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The far-reaching environmental changes of the colonial period owe their origins in part to the organisms described in Chapter 2, but they also stem from the very distinctive goals Europeans had in their relations with nature. William Cronon, in an excerpt from his prize-winning book Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, reveals how many of the most significant changes resulting from the arrival of European colonists in the Americas came about because the colonists sought to sell products of American ecosystems as commodities in the transatlantic market. Among the pre-eminent commodities of the colonial economy was livestock. Settlers raised domesticated animals partly to make money. The spread of livestock across New England thus reflected the expansion of the market economy. It brought profound social and environmental developments, including wholesale shifts in property relations (suggested by the proliferation of the fence, a device for controlling livestock) and New England ecology. As you read this selection, keep your eye on the ways that market demand for livestock encouraged their propagation and attendant environmental changes.

A World of Fields and Fences

William Cronon

(Excerpt from Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill & Wang, 1983.)

One must not exaggerate the differences between English and Indian agricultures. The two in many ways resembled each other in the annual cycles by which they tracked the seasons of the year. Although English fields, unlike Indian ones, were cultivated by men as well as women and contained a variety of European grains and garden plants which were segregated into single-species plots, their most important crop was the same maize grown by Indians. Like the Indians, the English began working their fields when the land thawed and cleared of snow sometime in March. They too planted in late March, April, and May, and weeded and hilled their corn – if rather more carelessly than the Indians – a month or two later. Summer saw colonists as well as Indians turning to a wide range of different food sources as they became available: fish, shellfish, migratory birds, foraging mammals, and New England’s many wild berries. August through October was the season of harvest when corn was gathered, husked, and stored, and other crops were made ready for the winter months. November and December saw the killing of large mammals – albeit of different species than the Indians had hunted – from the New England woods, the meat and hides of which were then processed for use in the months to come. The rest of the winter was devoted to tasks any southern New England Indian would readily have recognized: making and repairing tools and clothing, looking after firewood, occasionally fishing or hunting, and generally living off the stored produce of the preceding year. As the days lengthened and became warmer, the cycle began again: Europeans as well as Indians were inextricably bound to the wheel of the seasons.¹

What made Indian and European subsistence cycles seem so different from one another had less to do with their use of plants than their use of animals. Domesticated grazing mammals – and the tool which they made possible, the plow – were arguably the single most distinguishing characteristic of European agricultural practices. The Indians’ relationships to the deer, moose, and beaver they hunted were far different from those of the Europeans to the pigs, cows, sheep, and horses they owned. Where Indians had contented themselves with burning the woods and concentrating their hunting in the fall and winter months, the English sought a much more total and year-round control over their animals’ lives. The effects of that control ramified through most aspects of New England’s rural economy, and by the end of the colonial period were responsible for a host of changes in the New England landscape: the seemingly endless miles of fences, the silenced voices of vanished wolves, the system of country roads, and the new fields filled with clover, grass, and buttercups.²

Livestock were initially so rare in Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay that both William Bradford and John Winthrop noted in their journals the arrival of each new shipment of animals. Plymouth was over three years old before it obtained the “three heifers and a bull” which Bradford described as “the first beginning of any cattle of that kind in the land.” Massachusetts Bay had a larger number of livestock almost from the start, but there were by no means enough to satisfy colonial demand for more animals. One colonist explained to an English patron that cattle were “wonderful dear here,” and another argued that the most profitable investment a merchant could make in New England would be “to venture a sum of moneys to be turned into cattle.” As a result, ship after ship arrived laden with upward of 50 animals in a load. By 1634, William Wood was able to define the wealth of the Massachusetts Bay Colony simply by referring to its livestock. “Can they be very poor,” he asked, “where for four thousand souls there are fifteen hundred head of cattle, besides four thousand goats and swine innumerable?”³

