ABSTRACT
The physical region and primeval landscape It is the physical landscape on which humans impose their cultural landscape and activities, thereby changing parts of that physical landscape. Much of that original or primeval physical landscape such as climate and physiography at the regional scale has changed only slightly since settlement by Europeans. As we will see, these factors are highly influential because they supply potential or even kinetic energy. But part or even much of that original settlement landscape, such as vegetation and stream morphology, has been greatly changed, and only by knowing the original state can we deduce what has happened. We can find no better description of the primeval landscape of the Hill Country than that given by the noted early explorer and natural scientist, David Dale Owen, c. 1845, in northeast Iowa along the Upper Iowa River:
We find the luxuriant sward clothing the hill-slope even down to the water’s edge. We have the steep cliff, shooting up through it in mural escarpments. We have the stream, clear as crystal, now quiet and smooth and glassy, then ruffled by a temporary rapid, or, when a terrace of rock abruptly crosses it, broken up in to a small, romantic cascade. We have clumps of trees, disposed with an effect that might baffle the landscape gardener [an allusion to the 18th-and 19th-century creators of English landscape gardens such as Lancelot “Capability” Brown and Humphry Repton], now crowning the grassy height, now dotting the green slope with partial and isolated shade. From the hilltops, the intervening valleys wear the aspect of cultivated meadows and rich pasture-grounds, irrigated by frequent rivulets that wend their way through fields of wild hay, fringed with flourishing willows. Here and there, occupying its nook, on the bank of the stream, at some favorable spot, occurs the solitary wigwam. On the summit-levels, spreads the wide prairie, decked with flowers of the gayest hue,—its long, undulating waves stretching away till sky and meadow mingle in the distant horizon (Owen, 1852, pp. 65-66).
