Creatures of Empire:How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America by Virginia DeJohn Anderson

Author:Virginia DeJohn Anderson [Anderson, Virginia DeJohn]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2004-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

English people who regarded the New World as a land made for livestock never doubted that domestic animals would become their partners in colonization. Colonists expected the creatures to make good use of vast unpopulated meadows, converting grass into meat, milk, labor, and profit. Improving the land by their very presence, livestock would establish English rights to territory that Indians did not seem to need. In the colonies as in England, husbandmen who understood how animals ought to be raised would construct fences, plant clover, save manure, and exercise dominion over beasts that God had placed on the earth for human use. As these efforts proceeded, cows would become powerful symbols of civility, representing the means by which proper farmers improved themselves and the land at the same time. Colonists took it for granted that Indians would recognize the superiority of an English agrarian regime once they saw how it worked.

But colonists underestimated the difficulty of transplanting English methods of animal husbandry to the New World. The work of enclosing pastures and supervising livestock demanded more effort than hard-pressed settlers could muster so long as they had land to clear, houses to build, crops to plant, and, in the Chesapeake, tobacco to raise. Apologists for English imperialism had reckoned on colonists readily transforming lands that Indians held in common into private property through enclosure and intensive use, but that is not what happened. At least at first, the material improvements signifying English settlement were less extensive than they might have been, visible mainly on small portions of Chesapeake plantations and near the centers of New England towns. Much of the territory claimed by colonists during the seventeenth century remained uncleared and unfenced, the domain of free-ranging animals and not sedentary settlers. Colonists in effect appropriated Indian common lands to serve as their own commons.

Indians would be puzzled by this turn of events, wondering how the colonists’ use of the land created rights superior to native claims. The only difference seemed to be that the English had substituted tame animals for wild ones. And even that distinction proved hard to maintain. For the most part, the cattle and hogs roaming through woods and meadows behaved just like deer and other wild beasts, and some livestock actually became wild. Only a small proportion of English creatures appeared to be subject to the colonists’ dominion; the remainder did little to advertise the advantages of civility. For native peoples confronted by growing numbers of colonists and livestock, negotiating the differences between what the English said and how they acted emerged as one of the more confusing challenges of the seventeenth century.

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