The importance of these various animals to the English colonists can hardly be exaggerated. Hogs had the great virtues of reproducing themselves in large numbers and – like goats – of being willing to eat virtually anything. Moreover, in contrast to most other English animals, they were generally able to hold their own against wolves and bears, so that they could be turned out into the woods for months at a time to fend for themselves almost as wild animals. They required almost no attention until the fall slaughter, when – much as deer had been hunted by Indians – they could be recaptured, butchered, and used for winter meat supplies. Cattle needed somewhat more attention, but they too were allowed to graze freely during the warmer months of the year. In addition to the meat which they furnished, their hides were a principal source of leather, and milch cows provided dairy products – milk, cheese, and butter – that were unknown to the Indians. Perhaps most importantly, oxen were a source of animal power for plowing, clearing, and other farmwork. The use of such animals ultimately enabled English farmers to till much larger acreages than Indians had done, and so produce greater marketable surpluses. When oxen were attached to wheeled vehicles, those surpluses could be taken to market and sold. Horses were another, speedier source of power, but they were at first not as numerous as oxen because they were used less for farmwork than for personal transportation and military purposes. Finally, sheep, which required special attention because of their heavy wear on pastures and their vulnerability to predators, were the crucial supplier of the wool which furnished (with flax) most colonial clothing. Each of these animals in its own way represented a significant departure from Indian subsistence practices.⁴

What most distinguished a hog or a cow from the deer hunted by Indians was the fact that the colonists’ animal was owned. Even when it grazed in a common herd or wandered loose in woodlands or open pastures, a fixed property right inhered in it. The notch in its ear or the brand on its flanks signified to the colonists that no one other than its owner had the right to kill or convey rights to it. Since Indian property systems granted rights of personal ownership to an animal only at the moment it was killed, there was naturally some initial conflict between the two legal systems concerning the new beasts brought by the English. In 1631, for instance, colonists complained to the sachem Chickatabot that one of his villagers had shot an English pig. After a month of investigation, a colonial court ordered that a fine of one beaver skin be paid for the animal. Although the fine was paid by Chickatabot rather than the actual offender – suggesting the confusion between diplomatic relations and legal claims which necessarily accompanied any dispute between Indian and English communities – the effect of his action was to acknowledge the English right to own animal flesh. Connecticut went so far as to declare that Indian villages adjacent to English ones would be held liable for “such trespasses as shalbe committed by any Indian” – whether a member of the village or not – “either by spoilinge or killinge of Cattle or Swine either with Trappes, dogges, or arrowes.” Despite such statutes, colonists continued for many years to complain that Indians were stealing their stock. As late as 1672, the Massachusetts Court was noting that Indians “doe frequently sell porke to the English, and there is ground to suspect that some of the Indians doe steale and sell the English mens swine.” Nevertheless, most Indians appear to have recognized fairly quickly the colonists’ legal right to own animals.⁵

Ironically, legal disputes over livestock arose as frequently when Indians acknowledged English property rights as when they denied them. One inevitable consequence of an English agricultural system that mixed the raising of crops with the keeping of animals was the necessity of separating the two – or else the animals would eat the crops. The obvious means for accomplishing this task was the fence, which to colonists represented perhaps the most visible symbol of an “improved” landscape: when John Winthrop had denied that Indians possessed anything more than a “natural” right to property in New England, he had done so by arguing that “they inclose noe Land” and had no “tame Cattle to improve the Land by.” Fences and livestock were thus pivotal elements in the English rationale for taking Indian lands. But this rationale could cut both ways. If the absence of “improvements” – fences – meant to the colonists that Indians could claim to own only their cornfields, it also meant that those same cornfields lay open to the ravages of English grazing animals. Indians were quick to point out that, since colonists claimed ownership of the animals, colonists should be responsible for any and all damages caused by them.⁶

