 people inhabited that swampy area.¹⁸ Moreover, Algonquin languages had many words to refer to specific swamps, including scuppernong and oquaphenoqua (okefenokee), which has been translated as land of trembling earth. All along the Atlantic, indigenous people took advantage of the varied environment for their subsistence. From the northern woodlands to the southern coastal marshes, Native Americans hunted, fished, and gathered but also farmed in small plots to supplement their food supplies. Cleared river floodplains provided fertile places to grow corn and squash. Archaeological evidence suggests that Indians grew corn even in protected clearings within heavily forested swamps.¹⁹ Native people valued wetlands for the fish, fowl, and other food they supplied.

All told, wetlands of the Atlantic seaboard states, stretching from the glaciated Northeast south through Georgia, amounted to roughly 41.3 million acres (an area nearly eight times the size of New Jersey)—about 19 percent of the estimated native wetland estate of the continental United States.²⁰

Florida’s Wetland Eden

Underlain by a distinctive limestone bedrock, riddled with Swiss-cheeselike solution pockets, depressions, and sinkholes, and saturated with a high water table, Florida was wetland through and through. With roughly 20.3 million acres, the peninsula was more than half wetland—the highest density of swamps and marshes anywhere. Similar to the rest of the southeastern coastal plain, the vegetation of northern Florida wetlands graded from golden salt marshes into dense bottomland forests.

Jean Ribaut, a French Huguenot sailor who explored the wetland forests of Florida’s St. Johns River in 1562, found the country to be the fairest, frutefullest, and plesantest of all the worlde. He took note of both the abundant bottomland forest and the coastal wetlands. And the sight of the faire medowes, he wrote, is a pleasure not able to be expressed with tonge, full of herons, corleux, bitters, mallardes, egertes, woodkockes and all other kinde of smale birdes. Near the river’s mouth, Ribaut found villages of the Timacua tribe and noted that the friendly natives took full advantage of the marshes’ plentiful fish and fowl and also used marsh reeds to build their shelters. Ribaut was most amazed by the great abundance of perlles, which ... they toke out of oysters, wherof there is taken every [day] along the river side and amonges the reedes and in the marishes and in so mervelous aboundaunce as ys scant credeble.²¹

Farther to the south, yet another unique wetland formed at the peninsula’s tip. With spring-fed flows that meandered down the Kissimmee River into shallow Lake Okeechobee, the Everglades began where the water overspilled the lake’s south shore, spread out, and then slowly crept in a sheet, fifty miles wide and six inches deep. This sheet flow nourished vast sawgrass marshes, extending nearly to the Atlantic Coast and to a large baldcypress forest on the west—more than 2.3 million acres in all.²² Warmed by its subtropical climate, the Everglades housed unusual fish, colorful wading birds, gentle key deer, and stealthy panthers, but this wetland realm was truly the dominion of the alligators.

Like dam-building beaver in more northern latitudes, alligators made their mark on the Everglades landscape by digging deep holes in marshes. When the water was high, alligators churned their long bodies like giant augurs to excavate the bottom. During dry periods, when water levels in the marsh dropped, fish gravitated to the gator holes, which then attracted flocks of hungry egrets, storks, and herons. While the holes served up easy meals for alligators, they also sustained other members of the biotic community through times of drought.²³

Where freshwater met saltwater at Florida Bay, yet another distinct wetland ecosystem thrived. Thick mangroves grew on stilted roots, slowly colonizing the shallow waters. The roots sheltered oysters and young fish. Crocodiles also took advantage of the warm brackish environment. In the bay, aquatic grasses housed an array of fish and crustaceans, which fed countless wading birds. Like indigenous peoples in other regions, the native Calusas relied on the fish, shellfish, turtles, eels, bears, and deer of the Everglades wetlands. Archaeologists suspect that the Calusas, who depended on pine canoes to get around, dug a small canal to travel through the mangroves without having to brave the stormy Gulf of Mexico.²⁴

The Great Hourglass of Potholes, Bogs, and Bottomlands

Outside of Florida, the most wetland-laden parts of the nation fell into an area shaped like a giant mid-continent hourglass. The Missouri and Ohio rivers outlined the top chamber, and the southern portion of the glass centered on the Mississippi River but fanned out to include over three hundred miles of coastal plain from the Neches River in Texas east to Florida.

North of the Missouri and Ohio rivers, glaciers scraped and scoured the land, leaving an assortment of depressions and ponds when they retreated. ²⁵ The far western portion of this area was left densely pocked by millions of shallow bowls, each filled with snowmelt and rainwater and fringed with bulrushes, smartweeds, and wild rice. These prairie potholes dappled 6.9 million acres in the Dakotas alone, at least 5.7 million acres in Minnesota, and additional acreage in eastern Montana and northern Iowa—in total an area the size of Michigan.²⁶ This unique pothole landscape stretched far into the Canadian provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta.

