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CHAPTER 2

Raising Crops

Feeding the Market

The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English appropriation of Indian lands—a process sped along by the declining fortunes of the fur trade—radically transformed the ecology and economies of the Connecticut Valley. Native communities, who had formerly traded their agricultural surplus to feed ill-prepared English colonists, gradually found themselves displaced by aggressive (and often violent) English traders and settlers. A long-established Native American trade network was supplanted by a new English agricultural system that tied the valley into an imperial commercial network that stretched throughout the Atlantic. English farmers exploited the fertility of the bottomlands to turn the region into a breadbasket for empire, raising wheat and a myriad of other crops for export to the other mainland colonies, Europe, and, most importantly, the Caribbean. This transition introduced new plants, animals, and diseases to the valley, and redefined how human farmers managed the region’s landscape.

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In 1639, Captain David Pieterszen de Vries, acting on behalf of the Dutch West Indies Company, sailed his fluyt up the Connecticut River to call upon Governor John Haynes of the newly established Connecticut Colony. De Vries’ mission was to warn off the English, who by 1639 had planted four towns along the southern Connecticut River in lands that the Dutch considered their own by right of exploration. The Dutch had strengthened their title by purchasing these lands from the conquering Pequots with the (likely coerced) approval of the local Wangunk Indians and their sachem, Sowheage. Governor Haynes could have responded to de Vries’ accusations by pointing out that the English had also been granted land for their towns by local Indian communities eager to break the fur trade monopoly of the Pequots. Hartford, for example, had been founded upon lands provided by Wahginnacut, sachem of the local Podunks, while Sowheage himself had also sold lands to the settlers of nearby Wethersfield.

Instead, Haynes chose another tack. The governor upbraided de Vries and his Dutch countrymen for having left the lands of the Connecticut Valley “lying idle.” “It was,” Haynes insisted, “a sin to let such rich land, which produced such fine corn, lie uncultivated.”¹ Implicitly, Haynes criticized not only the Dutch West Indies Company’s decision to curtail agricultural settlement for fear it might disrupt the corporation’s monopoly on the fur trade, but also the Indian system of agriculture that had supported the peoples of the valley for centuries. For Haynes and most of his fellow English colonists, proper agriculture required plowed fields, livestock to produce manure, and fences all around. The Indians’ failure to exploit their lands in accordance with such a model supposedly invalidated any title they may have otherwise claimed to their homelands and invited—perhaps even required, in the view of Puritan leaders—their dispossession by new settlers.² The English may have first come to the valley to exploit the opportunities offered by the fur trade, but they would stay to become farmers.

Just as John Winthrop had, in 1633, bemoaned his fellow colonists’ continued addiction to “foreign commodities,” de Vries predicted that the Puritans of the Connecticut Valley would, despite the strict religion of their leaders, maintain a taste for many of the imported luxuries they had enjoyed in the commercial world of old England.³ During his short visit in Hartford, de Vries witnessed an English trading ketch arrive carrying, among other imports, a cargo of wine from the Portuguese Madeira islands. When a servant of the town was shortly afterward discovered to have overindulged in this luxury, he was sentenced to be flogged for his drunkenness. Horrified by what he considered an excessive punishment, De Vries interceded on the servant’s behalf and convinced Haynes to forgo the whipping. De Vries later warned the English governor “that it would be impossible for them [the colony’s Puritan authorities] to keep the people so strict, as they had come from so luxurious a country as England.”⁴

These two factors, the region’s rich soils and its inhabitants’ desire for imported goods, ensured that the Connecticut Valley remained firmly tied to Atlantic markets even following the failure of the fur trade. Writing a little over a decade after de Vries’ unsuccessful mission to Hartford, Captain Edward Johnson of Massachusetts observed that although the valley had originally been settled because it was so “fitly seated for a Bever trade with the Indians,” the decline of that trade had already encouraged enterprising settlers to shift their focus and “caused them to live upon husbandry.”⁵ Although this new focus on husbandry—a mixed agricultural system combining raising field crops with keeping livestock—initially aimed merely at subsistence, English farmers had by the time Johnson was writing already begun to export their agricultural surpluses beyond the valley.

