Conrad Richter's The Trees is a beautiful book of pioneer times. The heroine, Sayward, fears the forest, and the trees she hates dominate the book in a negative way. As Richter's series progresses the pioneers begin to make headway in clearing the forest. The second volume is The Fields. But in the last volume, The Town, there comes a point at which the last tree in the town in which Sayward now lives — it has grown up around her — is destroyed in a storm. Then at last she finds her feelings about trees are different, and she, and her family, are surprised at the change. With the destruction of the old tree she at last begins to plant some trees; she realizes that they are not the malevolent beings she has always imagined, but in talking to herself of her feelings she gives us a good idea of how many of the people of that early time looked at trees, a feeling difficult for most of us to understand today:
"It couldn't be that old tree lying on the ground that bothered her, she told herself. Why, all her life she had hugged herself to see a tree come down. It meant you could see the sun and stars a little better. A mite more light and air could come in. A few more stalks of corn could grow and give meal to hungry young mouths. Why, back in the woods, she and every other settler woman hated the trees like poison. They were your mortal enemy. All your life you had to fight them, chop, split, nigger them off till nothing was left. And then their wild sprouts kept coming up to plague you. Even now long after the trees were gone, the big butts still lived on in your joints. Heavy lifting and rolling had thickened them till you sometimes felt like an old tree walking."
Conrad Richter, The Town, Cap. 23; in the Trilogy The Awakening Land, (1989), p. 520.
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"To the English common law, by the time Englishmen had arrived in America, it was a waste to cut a tree. The courts of the settlers tried at first to apply this rule—a rule conceived under circumstances where no bit of land lacked an owner and under which the land and its workers were alike well accounted for. But east of the Mississippi, new arrivals found trees impeding every action, found land open to free settlement, and found themselves without effective controllers. Such circumstances compelled a change in the rule even by the judges, the pioneer's official preservers of tradition. Henceforward, declared the courts, cutting trees constituted an improvement. Only when the trees were gone did law swing round once more to the earlier tradition."
Earl F. Murphy, Water Purity, (University of Wisconsin, 1961), p. 4.
Mr. Murphy was a Professor of Law at Temple University, and was an editor of the American Journal of Legal History.
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