Explanation:
When the first American fur traders and settlers saw the Willamette Valley, they wrote glowingly about its natural beauty and its suitability for farming. It seemed to them as if nature had made the valley for the explicit purpose of planting crops, grazing livestock, and pleasing the eye of overland migrants from the east. Much less obvious to pioneers was the fact that Indians had very consciously shaped this environment through fire. Annual, low-intensity, controlled burns, set in the late summer, had minimized the valley's underbrush, reduced the number of trees, facilitated native hunting and gathering, and created the prairie-like appearance that settlers so appreciated. The Willamette Valley was in substantial part the artifice of Indians and of fires set by Indians.
Once American settlers set up homes in the area, however, their first impulse was to suppress the fires that Indians
