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

“It is important that we answer this question of Thoreau’s carefully: how did the ‘nature’ of New England change with the coming of the Europeans, and can we reasonably speak of its changes in terms of maiming and imperfection? There is nothing new to the observation that European settlement transformed the American landscape. Long before Thoreau, naturalists and historians alike were commenting on the process which was converting ‘wilderness’ into a land of European agricultural settlement.”

Cronon wants to avoid the pitfall of lamenting the ruination of a fallen, previously pristine Eden by European settlement without applying the logic of historical research to determining the causes of that change. That settlement changes the landscape cannot be denied, but Cronon is more interested in the question of how the landscape was altered and by what means or practices it was transformed.

“The task before us is not only to describe the ecological changes that took place in New England but to determine what it was about Indians and colonists—in their relations both to nature and to each other—that brought those changes about.”

This passage defines the main idea, or thesis, of Cronon’s work.

“Little sense of ecological relationships emerges from such a list [of tree types]. One could not use it to describe what the forest actually looked like or how these trees interacted with one another. Instead, its purpose was to detail resources for the interest of future undertakings.”

The early visitors to New England tended to have a commercial view of the landscape and of the commodities contained within it that had value in those terms. Therefore, European writings during the early colonial period tended to list the tremendous number of resources available to merchants and settlers, rather than forming a complete view of the landscape. These writings led many would-be colonists to develop erroneous beliefs about the ease of life in New England due to its abundant resources.

“Settlers who had actually to live in a New World environment were less likely than their merchant companions to view it as a linear list of commodities. Their very survival required that they manipulate the environment, and so it is from their writings that a sense of ecological relationships begins to emerge.”

Cronon sets the stage for the writings and viewpoints of the settlers, which he will use later in the book to report with veracity on the changes wrought in the land by the settlers, the Native Americans, and the capitalists looking for quick and easy profits. Cronon gives serious weight to the viewpoint of the settlers in his evaluation and explication of his primary theme: the interactions between the colonists and the Native Americans in their actions and attitudes toward New England’s abundant land and sea.

“But there was one European perception that was undoubtedly accurate, and about it all visitors were agreed—the incredible abundance of New England plant and animal life, an abundance which, when compared with Europe, left more than one visitor dumfounded.”

The commodification of New England’s natural resources, and the encouragement of would-be settlers, provided generous inducements for commercial exploitation and settlement of New England.

“When human beings, Indian or European, inhabited and altered New England environments, they were a part of that linear history. Their activities often mimicked certain ecological processes that occurred in nature, but with a crucial difference. Whereas the natural ecosystem tended toward a patchwork of diverse communities arranged almost randomly on the landscape—its very continuity depending on that disorder—the human tendency was to systematize the patchwork and impose a more regular pattern upon it.”

Cronon establishes one of the lynchpins of his argument here: that the ecology of New England was never a pristine wilderness. From the beginning of human habitation, both Native Americans’ activities and colonists’ activities altered the original ecology of New England, and the changes only grew more significant and prominent as more settlers arrived. The idyllic views of early European writer contained their own forms of bias about what state the land was in and the need and ability of the European settlers to take advantage of New England’s rich resources.

“If the myths which Levett [a contemporaneous, pre-colonial writer] criticized had anything in common, it was their vision of a landscape in which wealth and sustenance could be achieved with little labor. Hopes for great windfall profits had fueled New World enterprises ever since the triumphs of Cortes, and were reinforced by traditions as old as the Garden of Eden. When English immigrants exaggerated the wealth of New England, they dreamed of a world in which returns to human labor were far greater than in England.”

Early visitors wrote beguilingly of New England and its many resources. In many cases, they embellished upon the ease of life in New England, some unwittingly. These were the spring and summer visitors, who never saw the harshness of a New England winter. Thus, many settlers arrived unprepared for the weather and its year-round changing conditions.

“Selective Indian burning thus promoted the mosaic quality of New England ecosystems, creating forests in many different states of ecological succession. In particular, regular fires promoted what ecologists call the ‘edge effect.’ By encouraging the growth of extensive regions which resembled the boundary areas between forests and grasslands, Indians created ideal habitats for a host of wildlife species … Indian burning promoted the increase of exactly those species whose abundance so impressed English colonists: elk, deer, bear, hare, porcupine, turkey, quail, ruffed grouse, and so on.”

Here Cronon establishes the notion of the Native American population as the conscious and conscientious preservers and creators of a natural abundance. In general, this concept was lost upon the Europeans, who saw the landscape as free for their use and supposedly already natural—that is, not requiring human maintenance as a game-producing ecosystem.

