id="ulink_d13fbd49-1785-58c6-a471-79978ec59b2c">The importance of these various animals to the English colonists can hardly be exaggerated. Hogs had the great virtues of reproducing themselves in large numbers and – like goats – of being willing to eat virtually anything. Moreover, in contrast to most other English animals, they were generally able to hold their own against wolves and bears, so that they could be turned out into the woods for months at a time to fend for themselves almost as wild animals. They required almost no attention until the fall slaughter, when – much as deer had been hunted by Indians – they could be recaptured, butchered, and used for winter meat supplies. Cattle needed somewhat more attention, but they too were allowed to graze freely during the warmer months of the year. In addition to the meat which they furnished, their hides were a principal source of leather, and milch cows provided dairy products – milk, cheese, and butter – that were unknown to the Indians. Perhaps most importantly, oxen were a source of animal power for plowing, clearing, and other farmwork. The use of such animals ultimately enabled English farmers to till much larger acreages than Indians had done, and so produce greater marketable surpluses. When oxen were attached to wheeled vehicles, those surpluses could be taken to market and sold. Horses were another, speedier source of power, but they were at first not as numerous as oxen because they were used less for farmwork than for personal transportation and military purposes. Finally, sheep, which required special attention because of their heavy wear on pastures and their vulnerability to predators, were the crucial supplier of the wool which furnished (with flax) most colonial clothing. Each of these animals in its own way represented a significant departure from Indian subsistence practices.4
What most distinguished a hog or a cow from the deer hunted by Indians was the fact that the colonists’ animal was owned. Even when it grazed in a common herd or wandered loose in woodlands or open pastures, a fixed property right inhered in it. The notch in its ear or the brand on its flanks signified to the colonists that no one other than its owner had the right to kill or convey rights to it. Since Indian property systems granted rights of personal ownership to an animal only at the moment it was killed, there was naturally some initial conflict between the two legal systems concerning the new beasts brought by the English. In 1631, for instance, colonists complained to the sachem Chickatabot that one of his villagers had shot an English pig. After a month of investigation, a colonial court ordered that a fine of one beaver skin be paid for the animal. Although the fine was paid by Chickatabot rather than the actual offender – suggesting the confusion between diplomatic relations and legal claims which necessarily accompanied any dispute between Indian and English communities – the effect of his action was to acknowledge the English right to own animal flesh. Connecticut went so far as to declare that Indian villages adjacent to English ones would be held liable for “such trespasses as shalbe committed by any Indian” – whether a member of the village or not – “either by spoilinge or killinge of Cattle or Swine either with Trappes, dogges, or arrowes.” Despite such statutes, colonists continued for many years to complain that Indians were stealing their stock. As late as 1672, the Massachusetts Court was noting that Indians “doe frequently sell porke to the English, and there is ground to suspect that some of the Indians doe steale and sell the English mens swine.” Nevertheless, most Indians appear to have recognized fairly quickly the colonists’ legal right to own animals.5
Ironically, legal disputes over livestock arose as frequently when Indians acknowledged English property rights as when they denied them. One inevitable consequence of an English agricultural system that mixed the raising of crops with the keeping of animals was the necessity of separating the two – or else the animals would eat the crops. The obvious means for accomplishing this task was the fence, which to colonists represented perhaps the most visible symbol of an “improved” landscape: when John Winthrop had denied that Indians possessed anything more than a “natural” right to property in New England, he had done so by arguing that “they inclose noe Land” and had no “tame Cattle to improve the Land by.” Fences and livestock were thus pivotal elements in the English rationale for taking Indian lands. But this rationale could cut both ways. If the absence of “improvements” – fences – meant to the colonists that Indians could claim to own only their cornfields, it also meant that those same cornfields lay open to the ravages of English grazing animals. Indians were quick to point out that, since colonists claimed ownership of the animals, colonists should be responsible for any and all damages caused by them.6
Much as they might have preferred not to, the English had to admit the justice of this argument, which after all followed unavoidably from English conceptions of animal property. Colonial courts repeatedly sought some mechanism for resolving the perennial conflict between English grazing animals and Indian planting fields. In 1634, for instance, the Massachusetts Court sent an investigator “to examine what hurt the swyne of Charlton hath done amongst the Indean barnes of corne,” and declared that “accordingly the inhabitants of Charlton promiseth to give them satisfaction.” Courts regularly ordered payment of compensation to Indians whose crops had been damaged by stock, but this was necessarily a temporary solution, administered after the fact, and one which did nothing to prevent further incidents. Colonists for this reason sometimes found themselves building fences on behalf of Indian villages: in 1653, the town of New Haven promised to contribute 60 days of labor toward the construction of fences around fields planted by neighboring Indians. Similar efforts were undertaken by colonists in Plymouth Colony when Indians at Rehoboth complained of the “great damage” caused to their crops by English horses. The fences built across the Indians’ peninsula of land at Rehoboth did not, of course, prevent animals from swimming around the barrier, and so Plymouth eventually – for a short while – granted Indians the right to impound English livestock and demand payment of damages and a fine before animals were returned to their owners.7
Such solutions had the virtue – in principle – of giving Indians at least theoretical legal standing as they made their complaints to colonial courts, but the laws also forced Indians to conduct their agriculture in a new way. Indians wishing compensation for damages to their crops were required to capture wandering animals and hold them until they were claimed by their owners; moreover, the value of damages was to be “judged and levied by some indifferent man of the English, chosen by the Indians treaspased.” Indians had no right to collect damages by killing a trespassing animal: as always, the rare occasions when colonists offered Indians legal protection were governed wholly by English terms. The long-run effect was to force Indians to adopt fencing as a farming strategy. When New Haven built fences for its neighbors, it was only on the understanding that the Indians would agree “to doe no damag to the English Cattell, and to secure their owne corne from damage or to require none.” Indians, in other words, were eventually assumed to be liable for the maintenance of their own fences; if these were in disrepair, no damages could be collected for the intrusions of wandering animals. When Indians near Massachusetts Bay “promised against the nexte yeare, and soe ever after, to fence their corne against all kinde of cattell,” they were making what would prove to be an irrevocable commitment to a new way of life.8
Indians were not alone among New England’s original inhabitants in encountering new boundaries and conflicts as a result of the colonists’ grazing animals. Native predators – especially wolves – naturally regarded livestock as potential prey which differed from the deer on which they had previously fed only by being easier to kill. It is not unlikely that wolves became more numerous as a result of the new sources of food colonists had inadvertently made available to them – with unhappy consequences for English herds. Few things irritated colonists more than finding valuable animals killed by “such ravenous cruell creatures.” The Massachusetts Court in 1645 complained of “the great losse and damage” suffered by the colony because wolves killed “so great nombers of our cattle,” and expressed frustration that the predators had not yet been successfully destroyed. Such complaints persisted in newly settled areas throughout the colonial period.9
Colonists countered the wolf threat in a variety of ways. Most common was to offer a bounty – sometimes twopence, sometimes ten shillings, sometimes a few bushels of corn, sometimes (for Indian wolf hunters) an allotment of gunpowder and shot – to anyone who brought in the head of a wolf. All livestock owners
