How Did Native Americans Find Their Spirit Animals -your

Chickwallop and the Animal

Indian Responses to European Animals in Early New England

Virginia DeJohn Anderson

O ne winter's day in 1635 or 1636, a band of Norwottuck Indians noticed a strange creature floundering in deep snow near the Connecticut River. Advancing charily, they came upon a pocket-sized, horned animal, which they later described as "poor and scarce able to rise." They had never seen annihilation like it before. Unsure of what to exercise next, they traveled back to their sachem, Chickwallop, and a few days later he accompanied them to view the beast for himself. The men lifted the animal upward, but it speedily complanate under its own weight. Before long it "died of itself with hunger and cold," leaving the Indians thoroughly puzzled. Where had this creature come from? Were there more than of them nearby?'1

Had an Englishman been present to witness this encounter between the Norwottucks and the strange beast, he might well take laughed at the Indians' bewilderment, for the animal would have been utterly familiar to him. The animate being was zippo more than than a young cow that had wandered away from 1 of the new English language settlements in the Connecticut Valley. But the Norwottucks' confusion was perfectly understandable: they had never seen a cow, and there was no colonist at the scene to explicate that it was an English beast. Never before had they come up across a creature that none of them recognized. The Indians' careful examination of the beast suggested much marvel on their part, all the same their determination to fetch Chickwallop likewise testified to their business organization and, perhaps, fear.

The first and merely clarification of this incident appeared more than thirty years after the fact—in March 1669—in a scant few lines in a alphabetic character from one Englishman to another. It may seem to deserve the obscurity in which information technology has subconscious for well over three hundred years. But as an exceedingly rare account of a first see betwixt Indians and an Erstwhile Earth beast, it deserves close attention. Nosotros now know that the move of European livestock across the Atlantic was no less momentous for the time to come of America than that of the European peoples who brought them. For the near role, however, examinations of this topic have concentrated on the ecological impact of the imported animals. Even as cattle, swine, horses, and sheep provided food and muscle power for English language colonists—and, somewhen, for some Indian peoples—they too competed for space with ethnic animals, altered forest composition, compacted the soil, and introduced diseases. In so doing, they threatened Indian subsistence regimes and even, as Jared Diamond has suggested, helped establish European hegemony in the New World.2

Without denying the importance of ecological developments, this essay shifts our attention toward the cultural impact of European animals on native peoples.3 What follows is a case report of the means in which New England Indians tried to incorporate the new animals into their mental globe, and of how, and why, Indian ideas about the creatures inverse over time. For, as the story of the Norwottucks and the strange animate being demonstrates, European livestock first presented Indians with a conceptual puzzle long before subsistence and ecological problems emerged. Determining how the Indians grappled with that puzzle reveals a keen deal most how well they could adapt to new weather. In the end, however, their disability to pursue their own solutions without interference from the English exposed the uneven balance of power that characterized the procedure of colonization.

I

Due weste can never know, of course, exactly what Chickwallop and his men thought that solar day about the creature they had found. But one way to begin seeking an answer is to investigate what New England Indians thought about the animals with which they were familiar, on the assumption that they would have reasoned by analogy from the creatures they already knew. The task of recovering native ideas almost animals is complicated, even so, by the fact that Indians may not have conceived of the generic category of "animals" in the same way that the English language did—as all non-homo creatures capable of sensation and voluntary motion. Colonists like Roger Williams and John Eliot, who made an try to record native vocabularies, noted that both the Narragansett and the Massachusett languages included a discussion for "beasts" (penashímwock in Narragansett and puppinashimwog in Massachusett), but this may have connoted—every bit it does in English—a iv-footed mammal as opposed to all non-homo creatures.4

Fifty-fifty if Indians did not recall of "animals" equally a general category, they certainly recognized individual species of animals. Moreover, their conception of those animals' place in the world differed markedly from the agreement of the colonists. Indians viewed animals as different from people, just not necessarily subordinate to them. When Indians spoke of animals, they employed grammatical constructions that implied that animals were especially linked to people and the spiritual world. All words in the Massachusett language that referred to humans, spirits, or animals belonged to the category of breathing nouns. In the instance of plants, notwithstanding, only certain nouns (such as those for "cedar tree" or "pine tree") were breathing, which indicates that the quality of being alive did not, at to the lowest degree in a grammatical sense, place plants in the same grouping as people and animals. Since other Eastern Algonquian languages, including Narragansett and Mohegan-Pequot, shared common features with Massachusett, they probably included a similar grammatical characteristic.5 Such linguistic evidence is at best only suggestive, but it accords with other information that reveals a distinctive native agreement of animals as significant beings with spiritual connections.

English colonists recognized that Indian ideas well-nigh the nature of human-animal relations differed from their own, merely even the most sympathetic commentators struggled to explicate what they observed. Some of them, acknowledging the spiritual component of those relations, but asserted that Indians believed that animals were gods. Non long subsequently he arrived in Rhode Island, for case, Roger Williams reported that the Narragansetts "accept plenty of Gods or divine powers: the Sunn, Moone, Burn, Water, Snow, Earth, the Deere, the Beare etc. are divine powers." The inclusion of angelic and natural phenomena might possibly accept fabricated sense to Williams, at least insofar equally he could draw analogies from his knowledge of other, more familiar cultures. The Ancients had worshiped nature gods, after all, and even the Puritans considered such things every bit comets or fires or floods to be providences, or manifestations of divine power (though not powers in and of themselves).6 Merely animals?

