On a summer day many years ago, during an era when Indians of the Pacific Northwest had been herded onto reservations but still traveled by horseback, a man who had climbed high into the Cascade Mountains of Oregon faced a western red cedar and set to work.

Although I call this person a man, I am not certain of the gender; the passage of time has muddled his or her identity. But there’s plenty I do know about him, and about what he did that day. I know that he held a hatchet or a similar implement when he stood in front of the tree. I know that he probably wielded this hatchet with his left hand. I know that he was in need of a vessel to carry huckleberries. I know that he knew how to fashion such a vessel from cedar bark, or that he traveled with someone who did.

Perhaps most important, I know for sure that he stood precisely here, in this certain spot in the wilderness. I know this because on a warm September afternoon, I stood in the same spot, facing the same cedar, and saw the remnants of his work.

Across the American and Canadian West, there are thousands of old trees that, like this one, bear distinctive scars. They were put there by Indians who depended on trees for the raw materials that went into the goods they fashioned: baskets, boxes, bows and arrows, wickiups, plank houses, medicine, clothing, mats, blankets, ropes, towels, dyes, canoes, tarps, diapers.

Archaeologists call them “culturally modified trees,” but they could just as easily be called “history trees,” so directly do they bear witness to bygone times and practices. Unlike an arrowhead, a pottery shard or even an intact basket, these markings place a certain action at a certain place at a certain time.

“I think of these as living artifacts,” says Eric Bergland, an archaeologist with Oregon’s Willamette National Forest. “They’re a wonderful repository, showing direct land use. An ancient scattering of stone tools, just to pick an example, leaves a much vaguer impression. There’s less that we can interpret.”

The tree I faced on that September day, an old cedar with a three-foot-diameter trunk, showed a patch of bare wood, roughly rectangular, where the bark had been peeled away. At the top of the patch, a series of three- or four-inch lacerations were visible in the heartwood, slanting upward from left to right, where the peeler had cut the expanse of bark that he had pried loose from the trunk.

Stripped from the tree, the inner bark would have been separated from the outer bark and cut into a long rectangle. Then an outline shaped like a football would have been scored in the middle, creating two flaps that could be folded upward and stitched together on both sides, forming a lightweight basket capable of carrying thousands of berries.

I looked around at the grove where I stood, a stand of old growth next to a perfect dollop of a lake. Many other cedars, and a few western hemlock trees as well, had been peeled in a similar fashion, all apparently unharmed by the disturbance. Several sprouted from a level terrace a hundred yards from the lake. Undergrowth was sparse here, although all around the terrace the shrubbery was thick with ankle-grabbing rhododendron and tangles of huckleberry spangled with pea-sized blue and red fruit. A nice place to camp, I thought, given the water, the berries, the even terrain.

People have been using trees as a source of raw material for as long as they have been living with forests. On the Pacific Coast from California to Alaska, ancient cedars have grown thick, vertical lobes to heal scars as old as 700 years or more left by bark peelings. Massive sections of wood lie prone in the forest, where people felled them long ago, leaving them to cure for possible use as canoes. Along the dry eastern flank of the Sierra Nevada, venerable junipers show marks where Paiute Indians cut lengths of wood for use as bow staves. Beech trees in the Southeast bear scars where blazes were cut as guideposts through thick forest. The basket that was popular among Northwest huckleberry pickers (the kind that the peeler of the cedar I examined in the Oregon Cascades most likely made) is a universal design, according to Bergland, found not only in North America but in Asia and Africa as well.

In other words, a sort of low-impact forestry existed in the woods long before there were pulp mills and lumberjacks, chain saws and protesters. The difference between this native enterprise and modern industrial forestry goes beyond volume. With few exceptions, when Indians walked away with a resource gleaned from the forest, they left the tree alive and healthy.

“When I peel a tree, I’m careful not to go all the way around the trunk,” says Linda Edgar, a member of the Nitinaht tribe in British Columbia who makes baskets and other goods from cedar bark, a skill she learned from her grandmother. “I tell the tree that I won’t harm him.”

Culturally modified trees are more than curiosities. To archaeologists like Bergland, they are telling artifacts. To Indians like Edgar, they are tangible connections to a past and a way of life that was shattered by European encroachment.

And to conservationists, the trees are valuable weapons that can be used to fight industrial logging.

In the 1980s, the Canadian timber giant MacMillan Bloedel announced plans for massive logging in the misty rain forest of Clayoquot Sound, on the west coast of Vancouver Island in British Columbia. When the company secured permission to log Meares Island, area tribal members fought back. One key step that they took was to search the island for signs of historic cedar use. Marks from bark peelings on living cedars, they quickly learned, were abundant.

“There wasn’t any place on the island that wasn’t full of them,” recalls Paul George, director of the Western Canada Wilderness Committee. “There were so many, the tribes were able to claim an aboriginal right to the forests. That claim, which was never challenged in court, was enough to get an injunction. And Meares Island was never logged.”

The success did not go unnoticed. In various other parts of the Canadian West, First Nations, as native people in Canada are called, began looking for trees that bore historic markings, and, in the face of logging threats, demanded that they be saved.

