When I was a child, I remember reading Little House On The Prairie and wondering what a prairie was like. Through the various encounters that the Ingalls had with the Native Americans, I never began to guess what kind of impact their culture had had on the land that was now occupied by “Americans.” Lately, I have been surprised to find out

Europeans were not open to change, they didn’t want to eat the animals available in the new world, so they brought with them all sorts of European animals. Pigs, cattle, sheep, dogs, horses and chickens all came along with Columbus on his second journey.

In Ohio the first white settlers were astonished to find the woods open enough to drive their carriages through, no doubt they thought that god had made it that way for their convenience. But, surprisingly enough, god did not create the forests, nature and people did. As in the prairie of the west, The Native Americans used fire as a tool to keep the forest clear. Over thousands of years the annual burning created an intricate fire dependant ecosystem

“Indians often worked on such a grand scale that the scope of their ambitions are sometimes hard to grasp. They created small plots, as Europeans did, but they also reshaped entire landscapes to suit their purposes.” (Mann, Charles)

It has been said that humans were the keystone species of the New World, and when Columbus arrived he ruined everything. Huge changes in an ecosystem can be marked by the rise and fall of natural species of an area, within a few years of Columbus’s arrival the population of buffalo, elk and deer among others jumped dramatically. The Native Americans had created an intricate system of environmental shaping that, instead of domesticating, controlled the wild populations of animals by hunting. When the Native Americans began dying of diseases brought by the Europeans, the population of animals previously hunted by the Native Americans more than sextupled.

There were of course many changes that followed when Europeans started coming and settling into

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