In this, the new English settlers of the valley followed the example of the region’s Indian agriculturalists, although the cultural chauvinism of men like Haynes likely prevented them from appreciating the fact. Agricultural commodities had flowed from the valley for time immemorial. The River Indians exported corn, squash, and dried beans to their nonagricultural neighbors farther north and to coastal communities which specialized in exploiting marine resources. Indeed, the earliest English colonists in the valley depended on these surpluses to provision their own poorly planned efforts at settlement. But over time this reliance shifted toward a desire to dispossess the Native communities of the valley. As fur supplies declined, English merchants instead demanded land in exchange for their goods and Native leaders—facing devastating mortality from disease, stiff and sometimes hostile competition from rival nations, and the intimidating power of expanding English settlements—often saw trading away land as the best path forward for their communities. English traditions of agriculture replaced Indian practices. New crops were planted and, in time, the English began exporting the products of their own fields: apple cider to quench the thirst of neighboring New Englanders, flaxseed to supply the linen industries of Ireland and Britain, wheat and other grains to feed the slave plantations of the West Indies. Indeed, by 1660, one knowledgeable merchant was able to declare to the King’s Council for Foreign Plantations that the provisioning trade of New England, of which the produce of the Connecticut Valley made up an important part, was “the key to the Indies, without which Jamaica, Barbadoes and ye Charibby Islands are not able to subsist.”⁶ From a Native American trading nexus supplying the regions all around, to a production site for empire sending its produce into an Atlantic marketplace, the ecology of the valley shaped and was shaped by the economics of trade.

Native Agriculture

Maize had spread to the Connecticut Valley around 1000 AD, a relatively short six hundred years prior to the arrival of the first Europeans in the region, and disseminated throughout southern New England at roughly the same time. Indian women adopted this new crop and planted it in their fields alongside earlier arrivals—multiple species of beans and squash.⁷ Throughout the region, Native communities enjoyed broad diets. Native women raised crops and collected wild plant foods like berries, nuts, and tubers, while men hunted for game and fished. Along the coast, plentiful shellfish further expanded Native diets. The arrival of maize roughly paralleled a period of mild climatic warming in the northern hemisphere known as the Medieval Warm Period. Together, warmer temperatures (which in turn produced longer growing seasons for both cultivated and wild food plants) and the arrival of an important new dietary staple led to a gradual increase in the human populations of New England as a whole.⁸

This period of agricultural plenty proved fleeting. Within four centuries, warmer temperatures gave way to a period of global cooling—the Little Ice Age—that would stretch from roughly the mid-fourteenth to the early nineteenth century. By the end of the fourteenth century, lower average temperatures in the spring and autumn had shortened the agricultural growing season to the point where most communities throughout southern New England were forced to abandon cultivating crops. Even in communities where women continued to plant and tend to their fields of maize, squash, and beans, they cut back significantly on the amount of land planted and on the amount of time and labor spent in tending crops relative to their efforts at collecting wild plants and game. Only in the Connecticut Valley—where the waters of the Connecticut River and its larger tributaries acted to moderate local temperatures and slightly extend the growing season—did communities remain committed to a largely sedentary and agriculturally centered lifestyle. Elsewhere, New England communities returned to cultivating crops only as average temperatures rose (slightly) at the turn of the sixteenth century. As the earliest European explorers pushed into New England in the mid-sixteenth century, then, they encountered many Native communities that had only just recently readopted farming to supplement their continued reliance on hunting and foraging.⁹

The villages of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Connecticut Valley took advantage of their climatically fortuitous placement to become a breadbasket to the rest of New England, trading their surplus agricultural produce to communities living to their north, east, and west. Native traders traveling amid multiple interregional commercial networks traded agricultural foodstuffs and ceramics from the Connecticut Valley for copper coming from Nova Scotia and the Great Lakes, stone for toolmaking from areas in present-day Pennsylvania, and shells, wampum, and seafood from New England’s coastal communities. Historical sources show that Connecticut Valley communities continued to produce large agricultural surpluses for trade to northern and coastal New England even after the return of (again, slightly) warmer temperatures led to the readoption of crop cultivation elsewhere.¹⁰