In British Columbia, culturally modified trees are afforded a degree of legal protection. Provincial law dictates that no tree bearing traditional-use markings made before 1846 can be cut down. (Researchers can determine the age of the markings by counting the rings in the lobes that grow at the edges of the scars.) The province’s Ministry of Forests considers the trees “cultural heritage resources,” and they are eligible for formal designation as “provincial heritage sites.”

So far, though, only one cluster of culturally modified trees in the province has been so designated. Although logging companies often survey for such trees before clear-cutting, many go undetected or are not recorded. David Garrick, an anthropologist who conducts surveys commissioned by tribes and conservationists, has reported finding many more culturally modified trees in areas where logging was planned than have industry surveyors. Garrick has documented more than 1,800 such trees on Hanson Island, off the northern coast of Vancouver Island, after a logging company found only seventy-nine cedars on the island bearing such scars. Armed with Garrick’s information, the Kwakwaka’ wakw First Nation was able to forestall logging planned for the island. Last year, with the backing of conservationists and the Gitga’at First Nation, Garrick documented more than 300 culturally modified trees in stands in the Great Bear Rainforest of the central British Columbia Coast; the stands are targeted for clear-cutting.

In the United States, protection of trees bearing historical marks from Indians is hit-and-miss. Few lowland old-growth forests remain; an untold quantity of culturally modified trees fell to the ax and the chain saw before anyone knew, or perhaps cared, what they were.

Many national forests have taken steps to protect known stands of culturally modified trees. In 1985, the Gifford Pinchot National Forest in south-central Washington adopted a peeled cedar management plan. Gifford Pinchot researchers have identified 338 sites containing nearly 6,000 peeled cedar trees. Like the peeled bark from the site in Oregon that I visited, the bark in Washington is presumed to have been used to make baskets that would carry the fruits of extensive nearby huckleberry fields. (This was a landscape that was shaped by people long before the arrival of Europeans; Indians may have intentionally set fire to the fields from time to time to keep the area open and favorable for berry growth.)

But the fact that Forest Service officials know where the trees are doesn’t necessarily mean they will be spared the chain saw. Fewer than half of the peeled cedars on the Gifford Pinchot have been given a preservation status.

Archaeologists will tell you that there’s no compelling reason that the term culturally modified tree should be reserved for those trees that bear marks made by Indians living in traditional cultures. “A culturally modified tree could be one in which a trapper set a marten trap; a culturally modified tree could be one with an old Forest Service [trail] blaze,” says Jan Hollenbeck, archaeologist for the Mount Baker­Snoqualmie National Forest in Washington.

In the antebellum South, slave crews toiled in stifling forests, scratching grooves in the trunks of pine trees to extract resin that was used to manufacture turpentine, pitch, tar and other products. The practice continued largely unchanged even after the Civil War, using nonslave but poorly paid crews. The workers left marks in the trees commonly called “cat faces,” probably because the trees were slashed in patterns that resembled whiskers.

In the high meadows of the southern Rocky Mountains, isolated Basque and Hispanic sheepherders, working in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, cut pictures into the smooth bark of aspen trees to pass the time. The carved images—some simple symbols, others somewhat pornographic, still others highly accomplished—remain on aspen trunks, little altered. “The lonelier they got, the more they carved,” says Robert Mckeever, an archaeologist for the Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre, and Gunnison national forests in Colorado.

Nor are culturally modified trees necessarily ancient. The Oregon stand that I visited bore marks made as recently as the 1940s. Bergland, the Willamette National Forest archaeologist, believes that after horses gave way to automobiles, Indians from the Warm Springs Reservation east of the Cascades drove to the site for a period, gathering huckleberries and loading them into baskets made from peeled cedar.

But it is the tangible antiquity of the markings that holds much of their allure. To wander through a deep old-growth forest, one that seems never to have been touched by the hand of humanity, and then to see a centuries-old scar on a massive cedar, is to reconnect with the past, to remember that there was a time when the woods were the domain of a different people—a people intimately familiar with the bounty that the forest offered.

And there is a certain melancholy to the markings. (When I first saw peeled cedar trees, I was reminded of the rings of stones that are said to still rest on rare sections of the High Plains that were never plowed‚‚—rings that once held down the flaps of teepees.) To look at still-healthy stands of cedar that bear the peeling marks, and then to consider the crude patches of clear-cuts that litter the surrounding landscape, it’s hard not to feel a twinge of guilt—a decidedly European guilt.

But it’s also possible to see peeled cedar markings that were made as recently as the previous spring. In the western United States and Canada, practitioners continue to peel bark from cedar trees and fashion it into baskets, clothing and myriad other items. Some are sold as crafts. Some are used for ceremonial purposes. Many are made by tribal members committed to keeping ancient traditions alive. Federal land managers take pains to ensure that these artisans have access to the materials they need.

When she was a girl, Edgar, the Nitinaht bark peeler, followed her grandmother into the dark rain forest that surrounds her village. She remembers playing idly during those springtime excursions, paying little attention to her grandmother as the old woman cut into the bark of cedar trees, shook the slabs free of the heartwood and then carefully bundled them for later use.

But she noticed enough to figure out how to do it when years later she took an interest in the craft. Now Edgar teaches those skills to other tribal members.

“Recently, I was in the woods and I saw some scars that I think may have been made by my grandmother,” Edgar told me. “I am very lucky to have this knowledge. To me, it represents a tradition and a culture.”