Environmental History: Cast Iron Forest: A Natural and Cultural History of the North American Cross

The Cast Iron Forest: A Natural and Cultural History of the North American Cross Timbers. By Richard V. Francaviglia. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000. x + 276 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth $45.00, paper $24.95.

Toward the close of his meticulously researched book, Richard Francaviglia poses a question that animated the historiographical imagination underlying The Cast Iron Forest. How could the Cross Timbers region, which runs from southeastern Kansas to north-central Texas, a rough and wooded terrain that so fascinated nineteenth-century explorers, geologists, and other observers, "vanish from the public mind within a century?" What did the perceptive Washington Irving see in this belt of aged, gnarled, and stunted post and blackjack oaks that we do not?

Plenty. As Francaviglia observes, our failure of insight has much to do with our inability to perceive this forest as a forest. Because the Cross Timbers do not neatly conform to the lush photographic images of ancient stands of "giant redwoods and massive hardwoods" that are the stock-and-trade of Sierra Club calendars, they have slipped out of our memory as a distinct place. The "very factor that gives the Cross Timbers their character-drought stressed, relatively short, slow-growing trees-helps obscure the area's age and significance" (p. 223).

In what is a clearly a labor of love, Francaviglia sets out to recover the region's geological underpinnings, environmental structures, and cultural meanings. Digging into the diaries, journals, and correspondence of those who traveled through the area and making wonderful use of the maps and other illustrative material that cartographers and scientists have fashioned, he brings to life a fascinating landscape.

Its physical limits were once thought more expansive, as is suggested by its Native American denotation (the Great Forest), and its Spanish (Monte Grande). But geological evaluations of the underlying sandstone bedrock and the "sandy-clayey soils," as well as biological assessments of its distinctive vegetation, led Anglo-Americans to affirm the region's distinguishing ecological characteristics and thereby to shrink its size. It has further been shaped by a long-term climatic force, specifically drought, which is oddly paired with two substantial sources of water-an underground aquifer and a series of major rivers from the Arkansas to the Brazos. In keeping with this dry and wet landform set within the southern prairie, Francaviglia dubs the Cross Timbers a "forested archipelago in a sea of grass" (p. 8).

The image is apt, for in Anglo-American cultural memory the region's importance early on revolved around its barrier-like status; those who moved through or settled in the Cross Timbers in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Francaviglia argues, perceived it as a demarcation between the civilized and the savage. That conception would evolve as the indigenous peoples were killed or set aside, and the area came under new management. Ranching and agriculture, with attendant deforestation, would reduce the arboreal islands so that by the early-twenty-first century they have become "discontinuous patches of forest" (p. 226). That pattern has been especially evident along the periphery, site of the sprawling populations of Waco, Dallas/Ft. Worth, Oklahoma City, and Tulsa. As a consequence, the once "huge, complex mosaic of forest and prairie enclaves" (p. 228) has given way to the "razor-- straight edges of human-made property lines" (p. 232).

Integrated into a well-managed landscape, the Cross Timbers have also been absorbed into popular culture. Tracking the term through the Yellow Pages and the Internet, Francaviglia locates an emerging vernacular. Centered in Texas, the moniker "Cross Timbers" has been adopted by motels, radio programmers, oil companies, even a Boy Scout troop. Most of these adoptions are associated with the region's frontier past, but not so the phrase's recent appropriation by churches; because of the crucifix's powerful symbolic place in Christianity, some of his interviewees even "thought the name Cross Timbers was religious in origin" (p. 205).

Such confusion might yet have a secular consequence-the salvation of the battered ecosystem. Anointing the place through a revoicing of its once-hallowed name may help build a sense of communal stewardship for this "venerable, shared resource" (p. 237). Doing what he can to further this outcome through his words and photographs that give substance to the "sense of wonder" that the Cross Timbers can invoke, Francaviglia has become the region's academic apostle.

Reviewed by Char Miller, professor and chair of the history and urban studies departments at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. Mr. Miller most recently edited Fluid Arguments: Five Centuries of Western Water Conflict (University of Arizona Press, 2001) and is the author of Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism (Island Press, forthcoming) and editor of On the Border: An Environmental History of San Antonio (University of Pittsburgh Press, forthcoming).