Nostalgia runs all through this society—fortunately, for it may be our only hope of salvation. My own version, which I probably share with a few million others, takes me back to walk in pristine natural places on this continent. I dream of traveling with our second native-born naturalist, William Bartram (his father John was the first), a slightly daft Pennsylvania Quaker who botanized from the Carolinas down into Florida in the early 1770s. I would travel with him, “seduced by ... sublime enchanting scenes of primitive nature,” through aromatic groves of magnolia, sweet gum, cabbage palmetto, loblolly pine, live oak, the roaring of alligators in our ears. I would gaze with Thomas Jefferson through his elegant white-framed windows at Monticello toward the Blue Ridge Mountains, speculating about the prodigious country stretching west. Best of all, I imagine entering that west with Lewis and Clark in 1804–5, standing beside them on Spirit Mound in present-day South Dakota, beholding, as Clark put it in his execrable spelling, “a most butifull landscape; Numerous herds of buffalow were Seen feeding in various directions; the Plain to North N. W. & N.E. extends without interuption as far as Can be seen.” And I think what it must have been like for them warping and poling up the muddy Missouri River, penetrating farther into the vast open country of the unplowed, unfenced prairies when wolves still howled in the night; of heading into “the great unknown,” panting over the unpainted, unmined, unskiied Rocky Mountains and rafting down the uncharted, undammed Columbia to the gray-green drizzly shore of the Pacific Ocean. How much has been lost in our short years as a nation, how much have we to be nostalgic about. In the beginning of white discovery North America must have been a glorious place, brimming with exquisite wild beauty, offering to agriculturists some of the earth's richest soils, incredible stands of trees, booty on booty of mineral wealth. Think for a moment of the infinitude of animals that once teemed but are now diminished or gone. In the most comprehensive, detailed analysis yet offered, Frank Gilbert Roe estimated that forty million bison roamed the continent as late as 1830.
Stratigraphy, tectonic evolution and structural analysis of the Halfway River map area (94B), northern Rocky Mountains, British Columbia