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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 indigenous peoples numbered well over one hundred thousand.⁹ Their populations plummeted precipitously over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as an influx of European traders and settlers introduced diseases with which Native Americans had no previous cultural or immunological experience.¹⁰ An epidemic of mysterious identity—generally referred to simply as “plague” by European witnesses—ravaged southern New England from 1616 to 1619, but largely spared the communities of the Connecticut Valley. In 1633, a smallpox epidemic, this time centered on the villages along the Connecticut River, swept through the region. Mortality estimates for interior villages are hard to come by, although Pilgrim leader William Bradford recorded the intense suffering experienced the by Indians living near the Plymouth colony trading house at present-day Windsor, Connecticut—“ye poxe breaking and mattering … their skin cleaving … to the matts they lye on; when they turne them, a whole side will flea [flay] of[f] at once … they will be all of a gore blood, most fearfull to behold”—and offered the tragically high estimate that among a tribe living farther north in the valley (likely Pocumtucks) 950 died out of 1,000.¹¹ Scholars have estimated that the coastal Pequots may have suffered losses of as high as 75 percent, falling from a population in 1600 of about 16,000 to only 4,000 by 1637. The Connecticut River Indians, whose villages held perhaps 12,000 before the epidemic, likely suffered similarly.¹²

Such massive losses of human life dramatically undermined the social and political stability of Native New England. Introduced European diseases often carried off male hunters and female farmers in the prime of life, undermining food security in Native communities. If an entire village, or even a large portion, were incapacitated by disease at a crucial season for planting, harvesting, or hunting, the result would be famine. Hunger and malnutrition left those who avoided the first wave of an epidemic more susceptible when the disease returned, as with the recurring plague of 1616–1619, or when a new disease struck.¹³

Entire villages disappeared and new ones formed as survivors of epidemics banded together to form new societies from the wreckage of the old. Former regional powers declined or competed with emerging powers as they exploited circumstances to expand their regional authority at the expense of rivals. John Smith, for example, wrote of “civill wars” rending Native New England during the plague of the 1610s.¹⁴ Trade with Europeans offered new weapons in this struggle for regional power, driving Native nations into the fur trade. At the same time, competition for trade and unequal access to European merchants further destabilized an already volatile diplomatic environment. Seeking advantage in these shifting political and economic times, New England Indians, including leaders like Wahginnacut, worked to integrate European traders into preexisting Native American networks of diplomacy and trade at the same time that the region’s European settlers sought to integrate both Indian labor and the natural resource wealth of New England into an expanding network of transatlantic markets. Together, Native communities and European newcomers created a new economy and political system that would redefine human interaction with the natural world for much of the seventeenth century.

Over a surprisingly short period of time—less than a century—Native American hunters, pursuing the wealth and military power offered by the fur trade, destroyed the beaver populations of southern New England. As beaver pelts flowed into the hands of English (and Dutch and French) traders, the waters of beaver ponds flowed past the decaying remains of the beaver dams that had once held them in place. Hundreds of thousands of acres of wetlands disappeared over the course of just a few decades. Indeed, for most areas of the valley, the landscapes first encountered by English settlers were not in any sense “natural.” Nor were they the same landscapes that Native Americans had carefully crafted and cultivated for generations prior to the arrival of Europeans. Rather, the first English settlers of the Connecticut Valley were greeted by a new landscape—what could be termed a postdiluvian landscape—already in the throes of major ecological and hydrological upheavals.

Beaver Ecology

In Pocumtuck legend, Ktsi Amiskw, the Great Beaver, possessed the power to reorder nature. His giant dam halted the course of a mighty river (the Connecticut), flooding what had been dry land and transforming it into a great pond stretching up the length of the Connecticut Valley. Although terrible in life, Ktsi Amiskw left a rich legacy for the ancestors of the Pocumtucks. Slain by the hero Hobomok, the Great Beaver’s dam gradually drained to reveal a verdant valley, full of game and soils far more fertile than the surrounding lands. Modern understandings of the ecological role played by beaver echo this older Pocumtuck understanding. Biologists refer to beaver as a “keystone species”—one whose behavior affects the presence and relative abundance of multiple other species within an ecosystem. Unlike in the story of Ktsi Amiskw, however, beaver historically played an overwhelmingly positive role in Native American economies.

Like human beings, beaver possess the ability to profoundly reshape the physical world by applying their labor to the natural resources around them. Beaver transform the hydrology of rivers and streams by constructing dams from tree trunks, limbs, stones, and mud. As the water backs up behind the dam, a pond forms. The beaver of the colony then construct a separate lodge in the midst of their pond. Underwater passageways provide access to the lodge’s interior and the encircling waters of the beaver pond provide protection from predators. When ice forms in the pond and over the top of lodges in winter, this protective shell provides insulation against the cold air outside. The aquatic plants that flourish in beaver ponds provide the colony with a portion of their sustenance, the remainder coming from the bark of trees felled for construction and repair work on the lodge and dam. In sum, beaver engineer their own habitat and, in so doing, reengineer the land- and waterscapes which they inhabit.

Prior to the seventeenth century, beaver inhabited almost every body of water in New England. Beaver dams dotted the landscape, impounding and slowing the flow of the countless brooks and streams that eventually came together to form the Connecticut. Every major tributary housed multiple beaver colonies. Only the smallest brooks, those with too little flowing water to produce a proper pond, escaped their attention. Even the Connecticut River itself, too powerful for most of its length to be held back by the timber, mud, and stones that make up a beaver dam, would have housed a few intrepid beaver colonies in the slack waters of its more tranquil elbows and meanders.¹⁵

The approximately eleven thousand square miles of the Connecticut drainage basin likely supported upward of half a million beaver prior to the fur trade. The ponds sequestered behind the dams built by these half million beaver—maybe as many as one hundred thousand individual impoundments—would have varied in size from a few square feet to hundreds of acres. These beaver colonies formed a dense mosaic of nearly contiguous ponds and wetlands stretching along the length of most rivers and streams. One of the early settlers of Massachusetts provided a glimpse of these vast interior wetlands, writing in the 1630s of “swamps, some be ten, some twenty, some thirty miles long.”¹⁶ Taken together, beaver ponds may have engulfed up to 40 percent of the length of each of the Connecticut’s tributaries.¹⁷ While not quite on the scale of Ktsi Amiskw’s engineering handiwork, early seventeenth-century beaver ponds likely covered hundreds of thousands of acres within the basin—perhaps as much as nine hundred thousand acres, approximately 12 percent of the total Connecticut watershed.¹⁸

Beaver not only lived within the natural landscape of the Connecticut Valley, to an appreciable extent they created it. Long-term beaver occupation engineered much of the fertile bottomlands lining the Connecticut and its many tributaries, the very lands that first attracted English settlers to the valley in the 1630s. In the absence of beaver ponds, swiftly flowing streams would have gradually eaten away their beds and banks. The valleys of the watershed would have grown deeper and their banks steeper. Beaver dams slackened the flow of waters both within the ponds they impounded and in downstream stretches of river, decreasing stream bank erosion.

Indeed, the engineering skills of beaver actually reversed the process of stream bank erosion. Over time, beaver habitation built up rich meadowlands along the banks of tributary waterways.¹⁹ Rain and snowmelt runoff from the mountains, hills, and uplands of the watershed carried gravel, sand, silt, and soil into the streams of the region. As these waterways entered beaver ponds and their flow slowed, suspended sediment settled to the bottom of the pond. Individual beaver dams remain in operation for decades, sustaining multiple generations of a beaver colony and multiplying the effects of sediment retention over time.²⁰ Deposited sediment gradually raised the floor of these ponds, until grasses and swampland brush could take root and the pond site became too shallow to house a beaver lodge. When this happened, the beaver would move on in search of a new dam site. Abandoned by its engineers, the old dam would decay, and the last shallow waters impounded behind it would drain away to reveal a lush meadow. Given sufficient time—the several millennia beaver thrived in New England following the last Ice Age—the aggregate action of beaver colonies throughout the Connecticut watershed resulted in the painstakingly gradual aggradation of valley floors.

Beaver ponds played an important role in determining the species composition of the woodlands that, at least in part, came to cover these newly formed valley lands. The presence of beaver ponds raises the water table in a landscape. In the long term, those trees poorly adapted to life in wet soils—primarily pines and firs—slowly lose out to trees more tolerant of higher water tables. Most notable among these latter are aspens and birches, the two species most preferred by beaver for construction material and food. The cumulative effect of the hundreds of thousands of acres of beaver-engineered wetlands in pre–fur trade New England meant that birch and aspen stands would have been far more common than they are today.²¹ In essence, the beaver could be said to have farmed their own preferred tree species.

By engineering new ponds and wetlands, beaver also created habitat for numerous other species. Beaver ponds and the semisubmerged wetlands that often lay along their edges support a biomass that ranges from two to five times greater than comparable undammed stretches of stream. Species that call beaver ponds home tend to be extremely rare or nonexistent in other stretches of a watershed. Fish, bird, amphibian, reptile, mammal, aquatic invertebrate, and aquatic plant species that require ponded or slow moving waters to grow, breed, and/or feed proliferate in the ponds and wet meadows that beaver engineer.²² As a consequence, the pre-seventeenth-century Connecticut Valley, with its thriving beaver population, supported far more species and a greater overall biomass than did the eighteenth-century watershed.