The earliest English colonists in North America invariably relied upon the preexisting Indian provisions trade for the survival of their settlements. For example, the settlers of England’s first permanent American colony, Jamestown, at first proved notoriously bad at feeding themselves. Those who survived the colony’s early years relied on the flow of agricultural surpluses that undergirded Powhatan’s empire, receiving food as gifts, trading for corn, and eventually using violence to extort provisions from the Indians of coastal Virginia. Captain John Smith believed that subsequent colonies could likewise rely on America’s Native communities to supply them with food. In 1616, he assured English readers that settlers in the “New England” which he had recently returned from exploring would be able to purchase corn from neighboring Indians “for a few trifles,” and thus sustain themselves until their own plantations had been firmly established. For Smith, New England agriculture was not an end in itself. Rather, Indian corn, and eventually the provisions that the colonists grew for themselves, would support the production of “merchandable fish” and “other commodities.”¹¹

Whether intentionally or not, the early settlers of New England followed Jamestown’s lead by relying on local Indians for their initial subsistence. Perhaps taking Smith’s advice too much to heart, the Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth four years later relied on Indian corn to get through their first winter—although their decision to ransack abandoned Wampanoag villages and gravesites for grain caches likely alienated their would-be trading partners and contributed to the deaths of about half of the Mayflower’s passengers. Luckily, an improvement in relations with the Wampanoags early in 1621 allowed the foundering colony to trade for seed corn. A decade later, Podunk leader Wahginnacut recognized the potential of appealing to English bellies in his search for a European trading partner, offering the leaders of Massachusetts Bay both land for a new settlement along the Connecticut River and corn to feed its settlers.¹² As John Smith had recommended, the founders of the Connecticut Valley’s first English towns hoped to rely on Indian neighbors for provisions while extracting the region’s “merchandable” furs for sale to Europe.

Self-sufficiency was not easily achieved by settlers accustomed to an agricultural system developed in a society where labor was plentiful and most fields and meadows had been cleared generations ago and kept plowed, fenced, and manured annually ever since. Even given the great fertility of valley lands, and despite the fact that they were often able to take advantage of abandoned Indian fields for their early crops, there was no chance that the eight hundred English men, women, and children who moved to the banks of the Connecticut in the 1630s would be able to feed themselves without the support of local Indian communities. As at Jamestown, this dependence on the Indian provisioning trade left Connecticut Valley colonists ill at ease when famine threatened, eventually contributing to the outbreak of violence in the Pequot War.

Imperial competition and the English desire to dominate the fur trade provided the overarching impetus for the war, but hunger and a fear of famine helped to trigger the descent into violence. The two men whose deaths ostensibly sparked the war, John Stone and John Oldham, made for unlikely martyrs. Stone was a drunkard, a blasphemer, a kidnapper, and probably a pirate. Oldham lived in Plymouth only about a year before the colony’s leaders exiled him for his tendencies toward violence and rebellion. Unlike Stone, Oldham did eventually achieve a degree of respectability as a trader in the Bay Colony, but his slaying under unclear circumstances by Niantics on Block Island seems a poor justification for English colonists’ subsequent campaign to eliminate the Pequot as a nation. A number of ulterior motives—land hunger, the lure of fur trade profits, and a desire to wrest regional political hegemony from the Pequots and Dutch—better explain the English rush to war. To these may be added one further factor which helps to explain both the war’s timing and the importance that Stone’s and Oldham’s deaths likely played in English calculations: access to Indian corn.¹³

Recent scholarship suggests that the specter of famine stalked the communities of southern New England—native and colonist alike—in the years 1635–1636. The prospect of hunger loomed especially dire in the newly planted English towns of the Connecticut Valley. Native Americans in New England had first seen their food security threatened by the smallpox epidemic of 1633–1634. The disease devastated Indian communities, incapacitating and killing hunters and agriculturalists in the prime of life. Survivors, many still recovering from the ravages of illness, struggled to maintain their subsistence as best they could even as they mourned their dead. To compound problems, a hurricane struck southeastern New England in the summer of 1635, destroying crops as they stood in the fields. Only a few years old, many English towns in Massachusetts and, especially, in the Connecticut Valley still struggled to achieve self-sufficiency in food and relied heavily on trade with Indian villages to stave off starvation.¹⁴

