Colonial Ecology, Atlantic Economy. Strother E. Roberts
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Their populations plummeted precipitously over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as an influx of European traders and settlers introduced diseases with which Native Americans had no previous cultural or immunological experience.10 An epidemic of mysterious identity—generally referred to simply as “plague” by European witnesses—ravaged southern New England from 1616 to 1619, but largely spared the communities of the Connecticut Valley. In 1633, a smallpox epidemic, this time centered on the villages along the Connecticut River, swept through the region. Mortality estimates for interior villages are hard to come by, although Pilgrim leader William Bradford recorded the intense suffering experienced the by Indians living near the Plymouth colony trading house at present-day Windsor, Connecticut—“ye poxe breaking and mattering … their skin cleaving … to the matts they lye on; when they turne them, a whole side will flea [flay] of[f] at once … they will be all of a gore blood, most fearfull to behold”—and offered the tragically high estimate that among a tribe living farther north in the valley (likely Pocumtucks) 950 died out of 1,000.11 Scholars have estimated that the coastal Pequots may have suffered losses of as high as 75 percent, falling from a population in 1600 of about 16,000 to only 4,000 by 1637. The Connecticut River Indians, whose villages held perhaps 12,000 before the epidemic, likely suffered similarly.12
Such massive losses of human life dramatically undermined the social and political stability of Native New England. Introduced European diseases often carried off male hunters and female farmers in the prime of life, undermining food security in Native communities. If an entire village, or even a large portion, were incapacitated by disease at a crucial season for planting, harvesting, or hunting, the result would be famine. Hunger and malnutrition left those who avoided the first wave of an epidemic more susceptible when the disease returned, as with the recurring plague of 1616–1619, or when a new disease struck.13
Entire villages disappeared and new ones formed as survivors of epidemics banded together to form new societies from the wreckage of the old. Former regional powers declined or competed with emerging powers as they exploited circumstances to expand their regional authority at the expense of rivals. John Smith, for example, wrote of “civill wars” rending Native New England during the plague of the 1610s.14 Trade with Europeans offered new weapons in this struggle for regional power, driving Native nations into the fur trade. At the same time, competition for trade and unequal access to European merchants further destabilized an already volatile diplomatic environment. Seeking advantage in these shifting political and economic times, New England Indians, including leaders like Wahginnacut, worked to integrate European traders into preexisting Native American networks of diplomacy and trade at the same time that the region’s European settlers sought to integrate both Indian labor and the natural resource wealth of New England into an expanding network of transatlantic markets. Together, Native communities and European newcomers created a new economy and political system that would redefine human interaction with the natural world for much of the seventeenth century.
Over a surprisingly short period of time—less than a century—Native American hunters, pursuing the wealth and military power offered by the fur trade, destroyed the beaver populations of southern New England. As beaver pelts flowed into the hands of English (and Dutch and French) traders, the waters of beaver ponds flowed past the decaying remains of the beaver dams that had once held them in place. Hundreds of thousands of acres of wetlands disappeared over the course of just a few decades. Indeed, for most areas of the valley, the landscapes first encountered by English settlers were not in any sense “natural.” Nor were they the same landscapes that Native Americans had carefully crafted and cultivated for generations prior to the arrival of Europeans. Rather, the first English settlers of the Connecticut Valley were greeted by a new landscape—what could be termed a postdiluvian landscape—already in the throes of major ecological and hydrological upheavals.
Beaver Ecology
In Pocumtuck legend, Ktsi Amiskw, the Great Beaver, possessed the power to reorder nature. His giant dam halted the course of a mighty river (the Connecticut), flooding what had been dry land and transforming it into a great pond stretching up the length of the Connecticut Valley. Although terrible in life, Ktsi Amiskw left a rich legacy for the ancestors of the Pocumtucks. Slain by the hero Hobomok, the Great Beaver’s dam gradually drained to reveal a verdant valley, full of game and soils far more fertile than the surrounding lands. Modern understandings of the ecological role played by beaver echo this older Pocumtuck understanding. Biologists refer to beaver as a “keystone species”—one whose behavior affects the presence and relative abundance of multiple other species within an ecosystem. Unlike in the story of Ktsi Amiskw, however, beaver historically played an overwhelmingly positive role in Native American economies.
Like human beings, beaver possess the ability to profoundly reshape the physical world by applying their labor to the natural resources around them. Beaver transform the hydrology of rivers and streams by constructing dams from tree trunks, limbs, stones, and mud. As the water backs up behind the dam, a pond forms. The beaver of the colony then construct a separate lodge in the midst of their pond. Underwater passageways provide access to the lodge’s interior and the encircling waters of the beaver pond provide protection from predators. When ice forms in the pond and over the top of lodges in winter, this protective shell provides insulation against the cold air outside. The aquatic plants that flourish in beaver ponds provide the colony with a portion of their sustenance, the remainder coming from the bark of trees felled for construction and repair work on the lodge and dam. In sum, beaver engineer their own habitat and, in so doing, reengineer the land- and waterscapes which they inhabit.
Prior to the seventeenth century, beaver inhabited almost every body of water in New England. Beaver dams dotted the landscape, impounding and slowing the flow of the countless brooks and streams that eventually came together to form the Connecticut. Every major tributary housed multiple beaver colonies. Only the smallest brooks, those with too little flowing water to produce a proper pond, escaped their attention. Even the Connecticut River itself, too powerful for most of its length to be held back by the timber, mud, and stones that make up a beaver dam, would have housed a few intrepid beaver colonies in the slack waters of its more tranquil elbows and meanders.15
The approximately eleven thousand square miles of the Connecticut drainage basin likely supported upward of half a million beaver prior to the fur trade. The ponds sequestered behind the dams built by these half million beaver—maybe as many as one hundred thousand individual impoundments—would have varied in size from a few square feet to hundreds of acres. These beaver colonies formed a dense mosaic of nearly contiguous ponds and wetlands stretching along the length of most rivers and streams. One of the early settlers of Massachusetts provided a glimpse of these vast interior wetlands, writing in the 1630s of “swamps, some be ten, some twenty, some thirty miles long.”16 Taken together, beaver ponds may have engulfed up to 40 percent of the length of each of the Connecticut’s tributaries.17 While not quite on the scale of Ktsi Amiskw’s engineering handiwork, early seventeenth-century beaver ponds likely covered hundreds of thousands of acres within the basin—perhaps as much as nine hundred thousand acres, approximately 12 percent of the total Connecticut watershed.18
Beaver not only lived within the natural landscape of the Connecticut Valley, to an appreciable extent they created it. Long-term beaver occupation engineered much of the fertile bottomlands lining the Connecticut and its many tributaries, the very lands that first attracted English settlers to the valley in the 1630s. In the absence of beaver ponds, swiftly flowing streams would have gradually eaten away their beds and banks. The valleys of the watershed would have grown deeper and their banks steeper. Beaver dams slackened the flow of waters both within the ponds they impounded and in downstream stretches of river, decreasing stream bank erosion.
Indeed, the engineering skills of beaver actually reversed the process of stream bank erosion. Over time, beaver habitation built up rich meadowlands along the banks of tributary waterways.19 Rain and snowmelt runoff from the mountains, hills, and uplands of the watershed carried gravel, sand, silt, and soil into the streams of the region. As these waterways entered beaver ponds and their flow slowed, suspended sediment settled to the bottom of the pond. Individual beaver dams remain in operation for decades, sustaining multiple