ways in which Indians and colonists organized their economies, and no commodity moved more readily from farm to city than did animals.21
Livestock production was tied to the markets of the ports by a web of relationships that extended well beyond the fall drives. Whether generating a surplus by their own reproduction, by their labor in working crops, or by their contribution to lowering transportation costs in bringing themselves and other goods to market, grazing animals were one of the linchpins that made commercial agriculture possible in New England. Without them, colonial surpluses would probably have been produced on much the same scale as Indian ones; with them, colonial agriculture had a more or less constant tendency to expand and to put increasing pressure on its surrounding environment. As the ecologist E. Fraser Darling has noted, “Pastoralism for commercial ends … cannot continue without progressive deterioration of the habitat.”22
Signs that such deterioration was taking place, or at least that the number of animals was outrunning the available food supply, became apparent within four years of Boston’s founding. In 1634, the inhabitants of Newtown (Cambridge) complained of “want of accommodation for their cattle,” and asked the Massachusetts Court for permission to migrate to Connecticut. When colonists in Watertown and Roxbury put forward similar petitions a year later, John Winthrop explained that “the occasion of their desire to remove was, for that all towns in the bay began to be much straitened by their own nearness to one another, and their cattle being so much increased.” Regions which had once supported Indian populations considerably larger than those of the early English settlements came to seem inadequate less because of human crowding than because of animal crowding. Competition for grazing lands – which were initially scarcer than they later became – acted as a centrifugal force that drove towns and settlements apart. In 1631, Bradford lamented the changes wrought by livestock in Plymouth Colony: “no man,” he wrote,
now thought he could live except he had cattle and a great deal of ground to keep them, all striving to increase their stocks. By which means they were scattered all over the Bay quickly and the town in which they lived compactly till now was left very thin and in a short time almost desolate.
Unlike tillage, whose land requirements were far lower, pastoralism became a significant force for expansion. Further, if Bradford is to be believed, it also contributed to the famous declension which helped drive New England towns from their original vision of compact settlements, communal orders, and cities upon hilltops.23
One reason that scarcity of grazing land so quickly became a problem in Massachusetts Bay had to do with the nature of New England’s native grasses, which included broomstraw, wild rye, and the Spartinas of the salt marshes. Because most of the first English settlements were made on Indian village sites, the lands of which had been regularly cultivated and burned, there were extensive areas around them where only grass and shrubs grew. Animals could be turned loose to graze on these with virtually no preparation of the land, but often seemed to fare poorly on their new diet. Many colonists commented on the relative inferiority of New England hay in comparison with that of England, and one wrote in disgust that “it is so devoid of nutritive vertue, that our beasts grow lousy with feeding upon it, and are much out of heart and liking.” More serious than the quality of the native grasses, however, was their inadequate quantity: domesticated animal populations quickly ran out of pasture, so that their owners had to clear land to create more.24
Curiously, many colonists claimed that the native grasses, although initially very “rank” and “coarse,” seemed to improve the more they were mowed or eaten. “In such places where the cattle use to graze,” wrote William Wood, “the ground is much improved in the woods, growing more grassy and less weedy.” What in fact was happening was that a number of native grasses and field plants were slowly being destroyed and replaced by European species. Annual grasses were quickly killed off if grazed too closely, and the delicate crowns of some perennials fared little better. Not having evolved in a pastoral setting, they were ill prepared for their new use. That was why European grasses, which had adapted themselves to the harsh requirements of pastoralism, began to take over wherever cattle grazed. “English grasses,” such as bluegrass and white clover, spread rapidly in newly settled areas. Initially carried to the New World in shipboard fodder, and in the dung of the animals which ate them, these European species were soon being systematically cultivated by colonists. By the 1640s, a regular market in grass seed existed in the Narragansett country, and within one or two generations, the plants had become so common that they were regarded as native.25
Grazing animals were among the chief agents in transmitting to America one of the central – albeit unapplauded – characters of European agriculture: the weed. Because Indians kept no cattle, and because their mixed-crop, hoe agriculture provided a relatively dense ground cover, they failed to develop as many of the plant species which in the Old World followed wherever human beings disturbed the soil. Like the “English grasses,” weeds had evolved any of a number of adaptations that allowed them to tolerate grazing and to move quickly onto cleared agricultural land: they were able to germinate under a wide variety of environmental conditions, they grew rapidly, they might continuously produce huge quantities of seeds designed for widespread dispersal, and they were often brittle so that when broken off by cattle or farmers they could readily regenerate themselves from their remaining fragments. A few indigenous species had enough of these characteristics that they too became more common as a result of European settlement. Probably the most prolific of these was ragweed, which underwent such a population explosion in the colonial period that pollen scientists today, when studying the sediments in pond and lake bottoms, use the plant as a means of dating the arrival of the Europeans.26
Most weeds, however, were European. John Josselyn in 1672 listed no fewer than twenty-two European species which had become common in the area around Massachusetts Bay “since the English planted and kept Cattle in New England.” Among these were such perennial favorites as dandelions, chickweeds, bloodworts, mulleins, mallows, nightshades, and stinging nettles. Because it seemed to crop up wherever the English walked, planted, or grazed animals, the Indians called plantain “English-man’s Foot,” a name that suggests their awareness of the biological invasion going on around them. Not only Indians were affected by this invasion, since colonial grain crops – and, worse, the seeds used to plant them – were difficult to keep separate from the weeds that grew in their midst. As early as 1652, settlers in New Haven Colony were debating whether something could be done “to prevent the spreding of sorrill in the corne feilds,” but did so to no avail. Many of these European weeds – to say nothing of grains, vegetables, and orchard trees – would eventually be among the commonest plants of the American landscape, their populations sustained in all places by the habitats human beings and domesticated animals created for them.27
Although the invasion of livestock was sustained by the parallel invasion of edible plants, the two were rarely in perfect balance, at least in the eyes of colonists who for economic reasons sought to raise more animals. Livestock production expanded throughout New England in the eighteenth century and brought with it regular complaints about pasture shortages. By 1748, the Connecticut agricultural writer Jared Eliot was commenting that “the scarcity and high price of hay and corn is so obvious, that there are few or none Ignorant of it.” The shortage of hay, he said, had been “gradually increasing upon us for sundry Years past,” and was the direct result of livestock populations outgrowing available meadowlands. If pastures were inadequate, old and new settlements alike had to follow the process of forest clearing described in the preceding chapter, planting corn and rye before the unplowed soil was finally ready to be seeded with English grasses. During the eighteenth century, the range of grasses which were raised for moving was extended to include such species as timothy, red clover, lucerne (alfalfa), and fowl-meadow grass, all of which rapidly became common throughout the colonies.28
Where mowing was unnecessary and grazing among living trees was possible, settlers saved labor by simply burning the forest undergrowth – much as the Indians had once done – and turning loose their cattle. But because
