Colonial Ecology, Atlantic Economy. Strother E. Roberts
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however, the bargaining power of Indian villages in the valley began to decline. Indian traders found they could no longer rely on what had historically been their most important exports to the English towns—food and furs. After peaking in the early 1650s, fur yields in the valley began a precipitous decline until the 1670s when the regional trade effectively came to an end.19 At the same time, the early English towns of the valley, after twenty years of building and plowing, finally achieved self-sufficiency in feeding themselves. After forty years of trading with Europeans, valley Indians had to find a new commodity to offer if they were to maintain access to the European goods to which they had become accustomed (kettles, blankets, coats, knives, hatchets, guns, etc.) and thereby maintain their economies, fulfill their diplomatic obligations to powerful neighbors like the Mohawks, and maintain good relations with the English by honoring the debts that many Indian traders had run up by trading on credit. Increasingly, European merchants demanded land—rather than the resources that Native peoples harvested from it—in exchange for their goods.
After the mid-1650s, networks of English merchant credit and declining beaver yields paved the way for divorcing valley Indians from their ancestral territories. Transfers of land had long been tied up with the fortunes of the fur trade. When Wahginnacut, the Podunk sachem, approached the English in 1631 he offered the land for a new English settlement (which would eventually become Hartford) as part of the entry price he was willing to pay to break into the fur trade. Similar transfers, and numerous smaller sales, provided for the founding of the other Connecticut River towns. After midcentury, however, land went from a relatively minor, supplemental commodity in the larger fur trade to the central focus of Anglo-Indian trade and credit relationships.20
A number of considerations made land sales an attractive choice for the Indians of the valley. Decades of epidemic diseases and warfare encouraged by the fur trade had led to depopulation and the abandonment of small scattered farming communities in favor of larger, centralized village sites. Land that had fallen out of cultivation and that lay far from the village center was of little immediate use to these smaller, consolidated communities. Hunting lands, too, declined in value as there were fewer hunters to exploit them, as beaver populations declined, and as conflicts with the Mohegans and Mohawks made them unsafe to venture into. Despite these circumstances, land deeds with Europeans often included clauses stipulating that the Indian sellers could still return to deeded lands to hunt, fish, collect wild foods, and sometimes even to plant crops. With such stipulations, Indian communities worked to protect their agricultural heritage and adapt to changing conditions in the valley even as they yielded to English demands. For example, when Chickwallop and his fellow sachems among the Norwottucks sold the lands that would become Hatfield, Massachusetts, to John Pynchon in 1653 they did so with the express understanding that they would “have liberty to plant their present corn fields” and on the condition that Pynchon would “plow up or cause to be plowed up for the Indians sixteene acres of land on ye east side of the Quinnoticott River.”21
Trading away lands that were not currently under use or that were being used suboptimally made sense for Indian traders and village leaders under pressure to maintain access to both European goods, which their communities had come to enjoy and depend upon, and to wampum, which was crucial for treating with Native neighbors and for demonstrating the trader/leader’s own social preeminence. Land sales brought immediate, bulk payments of wampum and European goods equal to several years’ worth of proceeds from the fur trade into a community without the uncertainty that came from harvesting an increasingly scarce resource like beaver. In 1659, for instance, Umpanchela, a sachem of the Norwottucks, leased (and later sold) a parcel of farmland along the Connecticut north of recently founded Northampton, Massachusetts, in exchange for goods worth about 250 pounds of beaver pelts. This was in a year when the entire fur trade of the valley amounted to only 291 pounds of beaver. For traders and leaders like Umpanchela, the short-term benefits of land sales were obvious.22
The details of the deal Umpanchela made with John Pynchon help illustrate why land sales proved so attractive for Native leaders despite their negative long-term consequences, which seem so obvious in hindsight. In 1659, Umpanchela had purchased a variety of items on credit from Pynchon. The fur trade had been a source of great wealth for valley communities as recently as the early 1650s, and Umpanchela doubtlessly hoped to pay his debt off quickly. But by 1659, changing circumstances—renewed tensions with the Mohawks, often-violent competition with the Mohegans to the southeast, and rapidly declining regional beaver populations—emerged to stymie the trade.23 Umpanchela carried his debt over into 1660 and, in a gamble that the beaver trade would bounce back, ordered even more items from Pynchon. The variety of items purchased by Umpanchela—several fathoms of cloth, shirts, coats, breeches, knives, and even wampum—suggest he may have been acting as a middleman in the regional fur trade. Pynchon, however, was not convinced that Umpanchela would be able to make good on his climbing debt and demanded that the sachem mortgage three parcels of Norwottuck planting land as collateral. In December of 1660, Umpanchela departed upriver on a high-stakes trading venture to the Sokokis at Squakheag, while Pynchon gloated in his account book: “If I am not paid in Bever when he comes from Heakeg all his land is to be mine.” In the end, Umpanchela was unable to obtain enough pelts from the Sokokis to clear his accounts, and the Norwottuck lands transferred to Pynchon to be resold and incorporated into the English town of Hadley.24
While land sales offered immediate benefits to valley Indian communities under growing pressure from both their English and Native neighbors, this strategy also brought important long-term drawbacks. Land sales slowly undermined a village’s capacity for growth. As Indian populations in the valley gradually rebounded from the smallpox epidemic of the 1630s, the women farmers of the new, consolidated villages had to plant crops on ever more acres. Without the agricultural lands which had been sold to the English, these farmers were unable to allow their fields to lie fallow or to shift cultivation to outlying fields when those nearest villages began to lose their fertility.25
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