“But whereas Indian villages moved from habitat to habitat to find maximum abundance through minimal work, and so reduce their impact on the land, the English believed in and required permanent settlements …English fixity sought to replace Indian mobility; here was the central conflict in the way Indians and colonists interacted with their environments. The struggle was over two ways of living and using the seasons of the year, and it expressed itself in how two peoples conceived of property, wealth, and boundaries on the landscape.”

The colonists misunderstood the values of the Native American tribes and the meaning inherent in their mobile lifestyle. In their view, the Native Americans abandoned any sense of property right, due to their nomadic, peripatetic roaming from place to place. The colonists’ goals were to create permanent settlements, mirroring the farming and town diorama of England. Their goal was to recreate England, but with a more prosperous outcome for themselves than could be had in England. The colonist gave no thought to conservation or to a gentle husbandry of the land. The commodification of the land remained a primary goal of both the new settlers and European visitors.

“More importantly, English colonists could use Indian hunting and gathering as a justification for expropriating Indian land. To European eyes, Indians appeared to squander the resources that were available to them. Indian poverty was the result of Indian waste: underused land, underused natural abundance, underused human labor.”

Cronon explicates the colonists’ logic and attitudes towards the land. Of course, Europeans were used to permanent settlements with individual land ownership. The Native Americans had no such economic or social structure. The belief that the land was free for the use of all would prove to be the downfall of the Native American way of life.

“Few Europeans were willing to recognize that the ways Indians inhabited New England ecosystems were as legitimate as the ways Europeans intended to inhabit them. Colonists thus rationalized their conquest of New England: by refusing to extend the rights of property to the Indians, they both trivialized the ecology of Indian life and paved the way for destroying it.”

Here Cronon explains the ideology of conquest that allowed New England settlers to justify their expropriation of Native Americans’ land. The settlers’ belief that they had the right to take over the land lies at the heart of Cronon’s argument concerning the ecological abuses that followed. European property rights, asserted over unknown objections by the Native Americans that do not appear in the writings of Europeans, remain an essential feature of the pre-colonial period.

“As a result, the American Indians were blessed by the absence not only of diseases that Europeans ordinarily experienced in childhood, such as chicken pox and measles, but also of more lethal organisms that were epidemic in the Old World: smallpox, influenza, plague, malaria, yellow fever, and several others.”

Cronon states that no other single factor was as influential in the history of pre-colonial New England as the transmission of European diseases to a Native American population with no immunity to any of them. Disease and death diminished the Native people’s ability to fight for their lands; they were powerless against virulent diseases that killed between 80–90% of their people over several decades. Socioeconomic and political devastation accompanied these diseases, destabilizing the Native Americans’ way of life.

“Indian depopulation as a result of European diseases ironically made it easier for Europeans to justify taking Indian lands.”

Among the Puritans, the devastation of the Native Americans was viewed as a divine punishment upon Native Americans as heathens. Furthermore, the Puritans believed that God cleared the lands for their occupation. Many, if not all, of the new Puritan settlements in the southern portion of New England occurred on the locations of previous Native American villages. The European takeover remains significant because the Native Americans had already cleared the forest and planted crops. These factors helped the Europeans become established much more quickly than would have been possible if they had had to start from the beginning in clearing the forests for their villages and crops.

“Because Old World pathogens had such profound effects on Indian lives, any analysis of the fur trade must bear those effects constantly in mind. Changes in the ways Indians organized subsistence, made political alliances, and interacted with the environment stemmed directly from the new market in furs and trade goods, but the larger context was that of a society facing biological havoc.”

The part that European diseases played in the diminishment of the power and survival of the Native peoples cannot be underestimated, according to Cronon.

“The objects Europeans could offer in trade had certain qualities that were completely new to Indian material culture. Brass and copper pots allowed women to cook over a fire without the risk of shattering their earthen vessels, and were much more easily transported.”

Generally, European trade objects introduced a higher level of technical advancement that improved the quality of life for Native Americans. However, the prestige and status brought to Native Americans who came to own these objects was overshadowed by European contact that decimated fur-bearing animals and brought deadly diseases to the Native peoples.

“What Indians valued was often less the inherent technical qualities of a material object than its ascriptive qualities as an object of status.”

In the initial relationships between the Native peoples and the European settlers, the Native Americans focused on the advantages available to them from trade with the Europeans in increasing their influence among other Native peoples; they had no desire to impress the Europeans themselves.

