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 efforts to drain and improve agricultural lands).28 This process of beaver destruction was not limited to Great Britain, but instead proceeded upon approximately the same schedule throughout northern Europe. By the late middle ages the aristocratic classes of western and southern Europe had become increasingly dependent upon trade with the Rus to their east to supply them with the luxurious furs that helped mark them off from their social inferiors.29
By approximately the mid-sixteenth century, overhunting for export had led to the near extermination of beaver, sable, and other furbearers even in Russian lands. To hold onto the lucrative state revenues generated by the fur trade, Ivan IV (known as “the Terrible”) of Muscovy sent his armies east to drive the Tartars from Siberia and subjugate the native hunters of the region. The Muscovites would eventually—after eight decades—win their wars and extend their fur trading empire to the Pacific. The hostilities that ensued in the meantime, together with growing fur shortages in Russia, led to rising international prices in the late 1500s.30 As Russian armies marched east, the same historical forces driving Ivan the Terrible’s conquest of Siberia encouraged merchants in the Netherlands, France, and England to look west for a new, cheaper supply of furs at just the historical moment that maritime explorers were introducing the lands of northeastern North America to an expanding world economy.31
The availability of American furs to western European consumers contributed to a larger consumer revolution taking place during the Age of Exploration. As European traders increasingly integrated producers in the Americas, Africa, and Asia into an expanding world economy, luxury goods once available only to the most elite members of European society began to move down market. As furs streamed across the Atlantic, prices fell, and this luxury once reserved for kings and nobility increasingly appeared in the wardrobes of the gentry and professional classes. Besides their appeal as a traditional marker of social status, garments of beaver retained the same qualities that made their former owners so successfully adapted to semiaquatic lifestyles in often frigid climes. Beaver fur was warm, water resistant, and—once it had been felted—strikingly soft. For Europeans gripped in the throes of the Little Ice Age, beaver pelts held an obvious appeal. By the seventeenth century, lawyers, clerics, clerks, military officers, and their wives in England sported cloaks, capes, mittens, pantaloons, and, especially, hats made of North American beaver (Castor canadensis). By the 1640s, beaver hats had become the preferred headwear of a broad economic and political cross section of English society, sported by king and cavaliers, and Puritans and parliamentarians alike.32
Consequently, the Dutch and English who arrived in the Connecticut Valley in the seventeenth century looked out at the extensive beaver dams and ponds spread across the countryside and imagined the wealth that their architects’ hides might fetch. Strong demand and good prices in Europe meant that a cargo of New England beaver pelts guaranteed welcome profits for European merchants and settlers trying to finance their new colonies in America. As one nineteenth-century New England historian observed: “The colonist desired Indian corn and venison, but all the world desired beaver.”33 Or, at least, all the European world.
Indian hunters in the Connecticut basin and elsewhere desired the metal kettles, pots, knives, and firearms that they received in payment for their beaver pelts. Prior to the fur trade, Indian communities in eastern North America had utilized the beaver for meat and clothing, and had used its impressive incisors to make cutting tools. But for Native communities living in New England in the seventeenth century, beaver and the other furbearing mammals of the American north came to represent a much wider range of newly available commodities. Consumers in Europe may have provided the commercial demand, but it was Native American hunters (themselves also consumers) who formed the sharp spear point of the fur trade. As Massachusetts settler William Wood observed in 1634, “These beasts are too cunning for the English…. All the Beaver which the English have, comes first from the Indians.”34
European fishermen pioneered the fur trade with New England’s coastal communities in the first decades of the sixteenth century. For the sailors on these early fishing vessels, bartering furs from coastal Indians represented a lucrative sideline to the cod fishery, the primary economic motivator for their cross-ocean ventures. These sixteenth-century fishermen offered small bits of metal—nails, fishing hooks, and, perhaps, knives—and in exchange Indians often, literally, sold them the beaver coats off their backs. By the closing decades of the century, however, it had become apparent to many European merchants and statesmen that the financial returns from North American furs justified pursuing that trade in its own right.
In 1614, Dutch explorer Adriaen Block captained the first ship to sail up the Connecticut River while exploring the Long Island coast in search of trading opportunities. Block’s ship, the Onrust (“Restless”), penetrated upriver perhaps as far as present-day Hartford. Sailing east from the mouth of the Connecticut, Block established the first trade contacts between the Dutch and the powerful Pequot nation, whose territory centered on the Thames River. Over the course of the next two decades, the Pequots’ commercial relationship with the Dutch would transform the political and ecological landscape of southern New England and draw the Native nations of the Connecticut Valley firmly within the transatlantic network of the fur trade. Over the course of the late 1610s through early 1630s, the Dutch operating out of New Netherland exported approximately ten thousand beaver skins a year.35 Many of these the Dutch obtained from Native trappers operating along the Hudson River, but a sizable percentage likely came from the Pequot trade, and most of these latter furs (perhaps a few thousand) would have come from subordinate villages lying within the Connecticut watershed.
Figure 3. The mid-ground of this vignette from an early eighteenth-century map depicts Indians
