Colonial Ecology, Atlantic Economy. Strother E. Roberts

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СКАЧАТЬ also of declining water tables in the wake of collapsing beaver populations.

      English settlers were also denied the long-term flood control benefits that beaver dams convey. During heavy rains, ponds acted as a catchment for flood waters. Beaver dams (which one noted environmental historian has eloquently compared to “leaky sieves”) then released the waters at a near steady rate. The large-scale transition from ponds and wetlands to dry land that prevailed in the seventeenth-century Connecticut Valley decreased the watershed’s ability to deal with flood waters. Where once beaver ponds had helped to sequester rising waters and beaver dams impeded rushing torrents, flood waters now ran freely. In the absence of such wetlands and forest cover, streams and brooks ran swifter and their height fluctuated more dramatically over the course of the year. When the weather was dry, these waterways ran lower and the colonial-era grist and sawmills they powered ceased to run. When seasonal rains came or when an unexpected downpour struck, the streams overran their banks and spread across areas where their new English inhabitants would have preferred they not go.⁹³

      Writing from the perspective of the late eighteenth century, Jeremy Belknap declared that the beaver “is now become scarce in New Hampshire,” but noted that that “the vestiges of its labours are very numerous.” Although scarce, Belknap makes clear that New Hampshire did host a beaver population in the 1790s. In the volume of his History of New Hampshire devoted to natural history, Belknap recorded his observations on the life and industry of the beaver he encountered along the banks of New Hampshire’s streams and ponds. Belknap even recorded the “frequent” practice of laying out new roads in the more rural parts of the state so that they might incorporate beaver dams as crossing points for streams and brooks, thus allowing localities to forego the labor and expense of building a bridge or causeway.⁹⁴

      Belknap’s observations suggest that at least relict populations of beaver in the Connecticut watershed had survived the commercial onslaught of the seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century fur trade. Perhaps along the secluded small streams of the White and Green Mountains in the north, or the Berkshires in the west, individual colonies had survived unnoticed by hunters. In the absence of countervailing forces within the ecosystem, surviving lodges in the far north or west of the watershed could have recolonized the entire Connecticut Valley in just four decades.⁹⁵ Of course, countervailing forces did exist (and were multiplying) throughout the Connecticut watershed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

      For example, in Hampshire County, Massachusetts, in the eighteenth century, three successive generations of artisans and their apprentices combined the trades of furrier and hatter and sold their wares to their neighbors in the valley. They purchased most of the furs for their work from the markets in Albany and Boston. A small part of their supply, however, came from local farmers and hunters. Throughout the eighteenth century, this included a small number of beaver, trapped either in Hampshire County or in the territories lying farther to the north in New Hampshire and what would become Vermont.⁹⁶ Although the sale of locally trapped beaver was rare in this period, their occasional mention suggests that relict beaver populations from the far north of the Connecticut Valley, or perhaps the sparsely settled Berkshire Mountains, were attempting to recolonize the middle valley. Only continued pressures from hunting, likely supplemented by farmers’ efforts to prevent flooding on valuable grazing and croplands, prevented beaver from recolonizing the whole of their former territory in the Connecticut basin.

       The Benefits of Extermination

      For the English settlers who dispossessed the Native peoples of the Connecticut Valley in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the disappearance of beaver, with their dams and ponds, from the landscape did bring certain benefits. To a degree, the successful establishment of English agriculture in New England depended upon the prior removal of the beaver, a fact that Joseph Peirce first grasped in the 1790s. Had Indian hunters not removed beaver through the fur trade, the English farmers who settled the seventeenth-century valley would have had to exterminate them. This would have only added to the time and effort that colonists were already expending to drain and improve the marshes and swamps of the region, a task that environmental historian Brian Donahue has likened to “the labors of Hercules.”⁹⁷

      Throughout the seventeenth century, English efforts to “improve” lands by draining them reinforced the general drying out of wetlands due to the annihilation of the beaver. As the waters impounded behind beaver dams drained, the formerly high groundwater tables that they had helped to maintain began to gradually fall. As the water table fell, wetlands dried out and many small streams disappeared. English settlers, meanwhile, worked hard throughout the seventeenth century, and later the eighteenth century, to drain what swamps and marshes remained. In the process, they destroyed the few refuges left to wetland dwelling wildlife, including the beaver.

      Some of the earliest town regulations in the Connecticut Valley centered on ditching and draining the commons. Springfield boasts the earliest extant record of town-mandated efforts at swamp draining. In 1639 the town passed a law requiring all landholders to dig a ditch along the side of the highway as it passed through their lands, each inhabitant linking his ditch to his neighbor’s. Landowners were enjoined to keep this ditch clear to help ensure “the ready passadge of ye water yt it may not be pent up to flowe the meddowe.”⁹⁸ A year later, Hartford ordered landholders in its Little Meadow to dig a three-foot wide “dreyne” along the border of their lands to facilitate the draining off of seasonal standing waters into the nearby Little River.⁹⁹ The town records of Wethersfield for 1640 mention the arms of a “three-way lete” converging in that town’s centrally located common meadow. (The early modern English word “leat” refers to an open drainage ditch.) Such efforts continued for decades. In 1667, Springfield parceled out extensive new tracts of “swampy meadow” from its commons on the condition that the new owners would “improve” (presumably meaning drain) the land.¹⁰⁰ Numerous other drainage efforts, especially those undertaken on private lands, went unrecorded.

      Changing nomenclature can help illustrate the combined impact of the mutually reinforcing processes of agricultural improvement and declining water tables. In Hartford, for example, much of the vast swamps recorded in the earliest land divisions had transformed into dry land within just a few short decades. The large parcels of swampland originally granted to town founders Nathaniel Ward and John Haynes, and referred to locally as Ward’s Swamp and Haynes’ Swamp, came over the seventeenth century to be known as Ward’s Meadow and Haynes’ Meadow, respectively. Hayne’s Swamp may have begun the process of drying out in the 1640s when Haynes sold five and a half acres described in the records as “sometime swamp, now mowing land.” The drying out of swamps occurred elsewhere as well. One two-and-a-quarter-acre parcel recorded simply as “swamp” by George Wyllys in 1639 had become “dry swamp” by the time it was resold to James Ensign later in the 1640s. A parcel of land registered as “meadow & swamp” by William Parker in 1639 became merely “meadow” by the time it was sold to Edward Stebbing in the 1660s.¹⁰¹ All of this points to the gradual draining and drying out of the former wetlands that had bordered the Connecticut River and its tributaries.

      While the expansion of arable land, pastures and meadow benefitted the English husbandmen of the watershed, the disappearance of wetlands was not without its economic downside. The increased propensity to flooding that accompanied the large-scale loss of beaver ponds in the landscape would have only been exacerbated by the efforts of husbandmen to drain the other wetlands of the valley. Without these wetlands to act as a catchment for seasonal and other unexpected storms, colonial streams and rivers often overflowed their normal banks. The disastrous flooding that the lower Connecticut Valley endured in the early 1680s was likely an early portend of inundations that in later decades would come to be taken as unavoidable acts of nature.¹⁰² Usually this meant floodwaters overflowing the same lands that had formerly been swamp, marsh, or pond. The eighteenth-century residents of Hartford accepted with resignation that the northern half of Main Street, built along the course of a swampy stream that was redirected in the seventeenth century, would turn to a mass of mud СКАЧАТЬ