that of the fur trade, was to establish a price for wild animals, to create a court-ordered market for them, and so encourage their destruction. Indians especially were led to hunt wolves by these means. But bounties had several drawbacks. They occasionally tempted hunters to bring in the heads of wolves which had been killed many miles from English settlements and so forced towns to pay for predators that had never been a threat to English stock. Since neither wolves nor Indians respected the jurisdictional boundaries of English towns, it was difficult to distinguish which town should pay which hunter for which wolf. There was, moreover, a recurring problem of people trying to sell the same wolf’s head twice, so that towns were forced to cut off the dead animal’s ears and bury them separately from the skull in order to prevent repeated bounty payments for it.10
Whenever the wolf problem seemed especially severe, colonists supplemented the customary bounties with more drastic measures. Special hunters were occasionally appointed to leave poisoned bait or to set guns with tripwires as traps for wolves; domesticated animals killed by the traps were to be paid for by the town as a whole. Individual wolves that were particularly rapacious might have an unusually high bounty placed on their heads: thus, New Haven in 1657 offered five pounds to anyone who could kill “one great black woolfe of a more than ordinarie bigness, which is like to be more feirce and bould than the rest, and so occasions the more hurt.” A number of settlements fought wild dogs with domesticated ones. In 1648, Massachusetts ordered its towns to procure “so many hounds as they thinke meete … that so all meanes may be improved for the destruction of wolves.” Towns regularly ordered collective hunts of areas that were suspected of harboring wolves. Indeed, wolves became a justification for draining and clearing swamps. The anonymous “Essay on the Ordering of Towns” in 1635 suggested that towns hold every inhabitant responsible for clearing the “harboring stuffe” from the “Swampes and such Rubbish waest grownds” that sheltered wolves. That this was not merely a theoretical proposal is shown by Scituate’s decision in the mid-seventeenth century to divide its five hundred acres of swampland into parcels of two to five acres and to require every landowner to clear one of them. Entire ecological communities were thus threatened because they represented “an annoyance and prejudice to the town … both by miring of cattle and sheltering of wolves and vermin.” Whether the assault was conducted with bounties, hunting dogs, or the removal of the animals’ habitats, wolves suffered much the same fate as the rest of New England’s mammals. Although they were still found in northern New England at the end of the colonial period, Dwight reported that they were gone from the south. Because, unlike Indians, wolves were incapable of distinguishing an owned animal from a wild one, the drawing of new property boundaries on the New England landscape inevitably meant their death.11
Conflicts among Indians, wolves, and colonists over the possession and trespasses of grazing animals paralleled even more complicated conflicts among colonists themselves. Farmers accustomed to an English landscape hemmed in by hedges and by customs regulating the common grazing of herds found themselves forced to change their agricultural practices in unfenced New England. Whereas most livestock in England had been watched over by individual herders, labor was scarce enough in New England that only the most valuable animals – milch cows, sheep, and some horses and oxen – could generally be guarded in this way. Large numbers of swine and dry cattle in particular received less supervision than they would have gotten in England, and so presented a more or less constant threat to croplands. Fences could take the place of herders only where colonists built and maintained them, conditions that rarely applied in new settlements. Accordingly, towns, and colonies alike were constantly shifting their regulations in an effort to control the relationship between domesticated animals and crops.
Cattle and horses, for instance, were valuable enough so that colonial laws usually held farmers responsible for protecting their crops from them rather than requiring that the animals be restrained. In 1633, the Plymouth Court ordered that no one should “set corne … without inclosure but at his perill.” Massachusetts Bay tried in 1638 to spread the burden of this responsibility by requiring that “they that plant are to secure theire corne in the day time; but if the cattle do hurt corne in the night, the owners of the cattle shall make good the damages.” But the new rule, not too surprisingly, proved impossible to enforce, and within two years the colony was again declaring that planters rather than animal owners must bear the responsibility for protecting crops. Unfenced property boundaries, in other words, did not give legal protection against trespass by cattle. According to the Massachusetts Court in 1642, “Every man must secure his corne and medowe against great cattell.” If a property owner failed to do this, said the Court, and “if any damage bee done by such cattle, it shallbee borne by him through whose insufficient fence the cattle did enter.”12
But this by no means solved all problems. Large animals were quite capable of destroying a sound fence if they put their minds to it, and so towns were eventually forced to appoint fence viewers, who regularly visited farms to “see that the fence be sett in good repaire, or else complaine of it.” If a fence was declared sound by the fence viewers, its owner could collect damages from anyone whose animals broke into the field; if a fence was unsound, on the other hand, its owner not only was legally unprotected from damage by animals but might also be required to pay the costs borne by neighbors who repaired it. The competing claims of property in animals and property in lands were thus resolved in a way that in principle, seemed to reduce the absolute protection of the latter. In practice, however, cattle regulations had the opposite effect. Through the agency of the fence viewers and the formal litigation of the courts, towns took an increasing responsibility not only for enforcing the abstract boundaries between adjacent tracts of real estate but for guaranteeing that those boundaries were marked by the physical presence of fences. The fact that landed property received only conditional protection in law became a major impetus for fencing the countryside, and so redrawing the New England map.13
Not all English animals were equally protected by such fence laws. Swine were the weed creatures of New England, breeding so quickly that a sow might farrow twice in a year, with each litter containing four to 12 piglets. They so rapidly became a nuisance that, as early as 1633, the Massachusetts Court declared that “it shalbe lawfull for any man to kill any swine that comes into his corne”; the dead animal was to be returned to its owner only after payment had been made for damages to crops. The inadequacy of this solution is suggested by the proliferation of swine laws in the ensuing years. Colonists were glad to have swine reproducing and fattening themselves in forested areas distant from English settlements – where only Indians would have to deal with their depredations – but towns tried to restrain the animals whenever they wandered too near English fields. By 1635, Massachusetts had ordered towns to construct animal pounds to which untended swine could be taken whenever they were found within one mile of an English farm. A year later, the Court went so far as to declare an open season on any stray swine: unless pigs were restrained by fence, line, or pigkeeper, it was lawful “for any man to take them, either alive or dead, as hee may.” Anyone so doing got one half the value of the captured animal, while the Commonwealth of Massachusetts claimed the other; the owner got nothing. Ownership rights to swine were thus much more circumscribed than similar rights to cattle. The law produced so much protest from pig-keeping colonists that it was repealed two years later, but the battle of the swine nevertheless continued for many years. Complaints against pigs were a near constant feature of colony and town court proceedings, where the animals were sometimes portrayed almost as a malevolent force laying siege to defenseless settlements. The Massachusetts Court in 1658, for instance, reported that “many children are exposed to great daingers of losse of life or limbe through the ravenousnese of swyne, and elder persons to no smale inconveniencies.” To modern ears, such statements perhaps seem a little comic, but that reaction is surely one of ignorance: swine could indeed be vicious creatures, and no animal caused more annoyances or disputes among colonists.14
Ultimately, swine were relegated either to farmyard sties, where they could be fed corn, alewives, and garbage, or to relatively isolated areas, where they could feed as they wished and do little harm. Favorite swine-raising locations were coastal peninsulas and offshore islands, where the animals were free to do their worst without interfering with English crops. In the late 1630s, both Roger Williams and John