Figure 2. This vignette from a 1715 British map of North America greatly exaggerates the size of beaver colonies (which usually contained no more than six individuals), but does show that turn-of-the-eighteenth-century Europeans possessed some awareness of the beaver’s impact within a landscape. Hermann Moll, “A View of ye Industry of ye Beavers” (1715). A New and Exact Map of the Dominions of the King of Great Britain on ye Continent of North America, London: 1715. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

Despite the hostility ascribed to the legendary Ktsi Amiskw, the Pocumtucks and other Native Americans living in New England prior to the seventeenth century enjoyed a largely symbiotic relationship with the region’s beaver. Although beaver was considered a delicacy among many of the nations of the northeast, their meat never formed a staple of Native American diets. Instead, beaver contributed to Native American food supplies by creating novel habitats in which numerous other species could flourish. Multiple species of fish, frogs and toads, tortoises, and freshwater mussels made their homes in beaver ponds and contributed to the dietary diversity and seasonal food security of Native communities.²³

Beaver also transformed streamside woodlands in ways that supported Native American hunting and foraging. As they cut timber, beaver ranged up to one hundred yards beyond their dams. Selectively cutting down trees, beaver created gaps in the canopies of woodlands bordering their ponds. These new parklike stretches of woodland promoted the growth of myriad plant species whose growth was otherwise held in check by a lack of sunlight.²⁴ The growth of new succulents, in turn, attracted game animals like deer and moose, which also browsed the aquatic plants of the beaver pond. Native American communities made use of these new parklands both by harvesting edible plants, like blueberries, and by hunting the game they attracted.

Finally, the beaver meadows that emerged at the end of a pond’s life cycle provided perhaps the most important benefit to local Indian communities. Just as beaver ponds trapped sediment, they also became a holding site for organic material. Streams and rivers swept along leaves, branches, grasses, animal carcasses, and other decaying matter and deposited them as they entered the slack waters of the beaver pond. Algae and bacteria decomposed this natural compost, returning nutrients to the soil at the pond’s bottom. As sediment and organic detritus accumulated, the pond floor slowly rose and eventually gave way to a lush meadow. Wild food plants and other succulents flourished in the rich soils of these newly emerged meadows. This flora, in turn, continued to provide excellent browsing for the deer and moose that had formerly fed upon the pond’s aquatic vegetation. The fertile soils of former beaver ponds also made excellent planting grounds for the horticultural nations living in southern New England. Because beaver ponds acted as natural nutrient traps, soils in beaver meadows would have contained over four times the nitrogen of soils in surrounding areas.²⁵ And since maize draws heavily on nitrogen in soils during its growth cycle, beaver meadows could offer Indian agriculturalists far better yields than surrounding planting sites.

For their part, Native Americans set seasonal fires to preserve meadows against the encroachment of forests and to maintain parklike woodlands for hunting. As a side effect, Native American landscape management promoted the growth of certain tree species at the expense of others. Many of the fast-growing tree species best able to take advantage of the seasonal recycling of nutrients through burning—like aspen and birch—happened to be those most favored by beaver as food and construction material.²⁶ In the long term, Indian burning practices created habitat more favorable to beaver colonization at the same time that beaver engineered a landscape that favored human hunting, foraging, and farming.

As they worked to engineer their environment, beaver also served as an important buttress against ecological disturbance. Ponds and wetlands acted as reservoirs during periods of drought. They provided catchments in seasons of heavy rains or especially heavy snowmelts, reducing torrential flooding. When high waters overflowed or swept away a dam, surviving beaver or new colonizers would eventually repair or replace it, restoring the landscape to its predisturbance state.²⁷ In the beaver’s absence, the landscape of New England would have contained more swiftly flowing waterways, deeper gullies and valleys; more dry land, but less fertile soils. Open meadows and parklike woodlands would have been less common, as would game animals like deer and moose, which thrive in such habitat. Overall biodiversity would have been greatly lessened, and some species which rely on ponds for breeding or feeding may have been almost completely absent.

Echoes of the beaver’s ecological role in creating the Connecticut Valley can be easily discerned in the legend of Ktsi Amiskw, but instead of a single giant beaver creating the fertile lands of the valley, the rich soils of the watershed were the product of tens of thousands (and, over generations, perhaps millions) of smaller dams. And if the story of Hobomok’s slaying of Ktsi Amiskw seems to run counter to the symbiosis that actually characterized the human-beaver ecological relationship prior to the seventeenth century, it seems all too appropriate when viewing this same relationship through the prism of the transatlantic fur trade. In the Pocumtucks’ geography, the body of the slain Ktsi Amiskw became a mountain ridge that loomed over their historic heartland. The English who founded the town of Deerfield within sight of the ridge saw something different in its distinct shape. In an act of toponymical dispossession, they renamed the ridge Mount Sugarloaf. The Great Beaver was symbolically transformed into a manifestation of the desire for imported luxuries—an apt metaphor for the seventeenth-century fur trade.

The Fur Trade

Furs, including those of the Eurasian beaver (Castor fiber), were a staple of elite fashion throughout medieval Europe. Members of the royalty, nobility, and upper clergy drove a demand for fine furs that, by the high middle ages, contributed to a bustling trade between trappers, furriers, and their wealthy clients. Gradually, the most popular furbearers—sables, ermines, beaver—began to disappear across much of their former ranges. The beaver, for example, had disappeared from England by the end of the thirteenth century and from the whole of Great Britain by the beginning of the fifteenth, a victim of overhunting for its fur (and, likely, of habitat loss in the face of efforts to drain and improve agricultural lands).²⁸ This process of beaver destruction was not limited to Great Britain, but instead proceeded upon approximately the same schedule throughout northern Europe. By the late middle ages the aristocratic classes of western and southern Europe had become increasingly dependent upon trade with the Rus to their east to supply them with the luxurious furs that helped mark them off from their social inferiors.²⁹

By approximately the mid-sixteenth century, overhunting for export had led to the near extermination of beaver, sable, and other furbearers even in Russian lands. To hold onto the lucrative state revenues generated by the fur trade, Ivan IV (known as “the Terrible”) of Muscovy sent his armies east to drive the Tartars from Siberia and subjugate the native hunters of the region. The Muscovites would eventually—after eight decades—win their wars and extend their fur trading empire to the Pacific. The hostilities that ensued in the meantime, together with growing fur shortages in Russia, led to rising international prices in the late 1500s.³⁰ As Russian armies marched east, the same historical forces driving Ivan the Terrible’s conquest of Siberia encouraged merchants in the Netherlands, France, and England to look west for a new, cheaper supply of furs at just the historical moment that maritime explorers were introducing the lands of northeastern North America to an expanding world economy.³¹

The availability of American furs to western European consumers contributed to a larger consumer revolution taking place during the Age of Exploration. As European traders increasingly integrated producers in the Americas, Africa, and Asia into an expanding world economy, luxury goods once available only to the most elite members of European society began to move down market. As furs streamed across the Atlantic, prices fell, and this luxury once reserved for kings and nobility increasingly appeared in the wardrobes of the gentry and professional classes. Besides their appeal as a traditional marker of social status, garments of beaver retained the same qualities that made their former owners so successfully adapted to semiaquatic lifestyles in often frigid climes. Beaver fur was warm, water resistant, and—once it had been felted—strikingly soft. For Europeans gripped in the throes of the Little Ice Age, beaver pelts held an obvious appeal. By the seventeenth century, lawyers, clerics, clerks, military officers, and their wives in England sported cloaks, capes, mittens, pantaloons, and, especially, hats made of North American beaver (Castor canadensis). By the 1640s, beaver hats had become the preferred headwear of a broad economic and political cross section of English society, sported by king and cavaliers, and Puritans and parliamentarians alike.³²

Consequently, the Dutch and English who arrived in the Connecticut Valley in the seventeenth century looked out at the extensive beaver dams and ponds spread across the countryside and imagined the wealth that their architects’ hides might fetch. Strong demand and good prices in Europe meant that a cargo of New England beaver pelts guaranteed welcome profits for European merchants and settlers trying to finance their new colonies in America. As one nineteenth-century New England historian observed: “The colonist desired Indian corn and venison, but all the world desired beaver.”³³ Or, at least, all the European world.

Indian hunters in the Connecticut basin and elsewhere desired the metal kettles, pots, knives, and firearms that they received in payment for their beaver pelts. Prior to the fur trade, Indian communities in eastern North America had utilized the beaver for meat and clothing, and had used its impressive incisors to make cutting tools. But for Native communities living in New England in the seventeenth century, beaver and the other furbearing mammals of the American north came to represent a much wider range of newly available commodities. Consumers in Europe may have provided the commercial demand, but it was Native American hunters (themselves also consumers) who formed the sharp spear point of the fur trade. As Massachusetts settler William Wood observed in 1634, “These beasts are too cunning for the English…. All the Beaver which the English have, comes first from the Indians.”³⁴

European fishermen pioneered the fur trade with New England’s coastal communities in the first decades of the sixteenth century. For the sailors on these early fishing vessels, bartering furs from coastal Indians represented a lucrative sideline to the cod fishery, the primary economic motivator for their cross-ocean ventures. These sixteenth-century fishermen offered small bits of metal—nails, fishing hooks, and, perhaps, knives—and in exchange Indians often, literally, sold them the beaver coats off their backs. By the closing decades of the century, however, it had become apparent to many European merchants and statesmen that the financial returns from North American furs justified pursuing that trade in its own right.

