River Cane

A family friend in her eighties came to visit me in North Carolina from Roswell, Georgia, where she has lived most of her life. We were driving down the boulevard that runs around Chapel Hill, heading to an early dinner of fresh seafood brought in that day from the coast. As many S­­­outherners are prone to do, Jean was entertaining herself by observing and commenting on the plantings she recognized in the landscape. Suddenly, she blurted out, “That’s cane!”

Old-timers know it that way, simply as cane—the bamboo indigenous to the wild South. Botanists are likely to call it river cane, giant cane, or Arundinaria gigantea. This formidable species in the grass family once flourished in great, sweeping swaths across the region, and patches of it still grow where I live. It’s unusually abundant near the North Carolina Botanical Garden.

In Forgotten Grasslands of the South: Natural History and Conservation, Reed Noss reminds us that broad bands of cane, or “canebrakes,” are part of the South’s deepest history. Noss tells of a visit he made to the Gray Fossil site, discovered in 2000 during highway construction in eastern Tennessee.

There archaeologists made a stunning find: the bones of an ancient red panda along with dental evidence that the extinct mammal had fed on bamboo between 4.7 million and 4.9 million years ago, long before Indigenous people were on the scene.

The English explorer John Lawson was the first to document the presence of river cane in the South. He was fascinated by the many practical uses of the plant demonstrated by the Indigenous peoples he encountered.

In 1709, Lawson set out from Charleston, South Carolina, with five Englishmen, picking up local guides who joined his party along the way. He traveled some 550 miles through the interior of the Carolinas. His band of explorers came across many Native communities—Catawba, Congaree, Esaw, Keyauwee, Occaneechi, Santee, Saponi, Sugaree, Wateree, Waxhaw. He also met the Tuscarora, who would eventually take his life in revenge for their displacement after English settlers created the towns of Bath and New Bern.

Though he was not a botanist, Lawson documented the landscape, the waters he traveled, and the flora and fauna that delighted him. He recorded in detail how Indigenous communities across the coastal plain and Piedmont made use of river cane as an integral part of their hunting, fishing, toolmaking, and death rituals. Lawson distinguished between the larger, hollow river cane, which, he wrote, grew “so large, that one Joint will hold above a pint of liquor,” and a species of harder, thinner canes that seldom “grow thicker than a Man’s little Finger, and are very rough.” He was likely referring to the smaller species of native cane (Arundinaria tecta) that thrives in the wetlands of the South and is commonly called switch cane. In addition to eating boiled cane, Indigenous people pounded cane seeds into flour for bread.

Lawson witnessed how Native people laid fish out to dry on grids, or “hurdles,” made of cane. He described how a stick of cane was sometimes applied to the mouth to punch out a bad tooth. In one community, Lawson described how, when a Native person died, the body was wrapped in blankets and then covered “with two or three mats, which the Indians make of rushes or cane.”

Half a century after Lawson’s expedition, the botanist and illustrator William Bartram traveled much of the same territory. On the eastern side of the Savannah River, in what is now McCormick County, South Carolina (near where the Miccosukee gooseberry grows), Bartram forded the waterway and followed a Native American trading path to Mobile, Alabama.

On the first day of that journey, he wrote: “At evening we came to camp on the banks of a beautiful creek, a branch of Great Ogeche [now the Little River], called Rocky Comfort, where we found excellent accommodations, here being pleasant grassy open plains to spread our beds upon, environed with extensive cane meadows, affording the best of food for our quadrupeds.”

The sweet flavor and nourishing properties of young shoots of river cane would ultimately lead to the species’ near demise. As Bartram noted, young cane served as ready feed for wild game and for horses and cattle, an asset recognized by the Indigenous peoples, who took care not to overgraze it. European settlers soon learned the benefits of cane to nourish their farm animals. Cattle who ate emerging cane gained weight and produced better butter and milk.

