Where There Are Mountains: An Environmental History of the Southern Appalachians

By Donald Edward Davis. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000. xvi, 320 pp. $40.00. ISBN 0-8203-2125-7.

Since the publication of Tim Silver's masterful A New Face on the Countryside: Indians, Colonists, and Slaves in South Atlantic Forests, 1500-1800 (Cambridge, 1990), the South has enjoyed the attention of a number of environmental historians. After Silver's sweeping narrative, scholars turned their attention to specific areas within the South. In Where There Are Mountains, sociologist Donald Edward Davis uses an interdisciplinary approach to examine the environmental history of the southern Appalachians, a region he defines as stretching "roughly from the New River in southwestern Virginia southward to northern Georgia and Alabama" (p. xii). His study area extends eastward to the foothills of the Carolina Blue Ridge and westward to the Cumberland Plateau. Chronologically, Davis ranges from the pre-Columbian era through the arrival of industrial logging in the early twentieth century, with approximately half the coverage devoted to the pre-settlement era.

Davis opens with a brief examination of the terms Appalachia and Allegheny as applied to the southern Highlands to explain his own definition of the region. He then begins an in-depth description of the pre-Columbian Mississippian culture and its impact on the environment. Native Americans certainly altered the landscape with the use of fire, land cultivation, plant domestication, and hunting. These changes paled, however, when compared to those that came with the arrival of Old World peoples and their accompanying biological baggage. The Spanish, who introduced pigs, peaches, and pathogens to the Southern Appalachians, had a far greater and more long-lasting impact than their few travels through the region suggest. Davis argues that "the Indians of southern Appalachia were actively involved in . . . trade" with Spanish posts in Florida and Georgia before mid-century (p. 40). Trade goods, religious influence, disease, and possibly contributions to the gene pool, all traveled the trade routes between the mountains and the Gulf coast. Davis examines how "within a single century, pre-Columbian Mississippian life had all but vanished from the southern mountains" (p. 203). The resultant depopulation of the region may have allowed some animal populations to resurge. By the early eighteenth century, however, Cherokee successors to the Mississippians were conducting business with English traders in Virginia and South Carolina, "causing considerable ecological and cultural change even before the first permanent settlers arrived" (p. 62).

Early pioneers brought additional Old World plants and animals to the southern Highlands even as they decimated local populations of elk, buffalo, and other fur-bearing animals. They also began to clear the land on a far grander scale than any of the region's native inhabitants. Soon, population growth and transportation improvements allowed many mountain residents to shift to commercial agriculture. With the arrival of the railroad, the logging industry was able to exploit the region's untapped timber wealth. The removal of old growth forest, with the resultant erosion, wild fires, and flooding, meant that Southern Appalachia would never be the same.

Davis incorporates an impressive amount of information in this volume and documents it with thirty-five pages of endnotes and a sixty-page bibliography. Occasionally, the wide-ranging, interdisciplinary nature of Where There Are Mountains is confusing. For example, Davis uses the archeological term Mississippian to describe the inhabitants of the southern Appalachians at the time of European contact in the mid-sixteenth century. He then shifts from this broad cultural identifier to a specific people, the Cherokee, when he describes how "within a century after Spanish contact, the Mississippian culture group formally known as Pisgah had been transformed into the culture group Qualla-the ancestral peoples of the modern Cherokees" (p. 44). While significant cultural change took place following the disruption of European invasions, the author's implication that the Cherokee only became a distinct people after the arrival of the Spanish is doubtful.

Other shortcomings of Where There Are Mountains may rest with the publisher rather than the author. Several of the illustrations are reproduced at such a small scale as to render them indistinct-a few clear, half- and full-page illustrations would have been more useful. This volume, like all monographs that use endnotes rather than footnotes, would have benefitted from the inclusion of a running header in the notes sections to identify which pages of text are covered by each page of endnotes. These caveats aside, Where There Are Mountains remains a useful addition to the growing field of southern environmental history. It will also be of interest to specialists in Appalachian history and early American history.

L. SCOTT PHILYAW

Western Carolina University

Copyright University of Alabama Press Jan 2003
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