Much as they might have preferred not to, the English had to admit the justice of this argument, which after all followed unavoidably from English conceptions of animal property. Colonial courts repeatedly sought some mechanism for resolving the perennial conflict between English grazing animals and Indian planting fields. In 1634, for instance, the Massachusetts Court sent an investigator “to examine what hurt the swyne of Charlton hath done amongst the Indean barnes of corne,” and declared that “accordingly the inhabitants of Charlton promiseth to give them satisfaction.” Courts regularly ordered payment of compensation to Indians whose crops had been damaged by stock, but this was necessarily a temporary solution, administered after the fact, and one which did nothing to prevent further incidents. Colonists for this reason sometimes found themselves building fences on behalf of Indian villages: in 1653, the town of New Haven promised to contribute 60 days of labor toward the construction of fences around fields planted by neighboring Indians. Similar efforts were undertaken by colonists in Plymouth Colony when Indians at Rehoboth complained of the “great damage” caused to their crops by English horses. The fences built across the Indians’ peninsula of land at Rehoboth did not, of course, prevent animals from swimming around the barrier, and so Plymouth eventually – for a short while – granted Indians the right to impound English livestock and demand payment of damages and a fine before animals were returned to their owners.⁷

Such solutions had the virtue – in principle – of giving Indians at least theoretical legal standing as they made their complaints to colonial courts, but the laws also forced Indians to conduct their agriculture in a new way. Indians wishing compensation for damages to their crops were required to capture wandering animals and hold them until they were claimed 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 that, as early as 1633, the Massachusetts Court declared that “it shalbe lawfull for any man to kill any swine that comes into his corne”; the dead animal was to be returned to its owner only after payment had been made for damages to crops. The inadequacy of this solution is suggested by the proliferation of swine laws in the ensuing years. Colonists were glad to have swine reproducing and fattening themselves in forested areas distant from English settlements – where only Indians would have to deal with their depredations – but towns tried to restrain the animals whenever they wandered too near English fields. By 1635, Massachusetts had ordered towns to construct animal pounds to which untended swine could be taken whenever they were found within one mile of an English farm. A year later, the Court went so far as to declare an open season on any stray swine: unless pigs were restrained by fence, line, or pigkeeper, it was lawful “for any man to take them, either alive or dead, as hee may.” Anyone so doing got one half the value of the captured animal, while the Commonwealth of Massachusetts claimed the other; the owner got nothing. Ownership rights to swine were thus much more circumscribed than similar rights to cattle. The law produced so much protest from pig-keeping colonists that it was repealed two years later, but the battle of the swine nevertheless continued for many years. Complaints against pigs were a near constant feature of colony and town court proceedings, where the animals were sometimes portrayed almost as a malevolent force laying siege to defenseless settlements. The Massachusetts Court in 1658, for instance, reported that “many children are exposed to great daingers of losse of life or limbe through the ravenousnese of swyne, and elder persons to no smale inconveniencies.” To modern ears, such statements perhaps seem a little comic, but that reaction is surely one of ignorance: swine could indeed be vicious creatures, and no animal caused more annoyances or disputes among colonists.¹⁴

Ultimately, swine were relegated either to farmyard sties, where they could be fed corn, alewives, and garbage, or to relatively isolated areas, where they could feed as they wished and do little harm. Favorite swine-raising locations were coastal peninsulas and offshore islands, where the animals were free to do their worst without interfering with English crops. In the late 1630s, both Roger Williams and John Winthrop were moving swine onto islands in Narragansett Bay, and colonists elsewhere did likewise. Along the coast, the animals wreaked havoc with oyster banks and other Indian shelfish-gathering sites, but caused little trouble to the English. Roger Williams described how “the English swine dig and root these Clams wheresoever they come, and watch the low water (as the Indian women do).” In one important sense, then, English pigs came into direct competition with Indians for food: according to Williams, “Of all English Cattell, the Swine (as also because of their filthy dispositions) are most hateful to all Natives, and they call them filthy cut throats.” Pigs thus became both the agents and the emblems for a European colonialism that was systematically reorganizing Indian ecological relationships.¹⁵