In fact, the bear witness was more equivocal than Williams'due south argument suggested. In the early 1620s, Wampanoags who told Plymouth colonists virtually their creator deity Kiehtan (or Cautantowwit) declined to describe him at all. They merely informed Edward Winslow that "[due north]e'er man saw this Kiehtan; only old men tell them of him." Culture heroes in New England Indians' oral traditions—Maushop and his wife Squant in the southward and Gluskap in the n—appeared not as animals simply every bit giant humans who shaped the landscape and worked miracles. At the aforementioned time, however, Edward Johnson reported in the early on 1650s that Indians told him that Hobbamock (or Abbomocho), a deity linked to the underworld, appeared to people in visions and dreams in the shape of a deer, an eagle, a snake—or even, though Johnson's informants may have been enjoying a joke, "sometimes like a white boy." And in the same vein, John Josselyn claimed that some Indians in northern New England told him a "story of the Beaver, proverb that he was their Father."7

If animals were perchance not gods as such, supernatural beings or guardian spirits patently could presume the shapes of animals at volition. Spirits of prey animals appeared in hunters' dreams on the night before an trek. One shaman from Martha'due south Vineyard admitted to having many creature-shaped guardian spirits, including "Fowls, Fishes, and creeping things." Spirits might announced in the guise of animals during times of crisis, as in the reported instance during Rex Philip's War when—as an Englishman described it—warriors "had a Pawaw when the Devil appeared in the Shape of a Conduct walk[in]grand on his two hind feet." Indians, who drew no abrupt division between natural and supernatural phenomena, hands incorporated such experiences into their mental world in ways that Christian English colonists could not.8

If Indian comments on animals and spirits left many colonists confused, at to the lowest degree i Englishman edged closer to a improve agreement of native ideas. Afterward v years' residence near the Narragansetts, Roger Williams composed A Key into the Language of America in 1643, recording what he had learned about their community and beliefs. I of his more notable discoveries was the fact that among the Narragansetts there was "a generall Custome . . . at the apprehension of whatever Excellency in Men, Women, Birds, Beasts, Fish, &c. to cry out Manittóo A God . . . ."9 By distinguishing betwixt animals themselves and the particular quality of "excellency" that indicated manitou, Williams had fabricated an intellectual leap, no longer directly equating beasts with gods. Withal he still struggled to explicate in English terms what he had observed. His translation of the discussion manitou to hateful "a god" was at best an awkward attempt to connect an alien thought with Christian sensibilities. "Spirit" might have been a better, though till imprecise, choice, for there is no straight Christian analogue to the concept of Manitou.10

Algonquian peoples, including the Indians of southern New England, more often than not conceived of manitous every bit other-than-human beings capable of assuming a multifariousness of physical forms—including animals—and exerting spiritual power in a number of means. As far as Williams could discern, manitous among the Narragansetts most often took shape as deer, bears, black foxes, and coneys (rabbits). These creatures' elusiveness seems to have been a marker of their special status. Black foxes—merely not carmine or gray ones—"are Manittóoes" which the Narragansetts "accept often seene, but never could take any of them." Narragansett hunters had to accept care in setting their traps "for they say, the Deere (whom they conceive accept a Divine power in them) will soone smell and be gone." And although Williams offered no caption, Narragansetts may similarly accept "conceive[d] in that location is some Deitie" in rabbits because of their ability to evade humans.11

Indians may likewise accept detected manitou more than frequently in animals that were crucial to native subsistence as sources of food and raw materials for tools, clothing, and shelter. For instance, deer and bears—2 creatures described by Williams as "divine powers"—figured prominently in the Indian diet. Native peoples who lived in northern regions and subsisted primarily through hunting were specially disposed to perceive spiritual value in animals. Micmacs, Ojibwas, and Crees, among others, believed that benevolent spirits protected game animals.12 Abenakis personalized their relationships with creature manitous by addressing them as grandmother, granddaddy, sister, and brother.13 And even though various southern New England peoples, like the Norwottucks, expert horticulture to a greater extent than their northern neighbors, they too hunted extensively in the autumn and early winter, and this may help business relationship for their perception of spiritual power in their prey.14

But utility to humans was not in itself sufficient to confer spiritual ability on animals. There is no evidence that Indians perceived manitou in game birds, such every bit ducks and geese, or in fish. More to the bespeak, while wampum beads used in ritual ceremonies were held sacred, the shellfish that supplied the raw cloth for the beads apparently held no particular spiritual significance. And many Algonquian peoples feared two manitous that few, if whatever, persons had ever seen: a giant horned underwater serpent and a sacred thunderbird that occupied the sky globe.xv

What colonists found particularly hitting were not then much the ways that Indians talked almost manitous and animal spirits, only how they acted in accord with their beliefs. John Josselyn had lived in Massachusetts less than a year when he learned something nearly local Indians' regard for the powers of certain animals. One June 24-hour interval in 1639, a grouping of "Gentlemen" visited Josselyn's house and proceeded to entertain their host with a strange tale. Non long before, in the harbor at Cape Ann, two Indians traveling in a boat with several English language sailors had passed a stone on which "a Sea-Snake or Ophidian . . . lay quoiled up like a Cablevision." The sailors wanted to shoot the animal, but the Indians "disswaded them, proverb, that if he were non kill'd outright, they would be all in danger of their lives." The Indians may have mistrusted the marksmanship of the Englishmen (they were, after all, in a boat) and worried about how they would evade the thrashings of such a large wounded beast. But if that were the signal of the story, it hardly merited retelling, for the foolhardy English sailors would have been the butt of the joke. Josselyn's guests clearly saw this instead as an example of Indian foolishness. The Indians' response was represented as all out of proportion to the provocation: the English sailors were non in the least afraid of this snake or serpent. Josselyn did not elaborate on what either he or his guests thought was the cause of the Indians' reaction, but they may well take concluded that information technology somehow reflected the Indians' odd ideas about beast powers. If then, they may accept been on the correct track. The Indians may have feared offending such an unusual animal's guardian spirit. It is also possible that they identified the animate being as the Great Serpent, which in Algonquian cosmology represented potentially evil powers. Extreme caution around such a dangerous being, then, was the simply sensible course.xvi

