It is certain that a desolation, like that which has overwhelmed many once beautiful and fertile regions of Europe, awaits an important part of the territory of the United States, and of other comparatively new countries over which European civilization is now extending its sway, unless prompt measures are taken to check the action of destructive causes already in operation. It is vain to expect that legislation can do anything effectual to arrest the progress of the evil in those countries, except so far as the state is still the proprietor of extensive forests. Woodlands which have passed into private hands will everywhere be managed, in spite of legal restrictions, upon the same economical principles as other possessions, and every proprietor will, as a general rule, fell his woods, unless he believes that it will be for his pecuniary interest to preserve them. Few of the new provinces which the last three centuries have brought under the control of the European race, would tolerate any interference by the law-making power with what they regard as the most sacred of civil rights—the right, namely, of every man to do what he will with his own. In the Old World, even in France, whose people, of all European nations, love best to be governed and are least annoyed by bureaucratic supervision, law has been found impotent to prevent the destruction, or wasteful economy, of private forests; and in many of the mountainous departments of that country, man is at this moment so fast laying waste the face of the earth, that the most serious fears are entertained, not only of the depopulation of those districts, but of enormous mischiefs to the provinces contiguous to them.[214] The only legal provisions from which anything is to be hoped, are such as shall make it a matter of private advantage to the landholder to spare the trees upon his grounds, and promote the growth of the young wood. Something may be done by exempting standing forests from taxation, and by imposing taxes on wood felled for fuel or for timber, something by premiums or honorary distinctions for judicious management of the woods. It would be difficult to induce governments, general or local, to make the necessary appropriations for such purposes, but there can be no doubt that it would be sound economy in the end.
In countries where there exist municipalities endowed with an intelligent public spirit, the purchase and control of forests by such corporations would often prove advantageous; and in some of the provinces of Northern Lombardy, experience has shown that such operations may be conducted with great benefit to all the interests connected with the proper management of the woods. In Switzerland, on the other hand, except in some few cases where woods have been preserved as a defence against avalanches, the forests of the communes have been productive of little advantage to the public interests, and have very generally gone to decay. The rights of pasturage, everywhere destructive to trees, combined with toleration of trespasses, have so reduced their value, that there is, too often, nothing left that is worth protecting. In the canton of Ticino, the peasants have very frequently voted to sell the town woods and divide the proceeds among the corporators. The sometimes considerable sums thus received are squandered in wild revelry, and the sacrifice of the forests brings not even a momentary benefit to the proprietors.[215]
It is evidently a matter of the utmost importance that the public, and especially land owners, be roused to a sense of the dangers to which the indiscriminate clearing of the woods may expose not only future generations, but the very soil itself. Fortunately, some of the American States, as well as the governments of many European colonies, still retain the ownership of great tracts of primitive woodland. The State of New York, for example, has, in its northeastern counties, a vast extent of territory in which the lumberman has only here and there established his camp, and where the forest, though interspersed with permanent settlements, robbed of some of its finest pine groves, and often ravaged by devastating fires, still covers far the largest proportion of the surface. Through this territory, the soil is generally poor, and even the new clearings have little of the luxuriance of harvest which distinguishes them elsewhere. The value of the land for agricultural uses is therefore very small, and few purchases are made for any other purpose than to strip the soil of its timber. It has been often proposed that the State should declare the remaining forest the inalienable property of the commonwealth, but I believe the motive of the suggestion has originated rather in poetical than in economical views of the subject. Both these classes of considerations have a real worth. It is desirable that some large and easily accessible region of American soil should remain, as far as possible, in its primitive condition, at once a museum for the instruction of the student, a garden for the recreation of the lover of nature, and an asylum where indigenous tree, and humble plant that loves the shade, and fish and fowl and four-footed beast, may dwell and perpetuate their kind, in the enjoyment of such imperfect protection as the laws of a people jealous of restraint can afford them. The immediate loss to the public treasury from the adoption of this policy would be inconsiderable, for these lands are sold at low rates. The forest alone, economically managed, would, without injury, and even with benefit to its permanence and growth, soon yield a regular income larger than the present value of the fee.
The collateral advantages of the preservation of these forests would be far greater. Nature threw up those mountains and clothed them with lofty woods, that they might serve as a reservoir to supply with perennial waters the thousand rivers and rills that are fed by the rains and snows of the Adirondacks, and as a screen for the fertile plains of the central counties against the chilling blasts of the north wind, which meet no other barrier in their sweep from the Arctic pole. The climate of Northern New York even now presents greater extremes of temperature than that of Southern France. The long continued cold of winter is far more intense, the short heats of summer not less fierce than in Provence, and hence the preservation of every influence that tends to maintain an equilibrium of temperature and humidity is of cardinal importance. The felling of the Adirondack woods would ultimately involve for Northern and Central New York consequences similar to those which have resulted from the laying bare of the southern and western declivities of the French Alps and the spurs, ridges, and detached peaks in front of them.
It is true that the evils to be apprehended from the clearing of the mountains of New York may be less in degree than those which a similar cause has produced in Southern France, where the intensity of its action has been increased by the inclination of the mountain declivities, and by the peculiar geological constitution of the earth. The degradation of the soil is, perhaps, not equally promoted by a combination of the same circumstances, in any of the American Atlantic States, but still they have rapid slopes and loose and friable soils enough to render widespread desolation certain, if the further destruction of the woods is not soon arrested. The effects of clearing are already perceptible in the comparatively unviolated region of which I am speaking. The rivers which rise in it flow with diminished currents in dry seasons, and with augmented volumes of water after heavy rains. They bring down much larger quantities of sediment, and the increasing obstructions to the navigation of the Hudson, which are extending themselves down the channel in proportion as the fields are encroaching upon the forest, give good grounds for the fear of serious injury to the commerce of the important towns on the upper waters of that river, unless measures are taken to prevent the expansion of "improvements" which have already been carried beyond the demands of a wise economy.