The variety of shapes, sizes, depths, and vegetation made the potholes an ecological treasure. A teeming soup of invertebrate life, including worms, insect larvae, fairy shrimp, snails, tadpoles, and leeches, formed the base of the pothole food chain. Early each spring, enormous flocks of mallards, pintails, canvasbacks—fifteen duck species in all—from the four major migratory flyways converged in the marshy potholes to feast on these delicacies, to find nest sites, and to begin courtship rituals. Between 50 and 75 percent of the nation’s waterfowl was reared in this wetland region.²⁷

Just to the east of the prairie potholes, in northeastern Minnesota, the wetlands looked markedly different. From above, the landscape appeared flat but patterned, with ovoid islands of black spruce and elongated pools amid seas of heaths, laurels, and other shrubby vegetation. When glaciers receded here, the high water table of a giant glacial lake saturated the vegetation, creating an environment without the oxygen needed for decomposition. Instead of breaking down, the vegetation accumulated in layers of organic sludge to create waterlogged peat—the hallmark of bog wetlands. Covering 6 million acres (nearly the size of Vermont), these bogs of northeastern Minnesota remain the largest peatland complex in North America. Smaller bogs could also be found throughout the northern glaciated area, especially in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Maine.

The peat’s high acidity made it difficult for all but the hardiest plant species to survive. Sphagnum moss, along with sedges, formed the foundation of a floating mat atop the wet peat, but other evergreen shrubs such as leatherleaf and sheep laurel flourished as well. In some places, small, acid- and cold-tolerant trees, such as black spruce and tamarack, punctuated the scrubby terrain with their stunted silhouettes. Several plants developed special adaptations to cope with the bogs’ acidity and lack of nutrients. To obtain nitrogen, for example, pitcher plants attract insects, which they digest in a pool of water and enzymes created by their vase-shaped leaves.

Bogs were not the only wetlands in the glaciated North. Slow rivers meandering over the flat country also created extensive riparian marshes of bulrush, cattail, and wild rice. First Dakota and then Ojibwe Sioux inhabited the area that is now northern Minnesota. Both groups relied on wetland food plants, such as wild turnips and water-lily tubers. Locating the roots with their feet, native women often pulled the tubers in waist-deep water. Wild rice was also a staple. In late summer, Ojibwe gathered rice by arching the tops of the rice stalks and then knocking ripe grains into the bottom of their canoes with wooden rice sticks. In nearby bogs, the Sioux also harvested currants, cranberries, and blueberries. In addition to gathering the bounty of the bogs and marshes, native peoples hunted waterfowl, fish, and turtles. In winter months, Indians stalked game animals such as caribou, which grazed on the sedges and lichens of bogs, their large hooves carrying them safely over the undulant ground.²⁸ The Sioux also used wetland vegetation for medicinal purposes and for making baskets, mats, and canoes. According to nineteenth-century missionaries, both Dakota and Ojibwe peoples had several words to describe various wetland types, suggesting a precision of understanding based on close familiarity with the landscape. Both languages distinguished bogs from marshes and from swamps. The Indians even had distinct words for beavers of different ages and sexes and for different parts of beaver lodges and dams.²⁹

In the southernmost portion of the upper chamber of the hourglass that defines the wetlands of the Midwest, tallgrass prairie spilled across most of the low-level land. Receding glaciers left their mark here as well, replacing ancient well-worn drainage patterns with ponds, sloughs, and marshes. An enormous wet prairie of sloughgrass, prairie cordgrass, and common reed spread across east central Illinois and also across the eastern two-thirds of Iowa. The wet prairie grasses grew to heights of eight or nine feet. One mid-nineteenth-century writer found the grass higher than his head as he rode through on horseback.³⁰ Not only were marsh grasses tall, they were vast. A French traveler canoeing the upper reaches of the Kankakee River in 1683 wrote about the extent of the wetlands of northern Illinois. As far as the eye could reach nothing was to be seen but marshes full of flags [irises] and alders.³¹ Wetlands along the Kankakee included both marshes and swamp forests, which the Pottowatomies used for winter hunting and then trapping once the fur trade began. In northwest Ohio, the Black Swamp, with its varied forest of maple, ash, elm, and cottonwood, girded the Maumee River, which then poured into Lake Erie, forming extensive freshwater marshes. French explorer Etienne Brulé noted in 1615 that marshes spread over one hundred miles from present-day Vermilion, Ohio, to the mouth of the Detroit River.³² In the springtime, rain and floodwater inundated the marshes, attracting large flocks of waterfowl.