The first generations of overseas settlers concentrated on claiming the easiest farmland near the shore and in the river valleys. To their mind, there were no local resources. Everything had to be imported or reinvented. As invaders, they had constant battle with Indigenous people who defied them. It was not until the Revolutionary War ended and the Indian Wars devolved into treaty-making that the population noticeably increased and a need for more farmland brought settlers into the upland forests. The growing scarcity of good farmland revived old stories of swamp and marsh drainage. Farmers already knew that a wagonload of “muck” from a nearby swamp would enrich the soil, renewing yields that had weakened over the years. In addition, during the Civil War, moving heavy guns and personnel through swamps was incredibly difficult; soldiers often resorted to laboriously clearing bypass routes. One of the men wrote of wading through knee-deep and deeper mud in North Carolina after the battle of First Gum Swamp: “The brambles [were] thick and thorny, the water coffee-colored, alive with creeping things, the air heavy with moisture and foul odors.” These memories persisted. Across the country, the ongoing stories of vile adventures in the muck made it clear to military, government, and citizenry that something had to be done about the swamps so universally detested. Everywhere there were horrendous mixtures of fen, bog, swamp, river, pond, lake, and human frustration. This was a country of rich, absorbent wetlands that increasingly no one wanted.
After a rainstorm, any curious child who drags a stick obliquely away from a rivulet sees the rivulet forsake its original channel and follow the stick’s trail; the stick dragger has discovered the principle of drainage. It is this innate existential curiosity that has led humans to commit unthinking malfeasances against the natural world. Farmers grew up with shovel in hand ready to cut drainage ditches. The government was solidly on the side of drainage to increase land area, in part for incoming immigrants. In 1849, Congress passed the first of several swampland laws that turned federal wetlands over to the individual states with the right to dispense those water-sodden acreages for purposes of drainage. These laws perpetuated the myth of endless land free for the taking, and showed an inability or an unwillingness to observe changes in nature over the seasons and years.
By the nineteen-eighties, roughly half of America’s wetlands had been wiped out. Aerial photography made wetland size estimates possible, and in 1990 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service published a study showing that since the sixteen-hundreds the country’s treasury of wetlands had shrivelled to a hundred and three million acres, and that some states had lost almost all their original wetlands.