In the vicinity of English settlements, regulations were eventually passed requiring that hogs be yoked so that they would be unable to squeeze through fences, and ringed through the nose so that they would be prevented from rooting out growing plants. But the chief goal of swine regulations was to keep uncontrolled pigs away from settlements. At a heated New Haven town meeting in 1650, farmers declared that, if swine were allowed to forage freely, “they would plant no corne, for it would be eaten up.” The compromise solution was an order that no pigs should run loose unless driven at least eight miles from town center. Other communities passed similar regulations. And yet driving swine to the edges of town was obviously a temporary solution that lasted only so long as a town had edges beyond which were unenclosed common lands where pigs could run. Moreover, this “solution” tended to provoke conflict between towns when swine crossed town boundaries to descend on other settlements. Massachusetts Bay in 1637 pointed to the long-term solution of this problem by disclaiming any direct responsibility for the regulation of swine and delegating that burden to individual towns. “If any damage bee done by any swine,” it said, “the whole towne shalbee lyable to the parties action to make full satisfaction.” By making the control of swine a community responsibility, the Court redefined the property boundaries that applied to this particular animal so as to ensure its proper regulation. As the landscape gradually became peopled with settlements, the effect of legal liabilities was increasingly to restrain the movements of wandering hogs, until finally the beasts were more or less entirely confined to fenced farmyards.¹⁶

What became true of swine also became true of horses, sheep, and cattle: each was allocated its separate section of a settlement’s lands. The interactions among domesticated grazing animals, demographic expansion, and English property systems had the effect not only of bounding the land with relatively permanent fences but of segregating the uses to which that land was put. Even the earliest colonial towns had divided their territories according to intended function, and colonists had been granted land accordingly. Fences thus marked off not only the map of a settlement’s property rights, but its economic activities and ecological relationships as well. At the center of a family’s holdings was its house lot, around which a host of activities revolved, most of them controlled by women: food processing, cloth, and tool making, poultry keeping, vegetable, and herb gardening, and domestic living generally. Nearby were the outbuildings where animals spent their winters and some of their summer nights, as well as the various lots in which sheep, horses, milch cows, and pigs could be fed when not free to graze. In order for such animals to survive the winter, hay had to be cut in mid- to late summer, dried, and rationed out to them from November through early spring. This necessitated reserving large tracts of land for mowing, an activity which generally took place along the banks of streams, in salt marshes, and anywhere else that grass could be found. Aside from grain fields, all other lands were committed to grazing, including the upland woodlots where families cut their fuel and lumber. The key functional boundary in an English settlement was always the one between pasture and nonpasture: it was because the barrier between these two had to be so rigid that colonial towns presented such a different appearance from that of earlier Indian villages.¹⁷

English colonists reproduced these broad categories of land use wherever and however they established farms. Early land divisions had been done communally, each town deciding what agricultural activity would take place in different parts of its territory. Later divisions were generally made through the abstract mechanism of land speculation and tended to ignore both the ecological characteristics of a given tract of land and its intended agricultural use in order to facilitate the buying and selling that brought profits to speculators. This marked an important new way of perceiving the New England landscape, one that turned land itself into a commodity, but from the point of view of ecological practices, it merely transferred land-use decisions from the town to the individual land-owner. Every farm family had to have its garden, its cornfields, its meadows, and its pastures, no matter who decided where they would be located and how they would be regulated. In so dividing their lands, colonists began to create the new ecological mosaic that would gradually transform New England ecosystems.¹⁸

Livestock not only defined many of the boundaries colonists drew but provided one of the chief reasons for extending those boundaries onto new lands. Indian villages had depended for much of their meat and clothing on wild foraging mammals such as deer and moose, animals whose populations were much less concentrated than their domesticated successors. Because there had been fewer of them in a given amount of territory, they had required less food and had had a smaller ecological effect on the land that fed them. The livestock of the colonists, on the other hand, required more land than all other agricultural activities put together. In a typical town, the land allocated to them was from two to ten times greater than that used for tillage. As their numbers increased – something that happened quite quickly – the animals came to exert pressure even on these large amounts of land.¹⁹

