Colonial Ecology, Atlantic Economy. Strother E. Roberts
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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