Although they may not have always been welcome in polite society, traders like Stone and Oldham served as linchpins within this nascent regional commercial network. Few other colonists possessed the experience, knowledge, and contacts needed to strike deals with Indian villages while also successfully navigating the often-treacherous waters of the New England coast. The waterborne trade carried on by a handful of merchants like Stone and Oldham provided a lifeline to the early settlers of the Connecticut Valley. In the 1630s, English settlements still only hugged the coast of what these newcomers aspirationally labeled “New England.” The territory separating the Massachusetts Bay from the Connecticut Valley belonged to communities of Massachusetts and Nipmucs and was crisscrossed by Indian paths too rough for English carts. The deaths of Stone and Oldham threatened to cut the English towns of the Connecticut Valley off from both Indian corn suppliers and any assistance that might otherwise be forthcoming from the English settlements of eastern New England. Worse yet, if the murders of Stone and Oldham signaled a new unwillingness on the part of Indian communities to trade away their own (likely diminished) supplies of corn, then the English towns faced the prospect of a hungry future.¹⁵

War offered the beleaguered towns of the Connecticut an immediate solution to their food shortages. As the corn trade floundered amid worsening relations with the Pequots, settlers instead filled their cellars with food raided from Indian stores. Early raids against the Niantics of Block Island and the Pequots at the mouth of the Thames, ostensibly to chastise those communities for their roles in Stone’s and Oldham’s deaths, yielded large caches of corn that the English hauled back to their towns. Connecticut militiamen continued their raids for corn into 1638, long after Pequot power had been effectively crushed. Along with captives/slaves, corn was one of the principal spoils that the victorious English divided up among themselves and their Narragansett and other Indian allies at war’s end.¹⁶

This victory bought the fledgling Connecticut Valley towns a respite, but did not free them from their dependence on the Indian corn trade. In early 1638, the English—riding high after their victory over the Pequots—sought to impose greater control over the provisions trade of the Connecticut Valley by fixing the price at which corn could be purchased from Indians at five shillings a bushel.¹⁷ Unfortunately, when William Pynchon, acting as broker for the Connecticut towns, attempted to buy provisions at this rate, he encountered few willing to sell. He came away empty-handed from successive visits to the villages of Agawam, Woronoco, and Nonotuck. It was only after pushing farther north to Pocumtuck that he was able to secure five hundred bushels of corn in exchange for three hundred fathoms of wampum. Despite his having saved the residents of Hartford from starvation, the Massachusetts government fined Pynchon for overpaying. A few months later, Captain John Mason of Connecticut (a leader of the previous year’s Mystic Massacre of almost five hundred Pequots, mostly women and children) managed to procure fifty canoes loaded with corn from Indians upriver “at a reasonable rate,” but only by approaching his Indian trading partners with an armed militia at his back. The Pequot War may have laid the foundations for English hegemony in the valley, but as long as the English remained at least partially dependent upon purchased corn to feed their growing towns, the Indian communities of the valley possessed a bargaining chip with which to oppose the unwanted encroachment of English authority.¹⁸

As mid-century approached, however, the bargaining power of Indian villages in the valley began to decline. Indian traders found they could no longer rely on what had historically been their most important exports to the English towns—food and furs. After peaking in the early 1650s, fur yields in the valley began a precipitous decline until the 1670s when the regional trade effectively came to an end.¹⁹ At the same time, the early English towns of the valley, after twenty years of building and plowing, finally achieved self-sufficiency in feeding themselves. After forty years of trading with Europeans, valley Indians had to find a new commodity to offer if they were to maintain access to the European goods to which they had become accustomed (kettles, blankets, coats, knives, hatchets, guns, etc.) and thereby maintain their economies, fulfill their diplomatic obligations to powerful neighbors like the Mohawks, and maintain good relations with the English by honoring the debts that many Indian traders had run up by trading on credit. Increasingly, European merchants demanded land—rather than the resources that Native peoples harvested from it—in exchange for their goods.

