Bibliography

This chapter on forests does not deal directly with the Wisconsin forest. However, it has excellent comments on the relationship of Indians to the forest before the arrival of Europeans, and on the relationship of lumbering and other forest activities to deer populations. "A relatively small population of Indians had been chopping and burning the American forests for thousands of years. Though limited in technology, they were capable of causing great changes in the landscape. Some ecologists believe that fires set by nomadic hunters of bison in our Middle West helped to maintain prairies in regions that are forested today. Only after Iowa, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio were settled, and Indian burning stopped, did the trees return. Two hundred years from now, the silver maples that took root along Midwestern streams after 1830 may be considered 'virgin'." (p. 140)