I have stated, in a general way, the nature of the evils in question, and of the processes by which they are produced; but I shall make their precise character and magnitude better understood by presenting some descriptive and statistical details of facts of actual occurrence. I select for this purpose the southeastern portion of France, not because that territory has suffered more severely than some others, but because its deterioration is comparatively recent, and has been watched and described by very competent and trustworthy observers, whose reports are more easily accessible than those published in other countries.[216]
The provinces of Dauphiny, Avignon, and Provence comprise a territory of fourteen or fifteen thousand square miles, bounded northwest by the Isere, northeast and east by the Alps, south by the Mediterranean, west by the Rhone, and extending from 42° to about 45° of north latitude. The surface is generally hilly and even mountainous, and several of the peaks in Dauphiny rise above the limit of perpetual snow. The climate, as compared with that of the United States in the same latitude, is extremely mild. Little snow falls, except upon the higher mountain ranges, the frosts are light, and the summers long, as might, indeed, be inferred from the vegetation; for in the cultivated districts, the vine and the fig everywhere flourish, the olive thrives as far north as 43½°, and upon the coast, grow the orange, the lemon, and the date palm. The forest trees, too, are of southern type, umbrella pines, various species of evergreen oaks, and many other trees and shrubs of persistent broad-leaved foliage, characterizing the landscape.
The rapid slope of the mountains naturally exposed these provinces to damage by torrents, and the Romans diminished their injurious effects by erecting, in the beds of ravines, barriers of rocks loosely piled up, which permitted a slow escape of the water, but compelled it to deposit above the dikes the earth and gravel with which it was charged.[217] At a later period the Crusaders brought home from Palestine, with much other knowledge gathered from the wiser Moslems, the art of securing the hillsides and making them productive by terracing and irrigation. The forests which covered the mountains secured an abundant flow of springs, and the process of clearing the soil went on so slowly that, for centuries, neither the want of timber and fuel, nor the other evils about to be depicted, were seriously felt. Indeed, throughout the Middle Ages, these provinces were well wooded, and famous for the fertility and abundance, not only of the low grounds, but of the hills.
Such was the state of things at the close of the fifteenth century. The statistics of the seventeenth show that while there had been an increase of prosperity and population in Lower Provence, as well as in the correspondingly situated parts of the other two provinces I have mentioned, there was an alarming decrease both in the wealth and in the population of Upper Provence and Dauphiny, although, by the clearing of the forests, a great extent of plough land and pasturage had been added to the soil before reduced to cultivation. It was found, in fact, that the augmented violence of the torrents had swept away, or buried in sand and gravel, more land than had been reclaimed by clearing; and the taxes computed by fires or habitations underwent several successive reductions in consequence of the gradual abandonment of the wasted soil by its starving occupants. The growth of the large towns on and near the Rhone and the coast, their advance in commerce and industry, and the consequently enlarged demand for agricultural products, ought naturally to have increased the rural population and the value of their lands; but the physical decay of the uplands was such that considerable tracts were deserted altogether, and in Upper Provence, the fires which in 1471 counted 897, were reduced to 747 in 1699, to 728 in 1733, and to 635 in 1776.
These facts I take from the La Provence au point de vue des Bois, des Torrents et des Inondations, of Charles de Ribbe, one of the highest authorities, and I add further details from the same source.
"Commune of Barles, 1707: Two hills have become connected by land slides, and have formed a lake which covers the best part of the soil. 1746: New slides buried twenty houses composing a village, no trace of which is left; more than one third of the land had disappeared.
"Monans, 1724: Deserted by its inhabitants and no longer cultivated.
"Gueydan, 1760: It appears by records that the best grounds have been swept off since 1756, and that ravines occupy their place.
"Digne, 1762: The river Bléone has destroyed the most valuable part of the territory.
"Malmaison, 1768: The inhabitants have emigrated, all their fields having been lost."
In the case of the commune of St. Laurent du Var, it appears that, after clearings in the Alps, succeeded by others in the common woods of the town, the floods of the torrent Var became more formidable, and had already carried off much land as early as 1708. "The clearing continued, and more soil was swept away in 1761. In 1762, after another destructive inundation, many of the inhabitants emigrated, and in 1765, one half of the territory had been laid waste.
"In 1766, the assessor Serraire said to the Assembly: 'As to the damage caused by brooks and torrents, it is impossible to deny its extent. Upper Provence is in danger of total destruction, and the waters which lay it waste threaten also the ruin of the most valuable grounds on the plain below. Villages have been almost submerged by torrents which formerly had not even names, and large towns are on the point of destruction from the same cause.'"
In 1776, Viscount Puget thus reported: "The mere aspect of Upper Provence is calculated to appal the patriotic magistrate. One sees only lofty mountains, deep valleys with precipitous sides, rivers with broad beds and little water, impetuous torrents, which in floods lay waste the cultivated land upon their banks and roll huge rocks along their channels; steep and parched hillsides, the melancholy consequences of indiscriminate clearing; villages whose inhabitants, finding no longer the means of subsistence, are emigrating day by day; houses dilapidated to huts, and but a miserable remnant of population."
"In a document of the year 1771, the ravages of the torrents were compared to the effects of an earthquake, half the soil in many communes seeming to have been swallowed up.
"Our mountains," said the administrators of the province of the Lower Alps in 1792, "present nothing but a surface of stony tufa; clearing is still going on, and the little rivulets are becoming torrents. Many communes have lost their harvests, their flocks, and their houses by floods. The washing down of the mountains is to be ascribed to the clearings and the practice of burning them over."
These complaints, it will be seen, all date before the Revolution, but the desolation they describe has since advanced with still swifter steps.
Surell—whose valuable work, Étude sur les Torrents des Hautes Alpes, published in 1841, presents the most appalling picture of the desolations of the torrent, and, at the same time, the most careful studies of the history and essential character of this great evil—in speaking of the valley of Dévoluy, on page 152, says: "Everything concurs to show that it was anciently wooded. In its peat bogs are found buried trunks of trees, monuments of its former vegetation. In the framework of old houses, one sees enormous timber, which is no longer to be found in the district. Many localities, now completely bare, still retain the name of 'wood,' and one of them is called, in old deeds, Comba nigra [Black forest or dell], on account of its dense woods. These and many other proofs confirm the local traditions which are unanimous on this point.
"There, as everywhere in the Upper Alps, the clearings began on the flanks of the mountains, and were gradually extended into the valleys and then to the highest accessible peaks. Then followed the Revolution, and caused the destruction of the remainder of the trees which had thus far escaped the woodman's axe."
In a note to this passage, the writer says: "Several persons have told me that they had lost flocks of sheep, by straying, in the forests of Mont Auroux, which covered the flanks of the mountain from La Cluse to Agnères. These declivities are now as bare as the palm of the hand."