Before examining the ecological relationships of domesticated animals, it is well to remember their economic relationships. Livestock very early came to play a role in the New England economy comparable to that of fish and lumber: they proved to be a most reliable commodity. By 1660, Samuel Maverick, who had been one of the earliest English settlers in Massachusetts Bay, could point to increased numbers of grazing animals as one of the most significant changes in New England towns since his arrival. “In the yeare 1626 or there-abouts,” he said,

there was not a Neat Beast Horse or sheepe in the Countrey and a very few Goats or hoggs, and now it is a wonder to see the great herds of Catle belonging to every Towne…. The brave Flocks of sheepe, The great number of Horses besides those many sent to Barbados and the other Carribe Islands, And withall to consider how many thousand Neate Beasts and Hoggs are yearly killed, and soe have been for many yeares past for Provision in the Countrey and sent abroad to supply Newfoundland, Barbados, Jamaica, and other places, As also to victuall in whole or in part most shipes which comes here.

Maverick viewed New England with a merchant’s eye, and regarded its livestock as one of its most profitable productions.²⁰

Whether sold fresh to urban markets or salted for shipment to Caribbean sugar plantations, grazing animals were one of the easiest ways for a colonist to obtain hard cash with a minimum of labor. October and November saw many colonial farmers make an annual pilgrimage to coastal cities such as Boston, New Haven, and Providence, where fatted animals could be sold or exchanged for manufactured goods. This economic profitability contributed to the ecological consequences of livestock raising. Besides intensifying pressure on grazing lands and inviting more territorial expansion, it necessitated the construction of roads connecting interior towns with urban centers. No small number of trees were destroyed by the construction of these roads – they were typically between 99 and 165 feet wide – but their seemingly excessive size was more than justified since they facilitated moving large herds to market. Roads were the link binding city and countryside into a single economy. During the course of the colonial period, the opportunities represented by that linkage encouraged farmers to orient more and more of their production toward commercial ends. As one eighteenth-century visitor to New England observed:

Boston and the shipping are a market which enriches the country interest far more than the [trade in exports,] which, for so numerous a people, is very inconsiderable. By means of this internal circulation, the farmers and country gentlemen are enabled very amply to purchase whatever they want from abroad.

Almost from the start, port cities exemplified the different ways in which Indians and colonists organized their economies, and no commodity moved more readily from farm to city than did animals.²¹

Livestock production was tied to the markets of the ports by a web of relationships that extended well beyond the fall drives. Whether generating a surplus by their own reproduction, by their labor in working crops, or by their contribution to lowering transportation costs in bringing themselves and other goods to market, grazing animals were one of the linchpins that made commercial agriculture possible in New England. Without them, colonial surpluses would probably have been produced on much the same scale as Indian ones; with them, colonial agriculture had a more or less constant tendency to expand and to put increasing pressure on its surrounding environment. As the ecologist E. Fraser Darling has noted, “Pastoralism for commercial ends … cannot continue without progressive deterioration of the habitat.”²²

Signs that such deterioration was taking place, or at least that the number of animals was outrunning the available food supply, became apparent within four years of Boston’s founding. In 1634, the inhabitants of Newtown (Cambridge) complained of “want of accommodation for their cattle,” and asked the Massachusetts Court for permission to migrate to Connecticut. When colonists in Watertown and Roxbury put forward similar petitions a year later, John Winthrop explained that “the occasion of their desire to remove was, for that all towns in the bay began to be much straitened by their own nearness to one another, and their cattle being so much increased.” Regions which had once supported Indian populations considerably larger than those of the early English settlements came to seem inadequate less because of human crowding than because of animal crowding. Competition for grazing lands – which were initially scarcer than they later became – acted as a centrifugal force that drove towns and settlements apart. In 1631, Bradford lamented the changes wrought by livestock in Plymouth Colony: “no man,” he wrote,

now thought he could live except he had cattle and a great deal of ground to keep them, all striving to increase their stocks. By which means they were scattered all over the Bay quickly and the town in which they lived compactly till now was left very thin and in a short time almost desolate.

