Narragansett Bay, and colonists elsewhere did likewise. Along the coast, the animals wreaked havoc with oyster banks and other Indian shelfish-gathering sites, but caused little trouble to the English. Roger Williams described how “the English swine dig and root these Clams wheresoever they come, and watch the low water (as the Indian women do).” In one important sense, then, English pigs came into direct competition with Indians for food: according to Williams, “Of all English Cattell, the Swine (as also because of their filthy dispositions) are most hateful to all Natives, and they call them filthy cut throats.” Pigs thus became both the agents and the emblems for a European colonialism that was systematically reorganizing Indian ecological relationships.15
In the vicinity of English settlements, regulations were eventually passed requiring that hogs be yoked so that they would be unable to squeeze through fences, and ringed through the nose so that they would be prevented from rooting out growing plants. But the chief goal of swine regulations was to keep uncontrolled pigs away from settlements. At a heated New Haven town meeting in 1650, farmers declared that, if swine were allowed to forage freely, “they would plant no corne, for it would be eaten up.” The compromise solution was an order that no pigs should run loose unless driven at least eight miles from town center. Other communities passed similar regulations. And yet driving swine to the edges of town was obviously a temporary solution that lasted only so long as a town had edges beyond which were unenclosed common lands where pigs could run. Moreover, this “solution” tended to provoke conflict between towns when swine crossed town boundaries to descend on other settlements. Massachusetts Bay in 1637 pointed to the long-term solution of this problem by disclaiming any direct responsibility for the regulation of swine and delegating that burden to individual towns. “If any damage bee done by any swine,” it said, “the whole towne shalbee lyable to the parties action to make full satisfaction.” By making the control of swine a community responsibility, the Court redefined the property boundaries that applied to this particular animal so as to ensure its proper regulation. As the landscape gradually became peopled with settlements, the effect of legal liabilities was increasingly to restrain the movements of wandering hogs, until finally the beasts were more or less entirely confined to fenced farmyards.16
What became true of swine also became true of horses, sheep, and cattle: each was allocated its separate section of a settlement’s lands. The interactions among domesticated grazing animals, demographic expansion, and English property systems had the effect not only of bounding the land with relatively permanent fences but of segregating the uses to which that land was put. Even the earliest colonial towns had divided their territories according to intended function, and colonists had been granted land accordingly. Fences thus marked off not only the map of a settlement’s property rights, but its economic activities and ecological relationships as well. At the center of a family’s holdings was its house lot, around which a host of activities revolved, most of them controlled by women: food processing, cloth, and tool making, poultry keeping, vegetable, and herb gardening, and domestic living generally. Nearby were the outbuildings where animals spent their winters and some of their summer nights, as well as the various lots in which sheep, horses, milch cows, and pigs could be fed when not free to graze. In order for such animals to survive the winter, hay had to be cut in mid- to late summer, dried, and rationed out to them from November through early spring. This necessitated reserving large tracts of land for mowing, an activity which generally took place along the banks of streams, in salt marshes, and anywhere else that grass could be found. Aside from grain fields, all other lands were committed to grazing, including the upland woodlots where families cut their fuel and lumber. The key functional boundary in an English settlement was always the one between pasture and nonpasture: it was because the barrier between these two had to be so rigid that colonial towns presented such a different appearance from that of earlier Indian villages.17
English colonists reproduced these broad categories of land use wherever and however they established farms. Early land divisions had been done communally, each town deciding what agricultural activity would take place in different parts of its territory. Later divisions were generally made through the abstract mechanism of land speculation and tended to ignore both the ecological characteristics of a given tract of land and its intended agricultural use in order to facilitate the buying and selling that brought profits to speculators. This marked an important new way of perceiving the New England landscape, one that turned land itself into a commodity, but from the point of view of ecological practices, it merely transferred land-use decisions from the town to the individual land-owner. Every farm family had to have its garden, its cornfields, its meadows, and its pastures, no matter who decided where they would be located and how they would be regulated. In so dividing their lands, colonists began to create the new ecological mosaic that would gradually transform New England ecosystems.18
Livestock not only defined many of the boundaries colonists drew but provided one of the chief reasons for extending those boundaries onto new lands. Indian villages had depended for much of their meat and clothing on wild foraging mammals such as deer and moose, animals whose populations were much less concentrated than their domesticated successors. Because there had been fewer of them in a given amount of territory, they had required less food and had had a smaller ecological effect on the land that fed them. The livestock of the colonists, on the other hand, required more land than all other agricultural activities put together. In a typical town, the land allocated to them was from two to ten times greater than that used for tillage. As their numbers increased – something that happened quite quickly – the animals came to exert pressure even on these large amounts of land.19
Before examining the ecological relationships of domesticated animals, it is well to remember their economic relationships. Livestock very early came to play a role in the New England economy comparable to that of fish and lumber: they proved to be a most reliable commodity. By 1660, Samuel Maverick, who had been one of the earliest English settlers in Massachusetts Bay, could point to increased numbers of grazing animals as one of the most significant changes in New England towns since his arrival. “In the yeare 1626 or there-abouts,” he said,
there was not a Neat Beast Horse or sheepe in the Countrey and a very few Goats or hoggs, and now it is a wonder to see the great herds of Catle belonging to every Towne…. The brave Flocks of sheepe, The great number of Horses besides those many sent to Barbados and the other Carribe Islands, And withall to consider how many thousand Neate Beasts and Hoggs are yearly killed, and soe have been for many yeares past for Provision in the Countrey and sent abroad to supply Newfoundland, Barbados, Jamaica, and other places, As also to victuall in whole or in part most shipes which comes here.
Maverick viewed New England with a merchant’s eye, and regarded its livestock as one of its most profitable productions.20
Whether sold fresh to urban markets or salted for shipment to Caribbean sugar plantations, grazing animals were one of the easiest ways for a colonist to obtain hard cash with a minimum of labor. October and November saw many colonial farmers make an annual pilgrimage to coastal cities such as Boston, New Haven, and Providence, where fatted animals could be sold or exchanged for manufactured goods. This economic profitability contributed to the ecological consequences of livestock raising. Besides intensifying pressure on grazing lands and inviting more territorial expansion, it necessitated the construction of roads connecting interior towns with urban centers. No small number of trees were destroyed by the construction of these roads – they were typically between 99 and 165 feet wide – but their seemingly excessive size was more than justified since they facilitated moving large herds to market. Roads were the link binding city and countryside into a single economy. During the course of the colonial period, the opportunities represented by that linkage encouraged farmers to orient more and more of their production toward commercial ends. As one eighteenth-century visitor to New England observed:
Boston and the shipping are a market which enriches the country interest far more than the [trade in exports,] which, for so numerous a people, is very inconsiderable. By means of this internal circulation, the farmers and country gentlemen are enabled very amply to purchase whatever they want from abroad.
Almost