In 1614, Dutch explorer Adriaen Block captained the first ship to sail up the Connecticut River while exploring the Long Island coast in search of trading opportunities. Block’s ship, the Onrust (“Restless”), penetrated upriver perhaps as far as present-day Hartford. Sailing east from the mouth of the Connecticut, Block established the first trade contacts between the Dutch and the powerful Pequot nation, whose territory centered on the Thames River. Over the course of the next two decades, the Pequots’ commercial relationship with the Dutch would transform the political and ecological landscape of southern New England and draw the Native nations of the Connecticut Valley firmly within the transatlantic network of the fur trade. Over the course of the late 1610s through early 1630s, the Dutch operating out of New Netherland exported approximately ten thousand beaver skins a year.³⁵ Many of these the Dutch obtained from Native trappers operating along the Hudson River, but a sizable percentage likely came from the Pequot trade, and most of these latter furs (perhaps a few thousand) would have come from subordinate villages lying within the Connecticut watershed.

Figure 3. The mid-ground of this vignette from an early eighteenth-century map depicts Indians using metal-headed axes and spears to hunt beaver with the assistance of dogs. Elsewhere, two hunters have treed a bear while another pair course a moose in the background. Henri Abraham Chatelain, “Vignettes of Indians Hunting Beaver” (1719). Carte Tres Curieuse de la Mer du Sud, Amsterdam: 1719. Map reproduction courtesy of the Mapping Boston Collection at the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library.

At first, the Pequots may have taken advantage of their fortuitous placement along Long Island Sound merely to act as middlemen between the Dutch and Native communities lying farther inland. Pequot traders exchanged cloth and metal implements obtained from the Dutch and acted as a funnel through which the beaver pelts of southern New England flowed into the hands of Dutch traders. Soon, however, the Pequots sought to turn their commercial advantages into political hegemony. Direct access to Dutch firearms and other metal weaponry gave the Pequots a military advantage that allowed the nation to extend its authority over neighboring tribes.³⁶ In 1626, Sequin, the sachem of the Wangunks, an Indian village near present-day Middletown, led a coalition of Connecticut Valley Indians against the Pequots in an attempt to break the latter’s monopoly on the Dutch trade in the region. Sequin and his allies were defeated after a series of “three desperate pitched battles” and thereafter required to pay an annual tribute to the Pequots. The Pequot demanded that a substantial portion of this tribute be paid in beaver skins.³⁷

The strategic benefits that arose from the beaver trade spawned competition and then violence farther inland as well, in the territory lying between the Connecticut and the Hudson River. The Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy had been attempting to establish their control of the beaver trade in this stretch of lands since at least the first decade of the seventeenth century. In 1628, a military offensive by the Mohawks, the easternmost of the Iroquois nations, defeated the Mahicans, whose territory had formerly encompassed the interriver region, along with their allies among the Pocumtuck, Sokoki, and Pennacook villages of the middle and upper Connecticut Valley. Reeling from this defeat, the Mahicans withdrew from the Hudson watershed to concentrate on the portions of their hunting territory that lay closer to the Connecticut. Intermittent violence followed for the next five decades. The Mahicans, Pocumtucks, and Sokokis repeatedly clashed with the Mohawks as both sides sought to control the beaver trade of the lands west and north of the Connecticut River.³⁸ As the milliners of Europe ramped up their production of the beaver hats that had recently become the height of European fashion, violence engulfed the frontiers of Native New England.

Throughout the 1620s–1630s the Indian nations of the middle and upper Connecticut watershed—the Mahicans, the Pocumtucks, the Sokokis, and, one could add, the Nipmucs and Pennacooks—straddled three separate spheres of influence within the broader fur trade of the northeast. To the west were the lands that by 1628 had become dominated by Mohawk hunters trading with the Dutch operating out of the Hudson River. The growing political hegemony of the Pequots lay to the south. But trading opportunities also presented themselves to the north. The French founded their first permanent trading post at the mouth of the St. Lawrence in 1615, just one year after Adriaen Block opened Dutch commercial relations with the Pequots. The Wabanaki nations inhabiting what would become Maine and southern Quebec maintained close commercial and political ties to the French from the early sixteenth century forward and participated actively in the fur trade. Western Abenaki nations like the Sokokis and Cowasucks maintained ties with the French and with other Native American middlemen in the north, providing their regional allies with an alternative market for their Connecticut Valley furs.

The fur trade tied the Indian hunters and trappers of the Connecticut Valley not just to European merchants and, through them, European customers and producers living across the ocean, but also to Indian manufacturers living to their south.³⁹ Following their victory in the Mahican War of 1628, the Mohawks began extracting annual tribute from the defeated nations of the middle Connecticut Valley, a large portion of which had to be paid in wampum. Wampum was produced in largest quantities along the shores of Long Island Sound. During the 1620s, the Pequots began consolidating their control over these wampum-producing communities as a means of monopolizing trade with the Dutch. In the 1620s and the early 1630s, Iroquois tribute demands forced the middle and upper valley Indians to integrate themselves into the Dutch fur trade system by providing pelts to the Pequots in exchange for wampum. As a result, the tribes of the middle Connecticut Valley found themselves between the proverbial rock and a hard place; militarily and politically envassaled to the emerging hegemony of Iroquoia to the west and commercially beholden to growing Pequot power in the south. Consequently, the nations of the valley welcomed the appearance of the English in the east, first at Plymouth in 1620 and then along Massachusetts Bay in the 1630s, as an opportunity to free themselves from the control of their powerful neighbors.⁴⁰

As they settled the New England coast in the early seventeenth century, English adventurers began to view the fur trade of the Connecticut Valley as theirs for the taking. Edward Winslow, the governor of Plymouth, led a successful trading expedition up the Connecticut in 1633.⁴¹ A second group of Plymouth traders, seeking to follow their governor’s example, founded a trading house on the future site of Windsor in the same year. The Dutch responded to these English incursions by establishing the House of Good Hope, a trading fort built on Podunk lands but granted to the Dutch by the hegemonic Pequots.⁴² Many Bay Colony leaders and merchants also began to agitate for a trade route into New England’s interior and access to the fur wealth that could be found there.⁴³ A 1634 petition from a group of settlers eager to take up lands in what would become Hartford laid the matter bare: the Massachusetts Bay Colony needed to secure control of the Connecticut or risk losing out to either Dutch competitors or rival English colonists from Plymouth.⁴⁴

A breakdown in relations between the Dutch and their erstwhile trading partners, the Pequots, finally triggered a shift in Bay Colony policy. In early 1634, a band of Pequots, jealous of their nation’s commercial monopoly in the southern Connecticut Valley, attacked a group of Narragansett Indians traveling to trade with the Dutch at the House of Good Hope. Incensed at this interference with their trade, the Dutch retaliated by imposing an embargo on their former commercial partners. In all likelihood, the Dutch reasoned that weakening the Pequots would allow them to establish a more direct commerce with the other Indian peoples of the region. In fact, this attempt to shake up the distribution of power within the fur trade of New England merely drove the Pequots into the arms of the English, with whom they sought to negotiate a new treaty of friendship at the end of 1634. In exchange for this friendship, Governor Winthrop recorded, the Pequots offered “all their right at Connecticut.”⁴⁵

With the Pequots now in an uncertain position, the Massachusetts General Court moved to supplant Dutch influence in southern New England. In 1635, the court reversed its position and allowed the settlement of Newtown (later Hartford) on the north bank of the Little River (today’s Park River) at its junction with the Connecticut. This placed the Dutch House of Good Hope, located on the Little River’s southern bank, under the watchful eyes of English colonists. Also in 1635, the general court formally approved settlements at Windsor and Wethersfield (both of which had been founded without the Court’s sanction at the end of 1634). Adventurers backed by two wealthy Puritan lords founded Saybrook toward the end of 1635. Finally, wealthy merchant William Pynchon founded Springfield, the last of the original English Connecticut Valley towns, in 1636. Each of these towns owed its early settlement, at least in part, to English ambitions to dominate the beaver trade of the New England interior.