Unlike tillage, whose land requirements were far lower, pastoralism became a significant force for expansion. Further, if Bradford is to be believed, it also contributed to the famous declension which helped drive New England towns from their original vision of compact settlements, communal orders, and cities upon hilltops.²³

One reason that scarcity of grazing land so quickly became a problem in Massachusetts Bay had to do with the nature of New England’s native grasses, which included broomstraw, wild rye, and the Spartinas of the salt marshes. Because most of the first English settlements were made on Indian village sites, the lands of which had been regularly cultivated and burned, there were extensive areas around them where only grass and shrubs grew. Animals could be turned loose to graze on these with virtually no preparation of the land, but often seemed to fare poorly on their new diet. Many colonists commented on the relative inferiority of New England hay in comparison with that of England, and one wrote in disgust that “it is so devoid of nutritive vertue, that our beasts grow lousy with feeding upon it, and are much out of heart and liking.” More serious than the quality of the native grasses, however, was their inadequate quantity: domesticated animal populations quickly ran out of pasture, so that their owners had to clear land to create more.²⁴

Curiously, many colonists claimed that the native grasses, although initially very “rank” and “coarse,” seemed to improve the more they were mowed or eaten. “In such places where the cattle use to graze,” wrote William Wood, “the ground is much improved in the woods, growing more grassy and less weedy.” What in fact was happening was that a number of native grasses and field plants were slowly being destroyed and replaced by European species. Annual grasses were quickly killed off if grazed too closely, and the delicate crowns of some perennials fared little better. Not having evolved in a pastoral setting, they were ill prepared for their new use. That was why European grasses, which had adapted themselves to the harsh requirements of pastoralism, began to take over wherever cattle grazed. “English grasses,” such as bluegrass and white clover, spread rapidly in newly settled areas. Initially carried to the New World in shipboard fodder, and in the dung of the animals which ate them, these European species were soon being systematically cultivated by colonists. By the 1640s, a regular market in grass seed existed in the Narragansett country, and within one or two generations, the plants had become so common that they were regarded as native.²⁵

Grazing animals were among the chief agents in transmitting to America one of the central – albeit unapplauded – characters of European agriculture: the weed. Because Indians kept no cattle, and because their mixed-crop, hoe agriculture provided a relatively dense ground cover, they failed to develop as many of the plant species which in the Old World followed wherever human beings disturbed the soil. Like the “English grasses,” weeds had evolved any of a number of adaptations that allowed them to tolerate grazing and to move quickly onto cleared agricultural land: they were able to germinate under a wide variety of environmental conditions, they grew rapidly, they might continuously produce huge quantities of seeds designed for widespread dispersal, and they were often brittle so that when broken off by cattle or farmers they could readily regenerate themselves from their remaining fragments. A few indigenous species had enough of these characteristics that they too became more common as a result of European settlement. Probably the most prolific of these was ragweed, which underwent such a population explosion in the colonial period that pollen scientists today, when studying the sediments in pond and lake bottoms, use the plant as a means of dating the arrival of the Europeans.²⁶

Most weeds, however, were European. John Josselyn in 1672 listed no fewer than twenty-two European species which had become common in the area around Massachusetts Bay “since the English planted and kept Cattle in New England.” Among these were such perennial favorites as dandelions, chickweeds, bloodworts, mulleins, mallows, nightshades, and stinging nettles. Because it seemed to crop up wherever the English walked, planted, or grazed animals, the Indians called plantain “English-man’s Foot,” a name that suggests their awareness of the biological invasion going on around them. Not only Indians were affected by this invasion, since colonial grain crops – and, worse, the seeds used to plant them – were difficult to keep separate from the weeds that grew in their midst. As early as 1652, settlers in New Haven Colony were debating whether something could be done “to prevent the spreding of sorrill in the corne feilds,” but did so to no avail. Many of these European weeds – to say nothing of grains, vegetables, and orchard trees – would eventually be among the commonest plants of the American landscape, their populations sustained in all places by the habitats human beings and domesticated animals created for them.²⁷

