"When we think of wilderness in America today, we think of remote and perhaps designated regions that are commonly alpine, desert, or swamp.  Just a few centuries ago, when virtually all was wild in North America, wilderness was not something exceptionally severe.  Prong-horn and bison trailed through the grasslands, creeks ran full of salmon, there were acres of clams, and grizzlies, cougar, and bighorn sheep were common in the lowlands.  There were human beings, too: North America was all populated.  One might say yes, but thinly – which raises the question of according to who.  The fact is, people were everywhere.  When the Spanish foot-soldier Alvar Nunes (Cabeza de Vaca) and his two companions (one of whom was African) were wrecked on the beach of what is now Galveston, and walked to the Rio Grande valley and then south back into Mexico between 1528 to 1536, there were few times in the whole eight years that they were not staying at a native settlement or camp.  They were always on trails.

"It has been a part of basic human experience to live in a culture of wilderness.  There has been no wilderness without some kind of human presence for several hundred thousand years.  Nature is not a place to visit, it is home: and within that home territory there are more familiar and less familiar places.  Often there are areas that are difficult and remote, but all are known, and even named.  One August I was at a pass in the Brooks Range of northern Alaska at the headwaters of the Koyukuk River, a green 3000 foot tundra pass between the broad ranges, open and gentle, dividing the waters that flow to the Arctic Sea from the Yukon.  It is as remote a place as you could be in North America, no roads, and the trails are those made by migrating caribou.  Yet this pass has been steadily used by the Inupiaq people of the north slope, and Athapaskan people of the Yukon, as a regular north-south trade route for at least seven thousand years.  All of the hills and lakes of Alaska have been named in one or another of the dozen or so languages spoken by the native people, as the researches of Jim Kari and others have shown.  Euro-American mapmakers name these places after transient exploiters, or their own girl friends, or hometowns in the lower 48.  The point is, it's all in the native story, and yet only the tiniest trace of human presence through all that time shows.  The place-based stories people tell, and the naming they've done, is their archeology, architecture, and title to the land."

from "The Etiquette of Freedom" by Gary Snyder.