For the Pequots, the chance of a treaty with the English offered the hope of maintaining the status quo—trade with the English would replace trade with the Dutch and allow the Pequots to continue in their role as middlemen and regional hegemon. The English, however, viewed the treaty as an opportunity to bring the Pequots under their political heel. In exchange for peace and commerce, the Massachusetts Bay Colony required the Pequots to pay forty beaver skins, thirty otter skins, and four hundred fathoms of wampum. This small fortune would have given Massachusetts a strong advantage in competing for the trade of those more northerly Connecticut Valley nations who required wampum as tribute payments for the Mohawks. The Pequot delegates at Boston promised to bring the proposal to their sachems.⁴⁶

Such a demand represented a double insult to the Pequots. It would likely have beggared the nation to gather such a wealth of wampum, forcing the Pequots to lean heavily upon their tributary networks and likely stirring resentment. In Indian diplomacy such a one-sided payment of wampum held strong symbolic meaning, marking the paying nation as a political subordinate of the recipient. In effect, the Bay Colony’s leaders, through their demand, had declared the Pequots a dependent nation of the English. In the face of these insults, and despite the risk of being shut out of the fur trade, the Pequot council rejected the treaty’s terms.⁴⁷

Their commercial and political rivalry with the Pequots shaped how English colonial officials reacted to the deaths at Indian hands of two English traders, the first in 1633 and the second in 1636.⁴⁸ In late 1633, Captain John Stone of Virginia—a man who had formerly been banished from Boston for drunkenness and suspicion of piracy—kidnapped two Western Niantics, whom he forced to act as pilots for his pinnace while trading up the Connecticut River. The next night, while at anchor, a party of Niantics boarded Stone’s ship to rescue their captive comrades. Stone and the other Englishmen aboard were killed during the rescue, and the powder stores of the ship were accidentally set alight, causing it to explode. News of Stone’s death arrived in the Bay Colony in January of 1634. Many in Massachusetts and Plymouth took the view that Stone deserved his fate—one Massachusetts colonist even suggested that the Niantics had acted as God’s divine retribution against the sinful Captain Stone. Publicly, however, Massachusetts blamed the Pequots—to whom the Western Niantics were tributary—for Stone’s death and for sheltering his killers. The Pequots insisted that the Niantics were justified in their actions and, besides, had not known that Stone was English and instead thought they were killing Dutchmen. Within the context of the Anglo-Pequot trade negotiations taking place in 1634, English insistence on restitution for Stone’s murder provided the Pequots one more reason to reject the Bay Colony’s extortionary demands.⁴⁹

In July of 1636, another English trader, John Oldham, was discovered dead upon his pinnace, which had run aground on Block Island, off the Rhode Island coast. Oldham had been exiled from Plymouth Plantation in 1624 for conspiring against the colony’s government, but had subsequently settled in Massachusetts and prospered through trade with the Indians and other English colonies. Massachusetts officials strongly suspected that Oldham’s murder had been engineered by a group of Narragansett leaders angry that the Englishman had been trading with their Pequot rivals. However, Narragansett ambassadors insisted that these conspirators had fled Narragansett territory and been given sanctuary among the Pequots. English leaders proved surprisingly willing to accept this somewhat unlikely story, and the fallout from a Narragansett plot became the Pequots’ problem.⁵⁰

A force of 90–120 men from Massachusetts first launched a retaliatory raid against the Indians of Block Island, and then, after being joined by troops from Connecticut, continued on to a large Pequot village at the mouth of the Thames River. The English demanded that the Pequots surrender those responsible for Oldham’s murder. In the process they also renewed their demand that John Stone’s killers be turned over and further insisted that the Pequots accept the extortionary terms of the 1634 treaty of friendship. Unable to satisfy these demands (the Narragansett Indians guilty of Oldham’s death were beyond their reach, the Niantics who had led the assault against Stone’s ship had since all either died of smallpox or been killed by the Dutch, and the demands of the 1634 treaty remained infeasible), the Pequots prepared for war. Their demands unmet, the English attacked the Pequots at the mouth of the Thames only to find their village deserted.⁵¹

These hostilities came at an especially disastrous time for the Pequot nation. Their villages had been particularly hard hit by the smallpox epidemic of 1633–1634, in which three out of every four Pequots died. Then, in the summer of 1635, a hurricane made ground in southern New England, destroying crops as they stood in the fields. Hunger stalked New England from 1635 to 1636, striking European and Indian communities alike. Shortages in maize harvests may have placed further strain on subordinate villages who owed tribute to the Pequots, and the specter of famine likely contributed to the English rush to war. Raiding parties, especially those coming out of the hard-hit Connecticut Valley, made the seizure of Pequot corn supplies a wartime priority.⁵² Finally, the wealth and authority that came from the fur trade had not been evenly distributed among the villages and sachems of the Pequot nation. By the 1630s, a group of Pequot leaders who had been shut out of the inner circles of power, led by the sachem Uncas, had formed a splinter nation, the Mohegans, who sought their own commercial and military alliance with the English at the expense of the larger Pequot confederacy.⁵³ Reeling from natural disasters and beset by enemies both without and within, the Pequots had, by 1636, reached the nadir of their military and political power.

Despite now being outnumbered by the English, the Pequots retaliated in 1637, leading to a full-scale war for political control of southern New England. Rival nations (most notably the Narragansetts), eager to see the Pequots defeated and their hold over the regional fur trade destroyed, allied with the English. Meanwhile, many of the Indian communities whom the Pequots had reduced to political subordination, and upon whom the Pequots depended for military assistance, abandoned their erstwhile political masters. The Mohegans became key allies of the English, while many Connecticut Valley villages chose to remain neutral in the conflict. English colonists waged a campaign of fire and wanton slaughter against the hopelessly outnumbered Pequots. The majority who survived the war were either taken captive by their Indian opponents or enslaved by the English. Many of the latter were sold to the West Indies, joining other victims of the transatlantic slave trade to toil on tobacco and cotton plantations, and perhaps contribute their labor to the development of the still nascent sugar economy. Only a small fraction of the nation escaped to reconstitute a community on the Thames River. Having violently expelled the Pequots from their position in the New England fur trade, English traders eagerly began a direct commerce with the Indian nations of the lower and middle Connecticut Valley.

English entry into the valley fur trade quickly disrupted relationships between competing Native American nations in the region. Competition between European traders—both between individual English traders and between the English and the Dutch—led to a sharp uptick in the quantity of manufactured goods flowing into the hands of Indian traders. At the center of this new English fur trade in the valley sat the town of Springfield. William Pynchon and the other founders of Springfield located their town at the site where the Connecticut River was joined by the Westfield River; the latter’s basin being especially renowned among early traders for the density of its beaver populations.⁵⁴ The town’s location to the north of the other Connecticut Valley towns granted William Pynchon, and later his son John, an advantage in wooing Indian traders traveling down the Connecticut from the north. Since Springfield was located just above what became known as Enfield Falls, the Pynchons were well-situated to intercept Indian traders who otherwise would have needed to portage their canoes around the rapids. Writing in 1645, Edward Johnson, author of the first printed history of New England, declared that the fur trade at Springfield had already become “of little worth” through the practice of competing merchants “out-buying one another.”⁵⁵ In 1650, the Dutch director-general at New Amsterdam wrote to the commissioners of the United Colonies of New England to complain that English terms of trade were far too generous. As a result the Dutch found their trade “damnified and undervalued.”⁵⁶

Local Connecticut Valley Indian nations proved the winners—at least in the short run—in this competition between colonial European merchants. For English and Dutch merchants in New England, and the French farther north, their bidding war represented yet another front in the commercial contest being waged by their respective empires in the early seventeenth century. Indian nations in the northeast willingly and shrewdly exploited these interimperial tensions to their own gain. In doing so, they parleyed access to European goods—especially firearms and other metal weaponry—into military and diplomatic power within the shifting network of Indian alliances that defined political relationships in the region.

Local Indian leaders established new trading relationships with first William and, later, his son John Pynchon. The majority of the furs acquired by the Pynchons at Springfield came from hunters and traders operating out of the Pocumtuck villages of Pocumtuck, and Norwottuck, from the Agawam (today’s Westfield) River watershed, from the Sokoki town of Squakheag, and from hunters (other western Abenakis and likely Mahicans, as well) operating farther north in the Connecticut basin. The Indians of the valley also provided the Pynchons with maize, upon which the survival of Springfield and the other Connecticut towns depended in the early years of settlement.⁵⁷ Wampum obtained for furs and maize paid off the tribute demands of the Mohawks and could, potentially, buy the support of new Native allies. Meanwhile, direct access to English tools and weaponry increased the military power of those tribes who called the middle Connecticut home.

The fur trade of the Connecticut watershed, and of New England more generally, continued to revolve around the shifting military and diplomatic relationships between the Native nations of the region. The fur trade between the Pynchons of Springfield and the Indians of the Connecticut Valley reached its apex in the early 1650s, peaking in 1654 before declining precipitously. During these years, the Iroquois redirected their hunting and military efforts to the west and north, toward the lands of the Hurons, Petuns, and Neutrals. This realignment of Iroquois imperial interests freed Pocumtuck, Nipmuc, and Sokoki hunters from competition both in the northern Connecticut Valley and in the lands lying immediately westward. It also lessened the risk of renewed warfare with the Mohawks. The conclusion of hostilities following the Mahican War in 1628 had brought an uneasy peace. The Connecticut Valley nations resented Mohawk demands for tribute, and their acquiescence was ensured only by the threat of superior Iroquois military might. As long as Mohawk hunters ranged the same territories as hunters from the Connecticut Valley villages, the potential existed for misunderstanding and violence. This threat kept valley hunters close to home during the 1630s–1640s. But in the 1650s, with the Mohawks distracted farther west, valley hunters expanded their hunting efforts northward and westward along Connecticut tributaries and, consequently, increased their take of beaver and other furbearing species.⁵⁸

