THE SETTLEMENT OF GRASSLANDS

Everett E. Edwards

THE AGRICULTURAL settlement of the United States took nearly three centuries and involved two processes horizontal movements of pioneer conditions across the continent and vertical movements of improvements within every community.

Quickenings and some lags occurred within the two processes. Old and new systems of farming and crop rotations might exist side by side for a considerable time. Grassland generally tended to be the marginal part of every farm, and its integration into a farming system was slow. To the average farmer, grass was only grass. While some kinds were eventually recognized as better than others for livestock, the general recognition of the place of the various grasses and forage plants in rotations, soil improvement, and animal nutrition came slowly and relatively late.

In considering the place of grasses in the farming of the Thirteen English Colonies that became the United States, we should recall two basic background situations. One is the state of the farming that was familiar to the folk who colonized the North Atlantic seaboard. The second is the state of the forage resources that they found where they settled.

Another point: In the history of grasslands settlement in the United States, several factors make careful historical delineations and generalizations difficult. Grass was generally such a taken-for-granted item that it was not commented upon in historical records unless something went amiss with the supply. In the records also, and especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the terminology used for grasses was vague and overlapping a grass might be known by one name in one part of the country and by quite a difference one in another; or two distinct grasses might be known by the same name in different localities.

Although agriculturists have long recognized the prime importance of an abundant supply of nutritious forage plants for the successful raising of livestock, the early colonists of the seventeenth century were not keenly cognizant of this fact. They came from an England whose agriculture was primitive. Arable and pasture land were still regarded as permanently separate. The introduction of a rotation of crops, founded on the field cultivation of roots and clover usually attributed to Sir Richard Weston, did not take place until after the first settlements in America were made, and popularization of improved methods of farming and of better livestock was still more than a century and a half away.

The vegetation of North America at the time of European colonization was strikingly deficient in forage plants suitable for livestock. The American Indians had made phenomenal progress in the domestication and development of economic plants, but they had used these for human food. They had no herbivorous domestic animals and had, therefore, no occasion to give attention to forage plants.

The first pastures in the English colonies were the natural openings or clearings in the lowlands along the banks of streams and the woods where the underbrush had been burned by the Indians for hunting. In these places the colonists found two native forage plants, the wild-rye and the broom-straw. The first was common along the Atlantic coast from Virginia northward, and the second was dominant in the Middle Colonies and in parts of New England.

These grasses grew high and thick, and the early commentators wrote: enthusiastically about them. The cattle ate them freely during the summer, but shortly came the realization that it was practically impossible to make enough hay of these grasses to carry the cattle through the winter. The fact was that the proportion of roughage to nutrient -made them of little value as hay.

The attention the early settlers gave to the coarse reeds and sedges of the fresh- and salt-water marshes emphasizes the lack of good pasture and hay in the first half of the seventeenth century. If droughts reduced the forage, whole herds might be lost. Sometimes cattle were slaughtered to keep them from starvation, and there was always this danger as long as the livestock had to depend on native grasses.

It was not long, however, before the grasses of England appeared in the Colonies. On shipboard the animals were fed the forage provided for them, and when they were landed the ships were cleared of litter and manure. The grasses thus introduced spread rapidly and in a few generations came to be regarded as indigenous. In 1665 English grass, a term which regularly included bluegrass and white clover, was noted in a report on Rhode Island. In 1679, a visitor on Long Island saw fields of clover in bloom "which diffused a sweet odor in the air for a great distance."

Long before this time some of the seeding was intentional. In 1685 William Penn described an experiment in sowing English grass and noted that one of his colonists had sowed "great and small clover." As the seed used for these intentional sowings was unwinnowed chaff from hay stacks, the resulting pastures included an abundance of Old World weeds.

In view of the state of knowledge concerning livestock husbandry and the scarcity of labor, the first colonists turned their livestock loose on the unoccupied lands adjacent to their holdings as a matter of course and depended on the natural vegetation to carry them at all seasons. The realization that the rigorous winters of the more northern latitudes dictated shelters and supplies of fodder came slowly. As a system of mixed farming prevailed in all the earliest settlements, the protection of growing crops from the depredations of livestock was a prime necessity. Enclosures or fences of some kind were obviously needed, but fencing would have taken more labor than could be spared from clearing land, providing shelter, and cultivating crops. Out of this situation emerged several forms or stages of range husbandry which, generally speaking, were repeated again and again during the course of the American westward movement.