The ground upon the steep mountains being once bared of trees, and the underwood killed by the grazing of horned cattle, sheep, and goats, every depression becomes a watercourse. "Every storm," says Surell, page 153, "gives rise to a new torrent. Examples of such are shown, which, though not yet three years old, have laid waste the finest fields of their valleys, and whole villages have narrowly escaped being swept into ravines formed in the course of a few hours. Sometimes the flood pours in a sheet over the surface, without ravine or even bed, and ruins extensive grounds, which are abandoned forever."
I cannot follow Surell in his description and classification of torrents, and I must refer the reader to his instructive work for a full exposition of the theory of the subject. In order, however, to show what a concentration of destructive energies may be effected by felling the woods that clothe and support the sides of mountain abysses, I cite his description of a valley descending from the Col Isoard, which he calls "a complete type of a basin of reception," that is, a gorge which serves as a common point of accumulation and discharge for the waters of several lateral torrents. "The aspect of the monstrous channel," says he, "is frightful. Within a distance of less than three kilomètres [= one mile and seven eighths English], more than sixty torrents hurl into the depths of the gorge the debris torn from its two flanks. The smallest of these secondary torrents, if transferred to a fertile valley, would be enough to ruin it."
The eminent political economist Blanqui, in a memoir read before the Academy of Moral and Political Science on the 25th of November, 1843, thus expresses himself: "Important as are the causes of impoverishment already described, they are not to be compared to the consequences which have followed from the two inveterate evils of the Alpine provinces of France, the extension of clearing and the ravages of torrents. * * The most important result of this destruction is this: that the agricultural capital, or rather the ground itself—which, in a rapidly increasing degree, is daily swept away by the waters—is totally lost. Signs of unparalleled destitution are visible in all the mountain zone, and the solitudes of those districts are assuming an indescribable character of sterility and desolation. The gradual destruction of the woods has, in a thousand localities, annihilated at once the springs and the fuel. Between Grenoble and Briançon in the valley of the Romanche, many villages are so destitute of wood that they are reduced to the necessity of baking their bread with sun-dried cowdung, and even this they can afford to do but once a year. This bread becomes so hard that it can be cut only with an axe, and I have myself seen a loaf of bread in September, at the kneading of which I was present the January previous.
"Whoever has visited the valley of Barcelonette, those of Embrun, and of Verdun, and that Arabia Petræa of the department of the Upper Alps, called Dévoluy, knows that there is no time to lose, that in fifty years from this date France will be separated from Savoy, as Egypt from Syria, by a desert."[218]
It deserves to be specially noticed that the district here referred to, though now among the most hopelessly waste in France, was very productive even down to so late a period as the commencement of the French Revolution. Arthur Young, writing in 1789, says: "About Barcelonette and in the highest parts of the mountains, the hill pastures feed a million of sheep, besides large herds of other cattle;" and he adds: "With such a soil, and in such a climate we are not to suppose a country barren because it is mountainous. The valleys I have visited are, in general, beautiful."[219] He ascribes the same character to the provinces of Dauphiny, Provence, and Auvergne, and, though he visited, with the eye of an attentive and practised observer, many of the scenes since blasted with the wild desolation described by Blanqui, the Durance and a part of the course of the Loire are the only streams he mentions as inflicting serious injury by their floods. The ravages of the torrents had, indeed, as we have seen, commenced earlier in some other localities, but we are authorized to infer that they were, in Young's time, too limited in range, and relatively too insignificant, to require notice in a general view of the provinces where they have now ruined so large a proportion of the soil.
But I resume my citations.
"I do not exaggerate," says Blanqui. "When I shall have finished my excursion and designated localities by their names, there will rise, I am sure, more than one voice from the spots themselves, to attest the rigorous exactness of this picture of their wretchedness. I have never seen its equal even in the Kabyle villages of the province of Constantine; for there you can travel on horseback, and you find grass in the spring, whereas in more than fifty communes in the Alps there is absolutely nothing.
"The clear, brilliant, Alpine sky of Embrun, of Gap, of Barcelonette, and of Digne, which for months is without a cloud, produces droughts interrupted only by diluvial rains like those of the tropics. The abuse of the right of pasturage and the felling of the woods have stripped the soil of all its grass and all its trees, and the scorching sun bakes it to the consistence of porphyry. When moistened by the rain, as it has neither support nor cohesion, it rolls down to the valleys, sometimes in floods resembling black, yellow, or reddish lava, sometimes in streams of pebbles, and even huge blocks of stone, which pour down with a frightful roar, and in their swift course exhibit the most convulsive movements. If you overlook from an eminence one of these landscapes furrowed with so many ravines, it presents only images of desolation and of death. Vast deposits of flinty pebbles, many feet in thickness, which have rolled down and spread far over the plain, surround large trees, bury even their tops, and rise above them, leaving to the husbandman no longer a ray of hope. One can imagine no sadder spectacle than the deep fissures in the flanks of the mountains, which seem to have burst forth in eruption to cover the plains with their ruins. These gorges, under the influence of the sun which cracks and shivers to fragments the very rocks, and of the rain which sweeps them down, penetrate deeper and deeper into the heart of the mountain, while the beds of the torrents issuing from them are sometimes raised several feet, in a single year, by the debris, so that they reach the level of the bridges, which, of course, are then carried off. The torrent beds are recognized at a great distance, as they issue from the mountains, and they spread themselves over the low grounds, in fan-shaped expansions, like a mantle of stone, sometimes ten thousand feet wide, rising high at the centre, and curving toward the circumference till their lower edges meet the plain.
"Such is their aspect in dry weather. But no tongue can give an adequate description of their devastations in one of those sudden floods which resemble, in almost none of their phenomena, the action of ordinary river water. They are now no longer overflowing brooks, but real seas, tumbling down in cataracts, and rolling before them blocks of stone, which are hurled forward by the shock of the waves like balls shot out by the explosion of gunpowder. Sometimes ridges of pebbles are driven down when the transporting torrent does not rise high enough to show itself, and then the movement is accompanied with a roar louder than the crash of thunder. A furious wind precedes the rushing water and announces its approach. Then comes a violent eruption, followed by a flow of muddy waves, and after a few hours all returns to the dreary silence which at periods of rest marks these abodes of desolation.
"This is but an imperfect sketch of this scourge of the Alps. Its devastations are increasing with the progress of clearing, and are every day turning a portion of our frontier departments into barren wastes.
