Dream world

I'm reading After London, or Wild England by Richard Jeffries.  Published in 1885, it is one of the first post-apocalyptic novels.  Some disaster wipes out almost all the human race and nature reclaims the land.  The plot is not much, and sort of meanders, but the writing is delightful, the descriptions of plants and animals replacing and erasing the works of man are fascinating -- and accurate, as Jeffries was a naturalist in the grand English tradition of intelligent, keen-eyed hill walkers. 

But it is obvious to me that Jeffries had no experience of a landscape with large grazers such as bison in it.  He discusses water rats and moles and magpies, but doesn't mention deer, let alone elk, buffalo, horses and, curiously, cattle, pigs and sheep (at least not so far in my reading), of which there must have been many on farms in Britain then and would have easily gone feral.  All these creatures radically alter the landscape by their browsing and grazing habits.  Anyone who's tried to have a rose garden where deer abound knows this!  If you want to grow anything deer like you need to have it behind a fence at least eight feet tall.  And the larger herbivores change the landscape much more drastically.  Much of the southwest, for example, was forested before overgrazing turned it into desert.  That's also historically true of the middle east, goats and sheep being much more effective desertifiers than cattle.

In any case, should mankind perish utterly cattle would proliferate across the land, especially since no one would be castrating the bull calves.  I've read that during the Civil War the cattle on the Texas ranches, being neglected as the men went off to fight, went feral and by the end of the war numbered some ten million. Just that quickly did their numbers come to rival those of the buffalo.  Imagine how vast their numbers would grow if no men ever returned to round them up.

Wrangler roping a mustang from a herd rounded up on the prairie.

Horses, too, can quickly go feral and their numbers proliferate fantastically.  I read in Zebulon Pike's account of his 1806 expedition in search of the headwaters of the Red River that his company was once blocked by a herd of wild horses on the prairie that took a full day to pass.  Not an hour, but  a day.  These must have been descendants of  the handful of  Spanish horses that went feral during Popé's Rebellion of 1680.  And their numbers had exploded at a time when the buffalo numbered at least 30 million and perhaps as many as 60 million.  There were doubtless also feral cattle about.  In southern California during the Spanish period and in the immediate period afterward, semi-feral cattle teemed in vast numbers.  Robert Glass Cleland titled his history of southern California during the years 1850 to 1880 The Cattle on a Thousand Hills, after Psalm 50:10-12.  The Californios had just let their cattle run loose and untended. When they needed beef or hides, the vaqueros rounded some up.  

Of course, all those cattle destroyed the long-established southern California ecosystem as it was described by the chroniclers of the Gaspar de Portolá y Rovira expedition when they visited the area in 1769.  In particular, what is now the Los Angeles basin was described in almost Edenic terms, riotous with lush plant life, wild roses in gorgeous bloom, marshes and rivulets, artisan springs and pools of clear water everywhere, with all sorts of game abounding, including lots of grizzly bears.  Los Angeles still contains an echo of what once was in names like La Cienega (the swamp) and La Puente (the bridge).  The last artisan spring, in Lacy Park in Pasadena, was capped in the 1940s.    

According to Portolá's estimate, there were about 5,000 Indians living in the basin, probably what were later called by the Spanish Gabrielenos, after the San Gabriel mission where they were enslaved -- that is a carefully chosen word I use to describe their fate.  Of course, the Gabrielenos became entirely extinct a long time ago.  But if you make the easy hike up Mt. Hillyer in the San Gabriel Mountains above Los Angeles you can find bedrock mortars or metates used by Gabrieleno women to grind acorns with stone pestles or manos.  Once the Spanish invaded the Los Angeles basin and subjugated the inhabitants, those who managed to escape fled into the recesses of the San Gabriels and used these natural metates to prepare food. 

The acorn is highly nutritious, but requires preparation before it is edible.  In this it is like the olive, which cannot be eaten raw from the tree, but must be processed first.  When I used to hike the San Gabriels when I was a high school student at an LA gifted magnet, I would find vast heaps of acorns rotting away, far more than the wild life could consume. In the past, these were a bountiful harvest for the native inhabitants, each oak producing a crop every other year, but the volume was such that the Indians needed very little work to have a plentiful food supply year round, every year.  They stored the excess in cone-like granaries, wooden structures raised off the ground that dried and preserved the acorns safe from deer and other pests until they were needed.  Women would from time to time take some from these storage units, grind and soak them, then bake them into bread or boil them into mush, served with assorted berries and venison or other game.

