Then too, much of the destruction occurred far from those who had set the processes in motion; advancing settlers would stumble upon overgrown cornfields and depopulated villages. “I have been assured,” wrote de Tocqueville, “that [the] effect of the approach of the white man was often felt up to five hundred miles from their frontier. Their influence is thus exerted over tribes whose names they hardly know and who suffer from the evils of invasion long before they know the perpetrators.”6 Often it was noise that was the cause of long-range environmental disruption. “Colonial farms and
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