American Environmental History. Группа авторов

by their owners; moreover, the value of damages was to be “judged and levied by some indifferent man of the English, chosen by the Indians treaspased.” Indians had no right to collect damages by killing a trespassing animal: as always, the rare occasions when colonists offered Indians legal protection were governed wholly by English terms. The long-run effect was to force Indians to adopt fencing as a farming strategy. When New Haven built fences for its neighbors, it was only on the understanding that the Indians would agree “to doe no damag to the English Cattell, and to secure their owne corne from damage or to require none.” Indians, in other words, were eventually assumed to be liable for the maintenance of their own fences; if these were in disrepair, no damages could be collected for the intrusions of wandering animals. When Indians near Massachusetts Bay “promised against the nexte yeare, and soe ever after, to fence their corne against all kinde of cattell,” they were making what would prove to be an irrevocable commitment to a new way of life.⁸

      Indians were not alone among New England’s original inhabitants in encountering new boundaries and conflicts as a result of the colonists’ grazing animals. Native predators – especially wolves – naturally regarded livestock as potential prey which differed from the deer on which they had previously fed only by being easier to kill. It is not unlikely that wolves became more numerous as a result of the new sources of food colonists had inadvertently made available to them – with unhappy consequences for English herds. Few things irritated colonists more than finding valuable animals killed by “such ravenous cruell creatures.” The Massachusetts Court in 1645 complained of “the great losse and damage” suffered by the colony because wolves killed “so great nombers of our cattle,” and expressed frustration that the predators had not yet been successfully destroyed. Such complaints persisted in newly settled areas throughout the colonial period.⁹

Colonists countered the wolf threat in a variety of ways. Most common was to offer a bounty – sometimes twopence, sometimes ten shillings, sometimes a few bushels of corn, sometimes (for Indian wolf hunters) an allotment of gunpowder and shot – to anyone who brought in the head of a wolf. All livestock owners in a town were legally bound to contribute to these bounties. Their effect, like that of the fur trade, was to establish a price for wild animals, to create a court-ordered market for them, and so encourage their destruction. Indians especially were led to hunt wolves by these means. But bounties had several drawbacks. They occasionally tempted hunters to bring in the heads of wolves which had been killed many miles from English settlements and so forced towns to pay for predators that had never been a threat to English stock. Since neither wolves nor Indians respected the jurisdictional boundaries of English towns, it was difficult to distinguish which town should pay which hunter for which wolf. There was, moreover, a recurring problem of people trying to sell the same wolf’s head twice, so that towns were forced to cut off the dead animal’s ears and bury them separately from the skull in order to prevent repeated bounty payments for it.¹⁰

      Whenever the wolf problem seemed especially severe, colonists supplemented the customary bounties with more drastic measures. Special hunters were occasionally appointed to leave poisoned bait or to set guns with tripwires as traps for wolves; domesticated animals killed by the traps were to be paid for by the town as a whole. Individual wolves that were particularly rapacious might have an unusually high bounty placed on their heads: thus, New Haven in 1657 offered five pounds to anyone who could kill “one great black woolfe of a more than ordinarie bigness, which is like to be more feirce and bould than the rest, and so occasions the more hurt.” A number of settlements fought wild dogs with domesticated ones. In 1648, Massachusetts ordered its towns to procure “so many hounds as they thinke meete … that so all meanes may be improved for the destruction of wolves.” Towns regularly ordered collective hunts of areas that were suspected of harboring wolves. Indeed, wolves became a justification for draining and clearing swamps. The anonymous “Essay on the Ordering of Towns” in 1635 suggested that towns hold every inhabitant responsible for clearing the “harboring stuffe” from the “Swampes and such Rubbish waest grownds” that sheltered wolves. That this was not merely a theoretical proposal is shown by Scituate’s decision in the mid-seventeenth century to divide its five hundred acres of swampland into parcels of two to five acres and to require every landowner to clear one of them. Entire ecological communities were thus threatened because they represented “an annoyance and prejudice to the town … both by miring of cattle and sheltering of wolves and vermin.” Whether the assault was conducted with bounties, hunting dogs, or the removal of the animals’ habitats, wolves suffered much the same fate as the rest of New England’s mammals. Although they were still found in northern New England at the end of the colonial period, Dwight reported that they were gone from the south. Because, unlike Indians, wolves were incapable of distinguishing an owned animal from a wild one, the drawing of new property boundaries on the New England landscape inevitably meant their death.¹¹

Conflicts among Indians, wolves, and colonists over the possession and trespasses of grazing animals paralleled even more complicated conflicts among colonists themselves. Farmers accustomed to an English landscape hemmed in by hedges and by customs regulating the common grazing of herds found themselves forced to change their agricultural practices in unfenced New England. Whereas most livestock in England had been watched over by individual herders, labor was scarce enough in New England that only the most valuable animals – milch cows, sheep, and some horses and oxen – could generally be guarded in this way. Large numbers of swine and dry cattle in particular received less supervision than they would have gotten in England, and so presented a more or less constant threat to croplands. Fences could take the place of herders only where colonists built and maintained them, conditions that rarely applied in new settlements. Accordingly, towns, and colonies alike were constantly shifting their regulations in an effort to control the relationship between domesticated animals and crops.

      Cattle and horses, for instance, were valuable enough so that colonial laws usually held farmers responsible for protecting their crops from them rather than requiring that the animals be restrained. In 1633, the Plymouth Court ordered that no one should “set corne … without inclosure but at his perill.” Massachusetts Bay tried in 1638 to spread the burden of this responsibility by requiring that “they that plant are to secure theire corne in the day time; but if the cattle do hurt corne in the night, the owners of the cattle shall make good the damages.” But the new rule, not too surprisingly, proved impossible to enforce, and within two years the colony was again declaring that planters rather than animal owners must bear the responsibility for protecting crops. Unfenced property boundaries, in other words, did not give legal protection against trespass by cattle. According to the Massachusetts Court in 1642, “Every man must secure his corne and medowe against great cattell.” If a property owner failed to do this, said the Court, and “if any damage bee done by such cattle, it shallbee borne by him through whose insufficient fence the cattle did enter.”¹²

But this by no means solved all problems. Large animals were quite capable of destroying a sound fence if they put their minds to it, and so towns were eventually forced to appoint fence viewers, who regularly visited farms to “see that the fence be sett in good repaire, or else complaine of it.” If a fence was declared sound by the fence viewers, its owner could collect damages from anyone whose animals broke into the field; if a fence was unsound, on the other hand, its owner not only was legally unprotected from damage by animals but might also be required to pay the costs borne by neighbors who repaired it. The competing claims of property in animals and property in lands were thus resolved in a way that in principle, seemed to reduce the absolute protection of the latter. In practice, however, cattle regulations had the opposite effect. Through the agency of the fence viewers and the formal litigation of the courts, towns took an increasing responsibility not only for enforcing the abstract boundaries between adjacent tracts of real estate but for guaranteeing that those boundaries were marked by the physical presence of fences. The fact that landed property received only conditional protection in law became a major impetus for fencing the countryside, and so redrawing the New England map.¹³

      Not all English animals were equally protected by such fence laws. Swine were the weed creatures of New England, breeding so quickly that a sow might farrow twice in a year, with each litter containing four to 12 piglets. They so rapidly became a nuisance