Conflict, Choices, and Change

      Metaphorically speaking, no ecosystem is an island, complete unto itself. Nature is no more fixed in character and features than are the human beings who inhabit it. And, like human beings, individual ecosystems are defined by their relationships. These relationships include the dense networks of natural processes that tie regions together—the exchange of soil and seeds upon wind and waves, the migration of animal life on flippers, feet, and wings. Just as important are the links that humanity has created between far-flung ecosystems. Ever since the earth’s Eastern and Western Hemispheres rediscovered each other in 1492, human networks of commerce and migration have been tying the ecosystems of the world ever closer together. This book is an exploration of how the early modern revolution in world commerce transformed human and ecological relations in the lands touched by European colonialism. At its heart lies the question of how and why, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the opportunities offered by transatlantic commerce led ordinary men and women—both settlers and Native peoples—to radically transform the ecology of one corner of their rapidly globalizing world.

       Origins

      The Connecticut Valley, like all landscapes, has not always been as it is now. A tradition kept alive by the Pocumtuck Nation recalls a time when the Kwanitekw, the “Long River,” was not a river at all, but a great pond spreading out over the land. Far to the south Ktsi Amiskw, the Great Beaver, had erected a giant dam that held back the waters of the river. The lands to the south of the dam suffered from drought, while those to the north lay drowned. Ktsi Amiskw reveled in his giant beaver pond, devouring its fish and, when these became scarce, coming ashore to prey on the humans who inhabited its shores.

      In time, Hobomok, a trickster figure and cultural hero of the Pocumtucks, grew annoyed with the evils committed against the land by Ktsi Amiskw and called on the Great Beaver to take down his dam. When Ktsi Amiskw refused, Hobomok took up a massive tree trunk and waded into the pond. With this mighty cudgel Hobomok slew Ktsi Amiskw and demolished the Great Beaver Dam, setting loose the waters of the Kwanitekw to run freely to the sea. The Great Beaver Pond subsided to form a bounteous valley and the ancestors of the Pocumtucks moved their homes amid the fertile meadows and game-filled woodlands that now bordered the banks of the newborn river.¹

      In this telling the landscape of the modern valley was created through an act of destruction. Hobomok’s violence offers a reminder that nature exists as a site of conflict and that every landscape holds multiple possibilities. The valley could not support both Ktsi Amiskw’s beaver pond and the woodlands and meadows upon which the ancestors of the Pocumtucks depended for subsistence. In this story, human beings exist within nature and are at the mercy of its often brutal forces. But human beings are also shapers of nature. Like Hobomok, the historical Pocumtucks and their ancestors also destroyed beaver dams to transform the ponds behind them into verdant meadows.² The myth of Ktsi Amiskw reminds us that humans are not alone in their ability to reshape the natural landscape. The Great Beaver held the power to reshape the valley to his liking, as did his more diminutive beaver cousins who historically inhabited much of New England. But in the end it was Hobomok, as a stand-in for the mortal humans with whom he dwelled, who triumphed in imposing his