the Introduction to this book I discuss Bartram’s encounter with “floating islands” of water lettuce, or Pistia stratiotes, along the St. Johns River. In Travels (1791) Bartram is struck by the plant’s capacity to weather the sudden alterations of a landscape where water and land change places with little warning. Though jostled by winds and currents that continually drive the plants from shore and break their communities “to pieces,” the water lettuce always manages to “find footing” and a place to “spread and extend” once more. Such resilience is the result of “long fibrous roots”: rather than fixing the plant in place, which would guarantee uprooting, these roots enable mobility, and thereby ensure stability and longevity.54
I return now to Bartram’s reflection on water lettuce to place it in dialogue with other passages on root-taking in Travels as a way of tracking the text’s investment in the same topic that occupies De Brahm: human habitation of shifting ground. Human root-taking in Florida was never far from Bartram’s mind, a fact that is especially apparent when he concludes his reflection on water lettuce with the following observation: “These floating islands present a very entertaining prospect; for … [in] the imagination … we … see them compleatly inhabited, and alive, with crocodiles, serpents, frogs, otters, crows, herons, curlews, jackdaws, &c. there seems, in short, nothing wanted but the appearance of a wigwam and a canoe to complete the scene.”55 The concluding vision of a wigwam complements Bartram’s earlier descriptions of the plant as a being that “associates” in “communities” that “find footing” and form “colonies”: such language encourages us to read the reverie as a reflection on human roots, an encouragement amplified by similarities Bartram suggests between water lettuce roots and Indian mounds.
Scholars have shown that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century interest in Indian mounds focused primarily on determining the mounds’ origins. Thus the interest was not only anthropological but also deeply political.56 For example, when Thomas Jefferson and others theorized that the mounds were made by a population of non-Indian “mound-builders” who mysteriously vanished before the arrival of the “savage” Indians currently occupying the land, they fashioned a “Mound Builder myth” that licensed Indian removal on the grounds that Indians were not indigenous.57 This myth persisted as a way of invalidating Indian land claims until the late nineteenth century, though not without contest from writers such as Bartram, who claimed that the mounds were Indian in origin and should thus be considered proof of Indian indigeneity and rights to the land.58
While the mounds’ origins certainly concerned Bartram, he was interested not only in who built the mounds, but also why they were built and how the original builders used them. At several points in Travels Bartram reviews existing theories of the intended purpose of the mounds. For example, he considers and then rejects the idea that the mounds were “sepulchres” for a funerary ritual; entertains the possibility that they were “designed … to some religious purpose, as great altars and temples”; and speculates that they were “raised in part for ornament and recreation,” or simply as “monuments of magnificence, to perpetuate the power and grandeur of the nation.”59 Yet most persuasive to Bartram is another theory, which he derives from an encounter with a particular mound standing “in a level plain” near the bank of the Savannah River.
The mound, he reasons, must have enabled the community to remain on ground that could become water with little warning. For after puzzling over “what could have induced the Indians to raise such a heap of earth” in a place so frequently “subject to inundations,” Bartram hypothesizes that the mound acted as an “island,” “raised for a retreat and refuge” “In case of an inundation, which are unforeseen and surprise them very suddenly, spring and autumn” (325–26). In other words, rather than building “settled habitations” on frequently inundated land, the Indians established themselves by building temporary dwelling places that they could easily abandon for higher ground when the waters suddenly rose.
Bartram’s claim that mounds enabled Indians to establish themselves on shifting ground is more than an assertion of Indian land rights on the basis of indigeneity; the claim also suggests that Indian inhabitance of the land was durable, and that this endurance resulted from a capacity to adapt to land’s impermanence. This suggestion is important because it debunks the mound-builder myth in a way that resists co-optation by supporters of U.S. expansion. For, as Annette Kolodny shows, it was not always enough to prove that Indians had built the mounds, as scientists finally did during the 1890s.60 For one thing, many observers interpreted the mounds as structures that enabled their builders to live nomadically, and nomads did not count as proprietors according to law. Yet Bartram’s interpretation of mounds suggests a way out of this logic. By describing mounds as both the product of indigenous Indians and a sign of their capacity to endure on the land, Bartram fashions the earthen heaps as material evidence that Indians developed a complex form of land-based possession. Put otherwise, on the same ground where recently built British plantations lie in ruins, mounds endure as “monuments” attesting that prehistoric Indians, ancestors of those populating the land to this day, ably anchored themselves to the land via mobile roots.
While the broader political implications of mobile roots remain undeveloped in Travels, they were not lost on a late nineteenth-century reader of the text. Bartram’s mobile roots enjoy an interesting afterlife in the work of ethnographer Frank Hamilton Cushing, who considered Bartram a fellow member of the American Philosophical Society and “the source of more definite information regarding the southern Indians than those of any other one of our earlier authorities on the natives of northerly Florida and contiguous States.”61 In Cushing’s Report on the Exploration of Ancient Key-Dweller Remains, a narrative of archaeological discoveries about Florida’s Calusa Indians, he uses Travels and another text by Bartram, “Observations on the Creek and Cherokee Indians” (1788), to imaginatively reconstruct the environment and daily lives of the Southeast’s prehistoric cultures.62
Cushing’s conclusion that Florida’s early inhabitants remained on unstable ground by refusing firm fixity strikingly echoes Bartram’s descriptions of Florida roots in Travels. For example, the language of Bartram’s reverie on “floating islands” of water lettuce suffuses Cushing’s descriptions of excavated architectural remains of Calusa Indian “pile dwellings,” which Cushing calls “floating quays.”63 At “the Court of the Pile Dwellers,” an archaeological site on Key Marco in Southwest Florida, Cushing finds the remains of Calusa homes that are floating islands for some of the same reasons that Bartram uses the metaphor. Each home, Cushing explains, consisted of a horizontal, “partially movable platform” of timber, to the bottom of which vertical “piles” or “pillars” were affixed (34). These piles extended downward into the water to support the timber platform and keep it above the sea’s surface, much as the posts of a stilted house might. Yet, unlike stilts, the piles were not fixed firmly to the ground. Rather, they “rested upon, but had not been driven into” the top of artificial mounds or “benches” of “solid shell and clay marl” that the Calusa had built on the sea floor. The piles remained unfixed “so that as long as the water remained low, they would support these house scaffolds above it, as well as if driven into the benches.” However, “when the waters rose, the entire structures would also slightly rise, or at any rate not be violently wrenched from their supports, as would inevitably have been the case had these [supports] been firmly fixed below.” Cushing’s description unmistakably recalls the roots of Bartram’s water lettuce. Both pile-dwelling and plant remain upright by not being “firmly fixed” to the ground. Just as the water lettuce roots “descend from the nether center, downwards, towards the muddy bottom,” the piles extend downward, yet “had not been driven into” the ocean floor. And Cushing’s observation that, “when the waters rose, the entire structures would also slightly rise,” echoes Bartram’s statement that “when the river is suddenly raised” the water lettuce would rise and “float about.”
Cushing’s indebtedness to Bartram underscores