Co-ordinate to Roger Williams, Narragansetts exercised similar care in dealing with another creature with special spiritual connections. Although crows fattened themselves in Indian cornfields, "however scarce will i Native among an hundred kil them." Children were assigned the task of chasing crows away, but not destroying them. Such forbearance stemmed from a "tradition, that the Crow brought them at first an Indian Graine of Corne in ane Eare, and an Indian or French Beane in some other, from the Nifty God Kautántouwits field in the Southwest, from whence they hold came all their Corne and Beanes." Other birds—ducks, geese, swans, cormorants, pigeons—were fair game and Narragansetts killed an "affluence" of them, but the crow's mythological link to the origins of horticulture protected it from hunters. The crow's special condition may likewise have reflected the common knowledge that shamans' familiar spirits often took the grade of crows.17

Nowhere is the distinctive relationship between Indians and animals better seen than in hunting rituals. Since manitous, or guardian spirits, could aid animals avoid an arrow or a trap, hunters had to address those supernatural protectors and, in effect, receive permission to take game. Algonquians accordingly adopted practices that recognized a reciprocal relationship between hunters and the spirits of their prey. The precise forms these rituals took, allow alone their full significance, have been largely obscured past the imperfect descriptions of colonists, who usually saw them every bit evidence of Indian superstition. But one rare seventeenth-century business relationship of the ritualized handling of a dead animal suggests something of a lost earth rich in symbolic connections betwixt hunters and prey.18

John Josselyn barely hid his distaste when he described the butchering of a moose killed by a political party of northern New England Indians, suggesting that it was naught more than an opportunity for gluttony when native peoples "stuft their paunches" to the limit with meat. In fact, his description of the treatment of the moose bears a remarkably shut resemblance to modern-solar day practices of Cree Indians, who take preserved much of the symbolic context which gave meaning to the way their ancestors killed game and which continues to inform their ain exertions. These parallels between past and present practices offer a mode of interpreting the seventeenth-century incident that goes across Josselyn's bare description.

Josselyn began past describing "young and lustie" Indian hunters pursuing the moose through deep snow. In one case they "tyred him," the hunters approached the animate being "on each side and transpierce[d] him with their Lances." After information technology collapsed "like a ruined edifice," the men moved in to cut its pharynx. It was obviously in the hunters' interest to dispatch such a huge animate being quickly, but the severing of the moose's carotid artery may take been more than than purely functional. Like the Cree hunters who similarly impale their casualty expeditiously, Josselyn'south Algonquians may have felt an obligation to minimize the animal'due south suffering. The Crees believe that prolonging an fauna's death, or inflicting unnecessary cruelty in any fashion, demonstrates a lack of respect for its guardian spirit that could jeopardize the success of future hunting.19

One time the moose was expressionless, the Algonquian hunters skinned it so the women in their hunting party began the heavy work of butchering. First they removed the eye "and from that the bone." Cree women practise not butcher game, but the men who perform the task, like Josselyn's Indians, start by taking out the heart and a thin layer of fat located across the rib muzzle, to be brought back to camp every bit "tokens" of their kill. The Algonquian women then removed the "left foot behind"; among the Crees, the posterior legs of large mammals are considered women's food and are prized for their marrow. Side by side, the Algonquian women drew out the leg sinews and cut out the tongue. Cree hunters do besides, having for centuries considered the tongue a "medicine piece" with sacred connotations. (Josselyn himself, in some other context, described smoked moose natural language as "a dish for a Sagamor" or chief.) Only and then did the Algonquian women begin removing the meat, in a place where the men "with their snow shoos shovel[ed] the snow abroad to the bare Earth in a circle." Modernistic Crees similarly prepare a clean surface earlier cutting up game.

Josselyn did not mention how the moose hunters disposed of the animal'southward bones, but other seventeenth-century Algonquian hunters considered this activity to be another spiritually charged ritual that had to be performed properly. Indians in the Hudson Valley, according to one observer, "e'er burn down the beaver bones, and never permit their dogs to champ the same; alleging that later they volition exist unlucky in the chase." Modern Crees as well treat bones in a special way—by hanging them in copse, or boiling or called-for them—to show respect for the fauna's soul. Treating the bones in a ritually-prescribed way propitiated the guardian spirit that might otherwise withhold game horn even the near skilled hunters.20

Along with tales of animal spirits and observations of hunting rituals, the very appearance of New England native peoples alerted colonists to the Indians' distinctive human relationship with animals. English language commentators described in item how Indians imprinted their skins with fauna-shaped images, perhaps seeking to invoke the spiritual ability of animals through body decoration. William Wood described Massachusetts Indians who bore "upon their cheeks certain portraitures of beasts, as bears, deers, mooses, wolves, etc.; some of fowls, as of eagles, hawks, etc." There were other motifs available for personal adornment—Woods indicated that some not-representational designs were also used—but Indians apparently exhibited a distinct preference for beast-shaped images. Many of the specific designs were of creatures commonly identified with manitous and shamanistic spirits, a correspondence that suggests that their decorative significance derived from the spiritual powers associated with these animals. This spiritual connection may explain why the Indians who wore such images intended for them to be enduring. Forest noted that Indians practical creature images non by "a superficial painting but [past] a certain incision, or else a raising of their pare by a small sharp instrument under which they convey a sure kind of blackness unchangeable ink which makes the desired form apparent and permanent." These were tattoos, non temporary applications of paint such as might accompany certain rituals or preparations for war, and Indians expected to vesture such images for life.21

