A wolf in the garden - Animal Spaces, Beastly Places - page 151

place' and heretical to the emerging working landscape (see below), thereby
facilitating and justifying their eventual displacement (i.e. extermination) (Katz and
Kirby 1991; cf. Willems-Braun 1997). Like the wolf, the region's Native Americans
were posited to belong to a 'wild' nature that was a threat to the domestication of the
Adirondack landscape. Sylvester (1877:21-23) referred to the 'dreadful Iroquois' as
'nature's own wildest child', as a 'league belonging to the old savage wilderness', and
as 'savages…[that must follow] the dictates of [their] own wild will': savages in a
savage nature. 'Wild' nature and its representatives (Indians and wolves) no longer
had a place in the Adirondacks; together, they stood in the way of the experiment of
landscape abstraction, redefinition and appropriation. Other descriptions implicated
the region's native population as uninterested in and ignorant of the bounty of
natural resources (i.e. timber) that the Adirondacks had to offer (Byron-Curtiss
1976:114; Sylvester 1877:24). If the natives were not putting the land and its
resources to 'good use', then their removal would facilitate the entry into the area of
those who would. These descriptions, then, provided the additional incentive and
legitimacy necessary to entice the savvy, exploitation-minded settler and
entrepreneur into the region.
Perhaps the most insidious and damaging descriptions characterised Adirondack
natives in the same terms used to describe the region's wolf population, terms
successful in justifying and securing the eventual violent extermination of each. This
is well exemplified in the 1976 reprint of Byron-Curtiss's mid-nineteenth-century
biography of Nat Foster, an early Adirondack trapper and explorer. In this
narrative, Byron-Curtiss and the voices he employs regularly depend upon, and call
forth, metaphors and tropes that animalise the native 'other' as predator and as
'vermin':
[T]he suffering patriots… it is needless to say dealt with the Indians in the same
manner as they dealt with wild animals that stole from their flocks. They shot
them.
(Byron-Curtiss 1976:13, my emphasis)
Adirondack Indians were declared 'two-legged varmints' whose raids on and
abductions of settlers' livestock were characterised as predator-like 'depredations'
(Byron-Curtiss 1976:13, 68). They were described as just '[a]nother creature that
often made things lively' for the 'suffering' white settler (Byron-Curtiss 1976:181).
As such, the killing of an Indian was considered no more grievous than the killing
of any other form of 'vermin'. Indeed, their murder was frequently documented and/
or described in terms generally reserved for the hunting of the region's larger
'threats' such as bears, cougars or wolves (Byron-Curtiss 1976:73, 189).
Combined, these representational tropes constructed the Adirondack natives as
anathema to landscape meaning, its 'proper' use, and to humanity in general. They
were considered to be vermin, weeds, matter 'out of place', and in dire need of
removal (Cresswell 1997). These political and racist representations had devastating
consequences. It was widely determined that '[the native] and his [sic] forest must