Colonial Ecology, Atlantic Economy. Strother E. Roberts
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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