The presence of wild-growing cane usually indicated a high water table and good soil. In its early stages of growth, the nutritional value of the plant is at its peak. Settlers sought the rich bottomlands where cane grew, letting their animals graze the land before grubbing out the roots to till the soil for crops. The historian Mart Stewart says the loss of river cane is an under-appreciated and key component of “the long tale of extraction and decline—of the eighteenth and nineteenth century South.” River cane’s surrender to field crops happened in much the same way that the region’s longleaf pine forests were eventually harvested wholesale for naval stores—tar, turpentine, pitch, and rosin—and then replaced with loblolly pine plantations across Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina to meet a new market demand for pulpwood and paper.

The near-wholesale extraction of river cane in the South was no small feat. According to Nathan Klaus, a senior biologist with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, land lottery survey maps of Georgia from 1820 show that some 17,250 acres along the west side of the Flint River in Taylor and Crawford counties were the site of a river bottom canebrake so vast and impenetrable that surveyors could find no trees on which to post their lot numbers.

The presence of a canebrake a mile wide in this area is confirmed in the correspondence of Benjamin Hawkins, a former North Carolina senator whom George Washington appointed superintendent of Indian affairs for the southeastern United States in 1795. Hawkins settled along the Flint River in Georgia the next year and took a Creek woman as his common-law wife. In his letters, he describes creeks “margined with cane,” and notes that the Creek Indian farmers used cane for fencing off the potatoes and groundnuts they grew along the river. Cane originally extended as far south as the Florida Panhandle, and across all of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and into eastern Texas.

Following a bear-hunting trip in Louisiana in 1908, Teddy Roosevelt in Scribner’s Magazine wrote with wonder at the impenetrability of canebrakes, describing them as “feathery, graceful canes standing in ranks, tall, slender, serried, each but a few inches from his brother, and springing to a height of fifteen or twenty feet … Even on foot they make difficult walking unless free use is made of the heavy bush knife.”

Today in some spots in the Appalachian Mountains, where historic place-names often include the word “cane,” farmers swear by the value of canebrakes, which have protected their topsoil through recent hurricanes.

Other folks elsewhere may be inclined to shake their heads when they see a patch of river cane, mistaking it for Asian bamboo (Phyllostachys aurea), and they pity the poor landowner who was foolish enough to plant it in the first place because it grows so well. But the South’s native river cane creates a habitat like no other, providing refuge from predators for many species of songbirds: cardinals, evening grosbeaks, indigo buntings, hooded warblers, and water thrushes. The shy Swainson’s warbler, which migrates at night and is vulnerable to collisions with the communications towers that have gone up all across the region, also depends on river cane for habitat. The Bachman’s warbler, last sighted in 1988 and believed to be extinct, once thrived in southern canebrakes along with the Carolina parakeet and passenger pigeon. One of John James Audubon’s best-known portraits is of a male wild turkey set against a background of river cane. According to the biologist Stephen Platt, historical accounts of river cane often mention the great flocks of wild turkey that once occupied stands of cane.

As many as six species of butterflies depend on river cane in the caterpillar phase, and five moth species feed on the plant. Small mammals— mice, shrews, swamp rabbits, and voles—all take shelter in canebrakes and feed on cane seed when it arrives. The canebrake rattlesnake got its name from this favored habitat, too.

Canebrakes, when they were more common, were home to bear dens. In conservation management and habitat recovery, experts today will specify cane as a high-priority plant to be safeguarded or replanted for the protection of black bear. Bison, elk, and white-tailed deer grazed on young cane and benefited from its high nutritional value.

Canebrakes served as reliable hunting spots for Native Americans, who fashioned arrows, spears, blowguns, and darts from river cane and another cane native only to the Appalachian Mountains: Arundinaria appalachiana, or “hill cane,” as it is now known. This smaller, solid cane was recently determined to be a distinct species. Hill cane is deciduous and tends to grow along ridgetops. In times past, canebrakes provided refuge to human beings: enslaved people on the run in the South; poor whites, sometimes called “canebrake crackers”; and those whom Mart Stewart described as “assorted hooligans who found a haven in these dense thickets of the margins.”