Although the volume of pelts traded to English merchants during the seventeenth century fluctuated with the political climate, the overall trend was clearly one of declining fur yields.⁵⁹ Conflict in any given year could divert hunters and trappers to more martial pursuits, or else make them fearful of venturing into hunting territories that lay too far from the relative safety of fortified villages. As a long-term process, however, the incessant warfare that surrounded competition over the fur wealth of New England, and of northeastern North American more generally, created conditions that encouraged the extirpation of beaver from the region. French agents operating to the northeast of the Connecticut Valley had noted as early as the 1630s the tendency of Indian fur traders to “kill all, great and small, male and female” when harvesting beaver from a colony.⁶⁰ A similar practice seems to have prevailed among nations operating in the Connecticut basin. Mohawk hunters ranging eastward threatened Mahican, Sokoki, and Pocumtuck hunting territories in the Connecticut Valley. Indeed, Iroquois pressure culminated in a series of raids in 1664 and 1665 that resulted in the destruction of Pocumtuck and Squakheag, the two most populous villages in the central valley.⁶¹ Under such conditions, not harvesting as many pelts as possible became tantamount to handing them over to the enemy; an enemy who would exchange their poached beaver for new weapons that might be turned against one’s own community. The logic of conservation broke down and incentives to exploit—or, one might say, overexploit—furbearing species prevailed.⁶²

Records from the earliest years of the trade are hard to come by. But the account books of John Pynchon show that in the five-year span from 1652 to 1657, this premier trader of the valley received the pelts of nearly 10,000 beaver. From 1658 to 1674, Pynchon shipped another 6,500 beaver skins from the valley.⁶³ To these sums should be added the unknown thousands of beaver pelts collected by merchants active in other parts of the valley. Each of the Connecticut colony towns, for example, granted a single merchant the monopoly on the beaver trade with Native Americans operating in its hinterland, and most of these merchants’ records have not weathered the ravages of time and chance as well as have Pynchon’s accounts.⁶⁴ Other English landowners in the valley may have been legislatively prohibited from trading with the Indians, but nothing prevented them from hunting and trapping themselves on a small scale—further increasing the number of beaver that were likely taken in the early decades of settlement. And, finally, the Mohawks funneled an unknown number of pelts into Dutch hands.

As a result of these commercial pressures, beaver populations in the Connecticut watershed collapsed. The beaver trade of the lower and middle valley had entered decline by the 1650s, as evidenced by John Pynchon’s account books. When Pynchon’s trade rebounded, slightly, in the late 1660s it was only because his Indian trading partners had taken advantage of Mohawk distractions farther west to push their hunting into the Hudson River watershed.⁶⁵ In his 1677 history of New England, the Reverend William Hubbard wrote that beaver, which once had inhabited the lands lying between Casco Bay and the Piscataqua River, had been “gleaned away” as a consequence of the French and English fur trades.⁶⁶ Although Hubbard concerned himself primarily with the coastal trade, trading ties between the Abenaki nations living here and those living along the Connecticut meant that the latter region had been heavily depleted as well. By the turn of the century, beaver had disappeared from southern New England and only vestige populations survived in the northern valley.⁶⁷

For the Pocumtucks, the legend of Ktsi Amiskw kept alive a folk memory of a time when their ancestors had waged war not just against their Mohawk rivals, but, in a sense, against the beaver of their valley as well. The ancient Pocumtucks had called upon Hobomok to destroy the Great Beaver. Their descendants, encouraged by European traders, dealt with Ktsi Amiskw’s lesser cousins themselves. Over time, beaver disappeared from the Connecticut basin, their dams fell, and their ponds drained. The mutually beneficial environment that the beaver and Native Americans of New England had maintained for thousands of years disappeared in a few short decades. In this sense, Ktsi Amiskw’s fate has offered Pocumtucks (and, for that matter, any Euro-American who should stop to reflect on this appropriated tale) living from the eighteenth century until the present day a parable on the wages of greed. The Great Beaver, in his gluttony, sought to claim the land and resources of the Connecticut Valley for himself. His heedless actions threw the natural environment out of balance. That natural balance was eventually restored, but only after Ktsi Amiskw was forced to pay for his environmental misdeeds.⁶⁸ The humans living in the valley would likewise have to endure the ecological consequences of their economic actions.

A Postdiluvian Landscape

Colonial New Englanders were ignorant of the ecological role played by beaver. Nor could they imagine the impact that removing beaver from an ecosystem might have upon the ecology and hydrology of an area. Hunters, likely in concert with farmers attempting to claim wetlands for agriculture, had driven the Eurasian beaver to extinction in Great Britain at least a century before the first English colonists settled in North America. Even before this, knowledge of the beaver was extremely limited among Britons. Illuminated English bestiaries from the thirteenth century—when a dwindling number of beaver colonies may have still persisted in the more remote streams of the kingdom—depicted beaver that more closely resembled dogs, foxes, or even horses than they did actual specimens of C. fiber.⁶⁹

Edward Topsell’s Historie of Four-Footed Beastes, published in 1607, offered the most complete description of beaver available to England’s earliest American colonists. The book’s woodcuts provided important corrections on details of beaver anatomy (Topsell’s beaver actually looked like beaver), but its text did little to explicate the beaver’s relationship with the environment. Topsell presented beaver as piscivores who, when fish became scarce in their ponds, would “leave the water and range up and downe the land, making an insatiable slaughter of young lambes untill … they have fed themselves full of flesh, then returne they to the water, from whence they came.” Topsell also repeated the medieval belief that when pursued by hunters for its scent glands (from which beaver produce castoreum, a highly prized component in medieval and early modern medicine) the beaver would chew off its own “stones” and throw them to its pursuers in exchange for its life. For Topsell, and for the medieval bestiaries that preceded his text, the veracity of these accounts of beaverly bargaining was less important than their allegorical value. By casting away its own glands, the beaver set an example for humans “to give our pursse to theeves, rather then our lives, and by our wealth to redeeme our danger.”⁷⁰

The seventeenth-century chroniclers of New England combined the colonial booster’s interest in furs as an exportable commodity with a new appreciation for the beaver’s engineering prowess, now on display to the English settlers beginning to push up the river valleys of North America.⁷¹ William Wood, writing in the 1630s, noted the value of beaver as a source of furs and castoreum while also marveling at the creatures’ teamwork. He judged their dams and lodges to merit “admiration from wise understanding men.”⁷² Such sentiments would eventually develop into a new allegorical role for the beaver. In the eighteenth century English artists and authors anthropomorphized the beaver as a paragon of industriousness, and held up their colonies as models of well-ordered efficiency. In a similar vein, French anti-Cartesians pointed to the beaver’s engineering genius as proof that animals could possess souls.⁷³ Unfortunately, such representations did little to advance knowledge of the beaver’s broader role in the landscape.⁷⁴ Even those colonial authors who eschewed discussing the moral dimensions of beaver behavior focused instead on describing how best to hunt the creatures while showing little interest in the environmental impact of fur harvesting.⁷⁵

Knowledge of the important role that beaver played in creating and maintaining land- and waterscapes was slow to develop. For the English, the fact that most beaver hunting and trapping was done by their Native American trading partners in areas far removed from colonial settlements meant that it was hard to draw a direct link between the removal of beaver from a stretch of stream and the myriad environmental changes that followed. As late as the 1790s, Harvard-educated minister Jeremy Belknap was able to remark in his History of New Hampshire that the beaver’s capacity for constructing its own environment was “not mentioned by any of the writers of natural history which I have had the opportunity to consult.”⁷⁶

It was one of Belknap’s correspondents, New Hampshire Congressman Joseph Peirce, who helped make up this scientific shortfall. In a short essay on natural history, Peirce praised the benevolence of “that Being by whom the universe is so wisely governed” whose “design in this little animal [the beaver]” had in the two previous centuries created a landscape providentially suited to the pioneering efforts of English colonists. Precolonial beaver had, by Peirce’s account, transformed great stretches of swamps and marshes—the “worst of lands”—into verdant meadows. By creating ponds, beaver had drowned off trees and brush. At the same time “the leaves, bark, rotten wood and other manure, which is washed down by the rains, from the adjacent high lands … spread over this pond … making it smooth and level.” Then Indian hunters, “subservient to the great design of Providence,” destroyed the beaver and its dam so that “the whole tract, which before was the bottom of a pond, is covered with wild grass, which grows as high as a man’s shoulders, and very thick.” These newly formed, lush meadows attracted game animals like deer and moose for Native hunters. They were “of still greater use to new [English] settlers” who found “a mowing field already cleared to their hands … and without these natural meadows many settlements could not possibly have been made.” Beaver meadows provided early English settlers in New Hampshire and elsewhere in New England sufficient grass for their cattle until they had “cleared ground enough to raise English hay.” For Peirce, then, it was the hand of Providence—acting through the teeth of the beaver and the industry of Indian hunters—that had made successful English colonization possible.⁷⁷

Setting aside the role of “Providence,” Peirce presented an astute early understanding of the importance of beaver to colonial landscapes. Beaver had historically played an important role in converting woodlands bordering streams into first ponds and wetlands, and then broad, verdant meadows.⁷⁸ These meadows provided Native American hunters with game and, later, fed the cattle of the English settlers who appropriated their lands. But while astute, Peirce’s late eighteenth-century tribute to the utility of the beaver fell far short of accounting for all of the creature’s myriad impacts upon New England’s land- and waterscapes.