Although the invasion of livestock was sustained by the parallel invasion of edible plants, the two were rarely in perfect balance, at least in the eyes of colonists who for economic reasons sought to raise more animals. Livestock production expanded throughout New England in the eighteenth century and brought with it regular complaints about pasture shortages. By 1748, the Connecticut agricultural writer Jared Eliot was commenting that “the scarcity and high price of hay and corn is so obvious, that there are few or none Ignorant of it.” The shortage of hay, he said, had been “gradually increasing upon us for sundry Years past,” and was the direct result of livestock populations outgrowing available meadowlands. If pastures were inadequate, old and new settlements alike had to follow the process of forest clearing described in the preceding chapter, planting corn and rye before the unplowed soil was finally ready to be seeded with English grasses. During the eighteenth century, the range of grasses which were raised for moving was extended to include such species as timothy, red clover, lucerne (alfalfa), and fowl-meadow grass, all of which rapidly became common throughout the colonies.²⁸

Where mowing was unnecessary and grazing among living trees was possible, settlers saved labor by simply burning the forest undergrowth – much as the Indians had once done – and turning loose their cattle. But because English livestock grazed more closely and were kept in denser concentrations than the animals for whom Indians had burned the woods, English pastoralism had the effect of gradually shifting the species composition of any forest used for pasture. In at least one ill-favored area, the inhabitants of neighboring towns burned so frequently and grazed so intensively that, according to Peter Whitney, the timber “was greatly injured, and the land became hard to subdue. Hurtleberry and whitebush sprung up, together with laurel, sweetfern, and checker-berry, which nothing but the plough will destroy.” In the long run, cattle tended to encourage the growth of woody, thorn-bearing plants which they could not eat, and which, once established, were very difficult to remove. Such plants had to be cleared regularly with a scythe or grub hoe if they were not to take over a pasture entirely. The only other way of dealing with them was to graze sheep heavily in areas which the bushes had taken over; the flocks sometimes succeeded in reclaiming land that had otherwise become useless.²⁹

The tree species of the uplands were also affected by grazing, especially when exhausted fields were allowed to revert to wooded pastures. Hemlocks, whose shallow root systems were very sensitive to fire, tended to disappear from all woods that were burned for pasture. Where they were protected from fire, on the other hand, grazing encouraged their growth by destroying the more edible hardwood species that would otherwise have competed with them, so that hemlocks then became the dominant species of north-facing slopes. When land was initially cleared, whether for crops or pasture, the removal of existing trees had the effect of releasing the dormant seeds of certain species that preferred full sunlight and open growing conditions. Pin cherry was one of these. Timothy Dwight told of a farmer in Vermont in whose fields “there customarily sprung up … an immense multitude of cherry trees,” even though the surrounding forest was composed entirely of beech, hemlock, and maple. Red cedar also often acted as a pioneer on cleared lands.³⁰

Which species invaded which fields depended primarily upon whether or not grazing animals were allowed on the land. The ecological effects of pasturing and clearing on forest composition could become quite complex. In oak and birch forests that were cut for lumber and fuel, for instance, these two tree species were able to regenerate themselves by sprouting from their roots and stumps, and could be cut again in as little as 14 years. Cyclical cutting of this kind – known as a coppice system – was common among colonial farmers, and strongly favored hardwood species, which could sprout, over conifers, which could not. Coppice cutting was a major reason that chestnuts, which were prolific sprouters, increased their relative share of New England forests following European settlement. But if sprout hardwood forests were used for pasture after being cut, the sprouts were destroyed by being grazed, and the less edible white pine often came up instead. Conversely, white pines – which could not sprout but compensated for this by producing enormous quantities of airborne seeds – failed to regenerate themselves unless pasturing took place, because of their need for full sunlight and their inability to compete with hardwood species. The same was true of red cedar. In southern New England, abandoned croplands were more often than not invaded by gray birch; abandoned pastures, on the other hand, were taken over by red cedar and white pine.³¹

