A snowy woods in the 18th Century

In 1847-48, Daniel Drake, a prominent physician in the Ohio Valley, sat down to write a series of letters to his children about his life as an early settle in Kentucky. His parents came from New Jersey to Mays Lick, just a few miles down the road from where I now live, when he was three years old and he lived there until he left, at 15, to study medicine. The letters he wrote were subsequently published as Pioneer Life in Kentucky1785-1800. Drake was a charming writer, as many of these pioneers seem to be, if maybe just a little coy in apologizing to his children for rattling on about old times.

This morning I came across this passage, which seemed appropriately Currier and Ives for the Christmas season, and so I decided I’d share it here:

[In winter], my equipments were a substantial suite of butternut-linsey, a wool hat, a pair of mittens, and a pair of old stocking legs drawn down, like gaithers, over the tops of my shoes to keep out the snow which was quite as deep in those days as in later times and a great deal prettier. (Don’t smile, if you please, till you hear me out.) I do not mean that the separate flakes were more beautiful than at present; but that a snow in the woods in those days was far more picturesque than a snow in or around town as we see it now.

The woods immediately beyond our fields were unmutilated and not thinned out as you see them at present. They were, in fact, as nature received them from the hand of her Creator. When a snow had fallen without wind, the upper surface of every bough bent gracefully under its weight, and contrasted beautifully with the dark and rugged bark beneath; — the half decayed logs had their deformities covered up; the ground was overspread with a covering as pure and white as the souls of Nelly or Anna or Mary or Etta (sweet darlings, how I want to kiss them!). The cane as high as my head and shoulders, with its long green leaves made the alto relievo of the snowy carpet: — the winter grapes hung in what seemed rich clusters, from the limbs of many trees, which were decorated with tufts of green mistletoe, embellished with berries as white as pearls; while the Celastrus Scandens [Climbing bittersweet), a climbing vine hung out from others, its bunches of orange red berries, and the Indian Arrow wood (Euonymus Carolinensis) [E. Americanus, L., Strawberry Bush] below, displayed its scarlet seeds suspended by threads of the same colour. [pp. 76-77]

The bracketed interpolations were made by the editor, one Emmet Field Horine, M.D., of the old edition I found, published by Henry Schuman of New York in 1948.

Wild bittersweet used to grow in the fencerows of the country lane I lived on, but I haven’t seen it for years now. Farmers tend to clear out their fencerows. What he means by winter grapes I do not know. Back home in Owen County, I used to make wild grape jelly but we didn’t call them winter grapes. Cane, a form of bamboo, disappeared from Kentucky nearly as quickly as the buffalo.

For instance in central Kentucky in 1790, one canebrake was reported to be ‘‘15 miles long and nearly half as wide.’’ Today it is estimated that less than 2% of original habitat remains.

Overgrazing and cultivation are the primary culprits of native Arundinaria’s habitat loss. Decades of fire suppression have also been harmful in two ways: the canopy grows too thick for understory plants like river cane, and when fires do occur, they tend to be catastrophic and leave too much sunlight for the cane to reestablish itself.

I’m not sure what he means by Indian Arrow Wood, which is identified in my Google search as the wahoo (Euonymus atropurpurea), which is not the same as the strawberry bush, and neither is what we have in our yard and call a burning bush (Euonymus alata). Mistletoe is still around in abundance.

Butternut, I think, was a brown dye made from the bark of the butternut tree.