Algonquian peoples employed animate being motifs in the creation of cloth objects equally well. William Woods glimpsed Indians with "pendants in their ears, every bit forms of birds, beasts, and fishes, carved out of bone, shells, and rock." Roger Williams described Narragansett tobacco pipes made "both of forest and rock . . . with men or beasts carved" on them. Corroborating these seventeenth-century accounts, archaeologists accept unearthed amulets in the shape of birds, and rock fetishes resembling bears and seals. They have found stone pestles topped with animal-shaped effigies and brass spoons—made from fragments of European kettles—decorated with cut-out images of bears. Native peoples also etched pictures of thunderbirds and serpents on rocks. Fauna symbolism, then, was of import enough to seventeenth-century Algonquians that they surrounded themselves with animal-shaped objects even as they inscribed their very skins with the images of non-human being creatures.22

It was precisely because New England Indians perceived spiritual power in animals that the Norwottuck men could not ignore the brute they had found nigh the Connecticut River or care for it like any other game animal. Did the unusual brute have a manitou, and if so, how should they address it? These concerns doubtless explain why the men returned to their village to fetch Chickwallop, leaving it to him to figure out what to do. The very fact that the animate being had been seen in the frozen marsh well-nigh the river could only have heightened their apprehension, for they deemed places such equally deep woods and swamps to exist sacred. These were regions where spiritually meaning encounters betwixt humans and other-than-homo beings were more likely to occur. William Bradford reported that Wampanoag religious leaders near Plymouth preferred to conduct their "conjurations" in "a nighttime and dismal swamp" rather than out in the open up. The Norwottucks' forbearance in dealing with the moo-cow surely stemmed from the animal's very strangeness, just it may also have reflected their business concern that they did not know the right way to treat it. Rather than practise the wrong thing and invite retaliation from its guardian spirit, they did null at all.23

If the Norwottucks' understanding of animals as spiritually powerful creatures at beginning governed their approach to the cow, this response would be tested in the coming years. Encounters with cows and other English language livestock soon became commonplace equally the numbers of such creatures grew, requiring Indians to develop a more systematic approach to their presence. Not surprisingly, Indians initially employed familiar conceptual categories every bit they did so, fitting livestock into native understandings of what animals were, rather than altering their formulation of what animals were to fit the new creatures. Only as predictably, the colonists intervened to redirect this process of incorporating new animals into the New Globe to suit their ain purposes.

II

Native peoples starting time attempted to incorporate the new creatures into their world literally on their own terms. Instead of using English vocabulary or giving livestock newly-invented names, which would have emphasized their alien origins, Indians assigned them the names of the indigenous wild creatures they most closely resembled in appearance and behavior. Thus Roger Williams reported that when the Narragansetts noticed that an ockqutchaun, or woodchuck, was "near the bignesse of a Pig, and root[ed] like a Pig," they decided to "requite this proper name to all our Swine" They similarly assigned a native name to a horse—naynayoȗmewot—although Williams neglected in this example to explain the word choice.24

This naming technique represented one part of a broader strategy whereby Indians emphasized similarities between familiar objects and European appurtenances as a mode of easing their incorporation into native guild. Williams offered numerous examples of this practice at work. Noticing "a consimilitude betwixt our Guns and Thunder," the Narragansetts called a gun "Péskunck, and to discharge [it] Peskhómmin that is to thunder." The Narragansett give-and-take for "carmine copper kettle" (mishquokuk)—an English trade item—combined the terms for "reddish earth" (mishquock) and "kettle" (aúcuck). The discussion for "letter" became wussuckwhèke, derived from the verb "to paint" (wussuckwhómmin), because, Williams explained, "having no messages, their painting comes the neerest." They called a shallop wunnauanoȗnuck and a skiff wunnauanounuckquèse, using variations of a generic term for "carrying Vessells." Identifying Englishmen by their distinctive possessions, Narragansetts chosen them chauquaquock ("knive-men" in Williams's translation) or wautaconâuog ("coatmen"). At other times, they merely called Englishmen waútacone, or "stranger."25

Which items the Narragansetts chose to proper name is only as revealing as the style in which they went about naming them. Not all English goods received native names, at least in 1643 when Williams recorded Narragansett vocabulary. In addition to the terms mentioned higher up, Narragansetts had words for cloth, gunpowder, box, key, and fe—but not for a variety of English language foods, tools, or buildings with which they had almost certainly come up into contact.26 Obviously the most impressive or desirable goods—and, of course, the colonists themselves—start required Narragansett names, for the Indians coveted the objects and had to deal with colonists in social club to become them. Lilliputian wonder that livestock figured so prominently on the list too. They were unusual, numerous, and, unlike any of the other goods the English brought with them, capable of initiating contact with native people on their own.

