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 souls there are fifteen hundred head of cattle, besides four thousand goats and swine innumerable?”3
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