"The unfortunate passion for clearing manifested itself at the beginning of the French Revolution, and has much increased under the pressure of immediate want. It has now reached an extreme point, and must be speedily checked, or the last inhabitant will be compelled to retreat when the last tree falls.
"The elements of destruction are increasing in violence. Rivers might be mentioned whose beds have been raised ten feet in a single year. The devastation advances in geometrical progression as the higher slopes are bared of their wood, and 'the ruin from above,' to use the words of a peasant, 'helps to hasten the desolation below.'
"The Alps of Provence present a terrible aspect. In the more equable climate of Northern France, one can form no conception of those parched mountain gorges where not even a bush can be found to shelter a bird, where, at most, the wanderer sees in summer here and there a withered lavender, where all the springs are dried up, and where a dead silence, hardly broken by even the hum of an insect, prevails. But if a storm bursts forth, masses of water suddenly shoot from the mountain heights into the shattered gulfs, waste without irrigating, deluge without refreshing the soil they overflow in their swift descent, and leave it even more seared than it was from want of moisture. Man at last retires from the fearful desert, and I have, the present season, found not a living soul in districts where I remember to have enjoyed hospitality thirty years ago."
In 1853, ten years after the date of Blanqui's memoir, M. de Bonville, prefect of the Lower Alps, addressed to the Government a report in which the following passages occur:
"It is certain that the productive mould of the Alps, swept off by the increasing violence of that curse of the mountains, the torrents, is daily diminishing with fearful rapidity. All our Alps are wholly, or in large proportion, bared of wood. Their soil, scorched by the sun of Provence, cut up by the hoofs of the sheep, which, not finding on the surface the grass they require for their sustenance, scratch the ground in search of roots to satisfy their hunger, is periodically washed and carried off by melting snows and summer storms.
"I will not dwell on the effects of the torrents. For sixty years they have been too often depicted to require to be further discussed, but it is important to show that their ravages are daily extending the range of devastation. The bed of the Durance, which now in some places exceeds 2,000 mètres [about 6,600 feet, or a mile and a quarter] in width, and, at ordinary times, has a current of water less than 10 mètres [about 33 feet] wide, shows something of the extent of the damage.[220] Where, ten years ago, there were still woods and cultivated grounds to be seen, there is now but a vast torrent: there is not one of our mountains which has not at least one torrent, and new ones are daily forming.
"An indirect proof of the diminution of the soil is to be found in the depopulation of the country. In 1852, I reported to the General Council that, according to the census of that year, the population of the department of the Lower Alps had fallen off no less than 5,000 souls in the five years between 1846 and 1851.
"Unless prompt and energetic measures are taken, it is easy to fix the epoch when the French Alps will be but a desert. The interval between 1851 and 1856 will show a further decrease of population. In 1862, the ministry will announce a continued and progressive reduction in the number of acres devoted to agriculture; every year will aggravate the evil, and, in a half century, France will count more ruins, and a department the less."
Time has verified the predictions of De Bonville. The later census returns show a progressive diminution in the population of the departments of the Lower Alps, the Isère, the Drome, Ariège, the Upper and the Lower Pyrenees, the Lozère, the Ardennes, the Doubs, the Vosges, and, in short, in all the provinces formerly remarkable for their forests. This diminution is not to be ascribed to a passion for foreign emigration, as in Ireland, and in parts of Germany and of Italy; it is simply a transfer of population from one part of the empire to another, from soils which human folly has rendered uninhabitable, by ruthlessly depriving them of their natural advantages and securities, to provinces where the face of the earth was so formed by nature as to need no such safeguards, and where, consequently, she preserves her outlines in spite of the wasteful improvidence of man.[221]
Highly colored as these pictures seem, they are not exaggerated, although the hasty tourist through Southern France and Northern Italy, finding little in his high road experiences to justify them, might suppose them so. The lines of communication by locomotive train and diligence lead generally over safer ground, and it is only when they ascend the Alpine passes and traverse the mountain chains, that scenes somewhat resembling those just described fall under the eye of the ordinary traveller. But the extension of the sphere of devastation, by the degradation of the mountains and the transportation of their debris, is producing analogous effects upon the lower ridges of the Alps and the plains which skirt them; and even now one needs but an hour's departure from some great thoroughfares to reach sites where the genius of destruction revels as wildly as in the most frightful of the abysses which Blanqui has painted.[222]
There is one effect of the action of torrents which few travellers on the Continent are heedless enough to pass without notice. I refer to the elevation of the beds of mountain streams in consequence of the deposit of the debris with which they are charged. To prevent the spread of sand and gravel over the fields and the deluging overflow of the raging waters, the streams are confined by walls and embankments, which are gradually built higher and higher as the bed of the torrent is raised, so that, to reach a river, you ascend from the fields beside it; and sometimes the ordinary level of the stream is above the streets and even the roofs of the towns through which it passes.[223]
The traveller who visits the depths of an Alpine ravine, observes the length and width of the gorge and the great height and apparent solidity of the precipitous walls which bound it, and calculates the mass of rock required to fill the vacancy, can hardly believe that the humble brooklet which purls at his feet has been the principal agent in accomplishing this tremendous erosion. Closer observation will often teach him, that the seemingly unbroken rock which overhangs the valley is full of cracks and fissures, and really in such a state of disintegration that every frost must bring down tons of it. If he compute the area of the basin which finds here its only discharge, he will perceive that a sudden thaw of the winter's deposit of snow, or one of those terrible discharges of rain so common in the Alps, must send forth a deluge mighty enough to sweep down the largest masses of gravel and of rock.[224] The simple measurement of the cubical contents of the semi-circular hillock which he climbed before he entered the gorge, the structure and composition of which conclusively show that it must have been washed out of this latter by torrential action, will often account satisfactorily for the disposal of most of the matter which once filled the ravine.
It must further be remembered, that every inch of the violent movement of the rocks is accompanied with crushing concussion, or, at least, with great abrasion, and, as you follow the deposit along the course of the waters which transport it, you find the stones gradually rounding off in form, and diminishing in size until they pass successively into gravel, sand, impalpable slime.
