by the Pynchons at Springfield came from hunters and traders operating out of the Pocumtuck villages of Pocumtuck, and Norwottuck, from the Agawam (today’s Westfield) River watershed, from the Sokoki town of Squakheag, and from hunters (other western Abenakis and likely Mahicans, as well) operating farther north in the Connecticut basin. The Indians of the valley also provided the Pynchons with maize, upon which the survival of Springfield and the other Connecticut towns depended in the early years of settlement.57 Wampum obtained for furs and maize paid off the tribute demands of the Mohawks and could, potentially, buy the support of new Native allies. Meanwhile, direct access to English tools and weaponry increased the military power of those tribes who called the middle Connecticut home.
The fur trade of the Connecticut watershed, and of New England more generally, continued to revolve around the shifting military and diplomatic relationships between the Native nations of the region. The fur trade between the Pynchons of Springfield and the Indians of the Connecticut Valley reached its apex in the early 1650s, peaking in 1654 before declining precipitously. During these years, the Iroquois redirected their hunting and military efforts to the west and north, toward the lands of the Hurons, Petuns, and Neutrals. This realignment of Iroquois imperial interests freed Pocumtuck, Nipmuc, and Sokoki hunters from competition both in the northern Connecticut Valley and in the lands lying immediately westward. It also lessened the risk of renewed warfare with the Mohawks. The conclusion of hostilities following the Mahican War in 1628 had brought an uneasy peace. The Connecticut Valley nations resented Mohawk demands for tribute, and their acquiescence was ensured only by the threat of superior Iroquois military might. As long as Mohawk hunters ranged the same territories as hunters from the Connecticut Valley villages, the potential existed for misunderstanding and violence. This threat kept valley hunters close to home during the 1630s–1640s. But in the 1650s, with the Mohawks distracted farther west, valley hunters expanded their hunting efforts northward and westward along Connecticut tributaries and, consequently, increased their take of beaver and other furbearing species.58
Although the volume of pelts traded to English merchants during the seventeenth century fluctuated with the political climate, the overall trend was clearly one of declining fur yields.59 Conflict in any given year could divert hunters and trappers to more martial pursuits, or else make them fearful of venturing into hunting territories that lay too far from the relative safety of fortified villages. As a long-term process, however, the incessant warfare that surrounded competition over the fur wealth of New England, and of northeastern North American more generally, created conditions that encouraged the extirpation of beaver from the region. French agents operating to the northeast of the Connecticut Valley had noted as early as the 1630s the tendency of Indian fur traders to “kill all, great and small, male and female” when harvesting beaver from a colony.60 A similar practice seems to have prevailed among nations operating in the Connecticut basin. Mohawk hunters ranging eastward threatened Mahican, Sokoki, and Pocumtuck hunting territories in the Connecticut Valley. Indeed, Iroquois pressure culminated in a series of raids in 1664 and 1665 that resulted in the destruction of Pocumtuck and Squakheag, the two most populous villages in the central valley.61 Under such conditions, not harvesting as many pelts as possible became tantamount to handing them over to the enemy; an enemy who would exchange their poached beaver for new weapons that might be turned against one’s own community. The logic of conservation broke down and incentives to exploit—or, one might say, overexploit—furbearing species prevailed.62
Records from the earliest years of the trade are hard to come by. But the account books of John Pynchon show that in the five-year span from 1652 to 1657, this premier trader of the valley received the pelts of nearly 10,000 beaver. From 1658 to 1674, Pynchon shipped another 6,500 beaver skins from the valley.63 To these sums should be added the unknown thousands of beaver pelts collected by merchants active in other parts of the valley. Each of the Connecticut colony towns, for example, granted a single merchant the monopoly on the beaver trade with Native Americans operating in its hinterland, and most of these merchants’ records have not weathered the ravages of time and chance as well as have Pynchon’s accounts.64 Other English landowners in the valley may have been legislatively prohibited from trading with the Indians, but nothing prevented them from hunting and trapping themselves on a small scale—further increasing the number of beaver that were likely taken in the early decades of settlement. And, finally, the Mohawks funneled an unknown number of pelts into Dutch hands.
As a result of these commercial pressures, beaver populations in the Connecticut watershed collapsed. The beaver trade of the lower and middle valley had entered decline by the 1650s, as evidenced by John Pynchon’s account books. When Pynchon’s trade rebounded, slightly, in the late 1660s it was only because his Indian trading partners had taken advantage of Mohawk distractions farther west to push their hunting into the Hudson River watershed.65 In his 1677 history of New England, the Reverend William Hubbard wrote that beaver, which once had inhabited the lands lying between Casco Bay and the Piscataqua River, had been “gleaned away” as a consequence of the French and English fur trades.66 Although Hubbard concerned himself primarily with the coastal trade, trading ties between the Abenaki nations living here and those living along the Connecticut meant that the latter region had been heavily depleted as well. By the turn of the century, beaver had disappeared from southern New England and only vestige populations survived in the northern valley.67
For the Pocumtucks, the legend of Ktsi Amiskw kept alive a folk memory of a time when their ancestors had waged war not just against their Mohawk rivals, but, in a sense, against the beaver of their valley as well. The ancient Pocumtucks had called upon Hobomok to destroy the Great Beaver. Their descendants, encouraged by European traders, dealt with Ktsi Amiskw’s lesser cousins themselves. Over time, beaver disappeared from the Connecticut basin, their dams fell, and their ponds drained. The mutually beneficial environment that the beaver and Native Americans of New England had maintained for thousands of years disappeared in a few short decades. In this sense, Ktsi Amiskw’s fate has offered Pocumtucks (and, for that matter, any Euro-American who should stop to reflect on this appropriated tale) living from the eighteenth century until the present day a parable on the wages of greed. The Great Beaver, in his gluttony, sought to claim the land and resources of the Connecticut Valley for himself. His heedless actions threw the natural environment out of balance. That natural balance was eventually restored, but only after Ktsi Amiskw was forced to pay for his environmental misdeeds.68 The humans living in the valley would likewise have to endure the ecological consequences of their economic actions.
A Postdiluvian Landscape
Colonial New Englanders were ignorant of the ecological role played by beaver. Nor could they imagine the impact that removing beaver from an ecosystem might have upon the ecology and hydrology of an area. Hunters, likely in concert with farmers attempting to claim wetlands for agriculture, had driven the Eurasian beaver to extinction in Great Britain at least a century before the first English colonists settled in North America. Even before this, knowledge of the beaver was extremely limited among Britons. Illuminated English bestiaries from the thirteenth century—when a dwindling number of beaver colonies may have still persisted in the more remote streams of the kingdom—depicted beaver that more closely resembled dogs, foxes, or even horses than they did actual specimens of C. fiber.69
Edward Topsell’s Historie of Four-Footed Beastes, published in 1607, offered the most complete description of beaver available to England’s earliest American colonists. The book’s woodcuts provided important corrections on details of beaver anatomy (Topsell’s beaver actually looked like beaver), but its text did little to explicate the beaver’s relationship with the environment. Topsell presented beaver as piscivores who, when fish became scarce in their ponds, would “leave the water and range up and downe the land, making an insatiable slaughter of young lambes untill … they have fed themselves full of flesh, then returne they to the water, from whence they came.” Topsell also repeated the medieval belief that when pursued by hunters for its scent glands (from which beaver produce castoreum, a highly prized component in medieval and early modern medicine) the
