them. If a poor old stallion was found bothering their mares, the boys caught him, threw him down, and tied a large buffalo rib or hip bone to his forelock. The frightened animal left on the run. If a stray stallion persisted in bothering a man’s herd, the herd owner told the stallion’s owner to take better care of his horses thereafter.
Maintenance of Color Lines
Some men tried to build up herds of a single color. Three Calf said that after his father possessed 40 pintos he made no attempt to add to his herd except by breeding. He gave away any horses given him, and disposed of any colts bred to his herd that were not pintos. Many-White-Horses, so named because all the horses in his herd were whites or grays, traded any dark-colored horses he obtained for white ones. Nevertheless, his horses were said to have been of rather poor quality. They were small, tender-hoofed animals. When the Government furnished large stallions to Piegan owners, Many-White-Horses refused to accept them. He feared the stallions would injure his small mares. So he continued to raise large numbers of little horses. They had more prestige than practical value.
Joseph Sherburne recalled that when he traveled the Blackfeet Reservation (in the first decade of the twentieth century) making collections for his father’s store, some Indian owners of large herds still specialized in horses of a particular color or conformation. He learned to recognize the peculiarities of the horses of different owners so that he could tell from a distance the ownership of many range horses by their appearance. There were 10 or 12 owners on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana at that time whose horses were readily distinguishable by their physical appearance. Mr. Sherburne said the uniformity of these herds was maintained both by selection of studs and by swapping of horses which failed to exhibit the desired characteristics.
George Catlin, “Wild Horses at Play”
This 1830s painting by George Catlin (Figure 2.2) depicts a herd of wild horses on the Great Plains. It might be perceived as an illustration of raw, frontier nature. But how does the environmental history of the horse shape your understanding of this image? A painting that at first seems to suggest untouched American nature at some level portrays Eurasian organisms transforming their adopted homeland. Are these wild horses in some measure the side effects of colonialism? Or is the image even more complicated? Some of these animals may have escaped from Indian camps. Might their physical characteristics, their coloring, and even their size have been shaped by the influence of Indian horse breeders? Is the nature in this image, the Great Plains and its horses, more Eurasian or more American? Both? Neither?
Figure 2.2 Wild horses at play.
Source: From George Catlin, Wild Horses at Play (1834–7), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC. Public Domain.
3 Colonial Natures Marketing the Countryside
The far-reaching environmental changes of the colonial period owe their origins in part to the organisms described in Chapter 2, but they also stem from the very distinctive goals Europeans had in their relations with nature. William Cronon, in an excerpt from his prize-winning book Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, reveals how many of the most significant changes resulting from the arrival of European colonists in the Americas came about because the colonists sought to sell products of American ecosystems as commodities in the transatlantic market. Among the pre-eminent commodities of the colonial economy was livestock. Settlers raised domesticated animals partly to make money. The spread of livestock across New England thus reflected the expansion of the market economy. It brought profound social and environmental developments, including wholesale shifts in property relations (suggested by the proliferation of the fence, a device for controlling livestock) and New England ecology. As you read this selection, keep your eye on the ways that market demand for livestock encouraged their propagation and attendant environmental changes.
A World of Fields and Fences
William Cronon
(Excerpt from Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. New York: Hill & Wang, 1983.)
One must not exaggerate the differences between English and Indian agricultures. The two in many ways resembled each other in the annual cycles by which they tracked the seasons of the year. Although English fields, unlike Indian ones, were cultivated by men as well as women and contained a variety of European grains and garden plants which were segregated into single-species plots, their most important crop was the same maize grown by Indians. Like the Indians, the English began working their fields when the land thawed and cleared of snow sometime in March. They too planted in late March, April, and May, and weeded and hilled their corn – if rather more carelessly than the Indians – a month or two later. Summer saw colonists as well as Indians turning to a wide range of different food sources as they became available: fish, shellfish, migratory birds, foraging mammals, and New England’s many wild berries. August through October was the season of harvest when corn was gathered, husked, and stored, and other crops were made ready for the winter months. November and December saw the killing of large mammals – albeit of different species than the Indians had hunted – from the New England woods, the meat and hides of which were then processed for use in the months to come. The rest of the winter was devoted to tasks any southern New England Indian would readily have recognized: making and repairing tools and clothing, looking after firewood, occasionally fishing or hunting, and generally living off the stored produce of the preceding year. As the days lengthened and became warmer, the cycle began again: Europeans as well as Indians were inextricably bound to the wheel of the seasons.1
What made Indian and European subsistence cycles seem so different from one another had less to do with their use of plants than their use of animals. Domesticated grazing mammals – and the tool which they made possible, the plow – were arguably the single most distinguishing characteristic of European agricultural practices. The Indians’ relationships to the deer, moose, and beaver they hunted were far different from those of the Europeans to the pigs, cows, sheep, and horses they owned. Where Indians had contented themselves with burning the woods and concentrating their hunting in the fall and winter months, the English sought a much more total and year-round control over their animals’ lives. The effects of that control ramified through most aspects of New England’s rural economy, and by the end of the colonial period were responsible for a host of changes in the New England landscape: the seemingly endless miles of fences, the silenced voices of vanished wolves, the system of country roads, and the new fields filled with clover, grass, and buttercups.2
Livestock were initially so rare in Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay that both William Bradford and John Winthrop noted in their journals the arrival of each new shipment of animals. Plymouth was over three years old before it obtained the “three heifers and a bull” which Bradford described as “the first beginning of any cattle of that kind in the land.” Massachusetts Bay had a larger number of livestock almost from the start, but there were by no means enough to satisfy colonial demand for more animals. One colonist explained to an English patron that cattle were “wonderful dear here,” and another argued that the most profitable investment a merchant could make in New England would be “to venture a sum of moneys to be turned into cattle.” As a result, ship after ship arrived laden with upward of 50 animals in a load. By 1634, William Wood was able to define the wealth of the Massachusetts Bay Colony simply by referring to its livestock. “Can they be very poor,” he asked, “where for four thousand
