This panel brings together the work of two historians examining the environment in the nineteenth century United States. Hayden L. Nelson's paper discusses how the North American fur trade created profound environmental effects. Nelson examines how the destruction of furbearing populations—especially beaver—in the North Woods region around Lake Superior changed this environment before its survey and settlement by the United States beginning in the 1840s. Nelson challenges historical perceptions that the region was an untrammeled wilderness, arguing instead that the North Woods were in a state of flux before white settlement arrived, and that understanding the environmental changes caused by the fur trade are critical to understanding subsequent treaties, dispossession, and U.S. industrial expansion into the region. Karl Nycklemoe's paper is part of a larger environmental history of the Upper Mississippi watershed from the 1780s to the 1880s. This piece argues that US colonization of the region began at and through the water, not the land, by drawing from an archival base of military-scientific expeditions conducted in the first three decades of the nineteenth century by US soldiers and scientists. As US expeditioners re-envisioned Indigenous terraqueous homeland as a network of riverine “highways,” they pinpointed sites of military garrisons and the means to surveil Indigenous trade and diplomacy. Yet, domestic Indigenous sovereignty was consistently strong in this era, as US expeditions were always dependent on Indigenous interlocutors to navigate the politics and topography of the Upper Mississippi.

From 1890 to 1910, public works departments and private contractors collectively paved thousands of miles of new sidewalks in US cities. The new sidewalks, mostly cement-bound concrete, dramatically changed walking for city pedestrians across the country. Previously, walking around towns involved far more puddles, dust, mud, and lumpy surfaces. Impermeable cement regulated water and dirt while creating smooth surfaces. Into this history of urban environments, Kirke Elsass layers a story of snow-shoveling neighbors, street vendors, bicyclists, footwear designers, and rubber manufacturers to recount the role a simple and commonplace material played in how Americans moved, dressed, and lived together.

Rural entrepreneurs were consumed by the effort to mine, quarry, and transport natural resources such as granite, soapstone, graphite, iron, coal, and limestone in the early national period. This essay will focus on the Worcester Coal Company (1828) and its founder, William Elijah Greene, who doggedly pursued the knowledge, capital, markets, and transportation necessary to exploit his Massachusetts landholdings. In so doing, he joined a rural movement that offered the prospect of new wealth in a democratic society and was infused with patriotism for its role in the economic and scientific advancement of the young nation.

This panel examines the role of the environment in the United States during the early twentieth century and its relationship to colonialism. As a science largely employed by colonizing European powers at the turn of the twentieth century, forestry, Evan Bonney’s paper suggests, helped the United States claim the Intermountain West as part of its empire. Perri Meldon’s work centers on the Great Dismal Swamp, the wetland once owned by George Washington. As promotional material illustrates, the swamp became less an actual wetland and more an imagined space imbued with revolutionary (and rebel) spirit. Yet the swamp’s ecology repeatedly resisted the visions of those who promoted it. Meldon’s essay documents the efforts of local officials, outdoors enthusiasts, and lumber companies to advertise the swamp and how the wetland evaded their goals.

For seventeenth-century Susquehannock and Piscataway people, small rivers, creeks, and streams were nonhuman kin. For English settlers, these same waters were raw materials, infrastructure with which to make their fortunes in iron production. Seizures of water by settlers provoked resistance from Indigenous people, violent episodes which threatened the growth of industry, and, in some cases, forced proprietors out of the iron business altogether. Sophie Hess investigates these conflicts over water in Maryland's colonial records, arguing that economic growth hinged on securing water for iron and that Indigenous people disrupted this growth through organized attacks and other acts of resistance.

El Teatro Campesino created dramatic performances engaging their fellow farmworkers in fields and orchards, on picket lines and in union halls, to highlight the crisis of toxic poisoning in their workscape. Beginning with the Delano Grape Strike in 1965, ETC created a collective forum through their “actos” to identify and name the environmental crises they faced alongside fellow farmworkers. Utilizing playscripts paired with interviews and newspaper accounts of performances show how these farmworkers understood the ecology of their working environment, and the methods they used to articulate that relationship and build a movement to change it.