Changes in the Land: Chapter 7 Summary & Analysis

There were actually some similarities between Native and European forms of agriculture, such as the way they followed the cycle of seasons in largely the same manner. However, there was a stark contrast in the way the two groups approached animals. Whereas Native people hunted wild animals, Europeans kept domesticated grazing animals. Although there was initially very little livestock in New England, this changed over time and was perceived as an encouraging indicator of the region’s wealth. Pigs and cattle were hugely important to colonizers, providing meat, dairy, and leather. Oxen were used to work the fields, whereas sheep supplied wool. Crucially, each of these animals was owned by a person, which was not the way that Native people related to animals at all.

Conflicting understandings of whether animals were property led to disputes over Native people supposedly stealing animals that colonizers claimed belonged to them. Sometimes, Native people would use colonizers’ understanding of property rights against them by arguing that colonizers’ animals had damaged Native crops (reasoning that a person was responsible for the actions of their property). Native people were theoretically given a legal right of redress in response to this, but in practice these rights were difficult to put in place. Colonizers also made Native people responsible for maintaining fences separating their land from others’, arguing that if these fences were improperly maintained colonizers could not be blamed for their animals damaging others’ land.

There was also a problem of predators such as wolves killing colonizers’ livestock. As a result, colonizers offered a bounty for the heads of wolves, giving these animals a “value” in the same way beavers acquired value during the fur trade. At times, wolf-hunting became extremely aggressive and was used as a reason for draining swamps (where wolves were believed to take shelter). As a result, the number of wolves began to dwindle. In addition to all the tensions and conflicts already mentioned, there was also an intense amount of conflict between colonizers themselves regarding the keeping of animals. Legal rulings were designed to help protect crops from neighboring cattle, but again farmers were forced to maintain fences if they wanted these rules to be enforced.  

Regardless, even a functional fence could be easily mowed down by a large animal, leading to a need for “fence viewers” to assess that the fences were solid. Overall, this all had the effect of making the boundaries between different areas of private property starkly pronounced. Meanwhile, pigs so easily caused damage to crops that legal permission was granted for a person to kill any pig that wandered onto their property. Indeed, pigs were the single biggest cause of recorded conflict between colonizers. Sometimes pigs were driven to the edge of town, but this then caused conflict between towns. As a result entire towns were given a kind of collective responsibility over the behavior of the animals. Eventually, pigs were kept confined within enclosures.

Before long, the same was true of other animals, such as horses, sheep, and cows. Land was divided by fences and animals were kept in their own respective enclosed sections. Furthermore, whereas in earlier times colonizers adjudicated the division of land communally—based on which parts were best suited to which agricultural purpose—overtime this was overtaken by an abstract emphasis on property, which was not based on environmental factors.

Livestock were highly important within colonial society due to their status as commodities. Owning domesticated animals was “one of the easiest ways for a colonist to obtain hard cash with a minimum of labor.” The result of the expansion of livestock ownership was the clearing of forests to create grazing areas and the subsequent wearing out of these areas. Further land was destroyed building roads that led to the port cities where animals were sold at markets. It was thanks to such markets that colonial agriculture expanded so much; animals were the most common commodity brought to be sold at them.

The aggressively expansive nature of colonial agriculture had a destructive impact on the environment. Soon there was far more livestock than grazing land to feed the animals and this lack of land caused intense conflict between towns. Moreover, the natural grasses that grew in New England were steadily being replaced by species from Europe. During this time there was also a proliferation of European weeds such as dandelions, bloodworts, nightshades, and nettles. Native people were aware that foreign plant species were suddenly invading their land. In order to rid the land of weeds, settlers often burned the undergrowth, then letting their livestock graze, a practice that had several unwanted ecological consequences.

Whether or not a plant species invaded a given patch of land largely depended on whether there were animals grazing on it. As a result, livestock significantly reshaped the makeup of the New England landscape. Ironically, the presence of grazing animals often ended up shifting the land such that the plants on which the animals fed stopped growing there. Ploughing the land with horses and oxen also had significant long-term effects. It allowed a single farmer to work a much larger area of land. Unlike Native people, Europeans would continue to farm the same piece of land rather than moving on after a number of years, which intensified the wearing out of the soil.

During this time, there was a surge in sediment deposited in ponds and lakes, while across the region land became less fertile. Changes to the earth during this period were summed up by two processes: drying and erosion. The drying up of bodies of water had many secondary effects on local economies. In places covered in sandy soil, the combination of ploughing and livestock exposed deeper layers of the ground to wind, which contributed to further erosion. The combination of deforestation, grazing, ploughing, erosion, and changes to water levels meant that soil exhaustion became an “endemic” problem across New England during the colonial period.

The colonizers’ more intensive farming of the land, combined with their preference for monoculture, exhausted the soil in a way that Native agriculture never had. The colonizers’ practices drained the soil of nutrients and farmers were already complaining of soil becoming unfit for cultivation in the early seventeenth century. Moreover, because livestock were generally left to wander across the land, farmers were unable to collect and use their manure as fertilizer. As a result, farmers chose to use fish instead. This did help extend the fertility of the soil, but it had several drawbacks, including producing a horrifying smell. Moreover, overfishing meant that fish ultimately became an unreliable source of fertilizer.

With neither manure or fish, some farmers relied on ash, but this carried the problem of “destroy[ing] the forests for the benefit of fields.” A lot of wood needed to be burned in order to produce enough ash for fertilizer. Furthermore, the colonizers unintentionally created ideal conditions for the pests they had (again, unintentionally) brought over from Europe, such as the Hessian fly, which had a devastating impact on wheat production. Other “migrant” pests included the black fly, the cockroach, the grey rat, and the honeybee (although this final species was a much more “benign” presence than the others).

Some pests had already been in New England in precolonial times but underwent a dramatic increase in numbers due to the shift to colonial agriculture. These included caterpillars, grasshoppers, garden fleas, and maggots, all of which could have a highly destructive impact on crops. The most serious destruction, however, was caused by a fungus called black stem rust, which had been brought over from Europe in the early 1660s. Black stem rust, nicknamed “the blast,” could destroy an entire town’s wheat production. Colonizers soon realized that the blast had been brought over on barberry bushes, another weed that had migrated with them from Europe.

By the end of the eighteenth century, it was common for swamps and salt marshes to be drained and meadows irrigated, which led illnesses carried by mosquitoes to become a more prevalent part of life. Deforestation intensified as fuel demands increased. Yet the greatest change was still to come with the Industrial Revolution. In the nineteenth century, densely-populated cities would arise. The landscape changed so much between the colonial period and the present that it can be difficult to remember how much the colonial era itself brought a dramatic transformation of the land compared to precolonial times. Before industrialization, colonizers had already revolutionized the landscape into “a world of fields and fences.”