spawn, offering a bonanza to the humans who anxiously awaited their annual runs.
A broader phenomenon of nutrient loss within the river system as a whole meant that filter-feeding freshwater mussels also declined, further impoverishing the foraging options available to local Indian communities. Prior to their destruction, beaver ponds had functioned to conserve nutrients within the waters of the Connecticut basin by acting as nutrient sinks. Filter-feeding mussels and aquatic plants benefitted most directly from these impounded nutrients, but their good fortune reverberated throughout the food chain. Undammed stretches of waterways also felt the impact of beaver ponds. By slowing the overall pace of waterways beaver ponds significantly increased the likelihood that nutrients carried by streams and rivers would be utilized within the drainage basin, rather than being carried out to sea. Detritus in slow moving water was more likely to fall out of the current, to be decomposed and returned to the soil. In this way, beaver ponds not only increased the extent of aquatic habitat in a watershed but also increased the biomass that it was able to support. Without beaver dams holding back these ponds, the overall ability of the watershed to support life declined.82
Concurrent species loss meant that the extermination of beaver from New England was a double catastrophe for Indian communities. Beaver provided the most lucrative pelts, but were far from the only furbearers harvested. Minks, river otters, and muskrats contributed a considerable amount to the profits earned by merchants like John Pynchon. As beaver numbers declined, these other species took on new importance for Native hunters. Unfortunately, the population levels of mink, muskrat, and otter were directly linked to the presence of beaver in the landscape. Both minks and otters fed on the fish, amphibians, and invertebrates that thrived in beaver ponds. Muskrats exploited beaver ponds to build their own aquatically protected limb-and-mud lodges. Each of these species suffered an extensive loss of habitat as beaver ponds gave way to meadows. Reduced numbers of these species, added to the loss of the beaver, exacerbated the economic distress faced by Native communities that, by the second half of the seventeenth century, had become increasingly dependent upon the fur trade.83
If, from the 1630s to the 1650s, the terms of the fur trade favored Native American hunters, by the 1660s onward, the long-term consequences of the trade had begun to severely undermine Native American claims to the lands of the Connecticut Valley. The Indian nations of the valley continuously reduced the quantity of cropland they cultivated over the course of the seventeenth century. In part, this represented a decline in population occasioned by outbreaks of European diseases, many introduced through contacts in the fur trade. A decline in land under cultivation may also have occurred as a direct result of the fur trade. As Indian men harvested more beaver, women needed to exert more labor cleaning and processing beaver skins into marketable pelts. Since women provided the agricultural labor in Connecticut Valley Indian communities, this new demand may have cut into efforts to plant and maintain crops. With less land under cultivation, and facing declining fur yields, many Connecticut Valley communities chose to sell off territory in order to maintain access to European commodities.84
From the mid-1650s forward, the Pocumtucks, and neighboring communities, sold off great chunks of territory, a practice encouraged by English merchants who willingly advanced goods to Indian leaders on credit and then encouraged land cessions to clear these debts. Many of the deeds transferring these lands into English hands contained clauses in which the former Indian owners retained the right to hunt in the ceded lands—often explicitly mentioning beaver among the list of prey that Indian hunters should be allowed to pursue. Still, these land deals likely followed the extirpation of beaver from a given territory, the retained hunting rights representing a claim on any new beaver colonies that might someday return to local waterways. As such, the land cessions that spread through the Connecticut Valley in the 1660s–1680s represent Indian leaders’ efforts to market the only merchantable commodity left to them—their land.85 By the late seventeenth century, the Indian communities of the Connecticut Valley faced the end of the fur trade at the same time that they faced a decline in food security due to declining populations of numerous species of edible plants and animals as an ecological consequence of this trade.
Little wonder that most of the Connecticut Valley Indian nations—including the Mahicans, Pocumtucks, Podunks, and Pennacooks—chose to side with Metacomet during King Philip’s War in 1675. The English victory a year later forever broke Native American power in southern and central New England, ensuring English political hegemony in the region. In the decades following this military defeat many Mahicans, Pocumtucks, Podunks, and Pennacooks chose to abandon their Connecticut basin homes to join either the Wabanaki nations to the north or the new Schaghticoke nation along the Connecticut/Massachusetts/New York border. Other members of these nations integrated themselves within New England’s increasingly English-dominated economy as crafts artisans, wage laborers, or European-style farmers.86
While the tragic economic and ecological consequences of the fur trade fell disproportionately upon the Native communities of the Connecticut Valley, the region’s new Euro-American inhabitants also suffered from the beaver’s disappearance. The dynamic life cycle of beaver impoundments—from free-flowing stream, to pond, meadowland, and, after the erosion of streambeds, often back again—provided for the long-term, perpetual rejuvenation of large swaths of fertile meadow and woodlands.87 The fur trade brought this process to a halt. The overall fertility of soils along waterways would have slowly declined as the cycle of rejuvenation achieved through ponding was brought to an end. The spring freshets continued to annually overspread their floodplains, depositing silt and refreshing the fertility of the broad bottomlands bordering the Connecticut River and its larger tributaries. But lands along lesser streams would have slowly deteriorated. Even the intervales of the Connecticut River itself received less regenerative organic matter than in previous centuries due both to the more rapid flow and the general decline in the nutrient load of the river system as a whole. In the centuries that followed the fur trade, Euro-American farmers had to rely on manuring to rejuvenate soils.88
The drainage of beaver ponds by the thousands in the decades of the seventeenth century also had impacts beyond the biology of the Connecticut Valley. The very hydrology of the watershed was transformed. Vast stretches of ponded water and wetlands—perhaps as much as nine hundred thousand acres—would have disappeared from the Connecticut watershed along with the beaver.89 In many cases, this transformation to dry land brought negative environmental impacts that would plague the new English settlers of the region.
The increased amount of sediment borne all the way downriver to Long Island Sound directly threatened the commerce of the valley.90 The Connecticut, at its mouth, had never been deep. The first European explorer to visit the river, the Dutch explorer Adriaen Block, declared the river’s mouth to be “very shallow” as he sailed upstream. The disappearance of beaver ponds and the loss of wetlands upriver would have only made this problem worse. In the river’s tidal zone, waters rushing downstream collide with the incoming tide, slowing, swirling, and dropping their load of soil and silt. Such encounters are most dramatic just south of Hartford, at the far upper reaches of the river’s tidal flows. Here the increased sediment load of the Connecticut formed a series of shifting shoals and sandbars that came to plague the maritime trade of what had in its earliest years been a promising port with easy access for small oceangoing vessels. By the late eighteenth century, a traveler on business in Hartford complained that thanks to “these inconveniences the inhabitants are not only compelled to make use of smaller vessels than they could wish, but are also obliged to send them out partially loaded, and to complete their lading at New-London.”91
Falling local water tables would have followed the collapse of a beaver dam, resulting in a decline in local biodiversity among tree species.92 Still, it would have taken several decades of forest succession for pines and other wetlands-intolerant species of trees to begin making up the ground lost to beaver dam impoundment. This means that when colonial lumbermen went north in the eighteenth century in search of pine for regional and Atlantic markets, they would have encountered a scarcer supply than if beaver had never inhabited New England. It also means that many second-growth
