Some two hundred years before publication of William Cronon's Changes in Land, widely acknowledged text of early American environmental history, Indians in Spanish American borderlands were looking to environment to help interpret history legacv of European-Native encounters.1 In one account, Indians told a hunter who had found a mineral deposit in Spanish Louisiana that ore was the white treasure, and that amongst these mountains of Oar a noise was often heard like explosion of a Cannon . . . which Indians said was Spirit of white people working amongst their Treasure.' A similar tale recounted how uncommon Animal [was] seen by Natives in a lake in . . . New Mexico. It is compared to upper part of body of a Spaniard with his broad brimmed hat. The Indians express a dislike or abhorrence of place . . . assert that departed Spirits of first Spaniards who conquered their Country dwell in lake.3 Such stories record Natives'-or, perhaps, Anglo-American recorders'- enduring associations among death, Spaniards, precious metals, environments where all these things converged. These environmental histories, it seems, offered a fitting lens for interpreting key aspects of early contact era.Why ought environmental historians to pay more attention to early America Atlantic world, why, in turn, should early Americanists (and we define that term in its broadest terms, hemispherically) become more invested in telling stories about ecologies-about plants, animals, rivers, climates, all that? This is question that we asked ourselyes as we proposed organized this special issue of Early American Studies. After all, these are fields that do not necessarily jump to mind as easy allies. Scholars such as Peter Mancall have commented on irregular (if undeniably growing) appearance of environmental history in major journals of early American historv equally rare sightings of early Americanists at venues such as annual conference of American Society for Environmental History.4 Covering a time place before advent of sorts of scientifically minded sources that inform a great deal of more modern environmental historv' without an obvious stake in sort of moral project imagined for environmental historians Avho seek to influence policy public opinion about natural catastrophes both forecast already occurred-who seek nothing less than saving world, according to Donald Worster-studies of early American environments have lacked energy that has made field one of most dA'namic today.5Yet environment mattered to peoples of early America. At most obvious level, this was because they realized their health wealth were caught up in environmental circumstances as diverse as population of white-tailed deer, Avinter frosts, urban miasmas, rising floodAvaters. Decades centuries of priA'ation suffering created colonial communities attuned to local emdronments, millennia of experience created indigenous communities with a deep knowledge of American places. But early Americans' engagement with environment was also narrative historical: they told stories in which relationship between man nature was central to explaining past, present, future conditions of peoples places.This should challenge us as we consider genealogy of environmental history as a practice, for it suggests that environmental history has deeper roots in early American history than might often be appreciated. The standard historiographical periodization of environmental history tends to place its origins in twentieth century or, according to some borderlands scholars, Frederick Jackson Turner's thesis of 1890s. As Alfred Crosby put it, American environmental history got momentum in mid-twentieth century because legacy of Turner thesis had ensured that the historian of frontier was . …