THE FORESTS, MOUNTAINS, AND RIVER VALLEYS OF PENNSYLVANIA had been named and mapped by Native American cultures for thousands of years before the colonial era.2 Long before Pennsylvania became a territory ceded by Charles II of England to Admiral William Penn to discharge his debts, this was a landscape that had been traversed and interpreted, worshipped, storied, and sung by the people who lived there. Native places on the land and water were often endowed with names that carried mnemonic, descriptive qualities: Ahkokwesink (The Place of Mushrooms) or Ahsenesink (The Place of Rocks). The acoustic environments of forests, fields, and streams were also remembered with names that spoke of their sounds: Chekhonesink (The Place Where There Is a Gentle Sound) or Oniska (The Ringing Rocks). These place names were sounded metaphors that embedded generations of memories of animals and birds, the natural topography, or the sounds of falling water and lithophonic rocks. They were charted and mapped in rock cairns and painted trees, bark scrolls and songs. Places became intertwined with their names. To sound them was to honor and remember the ancestors who had once claimed that ancient landscape with words.
In the eighteenth century, this familiar landscape became a liminal space, wedged between the competing land claims of France, Great Britain, and the Six Nations. It would be claimed under a new name, Penn’s Woods, or “muni khikhakan eheluwensink Pennsylvania (This State Which Is Called Pennsylvania].” In this renamed landscape, both settlers and Native peoples sought to construct new and changing identities in response to each other and to rapid changes in their natural, political, and cultural environments. Along with an influx of immigrants from Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean, seeking new opportunities in Penn’s Colony, the first Moravian missionaries arrived in Pennsylvania in 1740. Within two years, they had established communities in the region around the Lechewuekink (Lehigh) and Lenapei Sipu (Delaware) Rivers.
Confronted with new and unfamiliar landscapes, European settlers, including Moravian missionaries, often fell back on familiar patterns of naming and claiming space that would transform Native country into a European-inflected landscape.3
Hearing the Forest
The world was a library and its books were the stones, leaves, grass, brooks, and the birds and animals.
Luther Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle
Our interactions with the natural environment are framed by the maps we draw, the stories we tell, and the songs we sing. As historian Simon Schama has argued, “landscapes are culture before they are nature; constructs of the imagination projected onto wood and water and rock.”4 Whether those landscapes are forest, grassland, mountain, sea coast, or other setting, the natural environment is the most fundamental place that we inhabit. It is in these environments that we develop our understandings of the world: attachments, connections, meanings, experiences, belongings, and exclusions.5 These simultaneously imagined and physical landscapes constitute the reality of our human experience on a daily level. But landscapes are not merely physical topographies: they also exist in sound.6 Our sense of spatiality is not grounded in only sight but in sound; we listen to perceive distance and space. Our interactions with the world fully engage the senses, and our ears are constantly attuned to a wide range of sounds: language, music, rain, even birdcalls.7 It is from these sounds, and other sensory data, that we form Schama’s “constructs of the imagination.” These are the landscapes of songs, maps, names, stories, rituals, and histories.
Long before Count Zinzendorf’s mid-eighteenth-century journey through Pennsylvania’s forests, this was a landscape that had been sung, storied, and mapped by Indigenous communities. According to current archaeological data, as glaciers receded from Pennsylvania around the end of the Ice Age, people migrated into the Ohio, Susquehanna, and Delaware river valleys from the more populous interior regions of the continent.8 Pennsylvania’s first residents would have encountered an ecological patchwork of environments in the lands south of the glacial ice. Thick forests of spruce, fir, birch, pine, and alder dominated the lower slopes of the Appalachian Mountains and the ridge and valley systems that stretched to the east and south. Over time, as the climate warmed, hardwoods such as oak, chestnut, hickory, and beech began to populate the forests along the Appalachian Plateau. These new forests supported a rich understory of edible and medicinal plants: mushrooms, berries, ginseng, chestnuts, walnuts, and hazelnuts.9 In the middle canopy, dogwood, ironwood, viburnum, spicebush, witch hazel, and honeysuckle vied for sunlight and sustenance.10 On the alluvial plains along the Susquehanna and Delaware Watersheds grew carpets of wild strawberries, so notable a feature of the riparian landscape for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years that early European travelers would eventually write of “whole plains covered with them as with a fine scarlet cloth.”11 Even during the sixteenth century, and the first recorded journeys of Europeans along these eastern river valleys, more than 90 percent of Pennsylvania’s landscape was covered in densely packed forests.
Pennsylvania’s diverse geographic regions and forests supported a great variety of animals. The grasslands of the higher elevations and pools of salt and brackish water along creeks and streams were home to deer, elk, moose, and buffalo.12 These salt holes attracted predators such as wolves, panthers, lynx, cougars, and foxes. In the denser parts of the forest, thickets of mountain laurel, witch hazel, and chokeberry harbored bears’ dens and crouching panthers, wild cats, mountain lions, and boars hiding in the underbrush. The dense carpet of leaves on the forest floor teemed with field mice, moles, chipmunks and squirrels, as well as ticks, fleas, and beetles that carved the bark of trees or fed on the blood of passing animals. Minks, otters, muskrats, and beavers flourished along the many creeks and streams that flowed off of the Appalachian Front.
The acoustic ecologies of Pennsylvania’s forests were dynamic. Depending on the particular place, time, and season, the sounds of wind, water, fire, rustling plants and trees, and falling rocks carried quickly over
