An Ambiguous Legacy
Timothy Dwight wrote in an era when New England was already well on its way to becoming the commercial and industrial heart of a nascent American empire. With its furs depleted, its woodlands scarce, and its soils in decline, the nineteenth-century Connecticut Valley epitomized a region that had shed its past as a colonial site of resource extraction and was now embracing the new opportunities offered by millwork and manufacturing. Meanwhile, the southern states and the Midwest functioned, in effect, as colonies providing New England’s workers and mills with the food, timber, and other raw materials that their own region had once produced for export.
Within this historical context, Dwight and most of his turn-of-the-nineteenth-century contemporaries looked at the valley and saw a narrative of economic progress written upon the landscape. Twentieth- and twenty-first-century historians have more often looked at the same economic processes and written, instead, of an environment in decline.52 This book aims to retire this declensionist narrative, not to replace it with a triumphal narrative of economic progress, but rather to examine how historical commodity producers in the region responded to market incentives to create a new landscape that offered both ecological challenges and opportunities. Progress and decline are ultimately in the eyes of the beholder, and the historical inhabitants of colonial New England who came before Dwight most often saw both in the changing environment around them. For New Englanders producing and consuming commodities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the incentives offered by a globalizing Atlantic economy wrought an ambiguous legacy upon the land- and waterscapes of the physical world around them. This lesson—the inherent ecological ambiguities of commercial production and consumption—is perhaps the most important lesson about the power of global markets that an environmental history of early modern New England can present to a twenty-first-century reader concerned about the fate of the global environment.
CHAPTER 1
Hunting Beaver
The Postdiluvian World of the Fur Trade
The seventeenth-century introduction of European trade goods, especially firearms and metal weaponry, into existing Native American networks of trade, warfare, and diplomacy transformed both the politics and the ecology of the Connecticut Valley. Seeking to gain an advantage over rivals, Indian nations competed to exploit the furbearing wealth of the region. Over the course of a century, hunters killed hundreds of thousands of beaver to satisfy the demands of consumers living in Europe. With beaver extirpated from the region, their dams collapsed, and the ponds and wetlands they had created drained. In all, up to nine hundred thousand acres of wetlands may have disappeared. This drying of the Connecticut watershed brought certain advantages. Swamps and marshes gave way to lush meadows and fertile croplands, saving English settlers the hard labor of improving agricultural land through ditching and draining. The loss of breeding habitat for mosquitoes spared valley inhabitants the ravages of malaria. But the destruction of wetlands also brought a range of negative consequences for the valley’s human inhabitants. Indian communities faced food shortages as biodiversity declined. English farmers suffered increased flooding and erosion in their fields, accompanied by the silting up of the river that they relied upon for trade with the world beyond the valley. By 1700, the land- and waterscapes of the Connecticut Valley would have been unrecognizable to the Indian communities living there when the first Dutch explorers arrived in 1614.1
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In the spring of 1631, a party of Indian diplomats arrived in Boston to meet with the leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Among them was the Podunk sachem Wahginnacut, who had traveled five days overland from the west to bring an invitation to the English. Wahginnacut offered land to the English for a new settlement near his own people’s villages along the banks of the “River Quonehtacut.” The Podunks called their homeland Nowashe, “the land between the two rivers.” It lay in the triangle of land formed where the Hockanum River joins its waters to the Connecticut. The lands of the valley, Wahginnacut assured Puritan leaders in Boston, were “very fruitful,” and to further encourage settlement, the sachem offered both corn to feed new settlers and a tribute of eighty beaver skins to be paid annually.2
John Winthrop, Massachusetts’ governor, refused Wahginnacut’s offer. He was more than aware that the Podunks chafed under the authority of the powerful Pequots, who dominated the territory between the bay and the Connecticut River, and that hostilities had recently broken out between the two nations. Trade with New Amsterdam and with Dutch ships along the northern shore of Long Island Sound had given the Pequots an advantage in the trade for firearms, powder, metal weaponry, and the other European goods that had come to dominate Native commercial and military relations. Since the 1610s, the Pequots had exploited this advantage to assert their political hegemony over neighboring Indian peoples. The Podunks, living just north of present-day Hartford, found themselves cut off from access to this trade by Pequot middlemen. By recruiting English settlers for the Connecticut Valley, Wahginnacut hoped to gain a European ally and trading partner. Winthrop, though, had no desire to antagonize the powerful Pequot nation or to see a vulnerable English town planted amid thousands of “warlike Indians.”3
The governor’s caution in turning down Wahginnacut’s hospitality only deferred the showdown between the English and Pequots. As Winthrop himself bemoaned in his journal, the godly Puritan settlers of Massachusetts had little desire or intention to forego the consumer items they had enjoyed in England.4 And if consumers living in the Bay Colony were to continue importing goods from across the Atlantic, then Massachusetts would need a marketable commodity to make good its balance of payments. Thanks to the high demand for beaver hats, coats, and cloaks in Europe, the pelts of these semiaquatic creatures were by far the most lucrative natural resource available to early New Englanders, and a steady supply of them seemed to beckon from just up the Connecticut River.5 Despite Governor Winthrop’s trepidation, more than eight hundred English settlers moved to the Connecticut Valley over the next five years.6 Their presence undermined the already fragile balance of power between the Native American nations of New England, contributing to the outbreak of the Pequot War in 1637.
For the Podunks, and for Native nations living elsewhere in the Connecticut Valley and New England, the arrival of European settlers in the seventeenth century merely contributed to the ongoing social adaptations undertaken by Native American communities who had always lived in an environment defined by change. The first Paleo-Indian communities had arrived in New England approximately twelve thousand years earlier, at the tail end of the last Ice Age and just as the great megafauna of the Pleistocene era were disappearing from the landscape. Societies to the southwest introduced maize agriculture to the region about 1000 AD, during a period of mild climactic warming that lengthened growing seasons. Four centuries later, many New England Indian communities decreased their reliance on farming, returning to an economy dominated by hunting and gathering as cooling temperatures made agriculture less tenable in the northeast. Only the villages of the Connecticut Valley, where the river helped moderate temperatures and extend the growing season, continued as agricultural centers. The river villages consequently became hubs of trade, sending corn both to the coast and farther inland in return for dried fish and shells on the one hand, and copper, furs, and other commodities on the other.7
Of course, the greatest disruption to New England’s early modern Native communities—greater even than shifting temperatures or the regional extermination of beaver on which this chapter focuses—was the introduction of new, devastatingly deadly diseases as a result of European trade and settlement. Trade with northeastern coastal communities—which by the 1520s were themselves engaged in sporadic trading with European fishing vessels—may have introduced some Eurasian pathogens, such as influenza, to the valley during the sixteenth century, but these early outbreaks seem to have led to relatively few deaths.8
They certainly never triggered the sort of catastrophic epidemics that would become all too familiar in later centuries. In 1600, New England’s