I do not mean to assert that all the rocky valleys of the Alps have been produced by the action of torrents resulting from the destruction of the forests. All the greater, and many of the smaller channels, by which that chain is drained, owe their origin to higher causes. They are primitive fissures, ascribable to disruption in upheaval or other geological convulsion, widened and scarped, and often even polished, so to speak, by the action of glaciers during the ice period, and but little changed in form by running water in later eras.[225]
In these valleys of ancient formation, which extend into the very heart of the mountains, the streams, though rapid, have lost the true torrential character, if, indeed, they ever possessed it. Their beds have become approximately constant, and their walls no longer crumble and fall into the waters that wash their bases. The torrent-worn ravines, of which I have spoken, are of later date, and belong more properly to what may be called the crust of the Alps, consisting of loose rocks, of gravel, and of earth, strewed along the surface of the great declivities of the central ridge, and accumulated thickly between their solid buttresses. But it is on this crust that the mountaineer dwells. Here are his forests, here his pastures, and the ravages of the torrent both destroy his world, and convert it into a source of overwhelming desolation to the plains below.
Transporting Power of Rivers.
An instance that fell under my own observation in 1857, will serve to show something of the eroding and transporting power of streams which, in these respects, fall incalculably below the torrents of the Alps. In a flood of the Ottaquechee, a small river which flows through Woodstock, Vermont, a milldam on that stream burst, and the sediment with which the pond was filled, estimated after careful measurement at 13,000 cubic yards, was carried down by the current. Between this dam and the slack water of another, four miles below, the bed of the stream, which is composed of pebbles interspersed in a few places with larger stones, is about sixty-five feet wide, though, at low water, the breadth of the current is considerably less. The sand and fine gravel were smoothly and evenly distributed over the bed to a width of fifty-five or sixty feet, and for a distance of about two miles, except at two or three intervening rapids, filled up all the interstices between the stones, covering them to the depth of nine or ten inches, so as to present a regularly formed concave channel, lined with sand, and reducing the depth of water, in some places, from five or six feet to fifteen or eighteen inches. Observing this deposit after the river had subsided and become so clear that the bottom could be seen, I supposed that the next flood would produce an extraordinary erosion of the banks and some permanent changes in the channel of the stream, in consequence of the elevation of the bed and the filling up of the spaces between the stones through which formerly much water had flowed; but no such result followed. The spring freshet of the next year entirely washed out the sand its predecessor had deposited, carried it to ponds and still-water reaches below, and left the bed of the river almost precisely in its former condition, though, of course, with the slight displacement of the pebbles which every flood produces in the channels of such streams. The pond, though often previously discharged by the breakage of the dam, had then been undisturbed for about twenty-five years, and its contents consisted almost entirely of sand, the rapidity of the current in floods being such that it would let fall little lighter sediment, even above an obstruction like a dam. The quantity I have mentioned evidently bears a very inconsiderable proportion to the total erosion of the stream during that period, because the wash of the banks consists chiefly of fine earth rather than of sand, and after the pond was once filled, or nearly so, even this material could no longer be deposited in it. The fact of the complete removal of the deposit I have described between the two dams in a single freshet, shows that, in spite of considerable obstruction from roughness of bed, large quantities of sand may be taken up and carried off by streams of no great rapidity of inclination; for the whole descent of the bed of the river between the two dams—a distance of four miles—is but sixty feet, or fifteen feet to the mile.
The Po and its Deposits.
The current of the river Po, for a considerable distance after its volume of water is otherwise sufficient for continuous navigation, is too rapid for that purpose until near Piacenza, where its velocity becomes too much reduced to transport great quantities of mineral matter, except in a state of minute division. Its southern affluents bring down from the Apennines a large quantity of fine earth from various geological formations, while its Alpine tributaries west of the Ticino are charged chiefly with rock ground down to sand or gravel.[226] The bed of the river has been somewhat elevated by the deposits in its channel, though not by any means above the level of the adjacent plains as has been so often represented. The dikes, which confine the current at high water, at the same time augment its velocity and compel it to carry most of its sediment to the Adriatic. It has, therefore, raised neither its own channel nor its alluvial shores, as it would have done if it had remained unconfined. But, as the surface of the water in floods is from six to fifteen feet above the general level of its banks, the Po can, at that period, receive no contributions of earth from the washing of the fields of Lombardy, and there is no doubt that a large proportion of the sediment it now deposits at its mouth descended from the Alps in the form of rock, though reduced by the grinding action of the waters, in its passage seaward, to the condition of fine sand, and often of silt.[227]
We know little of the history of the Po, or of the geography of the coast near the point where it enters the Adriatic, at any period more than twenty centuries before our own. Still less can we say how much of the plains of Lombardy had been formed by its action, combined with other causes, before man accelerated its levelling operations by felling the first woods on the mountains whence its waters are derived. But we know that since the Roman conquest of Northern Italy, its deposits have amounted to a quantity which, if recemented into rock, recombined into gravel, common earth, and vegetable mould, and restored to the situations where eruption or upheaval originally placed, or vegetation deposited it, would fill up hundreds of deep ravines in the Alps and Apennines, change the plan and profile of their chains, and give their southern and northern faces respectively a geographical aspect very different from that they now present. Ravenna, forty miles south of the principal mouth of the Po, was built like Venice, in a lagoon, and the Adriatic still washed its walls at the commencement of the Christian era. The mud of the Po has filled up the lagoon, and Ravenna is now four miles from the sea. The town of Adria, which lies between the Po and the Adige, at the distance of some four or five miles from each, was once a harbor famous enough to have given its name to the Adriatic sea, and it was still a seaport in the time of Augustus. The combined action of the two rivers has so advanced the coast line that Adria is now about fourteen miles inland, and, in other places, the deposits made within the same period by these and other neighboring streams have a width of twenty miles.
What proportion of the earth with which they are charged these rivers have borne out into deep water, during the last two thousand years, we do not know, but as they still transport enormous quantities, as the North Adriatic appears to have shoaled rapidly, and as long islands, composed in great part of fluviatile deposits, have formed opposite their mouths, it must evidently have been very great. The floods of the Po occur but once, or sometimes twice in a year.[228] At other times, its waters are comparatively limpid and seem to hold no great amount of mud or fine sand in mechanical suspension; but at high water it contains a large proportion of solid matter, and according to Lombardini, it annually transports to the shores of the Adriatic not less than 42,760,000 cubic mètres, or very nearly 55,000,000 cubic yards, which carries the coast line out into the sea at the rate of more than 200 feet in a year.[229] The depth of the annual deposit is stated at eighteen centimètres, or rather more than seven inches, and it would cover an area of not much less than ninety square miles with a layer of that thickness. The Adige, also, brings every year to the Adriatic many million cubic yards of Alpine detritus, and the contributions of the Brenta from the same source are far from inconsiderable. The Adriatic, however, receives but a small proportion of the soil and rock washed away from the Italian slope of the Alps and the northern declivity of the Apennines by torrents. Nearly the whole of the debris thus removed from the southern face of the Alps between Monte Rosa and the sources of the Adda—a length of watershed not less than one hundred and fifty miles—is arrested by the still waters of the Lakes Maggiore and Como, and some smaller lacustrine reservoirs, and never reaches the sea. The Po is not continuously embanked except for the lower half of its course. Above Piacenza, therefore, it spreads and deposits sediment over a wide surface, and the water withdrawn from it for irrigation at lower points, as well as its inundations in the occasional ruptures of its banks, carry over the adjacent soil a large amount of slime.
