Changes in the Land: Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

For the first century in which Europeans had settled in Massachusetts, there was actually much cooperation between them and the Native population. Native people traded animal furs and skins for clothing, decorative objects, and weaponry. There is little evidence in the historical record of indigenous people’s impression this trade. Yet it is also clear that in the early seventeenth century, Native people regularly approached Europeans seeking trade opportunities. There is also hardly any record of the many Europeans who travelled to America during this period, although other sources confirm that many such people did exist and that many engaged in trade with indigenous communities.

These European travelers brought the most destructive change to indigenous life in the form of microorganisms that previously did not exist in America. These microorganisms caused diseases such as chicken pox, measles, smallpox, influenza, plague, malaria, and yellow fever, and Native people had no immunity against them. Indeed, colonizers sometimes remarked on the striking absence of disease among Native populations. This all changed, however, as a result of the European presence. When a disease struck a Native village, the initial mortality rate was usually somewhere between 80 or 90%. This triggered “a long process of depopulation” which had dramatic knock-on effects.

Because the Native people who interacted with Europeans most were those involved in the fur trade, the northern Natives who disproportionately participated in fur trading were struck by disease first. However, once the diseases reached the much more densely populated southern regions, the impact was even more devastating. The first epidemic to hit the south started in 1616; the disease was likely chicken pox and there were several villages where only one person survived. In a subsequent 1633 epidemic, the mortality rate in some villages was 93%. Native people had essentially no way to defend themselves against these new pathogens. Aware of the high risk of contagion, they were forced to leave family members to die alone.

Disease prevented Native people from being able to hunt and farm properly, leading to starvation which worsened the problem of illness. By 1675, the number of Native people in New England had plummeted from 70,000 to 12,000. This massive change had a tumultuously destructive impact on Native life, as social structures were left in disarray. Those who rose to power during this chaotic time were often people who decided to ally themselves with the colonizers. The forms of medicine that Native people traditionally practiced could not effectively fight foreign disease. Many colonizers, meanwhile, chose to interpret the epidemics as the will of God, who they claimed wanted them to conquer America.

Without Native people working the land, it began to very gradually transform. Underwood grew because it was no longer being burned away; crops Native people had cultivated for years died out. The reason why some Native people participated in the fur trade with such seeming enthusiasm—to the point that animals such as the beaver ended up dying out—might at first seem mysterious. They certainly did participate, because English hunters were not remotely skilled enough to kill beavers at the rate Native people did.

There was already an important tradition of trade between different indigenous tribes and when Europeans arrived, the novel goods they had to offer made the prospect of trade very appealing. At the same time, acquiring European tools did not actually have a significant impact on improving quality of life. Many indigenous people ended up repurposing what they had purchased, for example wearing kettles they’d bought from Europeans as jewelry. For some time, corn was used as currency in the fur trade, but it wasn’t the ideal entity for this task. A better contender was wampumpeag, shell beads that are today known as wampum.

Wampum was a sign of wealth and power and was usually exchanged during important rituals such as engagements or gift exchanges between allies. Europeans therefore believed it could be used as money in their trade with Native people. Wampum quickly acquired extraordinary value for both the indigenous and settler populations. Over time, however, inflation decreased its value. The shifting status of wampum had a profoundly disorienting impact on Native social life, where power and status were already in flux. Moreover, as Native people had acquired European weaponry through trade, many Europeans became concerned about their power. In 1637, these tensions came to a head when colonizers massacred Pequots, before assassinating the Narragansett sachem Miantonomo in 1643.

Overall, the fur trade totally revolutionized indigenous life both directly and indirectly. The fur trade created a whole new system of value in indigenous cultures and, for the first time, a motivation to kill more animals than was necessary for survival. As a result, the numbers of particular species began to decrease, particularly the beaver. The beaver population steadily decreased and then swiftly declined in the 1670s due to King Philip’s War. By the end of the seventeenth century, the fur trade was no longer  lucrative. The beaver was far from the only animal that was overhunted during this time and species were further endangered by the destructions of their habitats, which was happening concurrently. Steadily, domesticated animals began to replace wild ones.

The elimination of animals such as deer had a devastating impact on Native communities. By the time that large wild animals died out, colonizers were no longer hunting for their food. Native people, however, still depended on the hunt to eat. Some villages attempted to stockpile shellfish in order to make more wampum. There was an overall increase in both intertribal conflict and battles between indigenous people and colonizers during this period. Indigenous ways of dressing changed; by the middle of the seventeenth century, European fabric was the most valuable item that Native people acquired in the fur trade. In the 1660s, the value of wampum steeply declined and eventually the colonizers stopped even counting it as money.

By this point, Native people relied on the markets from which they were now excluded. With fur gone and wampum useless, the only “commodity” Native people could trade was their land. Indigenous community’s loss of land to colonizers in the second half of the seventeenth century is the subject of many other history books, so Cronon chooses not to describe it in detail. The overall effect was that Native people had less land to use, which in turn made it more difficult to hunt. By the turn of the eighteenth century some Native communities were dependent on European livestock to eat.

Most of what is described above was more true of southern Native communities than those in the north, where there were fewer colonizers and less significant changes to the environment. Not every new form of technology that northern Native people gained from the Europeans hindered their life; for example, the smaller, metal kettles they acquired were more portable than the wooden ones they had been using before. However, there was a shift in attitudes toward private property that had a substantial impact on the northern Native way of life. Land was now something that was owned by a family and inherited, while an increasing reliance on the beaver trade meant that beavers came to be seen as a “commodity of exchange.”

However, it was not long before the beaver all but totally died out in New England. This had a number of important ecological consequences. Colonizers initially used old dams beavers had made as bridges to cross streams. When these dams eventually collapsed, they left behind mounds of extremely rich black soil formed by layers of rotting wood. This became “ideal mowing ground” for cattle. In this sense, the disappearance of the beaver created ecological conditions conducive to European takeover of the land. By 1800, the encroachment of colonizers and the effect on the landscape meant that Native people did not have any choice but to participate in the settlers’ markets. The precolonial world had been lost.