Nesbitt Memorial Library Journal, Volume 10, Number 2, July 2000 Page: 68
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Nesbitt Memorial Library Journal
maintained a non-depleting co-existence with the local mammals. In short, it is highly doubt-
ful that these people and their long-time residence in the area seriously influenced the status
of any of the modern (post Ice Age) resident mammals.
Invaders from the East
People from across the Atlantic began a "conquest" of the Texas gulf coastal
region, according to the historic record, beginning in the sixteenth century, but not exten-
sively until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These intruders from the east
were equipped with Old World cultural enhancements (including the importation of firearms,
iron implements, domesticated cereals, fruits, vegetables, flowering plants, house pets, and
domestic poultry and livestock, plus such unintentional "camp followers" as small pox and
other contagious diseases unknown previously in the New World, noxious weeds, roaches
and other pestiferous insects, and commensal rats and mice). These people came, not to
engage in nomadic existences, but to establish settlements, survey trade routes, extract
personally-useable or salable natural resources, and accumulate land for developing perma-
nent agribusiness programs.
Thus, in the early part of the nineteenth century, the new regime not only began
displacing the first American Indians, but "competed" with the native mammals and other
indigenous plants and animals for living space. Almost 200 years later, these human intruders
are still combating the native biota that would like to reclaim its heritage.
For most of the nineteenth century, the setters from the east busied themselves
with apportioning and developing the real estate. They also determined, often by wasteful
hit-or-miss methods, the best ways to survive in a new and untried land. They used and
abused the land's riches as they pleased, having no guidelines or governmental regulations.
The settlers' "winner-take-all" attitude was perhaps a release mechanism after being freed
from oppressive, gentry-oriented, European societies. At least this "liberation" may have
been a factor in initiating environmental overuses and eliminating many precious natural
resources-unsilted streams, bison herds, mulberry trees, passenger pigeons, etc. Settler
saturation, certainly not faulted herein for this historic style of behavior, resulted in the fol-
lowing kinds of natural habitat deterioration: plowing of virgin prairie and river bottom soils,
with topsoil runoff silting stream beds; leveling, cultivating, and/or irrigating huge tracts of
land; planting and fertilizing exotic farm crops and pasture grasses; introducing noxious
weeds and insects; using herbicides and pesticides; suppressing prairie wildfires causing a
succession of major native plant changes; hunting and trapping to excess; and reducing
forest diversity by selective lumbering.
However, by the turn of the century, and especially beginning in the 1930s, the
law books became filled with rules and regulations governing uses and controlling abuses of
the Texas countryside and its environmental resources. This led to modern ideas of the wise68
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Nesbitt Memorial Library. Nesbitt Memorial Library Journal, Volume 10, Number 2, July 2000, periodical, July 2000; Columbus, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth151409/m1/4/?q=%22civ-war%22: accessed July 18, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Nesbitt Memorial Library.