If we add to the estimated annual deposits of the Po at its mouth, the earth and sand transported to the sea by the Adige, the Brenta, and other less important streams, the prodigious mass of detritus swept into Lago Maggiore by the Tosa, the Maggia, and the Ticino, into the lake of Como by the Maira and the Adda, into the lake of Garda by its affluents, and the yet vaster heaps of pebbles, gravel, and earth permanently deposited by the torrents near their points of eruption from mountain gorges, or spread over the wide plains at lower levels, we may safely assume that we have an aggregate of not less than four times the quantity carried to the Adriatic by the Po, or 220,000,000 cubic yards of solid matter, abstracted every year from the Italian Alps and the Apennines, and removed out of their domain by the force of running water.[230]
The present rate of deposit at the mouth of the Po has continued since the year 1600, the previous advance of the coast, after the year 1200, having been only one third as rapid. The great increase of erosion and transport is ascribed by Lombardini chiefly to the destruction of the forests in the basin of that river and the valleys, of its tributaries, since the beginning of the seventeenth century.[231] We have no data to show the rate of deposit in any given century before the year 1200, and it doubtless varied according to the progress of population and the consequent extension of clearing and cultivation. The transporting power of torrents is greatest soon after their formation, because at that time their points of delivery are lower, and, of course, their general slope and velocity more rapid, than after years of erosion above, and deposit below, have depressed the beds of their mountain valleys, and elevated the channels of their lower course. Their eroding action also is most powerful at the same period, both because their mechanical force is then greatest, and because the loose earth and stones of freshly cleared forest ground are most easily removed. Many of the Alpine valleys west of the Ticino—that of the Dora Baltea for instance—were nearly stripped of their forests in the days of the Roman empire, others in the Middle Ages, and, of course, there must have been, at different periods before the year 1200, epochs when the erosion and transportation of solid matter from the Alps and the Apennines were as great as since the year 1600.
Upon the whole, we shall not greatly err if we assume that, for a period of not less than two thousand years, the walls of the basin of the Po—the Italian slope of the Alps, and the northern and northeastern declivities of the Apennines—have annually sent down into the Adriatic, the lakes, and the plains, not less than 150,000,000 cubic yards of earth and disintegrated rock. We have, then, an aggregate of 300,000,000,000 cubic yards of such material, which, allowing to the mountain surface in question an area of 50,000,000,000 square yards, would cover the whole to the depth of six yards.[232] There are very large portions of this area, where, as we know from ancient remains—roads, bridges, and the like—from other direct testimony, and from geological considerations, very little degradation has taken place within twenty centuries, and hence the quantity to be assigned to localities where the destructive causes have been most active is increased in proportion.
If this vast mass of pulverized rock and earth were restored to the localities from which it was derived, it certainly would not obliterate valleys and gorges hollowed out by great geological causes, but it would reduce the length and diminish the depth of ravines of later formation, modify the inclination of their walls, reclothe with earth many bare mountain ridges, essentially change the line of junction between plain and mountain, and carry back a long reach of the Adriatic coast many miles to the west.[233]
It is, indeed, not to be supposed that all the degradation of the mountains is due to the destruction of the forests—that the flanks of every Alpine valley in Central Europe below the snow line were once covered with earth and green with woods, but there are not many particular cases, in which we can, with certainty, or even with strong probability, affirm the contrary.
We cannot measure the share which human action has had in augmenting the intensity of causes of mountain degradation, but we know that the clearing of the woods has, in some cases, produced within two or three generations, effects as blasting as those generally ascribed to geological convulsions, and has laid waste the face of the earth more hopelessly than if it had been buried by a current of lava or a shower of volcanic sand. Now torrents are forming every year in the Alps. Tradition, written records, and analogy concur to establish the belief that the ruin of most of the now desolate valleys in those mountains is to be ascribed to the same cause, and authentic descriptions of the irresistible force of the torrent show that, aided by frost and heat, it is adequate to level Mont Blanc and Monte Rosa themselves, unless new upheavals shall maintain their elevation.
It has been contended that all rivers which take their rise in mountains originated in torrents. These, it is said, have lowered the summits by gradual erosion, and, with the material thus derived, have formed shoals in the sea which once beat against the cliffs; then, by successive deposits, gradually raised them above the surface, and finally expanded them into broad plains traversed by gently flowing streams. If we could go back to earlier geological periods, we should find this theory often verified, and we cannot fail to see that the torrents go on at the present hour, depressing still lower the ridges of the Alps and the Apennines, raising still higher the plains of Lombardy and Provence, extending the coast still farther into the Adriatic and the Mediterranean, reducing the inclination of their own beds and the rapidity of their flow, and thus tending to become river-like in character.
