the Podunks, and for Native nations living elsewhere in the Connecticut Valley and New England, the arrival of European settlers in the seventeenth century merely contributed to the ongoing social adaptations undertaken by Native American communities who had always lived in an environment defined by change. The first Paleo-Indian communities had arrived in New England approximately twelve thousand years earlier, at the tail end of the last Ice Age and just as the great megafauna of the Pleistocene era were disappearing from the landscape. Societies to the southwest introduced maize agriculture to the region about 1000 AD, during a period of mild climactic warming that lengthened growing seasons. Four centuries later, many New England Indian communities decreased their reliance on farming, returning to an economy dominated by hunting and gathering as cooling temperatures made agriculture less tenable in the northeast. Only the villages of the Connecticut Valley, where the river helped moderate temperatures and extend the growing season, continued as agricultural centers. The river villages consequently became hubs of trade, sending corn both to the coast and farther inland in return for dried fish and shells on the one hand, and copper, furs, and other commodities on the other.7
Of course, the greatest disruption to New England’s early modern Native communities—greater even than shifting temperatures or the regional extermination of beaver on which this chapter focuses—was the introduction of new, devastatingly deadly diseases as a result of European trade and settlement. Trade with northeastern coastal communities—which by the 1520s were themselves engaged in sporadic trading with European fishing vessels—may have introduced some Eurasian pathogens, such as influenza, to the valley during the sixteenth century, but these early outbreaks seem to have led to relatively few deaths.8
They certainly never triggered the sort of catastrophic epidemics that would become all too familiar in later centuries. In 1600, New England’s indigenous peoples numbered well over one hundred thousand.9 Their populations plummeted precipitously over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as an influx of European traders and settlers introduced diseases with which Native Americans had no previous cultural or immunological experience.10 An epidemic of mysterious identity—generally referred to simply as “plague” by European witnesses—ravaged southern New England from 1616 to 1619, but largely spared the communities of the Connecticut Valley. In 1633, a smallpox epidemic, this time centered on the villages along the Connecticut River, swept through the region. Mortality estimates for interior villages are hard to come by, although Pilgrim leader William Bradford recorded the intense suffering experienced the by Indians living near the Plymouth colony trading house at present-day Windsor, Connecticut—“ye poxe breaking and mattering … their skin cleaving … to the matts they lye on; when they turne them, a whole side will flea [flay] of[f] at once … they will be all of a gore blood, most fearfull to behold”—and offered the tragically high estimate that among a tribe living farther north in the valley (likely Pocumtucks) 950 died out of 1,000.11 Scholars have estimated that the coastal Pequots may have suffered losses of as high as 75 percent, falling from a population in 1600 of about 16,000 to only 4,000 by 1637. The Connecticut River Indians, whose villages held perhaps 12,000 before the epidemic, likely suffered similarly.12
Such massive losses of human life dramatically undermined the social and political stability of Native New England. Introduced European diseases often carried off male hunters and female farmers in the prime of life, undermining food security in Native communities. If an entire village, or even a large portion, were incapacitated by disease at a crucial season for planting, harvesting, or hunting, the result would be famine. Hunger and malnutrition left those who avoided the first wave of an epidemic more susceptible when the disease returned, as with the recurring plague of 1616–1619, or when a new disease struck.13
Entire villages disappeared and new ones formed as survivors of epidemics banded together to form new societies from the wreckage of the old. Former regional powers declined or competed with emerging powers as they exploited circumstances to expand their regional authority at the expense of rivals. John Smith, for example, wrote of “civill wars” rending Native New England during the plague of the 1610s.14 Trade with Europeans offered new weapons in this struggle for regional power, driving Native nations into the fur trade. At the same time, competition for trade and unequal access to European merchants further destabilized an already volatile diplomatic environment. Seeking advantage in these shifting political and economic times, New England Indians, including leaders like Wahginnacut, worked to integrate European traders into preexisting Native American networks of diplomacy and trade at the same time that the region’s European settlers sought to integrate both Indian labor and the natural resource wealth of New England into an expanding network of transatlantic markets. Together, Native communities and European newcomers created a new economy and political system that would redefine human interaction with the natural world for much of the seventeenth century.
Over a surprisingly short period of time—less than a century—Native American hunters, pursuing the wealth and military power offered by the fur trade, destroyed the beaver populations of southern New England. As beaver pelts flowed into the hands of English (and Dutch and French) traders, the waters of beaver ponds flowed past the decaying remains of the beaver dams that had once held them in place. Hundreds of thousands of acres of wetlands disappeared over the course of just a few decades. Indeed, for most areas of the valley, the landscapes first encountered by English settlers were not in any sense “natural.” Nor were they the same landscapes that Native Americans had carefully crafted and cultivated for generations prior to the arrival of Europeans. Rather, the first English settlers of the Connecticut Valley were greeted by a new landscape—what could be termed a postdiluvian landscape—already in the throes of major ecological and hydrological upheavals.
Beaver Ecology
In Pocumtuck legend, Ktsi Amiskw, the Great Beaver, possessed the power to reorder nature. His giant dam halted the course of a mighty river (the Connecticut), flooding what had been dry land and transforming it into a great pond stretching up the length of the Connecticut Valley. Although terrible in life, Ktsi Amiskw left a rich legacy for the ancestors of the Pocumtucks. Slain by the hero Hobomok, the Great Beaver’s dam gradually drained to reveal a verdant valley, full of game and soils far more fertile than the surrounding lands. Modern understandings of the ecological role played by beaver echo this older Pocumtuck understanding. Biologists refer to beaver as a “keystone species”—one whose behavior affects the presence and relative abundance of multiple other species within an ecosystem. Unlike in the story of Ktsi Amiskw, however, beaver historically played an overwhelmingly positive role in Native American economies.
Like human beings, beaver possess the ability to profoundly reshape the physical world by applying their labor to the natural resources around them. Beaver transform the hydrology of rivers and streams by constructing dams from tree trunks, limbs, stones, and mud. As the water backs up behind the dam, a pond forms. The beaver of the colony then construct a separate lodge in the midst of their pond. Underwater passageways provide access to the lodge’s interior and the encircling waters of the beaver pond provide protection from predators. When ice forms in the pond and over the top of lodges in winter, this protective shell provides insulation against the cold air outside. The aquatic plants that flourish in beaver ponds provide the colony with a portion of their sustenance, the remainder coming from the bark of trees felled for construction and repair work on the lodge and dam. In sum, beaver engineer their own habitat and, in so doing, reengineer the land- and waterscapes which they inhabit.
Prior to the seventeenth century, beaver inhabited almost every body of water in New England. Beaver dams dotted the landscape, impounding and slowing the flow of the countless brooks and streams that eventually came together to form the Connecticut. Every major tributary housed multiple beaver colonies. Only the smallest brooks, those with too little flowing water to produce a proper pond, escaped their attention. Even the Connecticut River itself, too powerful for most of its length to be held back by the timber, mud, and stones that make up a beaver dam, would have housed a few intrepid beaver colonies in the slack waters of its more tranquil