I often made acorn bread when I lived in Los Angeles as a teen.  It was very easy using a coffee grinder or blender to grind up the acorns.  Then I would soak the grounds in water for about a day.  The simplest way to emulate soaking them in a running stream as the Indians did was to place them in a porous sack -- I used muslin cloth I sewed into the shape I wanted, and hang them in a toilet reservoir tank.  As the toilet was flushed during the day, it would wash away the toxins in the acorns and rinse  them with fresh clean water.  After 24 hours or so, the acorns were ready.  I would dry them thoroughly, then place the grounds into a blender at highest speed until they had turned into a fine flour.  This I would use just like any other flour, buckwheat or wheat or oat or barley...whatever...to make the most delicious bread, nutty in flavor and much more nutritious than bread made with wheat flour.  I used to keep a stock of acorn flour on hand to mix a bit into just about everything -- pancakes, biscuits, bread, even tortillas. People often praised my cooking and wondered if I had a secret ingredient. Had I said yes and told the it was acorns, they would have been incredulous.

Well, I've drifted away from my musings on Jeffries' book.  I guess I don't have much more to say about it, other than that it is interesting to me how often "after man" novels have become popular. It seems that there is a yearning, at least in certain segments of society, for an escape from civilization, from the dull routine, life by the clock, the repetitious drudgery, the stresses of being always crowded up against strangers, having to deal with them, rely on them, cater to them, hear their noise wherever you go.  The rat race.  

The historian Bernard de Voto once kept a list of all the white men who had run away to live with the Indians. He gave it up after it passed one thousand names.  He also looked for Indians who had voluntarily run off to join the white world.  He never found even one.  Oh, and he never found a single white woman who had run off to join the Indians, but some who, once captured by Indians sometimes stayed when they could have escaped.  That was uncommon but he did find a few examples.  More usually, a white woman would make every effort to escape, and endure great hardships to return to her own people.  But often once home again, either by making her escape or being returned in a prisoner exchange or by being ransomed, she had a difficult time re-adjusting to the norms of the white world, in large part because she would be viewed as tainted by her time spent with the Indians.  Still, she would not run back to the red world.  

I suppose the women behaved the way they did because they, not men, are the carriers and transmitters of their peoples' inherited way of life, their culture. The hand that rocks the cradle and all that.  Whereas men...well, I don't really know.  Certainly the Indian way offered men a life of adventure and leisure.  They hunted big game, raided rival tribes to steal their horses and rape their women, make off with the prettier ones, in other words, a bit of the old loot and pillage now and again to liven life up.  What man would not be attracted to that?  But for women the life was much different, butchering the slain beasts and cooking them, making leather from their hides and sewing clothing, planting and tending the gardens if they were an agricultural or semi-agricultural tribe, otherwise going out and gathering grains and berries, tubers and herbs, acorns, then preparing them for cooking.  And of course child-bearing and raising. In other words, work, work, work.  

You would think that Indian women would have run away to the white world, but although they often married white men -- trappers, traders, scouts -- the white men stayed with the Indians so nothing really changed for the women. And if the Indian woman had fled to the white world, she would have found life as a white female to be one endless round of drudgery, too, so what would be the point?  Of course, for white men, as well, life was an endless round of drudgery.  No wonder so many young white men and boys dreamed of running off to live with the Indians and enjoy a Peter Pan existence, as they imagined, forever.  

"Writing appears to be necessary for the centralized, stratified state to reproduce itself. Writing is a strange thing.... The one phenomenon which has invariably accompanied it is the formation of cities and empires: the integration into a political system of a considerable number of individuals into a hierarchy of castes and classes. It seems to favor the exploitation rather than the enlightenment of mankind."
~ Claude Lévi-Strauss

 “Not so very long ago, self-governing peoples were the majority of humankind. Today, they are seen from the valley kingdoms as living ancestors, what we were like before we discovered cultivation and civilization. But hill peoples — aborigines, savages, natives — are best understood as runaway fugitive communities that have, over the course of millennia, been fleeing the oppressions of state-making projects in the valleys — slavery, conscription, taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare.”
― James C. Scott