This book is a "review of the impact of European colonialization on the cultural and natural landscapes of native North America. In this text, ...the author has focused on rare & neglected first-hand French and Spanish source materials to provide us with ecologically and ethnographically rich, stunningly detailed and articulate portraits of the American Landscape, and the culturally sophisticated Native land-management systems which were already in place at the dawn of Euro-American history. Far from a vast and open wilderness's America was, at its dawn, already a human environment, as Sauer so clearly demonstrates, and our history as a people would swing on the ability of our early 'Founding fathers,' often no more than glorified European real estate agents, to perceive the intricacies of these eco-systems as they lay before them like an open book"--Back cover.