Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England

In this chapter, Cronon describes the methods that pre-colonial settlers used to clear land for farming and to fell trees for sale as timber, as well as explaining the types of trees harvested for various commercial purposes. For example, the white pines of northern New England—up to 200 feet tall and 4-6 feet in diameter—were harvested as masts for English shipbuilding. The trees remaining in Europe were not tall enough or straight enough to serve as masts without piecing timber together. Maine and New Hampshire’s white pines ensured England’s primacy as a naval power, particularly during the latter half of the seventeenth century. Other tree species felled for ship building included white oak and black oak. By the middle of the eighteenth century, 24 lumber mills operated in Maine and New Hampshire for the processing of large trees.

Settlers also cleared forests in order to plant crops and build homesteads. The methods used to kill individual trees within a field intended for crops, leaving the trees in place to act as fertilizer as they rotted, included girdling and “driving a piece” (111). “Driving a piece” consisted of a process during which lumberers placed notches in a row of smaller trees and felled a large tree on top of them, allowing the smaller trees to break the fall of the larger tree as it was taken down. Once the larger tree was removed, settlers could use the smaller trees for fencing, as wood for heating, or simply in place, to rot and enrich the soil for the immediate planning of maize. Maize crops then ceded to other crops as the soil was gradually enriched by the rotting wood.

Though the commercial harvesting of timber was a substantial business, farmers were much more influential in the destruction of forests than was the timber trade. In fact, the largest depletion of timber occurred for heating homes, a voracious consumption of wood that could only be assuaged by the forests. For example, Boston achieved wood scarcity by 1638 (121), while the average home consumed 30 or 40 cords of wood per year, which equaled an acre of forest (120).

Through commerce and farming, New Englanders deforested the land at a rapid rate, using practices that incurred much waste through burning whole forests to clear farmland, girdling—removing a strip of bark around the entire trunk of a tree that eventually killed the tree—, or simply setting fire to wood that was not considered worth the labor of moving.

Widespread deforestation led to severe weather changes in addition to the inconvenient lack of wood for heating, building fences, or housing. Without the forests to conserve and trap winter snow and absorb spring runoff, floods frequently occurred. Winters became colder and windier, while summers became dryer and hotter.

In this chapter, Cronon explicates changes wrought to the environment through European methods of agriculture applied to New England’s environment. Both Native American and European farmers incorporated the seasons and their variations into their farming methods. For example, both Native peoples and the colonists began working the fields in March, planting in late March, April, and May. Summer brought an abundance of wild berries, wild game, fish, and shellfish. The fall, August through October, brought the harvesting of crops, particularly maize. The slaughter of animals and the preserving of their meat and hides occurred in November and December. While the Europeans slaughtered their domesticated animals, such as pigs, the Native peoples hunted game, such as deer.

Both Native Americans and Europeans used the winter months to repair tools and implements while they survived on hunting for fresh game, if possible, to add to the stored and preserved foodstuffs from earlier in the year.

Initially, early settlers did not have domesticated grazing animals. However, these animals were soon brought from overseas. Cattle, pigs, sheep, oxen, and horses were the most commonly kept animals, particularly cattle. The resources used by these grazing animals necessitated two things and forever changed New England’s landscape: fences, to keep animals in their owners’ fields and out of other people’s fields, and the clearing of vast tracts of land, to create enough pasture to feed them.

As the settlers built fences, largely to contain their domestic animals and protect their crops from other people’s animals, the Native peoples found themselves locked into smaller areas, forcing them to adopt more European methods of farming and raising of domesticated animals. Fences and pastures thus imposed the European model of land ownership upon Native Americans. The old days of their careful husbandry of the forests, grasslands, salt marshes, and ocean, which afforded them a bounty on which to survive, were gone forever, just as their nomadic ways were rendered impossible by the encroachment of the Europeans’ fences, farms, livestock, grazing lands, and crop lands.

The settlers’ desire to raise domesticated grazing animals for profit seemed insatiable, even though the land itself struggled to provide the hay and land area required to keep them. The settlers sought complete jurisdiction over their environment, using fences and other techniques to create fields suitable for their grazing animals. As Cronon remarks:

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. (128)

The New Englanders created a landscape that resembled their European homeland, and shaped their farming practices accordingly.

A complex landscape and differing ideas of animal ownership required the development of methods to ensure animal ownership. For example, the European practice of turning out hogs into the woods for the summer, to forage and roam the forests, required that others, including the Native Americans, respect the ownership of such animals. In turn, any damage done to the fields of European and Native American neighbors required that fencing eventually became the law of the land. As the seventeenth century progressed, Native Americans were increasingly hemmed in within smaller and smaller patches of land by the practices of the Europeans, who built fences to keep out the Native American’s and fellow settler’s cattle and pigs.

The pre-colonial landscape was also shaped by the arrival, via the insides of imported animals, of weeds. These weeds included English plants and grasses, such as clover, that later helped transform the settlers’ pastures into acceptable grasslands for their grazing animals, just as they helped propagate more unacceptable European transplants, such as “dandelions, chickweeds, bloodworts, mulleins, mallows, nightshades, and stinging nettles” (143). The result was a landscape whose plant life changed from native plants to European ones over just a few dozen years.

By burning the underbrush to encourage the growth of grasslands within the forests, as the Native Americans had once done, but by performing the burning too often and failing to rotate crops, the settlers eventually ruined the land, depleting it of nutrients and inadvertently encouraging the growth of noxious weed species that were very difficult to remove.

European agricultural practices also encouraged soil compaction, due to the large numbers of cattle typically contained within a pasture and their continued grazing upon land that lost nutrients every year. Deforestation, plowing, and their drying effects upon the land caused the problematic erosion of soil from crop fields and pasture alike. Taken together, settlers’ farming and animal husbandry methods depleted the soil and rendered it useless within only a few years.