During the nineteenth century, the Selkirk Settlement of Canada and the Homestead Act in the United States led to some of the most dramatic and widespread destruction of native ecosystems across a short time period in history. Soils across the Great Plains, from the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains, from the Chihuahuan desert of Mexico to the Boreal Forests of Canada, an area of around 4 million kilometers squared, were nearly all turned over for agriculture, from prairies with dense grasslands to riparian regions with extensive forest cover and deep roots, within the decades from approximately 1820 to 1890. By the 1890s, a protracted drought led to a collapse of agriculture in the United States, Canada, the Ukraine (the Selk’nam genocide), and elsewhere. The young field of ecology was just beginning, documenting the community ecology of recovery at lakeshores (182), glaciers (175), and from the abandonment of highly disturbed agricultural lands (170).