As beaver ponds disappeared from the landscape in the wake of the fur trade, species diversity declined apace. Bird species that nested in waterlogged trees—the blue heron, osprey, woodcocks, and various types of eagle—disappeared or saw their regional populations decline precipitously. Species of woodpecker that fed upon the insects living in these decaying trees also would have declined in number and, as a consequence, birds like black-capped chickadees, nuthatches, tree swallows, and screech owls that live in the holes excavated by woodpeckers would have become scarcer. As the populations of insects associated with ponds and wetlands—like dragonand damselflies—declined, so too did the populations of birds like the tree swallow and kingbird, which fed upon them. While the declining numbers of many of these bird species would likely not have dismayed early English settlers, or even their Native American neighbors, they may have felt differently about the loss of waterfowl habitat within the Connecticut basin. Duck species—like the wood duck and hooded merganser—lost many of their summer feeding and nesting sites in the region, reducing their numbers and forcing them to concentrate in the watershed’s lakes and remaining ponds.⁷⁹

Other pond species also suffered. Frogs, toads, tortoises—all of which local Native American communities relied upon seasonally to supplement their diets—and other species of amphibians and reptiles lost a large percentage of their breeding habitat. Freshwater crayfish continued to thrive in lakes and free-flowing rivers, but their numbers likely declined as the overall amount of freshwater habitat fell. Most obviously, fish populations faced declining habitat as a result of disappearing beaver ponds. Some species suffered more than others. Since beaver ponds are dynamic ecosystems, gradually transitioning from free-flowing stream to pond and back again, different fish species benefit from different stages in the pond lifecycle. Brook trout flourished in the still, well-shaded waters of new beaver ponds. As rising water tables and tree harvesting by beaver opened up the woodland canopies bordering ponds and waterways, yellow perch and sunfish flourished in the warmer, sunbathed waters and fed on the proliferating species of aquatic plants. With the disappearance of beaver dams and the ecological dynamism they fostered, fish of all species became less abundant, and local Native American and Euro-American communities faced declining opportunities for including fresh fish in their regular diet.⁸⁰

This decline in the availability of freshwater fish may in part explain English colonists’ later focus on the springtime runs of anadromous fish (those species that live and feed in the ocean but spawn in freshwater streams) like salmon, shad, and alewives. The relationship between beaver and salmon, especially, is an ambiguous one. While young anadromous fish can often pass downstream through the loose weave of limbs that forms a beaver dam, these same dams can pose an obstacle for adult fish attempting to ascend a river to breed. With each subsequent beaver dam on a stream, fewer spawners would have been able to pass. However, placing such geographic limits on anadromous fish actually protected the biodiversity of the river system. Shad and alewives head out to sea within a few months of hatching, but juvenile salmon can linger to feed in their native streams for up to five years, significantly decreasing the population of freshwater fish with whom they compete for food and space.

If beaver dams limited the geographic distribution of anadromous fish, beaver ponds provided important spawning habitat and more abundant food sources to help ensure the survival of the newly hatched fry. As beaver dams disappeared, anadromous fish would likely have expanded their range upstream in each of the Connecticut’s tributaries, but their overall numbers may have suffered, just as this new source of competition would have increased the pressure on freshwater fish populations already undergoing habitat loss.⁸¹ Still, the salmon, shad, and alewives would have retained one key advantage. Once their young had passed downstream and made it out into the ocean, the diets of these far-traveling fish no longer relied on the declining resources of the inland river environment. They could feed on the ocean’s bounty before returning to their native waterways to spawn, offering a bonanza to the humans who anxiously awaited their annual runs.

A broader phenomenon of nutrient loss within the river system as a whole meant that filter-feeding freshwater mussels also declined, further impoverishing the foraging options available to local Indian communities. Prior to their destruction, beaver ponds had functioned to conserve nutrients within the waters of the Connecticut basin by acting as nutrient sinks. Filter-feeding mussels and aquatic plants benefitted most directly from these impounded nutrients, but their good fortune reverberated throughout the food chain. Undammed stretches of waterways also felt the impact of beaver ponds. By slowing the overall pace of waterways beaver ponds significantly increased the likelihood that nutrients carried by streams and rivers would be utilized within the drainage basin, rather than being carried out to sea. Detritus in slow moving water was more likely to fall out of the current, to be decomposed and returned to the soil. In this way, beaver ponds not only increased the extent of aquatic habitat in a watershed but also increased the biomass that it was able to support. Without beaver dams holding back these ponds, the overall ability of the watershed to support life declined.⁸²

Concurrent species loss meant that the extermination of beaver from New England was a double catastrophe for Indian communities. Beaver provided the most lucrative pelts, but were far from the only furbearers harvested. Minks, river otters, and muskrats contributed a considerable amount to the profits earned by merchants like John Pynchon. As beaver numbers declined, these other species took on new importance for Native hunters. Unfortunately, the population levels of mink, muskrat, and otter were directly linked to the presence of beaver in the landscape. Both minks and otters fed on the fish, amphibians, and invertebrates that thrived in beaver ponds. Muskrats exploited beaver ponds to build their own aquatically protected limb-and-mud lodges. Each of these species suffered an extensive loss of habitat as beaver ponds gave way to meadows. Reduced numbers of these species, added to the loss of the beaver, exacerbated the economic distress faced by Native communities that, by the second half of the seventeenth century, had become increasingly dependent upon the fur trade.⁸³

If, from the 1630s to the 1650s, the terms of the fur trade favored Native American hunters, by the 1660s onward, the long-term consequences of the trade had begun to severely undermine Native American claims to the lands of the Connecticut Valley. The Indian nations of the valley continuously reduced the quantity of cropland they cultivated over the course of the seventeenth century. In part, this represented a decline in population occasioned by outbreaks of European diseases, many introduced through contacts in the fur trade. A decline in land under cultivation may also have occurred as a direct result of the fur trade. As Indian men harvested more beaver, women needed to exert more labor cleaning and processing beaver skins into marketable pelts. Since women provided the agricultural labor in Connecticut Valley Indian communities, this new demand may have cut into efforts to plant and maintain crops. With less land under cultivation, and facing declining fur yields, many Connecticut Valley communities chose to sell off territory in order to maintain access to European commodities.⁸⁴

From the mid-1650s forward, the Pocumtucks, and neighboring communities, sold off great chunks of territory, a practice encouraged by English merchants who willingly advanced goods to Indian leaders on credit and then encouraged land cessions to clear these debts. Many of the deeds transferring these lands into English hands contained clauses in which the former Indian owners retained the right to hunt in the ceded lands—often explicitly mentioning beaver among the list of prey that Indian hunters should be allowed to pursue. Still, these land deals likely followed the extirpation of beaver from a given territory, the retained hunting rights representing a claim on any new beaver colonies that might someday return to local waterways. As such, the land cessions that spread through the Connecticut Valley in the 1660s–1680s represent Indian leaders’ efforts to market the only merchantable commodity left to them—their land.⁸⁵ By the late seventeenth century, the Indian communities of the Connecticut Valley faced the end of the fur trade at the same time that they faced a decline in food security due to declining populations of numerous species of edible plants and animals as an ecological consequence of this trade.

Little wonder that most of the Connecticut Valley Indian nations—including the Mahicans, Pocumtucks, Podunks, and Pennacooks—chose to side with Metacomet during King Philip’s War in 1675. The English victory a year later forever broke Native American power in southern and central New England, ensuring English political hegemony in the region. In the decades following this military defeat many Mahicans, Pocumtucks, Podunks, and Pennacooks chose to abandon their Connecticut basin homes to join either the Wabanaki nations to the north or the new Schaghticoke nation along the Connecticut/Massachusetts/New York border. Other members of these nations integrated themselves within New England’s increasingly English-dominated economy as crafts artisans, wage laborers, or European-style farmers.⁸⁶

While the tragic economic and ecological consequences of the fur trade fell disproportionately upon the Native communities of the Connecticut Valley, the region’s new Euro-American inhabitants also suffered from the beaver’s disappearance. The dynamic life cycle of beaver impoundments—from free-flowing stream, to pond, meadowland, and, after the erosion of streambeds, often back again—provided for the long-term, perpetual rejuvenation of large swaths of fertile meadow and woodlands.⁸⁷ The fur trade brought this process to a halt. The overall fertility of soils along waterways would have slowly declined as the cycle of rejuvenation achieved through ponding was brought to an end. The spring freshets continued to annually overspread their floodplains, depositing silt and refreshing the fertility of the broad bottomlands bordering the Connecticut River and its larger tributaries. But lands along lesser streams would have slowly deteriorated. Even the intervales of the Connecticut River itself received less regenerative organic matter than in previous centuries due both to the more rapid flow and the general decline in the nutrient load of the river system as a whole. In the centuries that followed the fur trade, Euro-American farmers had to rely on manuring to rejuvenate soils.⁸⁸

The drainage of beaver ponds by the thousands in the decades of the seventeenth century also had impacts beyond the biology of the Connecticut Valley. The very hydrology of the watershed was transformed. Vast stretches of ponded water and wetlands—perhaps as much as nine hundred thousand acres—would have disappeared from the Connecticut watershed along with the beaver.⁸⁹ In many cases, this transformation to dry land brought negative environmental impacts that would plague the new English settlers of the region.

