Figure 2. This vignette from a 1715 British map of North America greatly exaggerates the size of beaver colonies (which usually contained no more than six individuals), but does show that turn-of-the-eighteenth-century Europeans possessed some awareness of the beaver’s impact within a landscape. Hermann Moll, “A View of ye Industry of ye Beavers” (1715). A New and Exact Map of the Dominions of the King of Great Britain on ye Continent of North America, London: 1715. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

      Despite the hostility ascribed to the legendary Ktsi Amiskw, the Pocumtucks and other Native Americans living in New England prior to the seventeenth century enjoyed a largely symbiotic relationship with the region’s beaver. Although beaver was considered a delicacy among many of the nations of the northeast, their meat never formed a staple of Native American diets. Instead, beaver contributed to Native American food supplies by creating novel habitats in which numerous other species could flourish. Multiple species of fish, frogs and toads, tortoises, and freshwater mussels made their homes in beaver ponds and contributed to the dietary diversity and seasonal food security of Native communities.²³

      Beaver also transformed streamside woodlands in ways that supported Native American hunting and foraging. As they cut timber, beaver ranged up to one hundred yards beyond their dams. Selectively cutting down trees, beaver created gaps in the canopies of woodlands bordering their ponds. These new parklike stretches of woodland promoted the growth of myriad plant species whose growth was otherwise held in check by a lack of sunlight.²⁴ The growth of new succulents, in turn, attracted game animals like deer and moose, which also browsed the aquatic plants of the beaver pond. Native American communities made use of these new parklands both by harvesting edible plants, like blueberries, and by hunting the game they attracted.

      Finally, the beaver meadows that emerged at the end of a pond’s life cycle provided perhaps the most important benefit to local Indian communities. Just as beaver ponds trapped sediment, they also became a holding site for organic material. Streams and rivers swept along leaves, branches, grasses, animal carcasses, and other decaying matter and deposited them as they entered the slack waters of the beaver pond. Algae and bacteria decomposed this natural compost, returning nutrients to the soil at the pond’s bottom. As sediment and organic detritus accumulated, the pond floor slowly rose and eventually gave way to a lush meadow. Wild food plants and other succulents flourished in the rich soils of these newly emerged meadows. This flora, in turn, continued to provide excellent browsing for the deer and moose that had formerly fed upon the pond’s aquatic vegetation. The fertile soils of former beaver ponds also made excellent planting grounds for the horticultural nations living in southern New England. Because beaver ponds acted as natural nutrient traps, soils in beaver meadows would have contained over four times the nitrogen of soils in surrounding areas.²⁵ And since maize draws heavily on nitrogen in soils during its growth cycle, beaver meadows could offer Indian agriculturalists far better yields than surrounding planting sites.

      For their part, Native Americans set seasonal fires to preserve meadows against the encroachment of forests and to maintain parklike woodlands for hunting. As a side effect, Native American landscape management promoted the growth of certain tree species at the expense of others. Many of the fast-growing tree species best able to take advantage of the seasonal recycling of nutrients through burning—like aspen and birch—happened to be those most favored by beaver as food and construction material.²⁶ In the long term, Indian burning practices created habitat more favorable to beaver colonization at the same time that beaver engineered a landscape that favored human hunting, foraging, and farming.

      As they worked to engineer their environment, beaver also served as an important buttress against ecological disturbance. Ponds and wetlands acted as reservoirs during periods of drought. They provided catchments in seasons of heavy rains or especially heavy snowmelts, reducing torrential flooding. When high waters overflowed or swept away a dam, surviving beaver or new colonizers would eventually repair or replace it, restoring the landscape to its predisturbance state.²⁷ In the beaver’s absence, the landscape of New England would have contained more swiftly flowing waterways, deeper gullies and valleys; more dry land, but less fertile soils. Open meadows and parklike woodlands would have been less common, as would game animals like deer and moose, which thrive in such habitat. Overall biodiversity would have been greatly lessened, and some species which rely on ponds for breeding or feeding may have been almost completely absent.

      Echoes of the beaver’s ecological role in creating the Connecticut Valley can be easily discerned in the legend of Ktsi Amiskw, but instead of a single giant beaver creating the fertile lands of the valley, the rich soils of the watershed were the product of tens of thousands (and, over generations, perhaps millions) of smaller dams. And if the story of Hobomok’s slaying of Ktsi Amiskw seems to run counter to the symbiosis that actually characterized the human-beaver ecological relationship prior to the seventeenth century, it seems all too appropriate when viewing this same relationship through the prism of the transatlantic fur trade. In the Pocumtucks’ geography, the body of the slain Ktsi Amiskw became a mountain ridge that loomed over their historic heartland. The English who founded the town of Deerfield within sight of the ridge saw something different in its distinct shape. In an act of toponymical dispossession, they renamed the ridge Mount Sugarloaf. The Great Beaver was symbolically transformed into a manifestation of the desire for imported luxuries—an apt metaphor for the seventeenth-century fur trade.

       The Fur Trade

      Furs, including those of the Eurasian beaver (Castor fiber), were a staple of elite fashion throughout medieval Europe. Members of the royalty, nobility, and upper clergy drove a demand for fine furs that, by the high middle ages, contributed to a bustling trade between trappers, furriers, and their wealthy clients. Gradually, the most popular furbearers—sables, ermines, beaver—began to disappear across much of their former ranges. The beaver, for example, had disappeared from England by the end of the thirteenth century and from the whole of Great Britain by the beginning of the fifteenth, a victim of overhunting for its fur (and, likely, of habitat loss in the face of