Livestock not only helped shift the species composition of New England forests but made a major contribution to their long-term deterioration as well. If colonial lumberers made sure that woods were stripped of their largest and oldest trees, grazing animals made sure that those trees were rarely replaced. Benjamin Lincoln wrote with some emotion when he argued:

We suffer exceedingly at this day by the ill judged policy of permitting the cattle to run at large in the woods, especially in the full settled towns. Those tracts reserved for building, timber, fence-stuff, and fuel, are constantly thinning, and many of them are ruined as wood land, there are so large a proportion of cattle turned out, compared with the plants which come up in the spring, and the shoots which appear around the stumps of trees fallen the year before.

To Lincoln, allowing animals to graze in the woods was to let trees be “wantonly destroyed,” and he sought to show that doing so was actually “more expensive and injurious to the common interest, than if lands were ploughed, and grain sowed, on which they might feed.”³²

Lincoln’s concern was well-founded. Wherever the English animals went, their feet trampled and tore the ground. Because large numbers of them were concentrated on relatively small tracts of land, their weight had the effect of compacting soil particles so as to harden the soil and reduce the amount of oxygen it contained. This in turn curtailed the root growth of higher plants, lowered their ability to absorb nutrients and water, and encouraged the formation of toxic chemical compounds. Soil compaction, in other words, created conditions that were less hospitable to plant life and eventually lowered the soil’s carrying capacity for water. (One of the things that distinguished European clover and timothy grass from other plants was precisely their ability to live on severely compacted soils containing little oxygen.) Ironically, then, an additional effect of woodland grazing was to kill many of the plants on which livestock depended for food, so that animals ran out of browse before their grazing season was over. Their survival in these circumstances depended on the colonists’ efforts to open new pastures, create additional hay meadows, or cultivate more grain crops. Pasture deterioration was thus an incentive for still more intensive colonial deforestation.³³

But the greatest effect of domesticated animals on New England soils came in the one area from which they were systematically excluded during most seasons of the year: croplands. Precolonial Indian women had had only their hoes and their own hands to turn the soil; the colonists, on the other hand, could use their oxen and horses to pull plows, which stirred the soil much more deeply. Plowing destroyed all native plant species to create an entirely new habitat populated mainly by domesticated species, and so in some sense represented the most complete ecological transformation of a New England landscape. Animals made it possible for a single colonial family to farm much larger areas than their Indian predecessors had done. Moreover, colonial farmers, because of their fixed notions of property ownership, continued to plow the same fields years after Indians would have abandoned them. The intimate connection between grazing animals, plows, and fixed property lay at the heart of European agriculture, with far-reaching ecological consequences.³⁴

Whatever the causes that reduced the ground cover of New England soils, the long-term effect was to put those soils in jeopardy. The removal of the forest, the increase in destructive floods, the soil compaction and close-cropping wrought by grazing animals, plowing – all served to increase erosion. The naturalist John Bartram wrote to Jared Eliot in the mid-eighteenth century and spoke of a time

above 20 years past when the woods was not pastured and full of high weeds and the ground light[,] then the rain sunk much more into the earth and did not wash and tear up the surface (as now). The rivers and brooks in floods would be black with mud but now the rain runs most of it off on the surface[,] is colected into the hollows which it wears to the sand and clay which it bears away with the swift current down to brooks and rivers whose banks it overflows.

Though he wrote of the mid-Atlantic colonies rather than New England, Bartram described processes which were unquestionably going on in both regions. Within a year or two after a forest was cleared, its soil began to lose the nutrients that had originally sustained (and been sustained by) its ecological community. Particles of inorganic matter in its runoff water increased perhaps five- or sixfold, and dissolved minerals also washed away more quickly. In pastures and meadows, both effects were aggravated by the presence of grazing animals; in planting fields, deeply stirred soils came into greater contact with both air and water, thus decomposing organic material and losing dissolved nutrients more rapidly. The result was to reduce still further the ability of soils to sustain plant life.³⁵