The increased amount of sediment borne all the way downriver to Long Island Sound directly threatened the commerce of the valley.⁹⁰ The Connecticut, at its mouth, had never been deep. The first European explorer to visit the river, the Dutch explorer Adriaen Block, declared the river’s mouth to be “very shallow” as he sailed upstream. The disappearance of beaver ponds and the loss of wetlands upriver would have only made this problem worse. In the river’s tidal zone, waters rushing downstream collide with the incoming tide, slowing, swirling, and dropping their load of soil and silt. Such encounters are most dramatic just south of Hartford, at the far upper reaches of the river’s tidal flows. Here the increased sediment load of the Connecticut formed a series of shifting shoals and sandbars that came to plague the maritime trade of what had in its earliest years been a promising port with easy access for small oceangoing vessels. By the late eighteenth century, a traveler on business in Hartford complained that thanks to “these inconveniences the inhabitants are not only compelled to make use of smaller vessels than they could wish, but are also obliged to send them out partially loaded, and to complete their lading at New-London.”⁹¹

Falling local water tables would have followed the collapse of a beaver dam, resulting in a decline in local biodiversity among tree species.⁹² Still, it would have taken several decades of forest succession for pines and other wetlands-intolerant species of trees to begin making up the ground lost to beaver dam impoundment. This means that when colonial lumbermen went north in the eighteenth century in search of pine for regional and Atlantic markets, they would have encountered a scarcer supply than if beaver had never inhabited New England. It also means that many second-growth pine forests in those regions may be the result not just of colonial-era lumbering, but also of declining water tables in the wake of collapsing beaver populations.

English settlers were also denied the long-term flood control benefits that beaver dams convey. During heavy rains, ponds acted as a catchment for flood waters. Beaver dams (which one noted environmental historian has eloquently compared to “leaky sieves”) then released the waters at a near steady rate. The large-scale transition from ponds and wetlands to dry land that prevailed in the seventeenth-century Connecticut Valley decreased the watershed’s ability to deal with flood waters. Where once beaver ponds had helped to sequester rising waters and beaver dams impeded rushing torrents, flood waters now ran freely. In the absence of such wetlands and forest cover, streams and brooks ran swifter and their height fluctuated more dramatically over the course of the year. When the weather was dry, these waterways ran lower and the colonial-era grist and sawmills they powered ceased to run. When seasonal rains came or when an unexpected downpour struck, the streams overran their banks and spread across areas where their new English inhabitants would have preferred they not go.⁹³

Writing from the perspective of the late eighteenth century, Jeremy Belknap declared that the beaver “is now become scarce in New Hampshire,” but noted that that “the vestiges of its labours are very numerous.” Although scarce, Belknap makes clear that New Hampshire did host a beaver population in the 1790s. In the volume of his History of New Hampshire devoted to natural history, Belknap recorded his observations on the life and industry of the beaver he encountered along the banks of New Hampshire’s streams and ponds. Belknap even recorded the “frequent” practice of laying out new roads in the more rural parts of the state so that they might incorporate beaver dams as crossing points for streams and brooks, thus allowing localities to forego the labor and expense of building a bridge or causeway.⁹⁴

Belknap’s observations suggest that at least relict populations of beaver in the Connecticut watershed had survived the commercial onslaught of the seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century fur trade. Perhaps along the secluded small streams of the White and Green Mountains in the north, or the Berkshires in the west, individual colonies had survived unnoticed by hunters. In the absence of countervailing forces within the ecosystem, surviving lodges in the far north or west of the watershed could have recolonized the entire Connecticut Valley in just four decades.⁹⁵ Of course, countervailing forces did exist (and were multiplying) throughout the Connecticut watershed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

For example, in Hampshire County, Massachusetts, in the eighteenth century, three successive generations of artisans and their apprentices combined the trades of furrier and hatter and sold their wares to their neighbors in the valley. They purchased most of the furs for their work from the markets in Albany and Boston. A small part of their supply, however, came from local farmers and hunters. Throughout the eighteenth century, this included a small number of beaver, trapped either in Hampshire County or in the territories lying farther to the north in New Hampshire and what would become Vermont.⁹⁶ Although the sale of locally trapped beaver was rare in this period, their occasional mention suggests that relict beaver populations from the far north of the Connecticut Valley, or perhaps the sparsely settled Berkshire Mountains, were attempting to recolonize the middle valley. Only continued pressures from hunting, likely supplemented by farmers’ efforts to prevent flooding on valuable grazing and croplands, prevented beaver from recolonizing the whole of their former territory in the Connecticut basin.

The Benefits of Extermination

For the English settlers who dispossessed the Native peoples of the Connecticut Valley in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the disappearance of beaver, with their dams and ponds, from the landscape did bring certain benefits. To a degree, the successful establishment of English agriculture in New England depended upon the prior removal of the beaver, a fact that Joseph Peirce first grasped in the 1790s. Had Indian hunters not removed beaver through the fur trade, the English farmers who settled the seventeenth-century valley would have had to exterminate them. This would have only added to the time and effort that colonists were already expending to drain and improve the marshes and swamps of the region, a task that environmental historian Brian Donahue has likened to “the labors of Hercules.”⁹⁷

Throughout the seventeenth century, English efforts to “improve” lands by draining them reinforced the general drying out of wetlands due to the annihilation of the beaver. As the waters impounded behind beaver dams drained, the formerly high groundwater tables that they had helped to maintain began to gradually fall. As the water table fell, wetlands dried out and many small streams disappeared. English settlers, meanwhile, worked hard throughout the seventeenth century, and later the eighteenth century, to drain what swamps and marshes remained. In the process, they destroyed the few refuges left to wetland dwelling wildlife, including the beaver.

Some of the earliest town regulations in the Connecticut Valley centered on ditching and draining the commons. Springfield boasts the earliest extant record of town-mandated efforts at swamp draining. In 1639 the town passed a law requiring all landholders to dig a ditch along the side of the highway as it passed through their lands, each inhabitant linking his ditch to his neighbor’s. Landowners were enjoined to keep this ditch clear to help ensure “the ready passadge of ye water yt it may not be pent up to flowe the meddowe.”⁹⁸ A year later, Hartford ordered landholders in its Little Meadow to dig a three-foot wide “dreyne” along the border of their lands to facilitate the draining off of seasonal standing waters into the nearby Little River.⁹⁹ The town records of Wethersfield for 1640 mention the arms of a “three-way lete” converging in that town’s centrally located common meadow. (The early modern English word “leat” refers to an open drainage ditch.) Such efforts continued for decades. In 1667, Springfield parceled out extensive new tracts of “swampy meadow” from its commons on the condition that the new owners would “improve” (presumably meaning drain) the land.¹⁰⁰ Numerous other drainage efforts, especially those undertaken on private lands, went unrecorded.

Changing nomenclature can help illustrate the combined impact of the mutually reinforcing processes of agricultural improvement and declining water tables. In Hartford, for example, much of the vast swamps recorded in the earliest land divisions had transformed into dry land within just a few short decades. The large parcels of swampland originally granted to town founders Nathaniel Ward and John Haynes, and referred to locally as Ward’s Swamp and Haynes’ Swamp, came over the seventeenth century to be known as Ward’s Meadow and Haynes’ Meadow, respectively. Hayne’s Swamp may have begun the process of drying out in the 1640s when Haynes sold five and a half acres described in the records as “sometime swamp, now mowing land.” The drying out of swamps occurred elsewhere as well. One two-and-a-quarter-acre parcel recorded simply as “swamp” by George Wyllys in 1639 had become “dry swamp” by the time it was resold to James Ensign later in the 1640s. A parcel of land registered as “meadow & swamp” by William Parker in 1639 became merely “meadow” by the time it was sold to Edward Stebbing in the 1660s.¹⁰¹ All of this points to the gradual draining and drying out of the former wetlands that had bordered the Connecticut River and its tributaries.

While the expansion of arable land, pastures and meadow benefitted the English husbandmen of the watershed, the disappearance of wetlands was not without its economic downside. The increased propensity to flooding that accompanied the large-scale loss of beaver ponds in the landscape would have only been exacerbated by the efforts of husbandmen to drain the other wetlands of the valley. Without these wetlands to act as a catchment for seasonal and other unexpected storms, colonial streams and rivers often overflowed their normal banks. The disastrous flooding that the lower Connecticut Valley endured in the early 1680s was likely an early portend of inundations that in later decades would come to be taken as unavoidable acts of nature.¹⁰² Usually this meant floodwaters overflowing the same lands that had formerly been swamp, marsh, or pond. The eighteenth-century residents of Hartford accepted with resignation that the northern half of Main Street, built along the course of a swampy stream that was redirected in the seventeenth century, would turn to a mass of mud and standing water following any heavy rain.¹⁰³ The Great Meadow in Springfield continually reverted to its former marshy state, drawing repeated calls from the town assembly for landowners to keep their ditches “well scowred.”¹⁰⁴ English landowners in the valley learned time and again that water had to go somewhere, and, especially during the spring freshets, it could not always be contained. The persistence of waters to find their own way to the waiting banks of the Connecticut and its tributaries, and then downriver to Long Island Sound, would continue to frustrate its human inhabitants throughout the colonial period and, indeed, can still cause problems today.