After the mid-1650s, networks of English merchant credit and declining beaver yields paved the way for divorcing valley Indians from their ancestral territories. Transfers of land had long been tied up with the fortunes of the fur trade. When Wahginnacut, the Podunk sachem, approached the English in 1631 he offered the land for a new English settlement (which would eventually become Hartford) as part of the entry price he was willing to pay to break into the fur trade. Similar transfers, and numerous smaller sales, provided for the founding of the other Connecticut River towns. After midcentury, however, land went from a relatively minor, supplemental commodity in the larger fur trade to the central focus of Anglo-Indian trade and credit relationships.²⁰

A number of considerations made land sales an attractive choice for the Indians of the valley. Decades of epidemic diseases and warfare encouraged by the fur trade had led to depopulation and the abandonment of small scattered farming communities in favor of larger, centralized village sites. Land that had fallen out of cultivation and that lay far from the village center was of little immediate use to these smaller, consolidated communities. Hunting lands, too, declined in value as there were fewer hunters to exploit them, as beaver populations declined, and as conflicts with the Mohegans and Mohawks made them unsafe to venture into. Despite these circumstances, land deeds with Europeans often included clauses stipulating that the Indian sellers could still return to deeded lands to hunt, fish, collect wild foods, and sometimes even to plant crops. With such stipulations, Indian communities worked to protect their agricultural heritage and adapt to changing conditions in the valley even as they yielded to English demands. For example, when Chickwallop and his fellow sachems among the Norwottucks sold the lands that would become Hatfield, Massachusetts, to John Pynchon in 1653 they did so with the express understanding that they would “have liberty to plant their present corn fields” and on the condition that Pynchon would “plow up or cause to be plowed up for the Indians sixteene acres of land on ye east side of the Quinnoticott River.”²¹

Trading away lands that were not currently under use or that were being used suboptimally made sense for Indian traders and village leaders under pressure to maintain access to both European goods, which their communities had come to enjoy and depend upon, and to wampum, which was crucial for treating with Native neighbors and for demonstrating the trader/leader’s own social preeminence. Land sales brought immediate, bulk payments of wampum and European goods equal to several years’ worth of proceeds from the fur trade into a community without the uncertainty that came from harvesting an increasingly scarce resource like beaver. In 1659, for instance, Umpanchela, a sachem of the Norwottucks, leased (and later sold) a parcel of farmland along the Connecticut north of recently founded Northampton, Massachusetts, in exchange for goods worth about 250 pounds of beaver pelts. This was in a year when the entire fur trade of the valley amounted to only 291 pounds of beaver. For traders and leaders like Umpanchela, the short-term benefits of land sales were obvious.²²

The details of the deal Umpanchela made with John Pynchon help illustrate why land sales proved so attractive for Native leaders despite their negative long-term consequences, which seem so obvious in hindsight. In 1659, Umpanchela had purchased a variety of items on credit from Pynchon. The fur trade had been a source of great wealth for valley communities as recently as the early 1650s, and Umpanchela doubtlessly hoped to pay his debt off quickly. But by 1659, changing circumstances—renewed tensions with the Mohawks, often-violent competition with the Mohegans to the southeast, and rapidly declining regional beaver populations—emerged to stymie the trade.²³ Umpanchela carried his debt over into 1660 and, in a gamble that the beaver trade would bounce back, ordered even more items from Pynchon. The variety of items purchased by Umpanchela—several fathoms of cloth, shirts, coats, breeches, knives, and even wampum—suggest he may have been acting as a middleman in the regional fur trade. Pynchon, however, was not convinced that Umpanchela would be able to make good on his climbing debt and demanded that the sachem mortgage three parcels of Norwottuck planting land as collateral. In December of 1660, Umpanchela departed upriver on a high-stakes trading venture to the Sokokis at Squakheag, while Pynchon gloated in his account book: “If I am not paid in Bever when he comes from Heakeg all his land is to be mine.” In the end, Umpanchela was unable to obtain enough pelts from the Sokokis to clear his accounts, and the Norwottuck lands transferred to Pynchon to be resold and incorporated into the English town of Hadley.²⁴

While land sales offered immediate benefits to valley Indian communities under growing pressure from both their English and Native neighbors, this strategy also brought important long-term drawbacks. Land sales slowly undermined a village’s capacity for growth. As Indian populations in the valley gradually rebounded from the smallpox epidemic of the 1630s, the women farmers of the new, consolidated villages had to plant crops on ever more acres. Without the agricultural lands which had been sold to the English, these farmers were unable to allow their fields to lie fallow or to shift cultivation to outlying fields when those nearest villages began to lose their fertility.²⁵