Much as native language at start shaped the Indians' identification of English creatures, native ideas about animals every bit spiritually powerful beings governed early encounters with the unfamiliar beasts. In applying those ideas, New England Indians may have cautiously employed the concept of manitou to describe domestic animals' strange and as even so imperfectly understood powers. This, at least, would explain a curious incident recorded by John Winthrop in 1642. That summer, New England was brimful in rumors of a Narragansett conspiracy against the colonists. Three Indian informers came forward in August to confirm the colonists' worst fears, and one of them had been inspired to do so by an ominous encounter with an English brute. The Indian had recently been "hurt near to expiry" past a cart drawn by an ox. Assuming that this was no ordinary accident, he sent for Connecticut's governor, John Haynes. Information technology was clear that "Englishman'due south God was angry with him," the injured man explained, for that God "had prepare Englishman's cow to impale him, because he had concealed such a conspiracy against the English." Thus the injured human being felt compelled to make a confession.27

Puritan believers in divine providence—including both Winthrop and Haynes—would have been just as likely to detect a godly admonition in such an accident. Only they would have been less prone to focus on the ox as God'due south musical instrument of penalisation. For an Indian thoroughly accustomed to the idea of animals' spiritual agency, however, the ox'due south behavior attracted specific attention. Its spiritual protector—which either the Indian himself or, more likely, his English interlocutors identified every bit "Englishman'due south God"—had demonstrated quite clearly its power to harm and a desire for propitiation that the Indian ignored at his peril.

This assimilation of new creatures and objects on Indian terms was hardly unique to New England, and probably typified North American Indians' responses to contact with Europeans and their possessions. But as they accepted imported copper and glass beads every bit equivalents of native copper and quartz crystals, Indians seem to accept initially conceived of English animals as variants of indigenous beasts. And, every bit the incident with the ox suggests, the notion that sure substances and creatures might have ritual significance or spiritual power could readily be transferred to imported objects and animals. The flexible thought of manitou, practical to new creatures and things, may have offered a particularly constructive mode of incorporating them into native cultures without requiring whatsoever significant changes in Indian beliefs or behavior.28

In seventeenth-century New England, withal, the Indians' liberty to think about English language animals as they wished diminished over time equally the numbers of colonists and their herds multiplied. Linguistic changes revealed the Indians' growing understanding that English livestock were not really like indigenous creatures. The Narragansetts abandoned analogies to local fauna and created new names for livestock that employed English words and thus recognized the animals' alien character. Swine were no longer woodchucks just hógsuck or pígsuck; cows became côwsnuck, and goats, gôatesuck. Equally Roger Williams explained, "This Termination suck, is mutual in their language; and therefore they adde it to our English Cattell, non else knowing what names to requite them."29

This determination was not as arbitrary equally Williams suggested. John Eliot's study of Massachusett grammar revealed that the suffix og (which may have been pronounced uck by the Narragansetts) formed the plural of whatever substantive representing an brute. Eliot so echoed Williams'southward observations by noting that Massachusett Indians called oxen oxesog and horses horsesog. When some Indians began learning English, they continued to combine English terms with native linguistic forms. William Wood, for instance, heard native hunters phone call a mare caught in a deer trap an "Englishman's squaw horse." He proceeded to ridicule them for having "no better epithet than to call her a woman'due south horse" fifty-fifty though they probably used the word "squaw" every bit an adjective simply to indicate that it was a female person fauna.30

The invention of neologisms and English-linguistic communication phrases symbolized the way in which Indians increasingly viewed livestock on English terms—an adaptation that was scarcely voluntary. Just irresolute names was just one small footstep in the procedure whereby Indians lost the power to incorporate domestic animals into their globe in their own mode. The colonists cared less near what the Indians called the animals than how they treated them. Most of all, they insisted that Indians recognize livestock as zip more (and zilch less) than property. Prior to the colonists' arrival, New England Indians regarded animals as belongings but after they were killed.31 And even and then—as Josselyn'due south description of the moose chase indicates—successful hunters shared their compensation with members of the hunting political party and their kin. There was no equivalent in the natives' earth (with the possible exception of dogs) to the breathing property that accompanied English colonists from the Old World to the New. Their thinking about livestock, and not just their names for them, would take to change.

From the moment in the spring of 1631 when the Massachusett sachem Chickataubut paid a beaver pare in recompense for a pig killed by one of his men, New England Indians discovered that English ideas most livestock equally property would overshadow any natives might take thought most the animals. They learned that cattle, horses, and swine should no more than be killed than English language goods should exist stolen from colonists' houses. Indians who hurt livestock, even inadvertently, faced prosecution in colonial courts. They could not retaliate directly against domestic animals that damaged their planting fields, but had to seek retribution through legal channels and learn to build fences to protect their crops. With English owners interim as such powerful human protectors, information technology may have seemed to Indians that livestock hardly needed spiritual guardians. Never before, in their feel, had "belongings" proven and so troublesome or belongings owners so indifferent to keeping it nether their command.32

Ironically, the colonists' lax supervision of their domestic animals—a applied response to a scarcity of labor—strengthened their insistence that Indians recognize livestock as property. Because the animals ranged freely, it was all the more of import that Indians acquire to get out them alone. Every bit far as the English settlers were concerned, the condition of domestic animals as property dated from time out of heed and had nothing to do with methods of husbandry. The connexion was evident in the word "cattle" itself, which shared etymological roots both with "chattel" and "capital."33 The colonists' intransigence on this point only intensified when they learned how efficiently their gratuitous-ranging fauna holding furthered the cause of purple expansion. The English, more than other European colonizers, conceived of their New Earth empire as the extension of dominion over land, more than control of indigenous peoples or resources. Colonial livestock, foraging freely in forest and meadows, enlarged the compass of English occupation far beyond the premises of towns and villages. And because the colonists believed that grazing livestock "improved" the state, domestic animals legitimized their claim to tracts where Indians merely hunted—an action that did not, as far as the English were concerned, secure their rights to property. John Winthrop spoke for many of his fellow colonists when he asserted that the Indians had no legitimate title to land "for they inclose no footing, neither take they cattell to maintayne information technology." The fact that the colonists, at least during much of the seventeenth century, "inclosed" relatively little ground themselves and scarcely used their animals to maintain it went unremarked.34

