In his book The Last Wilderness, Murray Morgan writes, “It was strangely like war.  They attacked the forest as if it were an enemy to be pushed back from the beachheads, driven into the hills, broken into patches, and wiped out.  Many operators thought they were not only making lumber but liberating the land from the trees...”

The trees as enemies?  Maybe it all started when Gilgamesh, an ancient king of Babylon (circa 2700 BCE), cut down the ancient cedar forests of Mesopotamia?  What we know is that there has been a global government and corporate assault on human existence itself for at least the last 200 years - as the Industrial Revolution spread out across the earth into what has now become “globalization.” 

Were does this incredible negative energy come from?  Leo Marx, in his book The Machine in the Garden, shows that the new “Americans” applied ideas about landscape taken from the old world to the landscape they discovered in the new world.  So the land itself became a “repository of value” - practical, economic, ‘spiritual,’ and even sexual.  To many historians and authors, the very idea of "conquering" bears sexual themes.

Hundreds of writers have tried to dig down and penetrate these mysteries.  Author Henry Nash Smith in his book Virgin Land attempts to encapsulate these symbolisms and mythologies of the American West, and how they still significantly influence our behavior today.  How early on the land was perceived as a “virgin” - “untouched by human hands” - and how that symbol of the 'virgin' land became distorted into a mental attitude of “taking it” for one’s own use (the names of the states of Virginia - virgin-land - and Maryland - Mary-land - are representative of those early virginal symbolizations).   The basic “Garden of the World” symbol; the fertile one; the new Eden.

The “machine” to Marx is this outrageous inflator.  Man begins to see himself as a Colossus.  His actual puniness is distorted by the power of his machines.   He can now take down mountains, change the course of rivers, cut down the trees to “’deflower’ the wilderness,” destroy his enemies with ease (primarily with the gun and axe).   The machine took man far beyond his emotional capacity to understand it.  How the machine sped up life to the point it was felt someone of immense power was turning the earth faster and faster - trying to see just how much speed man could take.

Emerson noticed this momentus change and wrote in the 1840s that "Things are in the saddle and ride mankind," and Thoreau pointed out that men had become tools of their tools, and that man was totally focused on means and not on ends.  That man was living without ideals any longer, but merely seeking his own self-interests.

Historian Frederick Jackson Turner advanced the theory “...that our society has been shaped by the pull of a ‘vacant’ continent drawing population westward...”  Smith says the American West was settled and developed due to the romanticism and heroics written about in 18th and 19th century poetry, books, and dime novels.  Daniel Boone is singled out as a man who was so outrageously mythologized as to become unrecognizable to his own ‘kin.’ 

James Fenimore Cooper’s series of novels, collectively titled The Leatherstocking Tales, featured a character named Natty Bumppo, who was also known and mythologized as Leatherstocking, Pathfinder, Deerslayer, and Hawkeye.  Tales upon tales of various men and women, exaggerated out of all proportion to the reality of their experience, permeated the consciousness of those who yearned for a better life.  Such characters as Kit Carson, Deadwood Dick, and of course Buffalo Bill and Billy the Kid, fit the so-called “western hero mold,” as did the “Dime Novel Heroine” Calamity Jane.

The whole trust was settling.  Taming.  Bringing nature into the control of man.  The clearing of space to farm.  Free farm land became available after the Homestead Act was passed.  It granted 160 acres to a person who would live on the land for at least 5 years.  The idea had been in development since the early 1840s but was constantly shut down in Congress by Southern politicians who feared a threat to plantation slavery.

Prior to the Civil War, Congress was divided along geographic lines regarding passage of the Homestead Act.  Immediately after the Southern states seceded, it passed in 1862.  For many reasons, the Homestead Act was a catastrophic failure.  The land speculators and the railroad cartels sold better quality land that had been granted to them by the government [for nothing] (some 42 million acres stretched from Boston to Seattle).  As we’ve seen over the last 100 years, the industrialization of farming erased any benefit of a country full of small, family-owned farms.  The Lord may giveth, but then other powers taketh away.