crew of migrant laborers, “the most of them Hollanders.”116
Contemporaries blamed the miasmas produced by these new standing waters as the source of their illness. Interpreting the outbreak from the perspective of twenty-first-century epidemiology, it seems that these new waters provided new breeding habitat for mosquitoes at the same time that the presence of Dutch skilled laborers offered a new reservoir of Plasmodium microbes. Malaria’s prevalence in the valley only increased over the following decades as new engineering projects sequestered waters for lock operation, to power industrial water mills, and to provide urban drinking water. As malaria outbreaks proliferated, contemporaries continued to identify new construction projects, and the miasmic waters they produced, as the source of their malarial woes.117 By the end of the nineteenth century, the towns lying on either side of the Connecticut Valley had once again gained a notorious reputation as regional hotspots for malarial infection within New England.118 If the postdiluvian landscape yielded by the fur trade spared eighteenth-century valley residents from the scourge of malaria, the reflooding of the watershed’s nineteenth-century industrial landscape placed their descendants once more at risk.
New Markets, New Landscape
Native Americans did not merely act within European commercial networks, they engaged with Europeans to actively construct the commercial networks and economic system that dominated and defined the seventeenth-century New England landscape. The economy that defined New England’s ecology up through the late seventeenth century was neither European nor Native American, but a hybrid system coconstructed by cultures with roots on both sides of the Atlantic. In many ways, and for most of the century, this economy was more Indian than European. The most significant changes to the Connecticut Valley land- and waterscape between 1600 and 1700 were the result of a Native American market revolution and the political and diplomatic transformations that accompanied it.
When Wahginnacut first urged the English to settle in the Connecticut Valley in 1631, he was inviting them to build their homes amid a landscape experiencing substantial ecological and hydrological changes. As English settlers pushed up the Connecticut Valley in the seventeenth century, they continually encountered lands that Indian communities had depleted of beaver and then traded away for as great a profit as possible. The ecosystems that greeted these new homesteaders were, in terms of biodiversity, far simpler than they had been mere decades before. And they were still in the process of becoming simpler yet. In many ways the “natural” environment that English settlers found in the Connecticut Valley in the mid- and late seventeenth century was actually a recent invention. Human actors, driven by the incentives of the fur trade, had destroyed the former ecological and hydrological systems that beaver had engineered over the course of millennia. By the end of the seventeenth century, the Connecticut Valley was a postdiluvian landscape diminished in its biodiversity, but “providentially” well-suited to the demands of English agriculture.
CHAPTER 2
Raising Crops
Feeding the Market
The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English appropriation of Indian lands—a process sped along by the declining fortunes of the fur trade—radically transformed the ecology and economies of the Connecticut Valley. Native communities, who had formerly traded their agricultural surplus to feed ill-prepared English colonists, gradually found themselves displaced by aggressive (and often violent) English traders and settlers. A long-established Native American trade network was supplanted by a new English agricultural system that tied the valley into an imperial commercial network that stretched throughout the Atlantic. English farmers exploited the fertility of the bottomlands to turn the region into a breadbasket for empire, raising wheat and a myriad of other crops for export to the other mainland colonies, Europe, and, most importantly, the Caribbean. This transition introduced new plants, animals, and diseases to the valley, and redefined how human farmers managed the region’s landscape.
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In 1639, Captain David Pieterszen de Vries, acting on behalf of the Dutch West Indies Company, sailed his fluyt up the Connecticut River to call upon Governor John Haynes of the newly established Connecticut Colony. De Vries’ mission was to warn off the English, who by 1639 had planted four towns along the southern Connecticut River in lands that the Dutch considered their own by right of exploration. The Dutch had strengthened their title by purchasing these lands from the conquering Pequots with the (likely coerced) approval of the local Wangunk Indians and their sachem, Sowheage. Governor Haynes could have responded to de Vries’ accusations by pointing out that the English had also been granted land for their towns by local Indian communities eager to break the fur trade monopoly of the Pequots. Hartford, for example, had been founded upon lands provided by Wahginnacut, sachem of the local Podunks, while Sowheage himself had also sold lands to the settlers of nearby Wethersfield.
Instead, Haynes chose another tack. The governor upbraided de Vries and his Dutch countrymen for having left the lands of the Connecticut Valley “lying idle.” “It was,” Haynes insisted, “a sin to let such rich land, which produced such fine corn, lie uncultivated.”1 Implicitly, Haynes criticized not only the Dutch West Indies Company’s decision to curtail agricultural settlement for fear it might disrupt the corporation’s monopoly on the fur trade, but also the Indian system of agriculture that had supported the peoples of the valley for centuries. For Haynes and most of his fellow English colonists, proper agriculture required plowed fields, livestock to produce manure, and fences all around. The Indians’ failure to exploit their lands in accordance with such a model supposedly invalidated any title they may have otherwise claimed to their homelands and invited—perhaps even required, in the view of Puritan leaders—their dispossession by new settlers.2 The English may have first come to the valley to exploit the opportunities offered by the fur trade, but they would stay to become farmers.
Just as John Winthrop had, in 1633, bemoaned his fellow colonists’ continued addiction to “foreign commodities,” de Vries predicted that the Puritans of the Connecticut Valley would, despite the strict religion of their leaders, maintain a taste for many of the imported luxuries they had enjoyed in the commercial world of old England.3 During his short visit in Hartford, de Vries witnessed an English trading ketch arrive carrying, among other imports, a cargo of wine from the Portuguese Madeira islands. When a servant of the town was shortly afterward discovered to have overindulged in this luxury, he was sentenced to be flogged for his drunkenness. Horrified by what he considered an excessive punishment, De Vries interceded on the servant’s behalf and convinced Haynes to forgo the whipping. De Vries later warned the English governor “that it would be impossible for them [the colony’s Puritan authorities] to keep the people so strict, as they had come from so luxurious a country as England.”4
These two factors, the region’s rich soils and its inhabitants’ desire for imported goods, ensured that the Connecticut Valley remained firmly tied to Atlantic markets even following the failure of the fur trade. Writing a little over a decade after de Vries’ unsuccessful mission to Hartford, Captain Edward Johnson of Massachusetts observed that although the valley had originally been settled because it was so “fitly seated for a Bever trade with the Indians,” the decline of that trade had already encouraged enterprising settlers to shift their focus and “caused them to live upon husbandry.”5 Although this new focus on husbandry—a mixed agricultural system combining raising field crops with keeping livestock—initially aimed merely at subsistence, English farmers had by the time Johnson was writing already begun to export their agricultural surpluses beyond the valley.
In this, the new English settlers of the valley followed the example of the region’s Indian agriculturalists, although the cultural chauvinism of men like Haynes likely prevented them from appreciating the fact. Agricultural
