Into the woods of 19th-century America

Early American settlers said that a squirrel could climb up a tree on the coast of Massachusetts, set off westwards and not touch the ground until it reached the Ohio river. The squirrels, like the Native Americans, were pushed out and west. Timber was the settlers’ main resource, and they stripped New England of wood for their farms, buildings and fuel. Today, after decades of rural depopulation and second-home gentrification, New England may well have more trees than at any time since the 1830s. But the wooden world of early America is gone, like the Native Americans.

Haunted, weird America, the America of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe, started to become mass-produced industrial America in the 1830s. The Forest is Alexander Nemerov’s eccentric, impressionistic and strangely hypnotic reconstruction of American life before deforestation and standardisation. Nemerov, a professor at Stanford University, calls it ‘a fable, not a history’.

His theme sounds Whitmanesque – ‘the dense and discontinuous woods of a nation, a forest of people destroying and saving the woods and, in some way, themselves’. But Nemerov uses the snapshot, not Whitman’s scattershot, to assemble a montage of a ‘lost world of intricate relation, of human beings going about their ways, living the dream of themselves in shade and sun’. This is appropriate, since the first American daguerreotype was taken in 1839. Like portrait photographs, The Forest is ‘based on the historical record’ but ‘only some of it is true’.

The first axe falls near the Kennebec river, north of Augusta, Maine. A woodman fells a white pine. The tree crashes in the forest, the lumbermen hear it, they slice it up into 15-foot sections, stamp each section with a company brand and stack them on the ice.