As a country—as distinct from a colony—America was created mainly by the surplus poor of Europe, reinforced by a small group who were just Europamüde, tired of Europe (a literary catchword of the 1840s), Yet even the poorest knew both a “culture,” largely invented by his social betters and administered from above, and a “nature” that had been pacified for centuries. These people arrived in a country where the indigenous culture was simply the enemy and was in process of being ruthlessly annihilated, and where nature, too, was the enemy, a pristine force, unmodified by civilization, that is, by
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