Livestock wandered off into fields and woods, but colonists insisted that an invisible tether still connected them to their owners. A missing animal was missing property, and since Indians frequented the fields and woods, they were the likeliest suspects when creatures disappeared. The lack of corroborating evidence offered no obstacle to prosecuting native people who were known to harbor superstitions nearly animals rather than a respect for them as property. Thus in 1668 the Plymouth Colony court ordered Mekamoo to pay 50 shillings to William Pointing just "on suspition" of killing Pointing's cow. Just if evidence later demonstrated Mekamoo's innocence could he have "the said sume returned to him againe." This inversion of the usual assumptions about guilt and innocence was surely non unique, at least where Indians were concerned, and testified to the colonists' readiness to entertain doubts nigh Indians' honesty without reasonable proof.35

The expansion of the colonists' rule inside New England only encouraged greater disrespect in the making of such accusations. Jeremy Adams of Springfield, at least, did not let the lack of proof hinder him in lodging a particularly audacious complaint in 1669. Without so much as a shred of hard show, he insisted that Chickwallop and his men more than thirty years earlier had killed one of his cows—none other than the strange beast the Indians had found near the Connecticut River. Now Adams wanted justice, or at least compensation. Unable to make his word a sufficient defense force against this outrageous accuse, Chickwallop appealed to John Pynchon, the almost influential Englishman in the valley, for support. In protesting his innocence, the sachem recalled his men'south surprise at finding the unusual beast so many years earlier and offered a description and then detailed that Pynchon could identify it every bit a two- or "at the most" three-yr-old cow. Convinced that Chickwallop was telling the truth, Pynchon defended him in a letter to Connecticut's governor, John Winthrop Jr., and offered his own stance virtually the errant moo-cow. "[B]due east it what information technology will or whosever it was," Pynchon declared, "I have already heard that it died of itself."36 The intercession of Pynchon and Winthrop apparently protected Chickwallop from further harassment, but their support—equally much as Adams'southward accusation—upheld the colonists' view that cows were property. Adams'due south charge failed to stick because he could not testify that the cow was his or that Chickwallop had killed it. Had Adams managed to substantiate both of these claims, Chickwallop—no thing what he had thought about the cow—would have been in trouble.

The story of Chickwallop and the beast reveals the extent to which English livestock helped to reshape the cultural, and non but the concrete, environment in which New England's Indians lived. Indians and colonists had deeply-embedded—and quite different—ideas near what animals were and how they should exist treated, which guaranteed that encounters over livestock would become opportunities for cultural commutation. The Indians' initial response—an power to have the new creatures and fifty-fifty to perceive in them testify of manitou—indicated their willingness to negotiate the terms nether which livestock might exist incorporated into the New World. Merely the colonists showed none of the flexibility necessary for such an exchange. Their understanding of domestic animals equally belongings only grew firmer in the context of colonization. Because colonists believed that their livestock helped constitute English claims to Indian state and thus furthered the cause of English dominion, their status as chattel—equally proxies for English language occupants—could not be negotiable. The seemingly inexorable growth in the number of English settlers and English animals eventually tipped the balance in the colonists' favor, ensuring that their views would prevail. As Chickwallop came to understand just too well, that initial encounter with the cow was a fateful one indeed.

Notes

one. John Pynchon to John Winthrop Jr., March v, 1668/69, in Carl Bridenbaugh, ed., The Pynchon Papers, 2 vols. (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1982–85), 1:79–eighty. I thank Kevin Sweeney for this reference and for his identification of Chickwallop as the Norwottucks' sachem.

2. Key works in this area include two books past Alfred W. Crosby Jr.: The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1972) and Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), as well every bit William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983); Carolyn Merchant, Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and Scientific discipline in New England (Chapel Hill, Due north.C.: Academy of North Carolina Press, 1989); and, more generally, Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W. Due west. Norton & Co., 1997).

three. Much new work in environmental history has also begun to examine the cultural impact of ecological change. See, for case, the essays in William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Man Place in Nature (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1995).

four. Roger Williams, A Key into the Linguistic communication of America (1643), ed. John J. Teunissen and Evelyn J. Hinz (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973), 173; John Eliot, The Indian Grammar Begun . . . (Cambridge, Mass: Marmaduke Johnson, 1666), 9. On the difficulty in recovering Indian ideas about the natural world, see Richard White, "Indian Peoples and the Natural World: Request the Right Questions," in Rethinking American Indian History, ed. Donald L. Fixico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Printing, 1997), 87–100. I thank Jim Drake for this reference.

5. Ives Goddard and Kathleen J. Bragdon, Native Writings in Massachusett, 2 vols., Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society, no. 185, (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1988), two:486–87; Ives Goddard, "Eastern Algonquian Languages," in Bruce M. Trigger, ed., Handbook of N American Indians, vol. xv, Northeast (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1978), 70–77.

half dozen. Roger Williams to Gov. John Winthrop, February 28, 1637/38, in Glenn W. LaFantasie, ed., The Correspondence of Roger Williams, 2 vols. (Hanover and London: Chocolate-brown University Printing/Academy Printing of New England, 1988), i:146. For Puritan beliefs in eclipses and other "wonders," come across David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Pop Religious Belief in Early New England (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), esp. chaps. 2, 5.

