building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

events 193 . From 1870, when the railroads had already reached the land of the
buffalo, west of the Mississipi, the American army was working to control the
territories and to ensure the submission of the prairie Indians and supplied the
professional hunters with free bullets. The entire economy linked to the buffalo,
which allowed the Indians to survive and to purchase small everyday goods, was
wiped away in a few years. Headrick reports the disconsolate words of Colonnel
Doge; “Where the year before myriads of buffalo roamed, there was now a myriad
of carcasses. The area gave off a nauseating stench and the endless prairies, [...]
were a solitary death, a putrid desert” 194 [Figures 128‐134].
The rapid transformations begun in the first half of the century were accelerated
and occasionally caused by the Civil War itself, and opened the doors to the period,
which Mumford defines and describes as the Brown Decades. “The growth of steel
mills, the mechanization of agriculture, the substitution of petroleum for whale oil,
the development of the trade union movement, and the concentration of great
fortunes, built up by graft, speculation, war‐profits, or the outright donation of
priceless lands to great railway corporations” 195 , had finally put a system into a
difficult position, one which the war had simply overcome by untying the political
knot of the abolition of slavery. Similarly, material progress introduced had been
overvalued to such an extent that the improvement in living conditions had hidden
what was being lost. Enormous amounts of land were placed in the hands of a few
owners, and natural landscapes were destroyed under a veil of asphalt soot. The
railroad brought with it the filth of the city, the mines, and steelworks. “[...] At first
the advantages and the defilements were so closely associated that people even
prided themselves on the smoke of the thriving town [...] But this assault on the
landscape was not confined to the industrial city: a parallel ruin went on the
193 HEADRICK, Daniel R., Power over Peoples. Technology, Environment, and Western Imperialism,
1400 to Present, Princeton‐Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2010 [English text translated from
Italian by the editor] (Italian translation by Giovanni Arganese, Il predominio dell’occidente.
Tecnologia, ambiente, imperialismo, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2010, pp. 246‐254)
194 Ibid., p. 253
195 MUMFORD, Lewis, The Brown Decades, New York, Dover Publication, 1971 [first ed. 1931], p. 2
(Italian translation edited by Francesco Dal Co, Architettura e cultura in America, dalla guerra civile
all’ultima frontiera, Venice, Marsilio, 1977, p. 34)
116