There are cases where torrents cease their ravages of themselves, in consequence of some change in the condition of the basin where they originate, or of the face of the mountain at a higher level, while the plain or the sea below remains in substantially the same state as before. If a torrent rises in a small valley containing no great amount of earth and of disintegrated or loose rock, it may, in the course of a certain period, wash out all the transportable material, and if the valley is then left with solid walls, it will cease to furnish debris to be carried down by floods. If, in this state of things, a new channel be formed at an elevation above the head of the valley, it may divert a part, or even the whole of the rain water and melted snow which would otherwise have flowed into it, and the once furious torrent now sinks to the rank of a humble and harmless brooklet. "In traversing this department," says Surell, "one often sees, at the outlet of a gorge, a flattened hillock, with a fan-shaped outline and regular slopes; it is the bed of dejection of an ancient torrent. It sometimes requires long and careful study to detect the primitive form, masked as it is by groves of trees, by cultivated fields, and often by houses, but, when examined closely, and from different points of view, its characteristic figure manifestly appears, and its true history cannot be mistaken. Along the hillock flows a streamlet, issuing from the ravine, and quietly watering the fields. This was originally a torrent, and in the background may be discovered its mountain basin. Such extinguished torrents, if I may use the expression, are numerous."[234]
But for the intervention of man and domestic animals, these latter beneficent revolutions would occur more frequently, proceed more rapidly. The new scarped mountains, the hillocks of debris, the plains elevated by sand and gravel spread over them, the shores freshly formed by fluviatile deposits, would clothe themselves with shrubs and trees, the intensity of the causes of degradation would be diminished, and nature would thus regain her ancient equilibrium. But these processes, under ordinary circumstances, demand, not years, generations, but centuries;[235] and man, who even now finds scarce breathing room on this vast globe, cannot retire from the Old World to some yet undiscovered continent, and wait for the slow action of such causes to replace, by a new creation, the Eden he has wasted.
Mountain Slides.
I have said that the mountainous regions of the Atlantic States of the American Union are exposed to similar ravages, and I may add that there is, in some cases, reason to apprehend from the same cause even more appalling calamities than those which I have yet described. The slide in the Notch of the White Mountains, by which the Willey family lost their lives, is an instance of the sort I refer to, though I am not able to say that in this particular case, the slip of the earth and rock was produced by the denudation of the surface. It may have been occasioned by this cause, or by the construction of the road through the Notch, the excavations for which, perhaps, cut through the buttresses that supported the sloping strata above.
Not to speak of the fall of earth when the roots which held it together, and the bed of leaves and mould which sheltered it both from disintegrating frost and from sudden drenching and dissolution by heavy showers, are gone, it is easy to see that, in a climate with severe winters, the removal of the forest, and, consequently, of the soil it had contributed to form, might cause the displacement and descent of great masses of rock. The woods, the vegetable mould, and the soil beneath, protect the rocks they cover from the direct action of heat and cold, and from the expansion and contraction which accompany them. Most rocks, while covered with earth, contain a considerable quantity of water.[236] A fragment of rock pervaded with moisture cracks and splits, if thrown into a furnace, and sometimes with a loud detonation; and it is a familiar observation that the fire, in burning over newly cleared lands, breaks up and sometimes almost pulverizes the stones. This effect is due partly to the unequal expansion of the stone, partly to the action of heat on the water it contains in its pores. The sun, suddenly let in upon rock which had been covered with moist earth for centuries, produces more or less disintegration in the same way, and the stone is also exposed to chemical influences from which it was sheltered before. But in the climate of the United States as well as of the Alps, frost is a still more powerful agent in breaking up mountain masses. The soil that protects the lime and sand stone, the slate and the granite from the influence of the sun, also prevents the water which filters into their crevices and between their strata from freezing in the hardest winters, and the moisture descends, in a liquid form, until it escapes in springs, or passes off by deep subterranean channels. But when the ridges are laid bare, the water of the autumnal rains fills the minutest pores and veins and fissures and lines of separation of the rocks, then suddenly freezes, and bursts asunder huge, and apparently solid blocks of adamantine stone.[237] Where the strata are inclined at a considerable angle, the freezing of a thin film of water over a large interstratal area might occasion a slide that should cover miles with its ruins; and similar results might be produced by the simple hydrostatic pressure of a column of water, admitted by the removal of the covering of earth to flow into a crevice faster than it could escape through orifices below.
Earth or rather mountain slides, compared to which the catastrophe that buried the Willey family in New Hampshire was but a pinch of dust, have often occurred in the Swiss Italian, and French Alps. The land slip, which overwhelmed and covered to the depth of seventy feet, the town of Plurs in the valley of the Maira, on the night of the 4th of September, 1618, sparing not a soul of a population of 2,430 inhabitants, is one of the most memorable of these catastrophes, and the fall of the Rossberg or Rufiberg, which destroyed the little town of Goldau in Switzerland, and 450 of its people, on the 2d of September, 1806, is almost equally celebrated. In 1771, according to Wessely, the mountain peak Piz, near Alleghe in the province of Belluno, slipped into the bed of the Cordevole, a tributary of the Piave, destroying in its fall three hamlets and sixty lives. The rubbish filled the valley for a distance of nearly two miles, and, by damming up the waters of the Cordevole, formed a lake about three miles long, and a hundred and fifty feet deep, which still subsists, though reduced to half its original length by the wearing down of its outlet.[238]
On the 14th of February, 1855, the hill of Belmonte, a little below the parish of San Stefano, in Tuscany, slid into the valley of the Tiber, which consequently flooded the village to the depth of fifty feet, and was finally drained off by a tunnel. The mass of debris is stated to have been about 3,500 feet long, 1,000 wide, and not less than 600 high.[239]
Such displacements of earth and rocky strata rise to the magnitude of geological convulsions, but they are of so rare occurrence in countries still covered by the primitive forest, so common where the mountains have been stripped of their native covering, and, in many cases, so easily explicable by the drenching of incohesive earth from rain, or the free admission of water between the strata of rocks—both of which a coating of vegetation would have prevented—that we are justified in ascribing them for the most part to the same cause as that to which the destructive effects of mountain torrents are chiefly due—the felling of the woods.
In nearly every case of this sort the circumstances of which are known, the immediate cause of the slip has been, either an earthquake, the imbibition of water in large quantities by bare earth, or its introduction between or beneath solid strata. If water insinuates itself between the strata, it creates a sliding surface, or it may, by its expansion in freezing, separate beds of rock, which had been nearly continuous before, widely enough to allow the gravitation of the superincumbent mass to overcome the resistance afforded by inequalities of face and by friction; if it finds its way beneath hard earth or rock reposing on clay or other bedding of similar properties, it converts the supporting layer into a semi-fluid mud, which opposes no obstacle to the sliding of the strata above.