“It was another commodity—like maize, more Indian than European—that revolutionized the New England fur trade: wampumpeag, the strings of white and purple beads we know today as wampum. Made by grinding and drilling the shells of whelks and quahogs until they were hollow cylinders a quarter of an inch long and an eighth of an inch in diameter, wampum manufacture was ecologically limited to the Long Island Sound area where these shellfish flourished. Never made in great quantities during pre-colonial times, wampum was a highly valued token of personal power and wealth.”

Here, Cronon explains a phenomenon of the growing capitalistic aspects of the fur trade. Wampum came to be a common currency used by both Native Americans and colonists, who purchased land and furs using wampum. Because the manufacture of this commodity took place in only one location, some Native Americans paid attention to market forces and began limiting their other activities, such as farming or burning the underbrush within the forests, in order to increase production of wampum. This example demonstrates one way in which the Native Americans became entrapped in a commodification of their way of life, at their expense, long term, when the fur trade ended.

“The colonists’ economic problem of obtaining a sure supply of wampum and the military problem of dealing with independent Indian arms were finally solved simultaneously by means of armed force: the slaughter of the Pequots in 1637 and the assassination of the Narragansett sachem Miantonomo in 1643.”

Uneasy with Native Americans being armed with guns, the colonists determined that they needed to subjugate the Native American population. Violence, not diplomacy, won the day. The violent oppression of Native peoples has a long history in the United States. Here, Cronon assures his readers that this history indeed begins with the founding of the first New England colonies.

“The fur trade was thus far more complicated than a simple exchange of European metal goods for Indian beaver skins. It revolutionized Indian economies less by its new technology than by its new commercialism, at once utilizing and subverting Indian trade patterns to extend European mercantile ones.”

In this passage, Cronon explains the Native Americans’ participation in an economic system that eventually destroyed the environment and with it the Native Americans’ way of life. Much more was lost than the abundance of wildlife and wild plants; the Native Americans lost the means to live independently as they had previously done through subsistence activities.

“By 1800, the joint efforts of Indians and colonists had decimated many of the animals whose abundance had most astonished early European visitors to New England …Such [wild] animals had fallen victim especially to the new Indian dependence upon a market in prestige goods. The Indians, not realizing the full ramifications of what they market meant, and finally having little choice but to participate in it, fell victims too: to disease, demographic collapse, economic dependency, and the loss of a world of ecological relationships they could never find again.”

The end of the eighteenth century also marks the end of the ecological wonder of New England. Cronon explains the loss of this ecological paradise by arguing that the Europeans, with complicit assistance from the Native Americans, destroyed the abundance of New England in all of its forms. The Native Americans found themselves without the means to support themselves, while the Europeans prospered.

“Dramatic as these [deforestation] changes may be, their full effect remains invisible until they can be seen in relationship to the ecological habitats with which the Europeans replaced the vanished forests … The colonists themselves understood what they were doing almost wholly in positive terms, not as ‘deforestation,’ but as ‘the progress of cultivation.’ The two descriptions were in reality simply inverse ways of stating a single fact: the rural economies of Europe were adapted to a far different mosaic of ecological habitats than were pre-colonial Indian economies. Reducing the forest was an essential first step toward reproducing that Old-World mosaic in an American environment. For the New England landscape, and for the Indians, what followed was undoubtedly a new ecological order; for the colonists, on the other hand, it was an old and familiar way of life.”

Cronon highlights the stark contrast between the ecology of New England under the Native American way of life versus the English ecology that the settlers attempted to re-create in New England. The destruction of the old-growth forests was only the beginning of New England’s transformation. The destruction of the forests symbolizes the taming of the wilderness to the settlers, while it simultaneously symbolizes the destruction of the pre-colonial ecology under the husbandry of the Native peoples.

“Pigs thus became both the agents and the emblems for a European colonialism that was systematically reorganizing Indian ecological relationships.”

Cronon explains the symbolism of European settlers’ pig husbandry, which consisted of turning them out into the forest for the summer and harvesting their meat in the fall, frequently resulting in severe damage to other European or Native American crops as the pigs wandered unfettered. This animal represents an agent of destruction, both to Native Americans’ crops because their lands were unfenced and to European neighbors whose fences might not be strong enough. Therefore, the pig operates as an agent of disruption of the previous environmental order and symbolizes the ultimately self-destructive relationship between Europeans and New England’s environment.

“Ecological abundance and economic prodigality went hand in hand: the people of plenty were a people of waste.”

Here Cronon simply states the result of his research: the European settlers to New England wasted or mismanaged the natural resources available to them in every manner possible.