Colonial Ecology, Atlantic Economy. Strother E. Roberts
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focus on human interactions with a physical, ecologically defined region further sets Colonial Ecology, Atlantic Economy apart from previous studies which have instead defined their scope through reference to political abstractions (“New England”) largely independent of the natural landscape. Rather than delimiting nature within the political boundaries of a historically defined region, the research presented here recognizes that natural processes (in this case, located within a particular river basin) often shape and define their own logically discernable geographical regions. Nevertheless, the pages that follow (and also some that have preceded) make frequent mention of New England as a discrete region. The watershed formed an important part of this larger geopolitical space, and many of the ecological processes at work in the Connecticut basin in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are representative of developments taking place throughout New England (as well as other areas of North America). Taking the Connecticut basin as a spatial focus is not intended as a rejection of “New England” as an important category for historical study, but rather to suggest that an environmental history should, in its scope, be defined by the physical environment.31
The Connecticut basin, as a geographical focus, is small enough to allow for detailed analyses of how various ecological changes affected local streams and soils in individual towns. The region is broad enough for generalizations about what those local changes meant for the hydrology and ecology of the river basin as a whole. And, finally, focusing on a discrete ecological unit like the Connecticut watershed offers a case study from which to explore the implications of the expanding ecological, commercial, and social networks in which the Connecticut Valley’s inhabitants took part. In short, the book that follows conceives of the Connecticut Valley as a discrete ecological region, but one whose physical ecology was intimately tied to the larger geographical region of New England and to the transatlantic community beyond.
If the valley’s earliest English settlers arrived already in possession of an Atlantic-oriented view of the world, its trade-savvy Native communities lost no time in exploring how best to exploit the new economic incentives that the Atlantic World had to offer. The lands of the valley were neither unpeopled nor ungoverned when the first English settlers arrived. For over ten thousand years the Native communities of the valley had traded with other Native populations living to their north, east, and west. The arrival of the English merely expanded these preexisting trade networks, integrating European markets with Indian ones and slowly reorienting the trade of the valley toward the markets of the Atlantic World.32
Early English settlers often rejected the authority of the region’s Indian occupants. In part, they did this by ignoring the presence of these earlier proprietors of the valley. The Puritan founders of Windsor referred to the valley as “the Lord’s waste”: an uninhabited and unclaimed land prepared by God for his chosen people.33 Even when they took note of Indians’ presence and use of the land, these newcomers often asserted that the perceived inferiority of Native cultures and economies undermined the latter’s title to territory. The Massachusetts Bay Colony’s first governor, John Winthrop, put the English case succinctly: “This savage people ruleth over many lands without title or property; for they inclose no ground, neither have they cattell to maintayne it, but remove their dwellings as they have occasion…. Why may not christians have liberty to go and dwell amongst them in their waste lands and woods…?” In English eyes, only settled occupancy and farming could justify the ownership of land. Although Winthrop advocated the usurpation of lands that Indians used for hunting and gathering wild foods, he did recognize the propriety of “leaving them such places as they have manured for their corne.”34 Succeeding English generations were not always willing to make even this allowance for the rights of their Indian neighbors.
The Connecticut basin’s Native populations never disappeared. Nor, in the face of increasing rates of environmental change, did they remain static in their practice of “traditional” cultures and economies. Generations of Pocumtucks, Podunks, Wangunks, Tunxis, Nipmucs, and others learned that while English livestock, crops, and weeds often undercut the ecological foundations of long-practiced economic pursuits, these exotic imports, when incorporated into Native practices, also offered the opportunity to create a new material culture.35
The imposition of the English system of property rights—through a combination of honest purchase, judicious deceit, and outright force—displaced the collective sovereignty of Native communities and ushered in a creeping tide of usurpation and dispossession. The horrendous toll that disease took upon the indigenous populations of the Connecticut Valley (and of the American continents in general) is well documented.36 In the valley, tens of thousands of men, women, and children never survived to face the decision of how best to adapt to the new economy and new environment spawned by the arrival of Europeans. Thousands rejected these changes and perished at the hands of English violence in the Pequot War and King Philip’s War or were sold into distant slavery, joining other victims of the transatlantic slave trade to supply the labor that kept the plantation system of the sugar islands profitably running. Of those who avoided death or enslavement, many decided relocating was their best option and moved west or north. Despite these losses, many of the valley’s Native inhabitants chose to remain and build a place for themselves within this new economy, joining their own labors to the English transformation of the region’s land- and waterscapes.
Much ink has been spilled discussing early English settlers’ antipathy for the woodland wildernesses that faced them upon arrival in the Americas and which later offered sanctuary to Indian neighbors-cum-enemies.37 Puritan minister and poet Michael Wigglesworth, in a much quoted line, described the New England woods as “a waste and howling wilderness where none inhabited but hellish fiends and brutish men.”38 But the woodlands of New England, and of the Connecticut Valley, were more than simply a symbol. Historical discussions of the imagined wilderness of the Puritan mind has led to too little consideration of the role that the physical landscape played in shaping the everyday lives of colonial New Englanders.39 Early Americans expressed their understanding of the world not just through what they wrote on paper but also by what they wrought upon the land. For the Puritans and for the later generations of Euro-American settlers who followed them, it was the mundane chores of economic production that most intimately defined their relationships with the woods and waters surrounding their New England homes. The ecological history of the valley can best be seen here, where human labor married itself to the natural world.40
All too often violence tinges the outlines of these stories. For instance, tales of Indian attacks—of neighbors kidnapped and killed—fill the pages of the journal kept by farmer William Heywood of Charlestown, New Hampshire, in the years surrounding King George’s War. Here, in the northern valley, western Abenakis committed to maintaining their access to hunting, fishing, and agricultural territories clashed repeatedly with the settlers at the vanguard of English expansionism. Heywood kept his entries short and stoic: “June 20th, 1749—about 3 o’clock the Indians fired on Ensign Sartwell and Enos Stevens as they were harrowing corn, killed Sartwell and took Enos, & killed the horse.” Heywood never recorded the emotions that such events aroused, but the reader cannot help but imagine the fear that must have gripped him and his neighbors day in and day out. They would have warily eyed the woodlands of their frontier home, familiar from long habitation but now threatening, never knowing when danger might emerge from the cover of the trees. Still, even at the height of their danger, the woodlands could not be avoided. Heywood joined the local militia and spent each growing season during the war standing guard over his neighbors as they tended crops and cut hay ominously close to the threatening presence of the woods. Nor could the products of the woodlands themselves be dispensed with. Less than a month after the raid that resulted in Obadiah Sartwell’s death and Enos Stevens’ capture, Heywood ventured into the woods to chop firewood and cut poles to fence in a new turnip yard he was planting.41 As generations came and went, a lingering fear of the woods and the unknown dangers that they held may have lingered in the darkest corners of the minds of these Puritan descendants, but it was the mundane concerns of subsistence and commerce that truly defined early Americans’ lived experience of their wilderness homes.42
It is important, when considering the effect of transatlantic trade on the Connecticut Valley, to not regard the dispossession of New England’s