The upper part of the mountain which buried Goldau was composed of a hard but brittle conglomerate, called nagelflue, resting on an unctuous clay, and inclining rapidly toward the village. Much earth remained upon the rock, in irregular masses, but the woods had been felled, and the water had free access to the surface, and to the crevices which sun and frost had already produced in the rock, and of course, to the slimy stratum beneath. The whole summer of 1806 had been very wet, and an almost incessant deluge of rain had fallen the day preceding the catastrophe, as well as on that of its occurrence. All conditions then, were favorable to the sliding of the rock, and, in obedience to the laws of gravitation, it precipitated itself into the valley as soon as its adhesion to the earth beneath it was destroyed by the conversion of the latter into a viscous paste. The mass that fell measured between two and a half and three miles in length by one thousand feet in width, and its average thickness is thought to have been about a hundred feet. The highest portion of the mountain was more than three thousand feet above the village, and the momentum acquired by the rocks and earth in their descent carried huge blocks of stone far up the opposite slope of the Rigi.
The Piz, which fell into the Cordevole, rested on a steeply inclined stratum of limestone, with a thin layer of calcareous marl intervening, which, by long exposure to frost and the infiltration of water, had lost its original consistence, and become a loose and slippery mass instead of a cohesive and tenacious bed.
Protection against fall of Rocks and Avalanches by Trees.
Forests often subserve a valuable purpose in preventing the fall of rocks, by mere mechanical resistance. Trees, as well as herbaceous vegetation, grow in the Alps upon declivities of surprising steepness of inclination, and the traveller sees both luxuriant grass and flourishing woods on slopes at which the soil, in the dry air of lower regions, would crumble and fall by the weight of its own particles. When loose rocks lie scattered on the face of these declivities, they are held in place by the trunks of the trees, and it is very common to observe a stone that weighs hundreds of pounds, perhaps even tons, resting against a tree which has stopped its progress just as it was beginning to slide down to a lower level. When a forest in such a position is cut, these blocks lose their support, and a single wet season is enough not only to bare the face of a considerable extent of rock, but to cover with earth and stone many acres of fertile soil below.[240]
In Switzerland and other snowy and mountainous countries, forests render a most important service by preventing the formation and fall of destructive avalanches, and in many parts of the Alps exposed to this catastrophe, the woods are protected, though too often ineffectually, by law. No forest, indeed, could arrest a large avalanche once in motion, but the mechanical resistance afforded by the trees prevents their formation, both by obstructing the wind, which gives to the dry snow of the Staub-Lawine, or dust avalanche, its first impulse, and by checking the disposition of moist snow to gather itself into what is called the Rutsch-Lawine, or sliding avalanche. Marschand states that, the very first winter after the felling of the trees on the higher part of a declivity between Saanen and Gsteig where the snow had never been known to slide, an avalanche formed itself in the clearing, thundered down the mountain, and overthrew and carried with it a hitherto unviolated forest to the amount of nearly a million cubic feet of timber.[241] The path once opened down the flanks of the mountain, the evil is almost beyond remedy. The snow sometimes carries off the earth from the face of the rock, or, if the soil is left, fresh slides every winter destroy the young plantations, and the restoration of the wood becomes impossible. The track widens with every new avalanche. Dwellings and their occupants are buried in the snow, or swept away by the rushing mass, or by the furious blasts it occasions through the displacement of the air; roads and bridges are destroyed; rivers blocked up, which swell till they overflow the valley above, and then, bursting their snowy barrier, flood the fields below with all the horrors of a winter inundation.[242]
Principal Causes of the Destruction of the Forest.
The needs of agriculture are the most familiar cause of the destruction of the forest in new countries; for not only does an increasing population demand additional acres to grow the vegetables which feed it and its domestic animals, but the slovenly husbandry of the border settler soon exhausts the luxuriance of his first fields, and compels him to remove his household gods to a fresher soil. With growing numbers, too, come the many arts for which wood is the material. The demands of the near and the distant market for this product excite the cupidity of the hardy forester, and a few years of that wild industry of which Springer's "Forest Life and Forest Trees" so vividly depicts the dangers and the triumphs, suffice to rob the most inaccessible glens of their fairest ornaments. The value of timber increases with its dimensions in almost geometrical proportion, and the tallest, most vigorous, and most symmetrical trees fall the first sacrifice. This is a fortunate circumstance for the remainder of the wood; for the impatient lumberman contents himself with felling a few of the best trees, and then hurries on to take his tithe of still virgin groves.
The unparalleled facilities for internal navigation, afforded by the numerous rivers of the present and former British colonial possessions in North America, have proved very fatal to the forests of that continent. Quebec has become a centre for a lumber trade, which, in the bulk of its material, and, consequently, in the tonnage required for its transportation, rivals the commerce of the greatest European cities. Immense rafts are collected at Quebec from the great Lakes, from the Ottawa, and from all the other tributaries which unite to swell the current of the St. Lawrence and help it to struggle against its mighty tides.[243] Ships, of burden formerly undreamed of, have been built to convey the timber to the markets of Europe, and during the summer months the St. Lawrence is almost as crowded with vessels as the Thames.[244] Of late, Chicago, in Illinois, has been one of the greatest lumber as well as grain depots of the United States, and it receives and distributes contributions from all the forests in the States washed by Lake Michigan, as well as from some more distant points.
The operations of the lumberman involve other dangers to the woods besides the loss of the trees felled by him. The narrow clearings around his shanties[245] form openings which let in the wind, and thus sometimes occasion the overthrow of thousands of trees, the fall of which dams up small streams, and creates bogs by the spreading of the waters, while the decaying trunks facilitate the multiplication of the insects which breed in dead wood, and are, some of them, injurious to living trees. The escape and spread of camp fires, however, is the most devastating of all the causes of destruction that find their origin in the operations of the lumberman. The proportion of trees fit for industrial uses is small in all primitive woods. Only these fall before the forester's axe, but the fire destroys, indiscriminately, every age and every species of tree.[246] While, then, without much injury to the younger growths, the native forest will bear several "cuttings over" in a generation—for the increasing value of lumber brings into use, every four or five years, a quality of timber which had been before rejected as unmarketable—a fire may render the declivity of a mountain unproductive for a century.[247]
American Forest Trees.
The remaining forests of the Northern States and of Canada no longer boast the mighty pines which almost rivalled the gigantic Sequoia of California; and the growth of the larger forest trees is so slow, after they have attained to a certain size, that if every pine and oak were spared for two centuries, the largest now standing would not reach the stature of hundreds recorded to have been cut within two or three generations.[248] Dr. Williams, who wrote about sixty years ago, states the following as the dimensions of "such trees as are esteemed large ones of their kind in that part of America" [Vermont], qualifying his account with the remark that his measurements "do not denote the greatest which nature has produced of their particular species, but the greatest which are to be found in most of our towns."