7. Edward Winslow, "Good Newes from New England. . ." [1624], in Alexander Young, ed., Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers of the Colony of Plymouth, from 1602 to 1625 (Boston: C. C. Little and J. Dark-brown, 1841), 356–57; William Southward. Simmons, Spirit of the New England Tribes: Indian History and Folklore, 1610–1984 (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1986), 38–41, 172–234; Edward Johnson, Johnson'south Wonder-Working Providence 1628–1651 [1654], ed. J. Franklin Jameson (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1910), 263; Paul J. Lindholdt, ed., John Josselyn, Colonial Traveler: A Critical Edition of Two Voyages to New-England (Hanover: University Printing of New England, 1988), 97. Come across likewise Kathleen J. Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 1500–1650 (Norman, Okla., and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996), 188–90 and, more generally, William S. Simmons, "Cultural Bias in the New England Puritans' Perception of Indians," William and Mary Quarterly, 3^d ser., 38 (1981): 56–72.

8. Merchant, Ecological Revolutions, 49; Henry Whitfield, "Strength Out of Weaknesse; or a Glorious Manifestation of the Further Progresse of the Gospel among the Indians in New England" [1652], in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Club, 3^d ser., 4 (1834): 187; Simmons, Spirit of the New England Tribes, 51. Virtually every written report of Native American spirituality emphasizes the lack of a abrupt boundary between the natural and supernatural worlds. Come across, for instance, James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Competition of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 16; Colin G. Calloway, New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 72–73; Clara Sue Kidwell, "Science and Ethnoscience: Native American World Views as a Factor in the Development of Native Technologies," in Kendall E. Bailes, ed., Environmental History: Disquisitional Problems in Comparative Perspective (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1985), 277–87.

9. Williams, Key into the Language of America, ed. Teunissen and Hinz, 191.

10. Variations in modern definitions of manitou propose that scholars today share Williams's difficulty in trying to discover a precise translation that would be meaningful to non-Indian readers. Run across, for instance, Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 184–90; Simmons, Spirit of the New England Tribes, 38–41; Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500–1643 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 37–39; John A. Grim and Donald P. St. John, "The Northeast Woodlands," in Native American Religions: North America, ed. Lawrence East. Sullivan (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 118; Elisabeth Tooker, ed., Native Northward American Spirituality of the Eastern Woodlands: Sacred Myths, Dreams, Visions, Speeches, Healing Formulas, Rituals and Ceremonials (New York: Paulist Press, 1979), 11–thirty.

11. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Dandy Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 25; Williams, Key into the Language of America, ed. Teunissen and Hinz, 173, 174, 225.

12. Grand. K. Bennett, "The Food Economy of the New England Indians, 1605–75," Periodical of Political Economy 63 (Oct 1955): 387–88.

13. Peradventure the best known historical report of the spiritual element in human-animate being relations in Indian society is Calvin Martin, Keepers of the Game: Indian-Brute Relationships and the Fur Trade (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). Martin's thesis about the furnishings of European contact and the fur trade on the Indian-beast relationship has sparked considerable criticism, but his clarification of pre-contact relations remains useful. For Martin'due south critics, come across Shepard Krech 3, ed., Indians, Animals, and the Fur Trade: A Critique of Keepers of the Game (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1981). In that location are numerous examples of Indian conceptions of animal spirits in Trigger, ed., Handbook of N American Indians, vol. fifteen, Northeast; see, for case, 84, 139, 192, 319. See also Colin One thousand. Calloway, The Western Abenakis of Vermont, 1600–1800: War, Migration, and the Survival of an Indian People (Norman, Okla.: Academy of Oklahoma Press, 1990), 49–fifty; Ruth Underhill, Red Man'due south Religion: Beliefs and Practices of the Indians North of Mexico (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 41–46.

fourteen. Grand. Thousand. Bennett estimated that southern New England Indians derived 65 percent of their daily calories from grain products, and 10 percent from meat; run into "Food Economy of the New England Indians," 392. For hunting in native New England, see Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 117–18; Cronon, Changes in the Land, 46–51.

fifteen. Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 97–98, 187–88; Williams, Cardinal into the Language of America, ed. Teunissen and Hinz, 182, 210–14; William Wood, New England'southward Prospect, ed. Alden T. Vaughan (Amherst: Academy of Massachusetts Press, 1977), 81, 85, 111.

16. Lindholdt, ed., John Josselyn, Colonial Traveler, 20; Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 187–88; White, Middle Basis, 507.

17. Williams, Key into the Language of America, ed. Teunissen and Hinz, 164; Williams described children stationed in "niggling watch-houses" to hunt birds from cornfields, see 163. On shamans' familiar spirits, see Simmons, Sprit of the New England Tribes, 91.

18. Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 133–34, 195–96.

xix. The information in this and the following paragraph is from Lindholdt, ed., John Josselyn, Colonial Traveler, 98–99; John Josselyn, New Englands Rarities Discovered: In Birds, Beasts, Fishes, Serpents, and Plants of that Land (London: G. Widdowes, 1672), 20; Robert A. Brightman, Grateful Prey: Stone Cree Homo-Animal Relationships (Berkeley: Academy of California Press, 1993), 110–13, 117, 120, 123–32; Adrian Tanner, Bringing Home Animals: Religious Credo and Fashion of Product of the Mistassini Cree Hunters (New York: St. Martin's Printing, 1979), 155–56.

20. Adriaen Van der Donck, A Description of the New Netherlands, ed. Thomas F. O'Donnell (Syracuse,: Syracuse University Press, 1968), 120; Brightman, Grateful Prey, 118–19, 132–33.