Even as the valley’s eighteenth-century inhabitants continued to wrestle with the increased hazards of periodic flooding, they benefitted from the absence of an even greater scourge to their health and well-being. The disappearance of large areas of standing water reduced the breeding habitat for, and thus the numbers of, mosquitoes in the region.¹⁰⁵ This in turn spared the valley’s human residents both the annoyance of being bitten and the very real dangers associated with mosquito-borne illnesses. Malaria, for example, was a common affliction throughout the early modern Atlantic World. The disease’s near-complete absence in the eighteenth-century valley suggests the wide-ranging ecological impacts of beaver extermination in the Connecticut Valley, and New England more generally.

Plasmodium vivax, the species of malarial microbe that made up the vast majority of cases in New England, seldom proved fatal in itself. This species is less deadly than Plasmodium falciparum, which can lead to organ failure and which came to predominate in the American south. But the symptoms of P. vivax could still be quite debilitating for sufferers, and could expose their hard-pressed immune systems to other diseases that might result in death. Malaria afflicts sufferers with recurring fevers interspersed with severe cases of the chills. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers commonly referred to malaria as the “ague” (a general term for fevers, although it was especially associated with malarial symptoms), “remittent” or “intermittent fever” (a reference to the chills that interspersed spiking malarial fevers), or as “tertian” or “quatrain fever” (depending on whether the periods between fevers averaged three or four days). Although early modern theorists commonly blamed malarial outbreaks on the presence of “miasmas” (“bad airs” usually associated with marshes and other areas of stagnant water) the exact nature of the disease and its transmission remained a mystery. This was at least partially because malaria is a recrudescent disease—one in which the invading microbes can lay dormant for a period of years between the outbreak of symptoms. Malaria sufferers who seemed to have been cured of their fevers could quite suddenly fall ill again many miles, or even an entire ocean, away from the areas of “bad air” where they first contracted the disease.¹⁰⁶

Three factors are required for malaria to persist as an endemic disease within a region: the presence of the protozoa which causes the disease, a sufficiently large human host population to maintain the microbe and allow it to multiply, and a sufficiently large Anopheles mosquito population to transmit the microbes to new hosts. Prior to 1600, the lands that would become New England housed a large number of populous human communities as well as a substantial Anopheles mosquito population—the latter a source of considerable complaint for early European explorers in the region. However, like so many of the deadliest and most debilitating diseases to afflict humanity, malaria had evolved in the eastern hemisphere. To gain a foothold in New England, malaria plasmodium first needed to hitch a ride across the Atlantic. Beginning in the 1620s, thousands of English emigrants unwittingly volunteered as carriers.

Malaria was endemic to many areas of southeastern England in the seventeenth century. The very counties which contributed the majority of emigrants to the first wave of Puritan settlement in New England also experienced some of the highest rates of malarial fever.¹⁰⁷ Malaria was also widespread in the Netherlands, where many leaders of the Pilgrim and Puritan migrations lived in exile prior to their departure for America. For example, Thomas Hooker, Hartford’s first minister, contracted the “ague” in 1633 (or earlier) while living in Rotterdam.¹⁰⁸ After recovering from his initial illness, Hooker, along with many of his coreligionists, carried dormant Plasmodium protozoa in their bloodstreams when they crossed the Atlantic. Any recurrence of symptoms turned infected migrants into transmitters of the disease, as native mosquitoes spread malaria from the initial host to his or her neighbors.

Malarial fevers plagued New Englanders from at least the 1640s forward, and recurred region-wide throughout the remaining decades of the seventeenth century.¹⁰⁹ One scholar has suggested that an outbreak of malaria helps explain symptoms ascribed to some of the supposed victims of the Connecticut witchcraft craze of 1647–1653.¹¹⁰ John Winthrop Jr., Royal Society member and governor of Connecticut, recorded numerous new cases in the colony from 1657 forward—including one especially virulent outbreak he witnessed firsthand during a visit to Hartford in the summer of 1672.¹¹¹ Indeed, in the 1680s and early 1690s, the towns of the Connecticut Valley gained a reputation as particularly bedeviled by the scourge of malaria.¹¹²

Then, after approximately 1700, malaria almost completely disappeared from both the Connecticut Valley and New England more generally.¹¹³ New England’s climate is usually credited for malaria’s eighteenth-century disappearance.¹¹⁴ Unlike the warmer southern colonies, the greater length of northern winters limited the annual number of days during which mosquitoes were active at the same time that greater severity of cold reduced the survival rate of adults and larvae. However, a climactic explanation fails to account for malaria’s persistence in the first decades after English settlement or for the disease’s decline just as average temperatures began to rise from the seventeenth-century low point reached during the depths of the Little Ice Age. Nor can it explain the persistence of malaria in areas like New York City, which shares, roughly, the wintery conditions of southern New England. Even more puzzling is the case of Deerfield, the one exception to the general disappearance of malaria from the eighteenth-century Connecticut Valley. In the neighborhood immediately around Deerfield, new cases of malaria continued to appear throughout the 1700s. Locals blamed these persistent outbreaks, so exceptional in New England as a whole, on a group of undrained marshes and stagnant pools that persisted on the unimproved lands east of Deerfield, on the far side of the Connecticut River.¹¹⁵

In this, the inhabitants of Deerfield offer a clue both to the persistence of malaria as a health concern in their own locality and the disease’s disappearance from the larger region after 1700. Since the pool of human hosts continued to increase as the population of the valley grew during the eighteenth century, and the Plasmodium microbe remained in the region, at least, in Deerfield, then a decline in the number of available disease vectors, of Anopheles mosquitoes, must explain malaria’s disappearance. As water tables throughout the valley slowly fell, no longer maintained by the presence of beaver dams, related ponds and wetlands dried up and mosquito-breeding habitat disappeared. Euro-American settlers, intent on draining lands and improving them for agriculture, contributed to the process. Only in the lands east of Deerfield—in an area that had, at the time of first settlement, been a lake bed—did sufficient standing waters persist to provide adequate breeding grounds for a mosquito population capable of maintaining malaria as a local health threat. Deerfield’s own population, likely supplemented by migrants passing through town, some of whom likely had experience in the West Indies trade, provided a reservoir from which the Plasmodium could spread, via mosquito intermediaries, to new hosts.

That the drainage of lands following the decimation of beaver ponds lay behind malaria’s post-1700 retreat from New England is further evidenced by the conditions that eventuated the disease’s return at the end of the eighteenth century. The millponds associated with the saw- and gristmills of the colonial era provided insufficient breeding habitat to reestablish mosquito populations capable of maintaining malaria outbreaks. The much grander engineering projects of the last decade of the eighteenth century, and of the nineteenth century, were another matter. Malaria returned to the valley (outside of Deerfield) in 1792, striking at the towns of Northampton and nearby Hadley. Local residents had little doubt as to the cause of the new outbreak. They pointed to the waters backed up behind a recently constructed dam—a part of the lock system for the new South Hadley Canal then being erected by a construction crew of migrant laborers, “the most of them Hollanders.”¹¹⁶

Contemporaries blamed the miasmas produced by these new standing waters as the source of their illness. Interpreting the outbreak from the perspective of twenty-first-century epidemiology, it seems that these new waters provided new breeding habitat for mosquitoes at the same time that the presence of Dutch skilled laborers offered a new reservoir of Plasmodium microbes. Malaria’s prevalence in the valley only increased over the following decades as new engineering projects sequestered waters for lock operation, to power industrial water mills, and to provide urban drinking water. As malaria outbreaks proliferated, contemporaries continued to identify new construction projects, and the miasmic waters they produced, as the source of their malarial woes.¹¹⁷ By the end of the nineteenth century, the towns lying on either side of the Connecticut Valley had once again gained a notorious reputation as regional hotspots for malarial infection within New England.¹¹⁸ If the postdiluvian landscape yielded by the fur trade spared eighteenth-century valley residents from the scourge of malaria, the reflooding of the watershed’s nineteenth-century industrial landscape placed their descendants once more at risk.

New Markets, New Landscape

Native Americans did not merely act within European commercial networks, they engaged with Europeans to actively construct the commercial networks and economic system that dominated and defined the seventeenth-century New England landscape. The economy that defined New England’s ecology up through the late seventeenth century was neither European nor Native American, but a hybrid system coconstructed by cultures with roots on both sides of the Atlantic. In many ways, and for most of the century, this economy was more Indian than European. The most significant changes to the Connecticut Valley land- and waterscape between 1600 and 1700 were the result of a Native American market revolution and the political and diplomatic transformations that accompanied it.

When Wahginnacut first urged the English to settle in the Connecticut Valley in 1631, he was inviting them to build their homes amid a landscape experiencing substantial ecological and hydrological changes. As English settlers pushed up the Connecticut Valley in the seventeenth century, they continually encountered lands that Indian communities had depleted of beaver and then traded away for as great a profit as possible. The ecosystems that greeted these new homesteaders were, in terms of biodiversity, far simpler than they had been mere decades before. And they were still in the process of becoming simpler yet. In many ways the “natural” environment that English settlers found in the Connecticut Valley in the mid- and late seventeenth century was actually a recent invention. Human actors, driven by the incentives of the fur trade, had destroyed the former ecological and hydrological systems that beaver had engineered over the course of millennia. By the end of the seventeenth century, the Connecticut Valley was a postdiluvian landscape diminished in its biodiversity, but “providentially” well-suited to the demands of English agriculture.