For me, river cane conjures sweet memories tied to place and family. I fished as a child in Georgia with cane poles that my grandfather chopped and dried in his garage and strung with a hook and lead sinker on a monofilament fishing line. Bomer Henry Eubanks was born in 1893 in Cullman, Alabama, where native cane grew far and wide on the banks of rivers.

Among his people, cane poles were put to practical use to stake tomatoes, trellis beans, and catch fish.

Bomer was orphaned as a child. His mother succumbed to influenza in 1902, and his father died a few years later from a mysterious illness he contracted apparently while working in the mines around Birmingham, where rich veins of coal, dolomite, iron ore, and limestone were extracted for the production of steel. When their father died, Bomer and his three younger siblings were each farmed out to relatives to be raised. Family legend suggests that Bomer somehow drew the short straw, perhaps because he was the closest to being grown. The uncle who took him in was struggling and often fed Bomer his meals last, after the dogs. But Bomer was scrappy. He quickly trained himself to become a wily hunter, forager, and gardener to supplement his lean diet. He loved fishing with a cane pole. He also gigged bullfrogs and caught turtles that he would clean, cut up, and fry just like chicken—a practice he continued all his life, to the dismay of his squeamish and citified daughters-in-law, including my mother.

Bomer was expert at growing peaches and plums and worked as a sharecropper before marrying my grandmother, who encouraged him to seek more reliable employment. In his later years, as a retired employee of the US Postal Service, Bomer instilled in his grandsons an appreciation of nature and took them hunting for deer, dove, quail, rabbit, and squirrel. For me—the last grandchild after a twelve-year gap—Bomer offered fishing lessons, and they took, as we say in the South.

Bomer grew a patch of cane that served as a screen between his side yard and the neighbors, “Mister and Miz Fits” (surname Fitzgerald), who were his partners in building the pond. From this thicket, Bomer would judiciously select a few stalks of just the right circumference and chop them out for fishing poles. He hung them by their narrow tips in the garage to make sure they stayed straight as they seasoned. Bomer always had several on hand for the two of us, already strung their full length with filament and equipped with hooks and bobbers. River cane makes an amazingly flexible fishing pole. The jointed segments can bend without shattering.

The wood itself—a more or less hollow pipe—eventually turns from green to yellow as it dries. And once dried out, it remains strong and limber. “You want to run the fishing line all the way from one end of the pole to the other,” Bomer explained to me one day. “In case the tip breaks off from the weight of a really big fish, you’ll still have the line and can keep hold of him with the piece of pole that’s left.”

I was never happier than on the bank of his modest pond—we grandly called it a lake—using earthworms that he’d pitchforked from the compost pile behind his toolshed for bait. I learned to wait for the red and white bobber to disappear underwater before I pulled hard on my pole to raise a glistening redbreast sunfish or opalescent bluegill, both species of bream that he had stocked years earlier.

We always ate what we caught—dusted in cornmeal and flash-fried in corn oil by my grandmother Stella before sunset on summer evenings. She served the crispy fish with more cornmeal—quail-egg-sized hushpuppies laced with chopped onion—and a delicate cabbage slaw heaped in chilled mounds on the plate. We drank sweet iced tea, sometimes garnished with mint from Stella’s bed of herbs.

Suburban mansions surround that half-drained pond today. When I visited the last time a decade ago, it looked like little more than a reflecting pool. A platform and fountain had been built in the middle of the pond to produce a weak spire of water. The huge houses left little open shoreline.

I suspect the bluegill and bream are long gone, as is Bomer’s stand of river cane.

From Saving the Wild South: The Fight for Native Plants on the Brink of Extinction. Copyright © 2021 by Georgann Eubanks. Used by permission of the University of North Carolina Press. uncpress.org

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