Keep off the Grass

ED: So on today’s episode of BackStory, we’re going to look at the long and sometimes sordid history of domesticating animals. And we’ll ask what our relationship with those animals tells us about our relationships with each other.

PETER: We’ll tell the story of America’s most unrelenting imperialists, pigs, with a taste for shellfish. We’ll look at how expanding animal rights actually led to greater human rights. And we’ll remember the elephants, circus elephants, that got out of hand.

ED: In the 1600s, English settlers started arriving in the region now known as New England. And at their sides were the pigs, cattle, sheep, and goats they had brought with them across the ocean. They were animals never before seen in the New World. And they triggered not a small amount of conflict with the humans who were already here.

PETER: Virginia DeJohn Anderson is an historian at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the author of Creatures of Empire, How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America. I asked her, which would have been more alien to Indians, the Europeans or the animals they brought with them?

VIRGINIA DEJOHN ANDERSON: In some ways, I can’t help but think the animals maybe are. Because the Indians, we now know, had had contacts with Europeans well before European settlement, that ship captains and fishermen would be stopping off the coast. And so there had been encounters between Indians and Europeans. But it’s not really until settlement occurs that the animals are coming along as well.

And although there’s not a tremendous amount of direct evidence of this, I suspect a lot of Indians first encountered an English pig or cow when that animal was not near a colonist. And so it was just a strange creature in the woods that the Indians had to figure out what is this? Why is it here? And what do I do with it?

PETER: Well, this was Indian country, of course. And they had lived with their own animals. Why couldn’t they deal with these new English animals?

VIRGINIA DEJOHN ANDERSON: The problem is not so much dealing with the animals themselves as with the package of ideas that the English settlers brought with them about their domestic animals. And the most significant one is that the English perceived of their livestock as property, whereas Indians did not conceive of living animals as anyone’s property.

PETER: Well, let’s talk a little bit more about the Indian perspective on these animals. They don’t have that same idea of property rights, so what do they think about animals? They don’t have that dominion that goes back to the Bible in the Christian tradition, Judeo-Christian tradition. What do they think?

VIRGINIA DEJOHN ANDERSON: Well, as far as we can tell, the native view of animals consisted, in effect, of these creatures being, sometimes you hear the phrase other than human persons. That they were living beings sharing the earth who were different from human beings, but not necessarily inferior to them.

And a lot of different kinds of animals, particularly some of the major prey animals like deer, were thought to have spiritual power or spiritual protectors. And the notion of animals having any kind of spiritual protector is heretical to the English Christians.

PETER: How did English animals precipitate conflict between the settlers and Native Americans?

VIRGINIA DEJOHN ANDERSON: They did in any number of ways. And in part, it’s because the English did not have full control over their animals’ behavior. So we find a lot of instances of English animals trespassing on Indian planting fields, destroying crops, digging up the land, and so on, creating real damage to the Indians’ subsistence practices, even to the point of pigs, for instance, going out to the coasts at low tide, digging up the shellfish that the native peoples relied on for their subsistence. Animals chewing on the same kinds of bark and eating the grasses that deer and other indigenous animals that the Indians relied on for hunting.

And especially because, in the Northeast, a lot of Indian hunting was with traps, not bows and arrows. You set a trap for a deer, but if a cow wanders into it, you didn’t make that happen. But if that cow wanders into the trap, is injured or killed, then the Indian who set the trap is liable for damages.

And where it becomes a problem with Indians without a sense of property and animals on their side, is that when they encounter an animal that’s creating problems, an Indian might be tempted to deal with that animal as he would any wild animal, which is, to say, kill it. But if he does, he finds that it’s not the same thing to kill a piece of property. And the native person may well find himself hauled into court as a criminal who has committed an offense against the English.

PETER: Well, it takes a while before push comes to shove and we have a great big war, that would be King Phillip’s War.

VIRGINIA DEJOHN ANDERSON: Well, King Philip’s War begins in 1675, almost accidentally, with a number of young Indian men raiding a village, an English settlement. And then it sort of blows up into this larger conflict. And Philip himself takes charge of this uprising. But it’s a culmination of tensions that have been building for years as the burgeoning English population has been encroaching on Indian lands, putting pressure on Indians to move away, and so on.

And when I bring animals into this story, it’s not just me doing this. This is me speaking Phillip’s own words. There’s an interesting incident that occurs right at the start of the war, where a Rhode Island official named John Easton goes to Philip and says, wait a minute, what’s this all about? Is there some way we can halt this bloodshed?

And Philip, at least in Easton’s rendition of this, pours out this litany of grievances, agreeing to sell land to English settlers, and when those settlers are the ones who are drawing up the deeds, the property that the Indians have suddenly transferred is a whole lot bigger than what the Indians had though, things like that.

But then Philip goes on to say that even when the Indians move 30 miles away from the settlers– he uses that 30 miles away– they still can’t keep their planting fields free from livestock. And at one point he says, the Indians had thought that when the English bought the land of them, they would’ve kept their cattle on their own land. And so Philip himself is identifying trespassing animals as this sort of phenomenally irritating aspect.

PETER: So Virginia, you’ve described domestic animals as creatures of empire, suggesting that cattle and pigs are more significant for the process of settlement than we have recognized. Is this just a New England problem?

VIRGINIA DEJOHN ANDERSON: No. You see the exact same thing happening in the Chesapeake at the same time. And then when you push forward into the 19th century, what you find often is that as settlers, first English colonists and then Americans, move westward, often sort of the leading edge of that settlement are livestock, who are creating the same kinds of frictions with native peoples along the edge of the frontier as it moves forward. The same kind of problems reappear into the 19th century. So I see the story of New England in the 17th century with King Phillip’s War or the 17th century Chesapeake as just the first chapter in an ongoing story in American history, in a critical part of the Euro-Indian encounter.

PETER: Virginia DeJohn Anderson is an historian at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She’s the author of Creatures of Empire, How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America.