In New England and in the localities developed by New Englanders in New York and northern New Jersey, the method of community settlement made possible a system of common pasturage. The duties of the community cowherd who went through the village street every morning sounding his horn and gathering the livestock were set forth repeatedly in the ancient town records.

If the farmers of the community had enough sheep to justify segregation they were handled separately by a shepherd during the grazing season. Swine were especially troublesome and became the subject of more legislation than any other single agricultural matter. Circumstances soon compelled the registering of-livestock brands and earmarks with the town authorities.

The Dutch of New Netherland had common pastures, and the practice was recognized legally when the colony was taken over by the English. In the Middle Colonies, where settlements were made by individuals without group cooperation at first, each farmer had to handle his own livestock. Farther south the same situation prevailed.

In the Southern Colonies the abundance of open range, even though poorly provided with grasses, discouraged the planting of artificial grasses. The straw of wheat, rice, and other small grains was used for roughage, and Virginia farmers sometimes pastured growing wheat. The soils of the Coastal Plain would have needed special fertilization for the growing of the ordinary meadow and pasture grasses and the extreme heat of the summers would also have hindered their extensive introduction.

On the frontier of the Southern Colonies a range-cattle industry developed which was an eighteenth-century counterpart of the later industry on the Great Plains. Even at the close of the seventeenth century, herds of wild cattle and horses ranged on the western edge of the Virginia settlements. These animals were hunted by the planters, driven into pens, and branded as needed. Cattle raisers, learning from the fur traders about the rich pea-vine pastures of the uplands, pushed into the Piedmont. Sometimes they drove their herds from range to range; sometimes they established permanent ranges around the cowpens that they erected. The cattle were marketed in Charleston and later even driven to Baltimore, Philadelphia, or New York. Sometimes the cattle were sold to Delaware farmers for fattening. By the middle of the eighteenth century the outbreak of diseases necessitated colonial regulation of the cattle drives.

By the eighteenth century the problem of adequate pasturage on farms became accentuated. The supply of grasses in the woods and unenclosed meadows did not keep pace with the increase in livestock.

Pehr Kalm, the famous Swedish botanist who visited the Colonies in the middle of the century, noted that the pastures of the older settlements in Pennsylvania and New Jersey were failing because they were overstocked and the annual grasses could not ripen and reseed themselves. Because of the persistence of the practice of burning the woods, the timber forage declined. The lands, worn out from overtillage and then abandoned to a weed fallow, made poor pasture. Perhaps half of the average farm was a vast pasture largely overrun with sour grass, briers, and bushes. The farmers continued to cut their hay chiefly from the natural meadows and the marshes. Large quantities of coarse hay, chiefly Carex, were gathered, but as the livestock numbers increased the sources became increasingly unreliable.

Sometime before 1750 the German farmers of Pennsylvania began to irrigate natural meadows. The streams flowing through the meadows were diverted along the hillsides and the water distributed by lateral ditches over the lowlands. The procedure often took much labor, but the increased hay crops apparently justified the expense. Farms with a large acreage capable of irrigation were highly valued. A few localities in New England also developed what was called "watered meadows." In the years 1745 to 1760 many of the salt marshes along the Delaware River were drained with dikes and tide gates and the land seeded to grain and then to clover or other English grasses.

A step of significance for the livestock industry was the creation of so-called artificial meadows. The seeding of tilled uplands with tame grasses as a substitute for weed fallow provided the farm stock with a very necessary and better supply of forage. The procedure was an important step forward in crop management.

In the eighteenth century such sowings increased, and selected seed began to be substituted for haymow sweepings. In 1749 Kalm saw fields of red clover near New York, and a decade later another observer found Pennsylvania farmers sowing clover seed "after they have harrowed in their wheat to make the crop stronger." The culture of clover, however, did not become widespread until after the American Revolution. By the beginning of the nineteenth century the advantage of using cultivated grasses on uplands as the source of hay had won recognition, and there was less reliance on natural meadows in the older and more settled parts of the country. Even the Pennsylvania-German farmers no longer valued irrigated meadows.