21. Wood, New England'due south Prospect, ed. Vaughan, 85. For English colonists' fascination with Indian appearances, meet Karen Ordahl Kupperman, "Presentment of Civility: English language Reading of American Self-Presentation in the Early Years of Colonization," William and Mary Quarterly, iii^d ser., 54 (1997): 193–228.

22. Wood, New England's Prospect, ed. Vaughan, 85; Williams, Primal into the Language of America, ed. Teunissen and Hinz, 127. For archaeological findings, see Charles C. Willoughby. Antiquities of the New England Indians (Cambridge: Peabody Museum of American Archeology and Ethnology, 1935), 106–x, 164, 166, 169–70; Bragdon, Native People of Southern New England, 118–nineteen, 187; Patricia East. Rubertone, Grave Undertakings: An Archeology of Roger Williams and the Narragansett Indians (Washington, D.C. and London: Smithsonian Institution Printing, 2001), 150–51, 156.

23. William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation 1610–1647, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1952), 84; George R. Hamell, "Mythical Realities and European Contact in the Northeast During the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries," Human being in the Northeast, 33 (1987): 69; Constance A. Crosby, "The Algonkian Spiritual Landscape," in Peter Benes, ed., Algonkians of New England: Past and Nowadays, The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, Annual Proceedings 1991 (Boston: Boston University, 1993), 35–41.

24. Williams, Cardinal into the Language of America, ed. Teunissen and Hinz, 173–74. James Trumbull translated ockqutchaun as woodchuck; run into his Natick Lexicon, Bureau of American Ethnology, Smithsonian Institution, Bulletin 25 (Washington, DC., 1903), 277. Other Indian peoples similarly drew on analogies with ethnic creatures in naming Old Earth animals. The Nahuatl or Mexico initially chosen a equus caballus maçatl (deer), a mare cihuamaçatl (female deer), and, interestingly, a sheep ichcatl (cotton wool); see James Lockhart, The Nahuas After the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth Through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 279–80. Mayan Indians at commencement chosen a equus caballus a "tapir of Castile"; encounter Inga Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucutan, 1517–1570 (Cambridge: Cambridge Academy Press, 1987), 137.

25. Williams, Key into the Language of America, ed. Teunissen and Hinz, 103, 121, 133, 137, 138, 158, 176, 240.

26. Williams, Key into the Language of America, ed. Teunissen and Hinz. 125, 216, 234.

27. White, Middle Ground, 25; Richard Due south. Dunn, James Barbarous, and Laetitia Yeandle, eds., The Journal of John Winthrop 1630–1649 (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1996), 406. For another discussion of Indians' imputing spiritual power to European livestock, see Rebecca Kugel, "Of Missionaries and Their Cattle: Ojibwa Perceptions of a Missionary as Evil Shaman," Ethnohistory 41 (1994): 227–44.

28. Christopher L. Miller and George R. Hamell, "A New Perspective on Indian-White Contact: Cultural Symbols and Colonial Trade," Journal of American History, 73 (1986–1987): 311–28; White, Middle Ground, 25; Constance Crosby, "From Myth to History, or Why King Philip'due south Ghost Walks Abroad," in Marker P. Leone and Parker B. Potter, eds., The Recovery of Meaning: Historical Archaeology in the Eastern The states (Washington, D.C., and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988), 183–209.

29. Williams, Cardinal into the Language of America, ed. Teunissen and Hinz, 174. They adopted a similar change in their discussion for "Englishmen," which became Englishmánnuck; run into 197.

30. Eliot, Indian Grammar Begun, 9; Forest, New England's Prospect, ed. Vaughan, 106–7.

31. Cronon, Changes in the Land, 64, 130.

32. Dunn, et al., eds., Journal of John Winthrop, 52; Virginia DeJohn Anderson, "Male monarch Philip's Herds: Indians, Colonists, and the Problem of Livestock in Early New England," William and Mary Quarterly, 3^d ser., 51 (1994): 607–13; Peter Karsten, "Cows in the Corn, Pigs in the Garden, and 'the Problem of Social Costs': 'Loftier' and 'Low' Legal Cultures of the British Diaspora Lands in the 17^thursday, eighteen^th, and 19^thursday Centuries," Police & Gild Review 32 (1998): 80–83.

33. Oxford English Dictionary, south.v. "cattle"; see too Gary L. Francione, Animals, Belongings, and the Law (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), 34.

34. Allyn B. Forbes, et al., eds., Winthrop Papers, 1498–1634, 6 vols. (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1929–1992), 2: 120. On English ideas of empire, run across Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and French republic c. 1500–c. 1800 (New Oasis: Yale University Press, 1995), 76–78; Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe'south Chickwallop and the Beast Conquest of the New Globe 1492–1640 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), chap. 1. On free-range livestock husbandry in New England, see Anderson, "King Philip's Herds," 604; Howard Due south. Russell, A Long, Deep Furrow: Three Centuries of Farming in New England (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1976), chap. four; Cronon, Changes in the Land, 141–42; Darrett B. Rutman, Husbandmen of Plymouth: Farms and Villages in the Erstwhile Colony, 1620–1692 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 17–xix.

35. Nathaniel Shurtleff and David Pulsifer, eds., Records of the Colony of New Plymouth in New England, 12 vols. (Boston: W. White, 1855–1861), iv:190–91. For other examples of Indians being defendant of killing livestock without due proof, see Shurtleff and Pulsifer, eds., Records of the Colony of New Plymouth, ix:209; Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, ed., Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, 5 vols. (Boston: W. White, 1853–1854), vol. 4, pt. ii, p. 361.

36. Bridenbaugh, ed., Pynchon Papers, one:79–fourscore.

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