Omer Stewart wrote this in the 1950s and nobody would publish it. His claim was that the pristine wilderness the pioneers walked into wasn’t pristine at all — Native people had been burning it on purpose for thousands of years, deliberately, in specific places at specific times of year, to move game, clear brush, favor certain plants, and keep the woods open. Prairie, oak savanna, pine forest, chaparral, the lot. That got him treated as a crank. He kept collecting evidence anyway, hundreds of eyewitness accounts from explorers, trappers, and settlers who watched it happening and wrote it down. He died in 1991. Lewis and Anderson finally published the manuscript in 2002, by which time fire ecologists had come around, and prescribed burning is now standard practice.