Focus 580; Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America

In this hour of the show we'll be talking with Virginia Dejan Anderson. She is an historian associate professor of history at University of Colorado at Boulder and we will be talking about some of the ideas that you will find in her book creatures of Empire and the subtitle here tells it all how domestic animals transformed early America. It's published by the Oxford University Press. And here is the way that she writes about the book and what she's interested in right within the first couple of pages. She writes this historical narratives usually attribute the course of events to the conscious decisions of human actors yet this is not always the way in which history itself unfolded. Sometimes other kinds of actors were involved driven by instinct rather than reason. Such was the case in 17th century America where the lives of Indians and colonists alike often were shaped in unexpected ways by the activities of animals. This book by incorporating livestock into the history of early America restores an important element of contingency to the narrative making it less familiar but no less compelling.

Professor Anderson hello. Hello. Thanks for talking with us. Glad to be here. I'm interested in quite intrigue really with this kind of basic premise on which the whole project rests and that is that in doing history we we do tend to focus on the of the activities of people of humans. And of course rightly so but one cannot ignore the environment. It has a way of shaping history it has a way of directing the story in one down one road as opposed to another that it might go. And and to me I think that it's interesting that now apparently within the field of history there are more and more historians that are taking those things into account. That's absolutely true and what's interesting is I never really identified myself as an environmental historian until I got onto this project. And so I think even people who might think of themselves as traditional historians are now paying close attention to that very

theme about the environment. And what interested me in particular about animals is what I try to argue in the book is they're not simply part of the environment although they certainly have an impact on the environment in early America. But in some measure there are historical actors because they move around and do things and they do things on their own volition that Hume. You can't control. And that's that's an important part of the story here and something that we will talk about but I guess here a central idea is that and one might not think about it but that livestock by by their actions gave you know created an opportunity for conflict between the native people and the European colonists. Guess you wouldn't you could think of a lot of different reasons I suppose that there would be conflict and I suppose one of the first things I would think about would be well land territory we're fighting over that and that certainly is related. But having the animals be the focus

of the conflict would not have been something that I probably would have thought about and I expect a lot of other people wouldn't either. Right and if it operates on a number of levels as you mentioned it's a big issue about land. The human colonists who come over occupied land and that leads to friction with the Indians but the domestic animals that the colonists bring with them also occupy land and actually more land than the human colonists themselves do. And so you do find opportunities for friction trespass cases things like that. There are also conceptual. Concerns that lead to friction and that the colonists are bringing over animals that they consider to be property. And the notion of living animals as property is a concept that is essentially foreign to native peoples and so they have to come to terms not only with the environmental impact of Ghana move the competition over land but also come to

terms with a whole new conception of what an animal can be. Yeah well that's that is really where the the the meat of the story starts with you're exploiting these two kinds of use of animals that is the European view in the native year before going to that I guess I'm also interested in the fact that apparently as you explain in the book is the way this started was as an an attempt to understand why it is that in so much of the documents that we have that relate to early American history there are so many references to animals and not wild animals to domestic animals. What is it that you find. Well this is where as I said in the introduction the project got going because I originally intended the book to be a history of livestock husbandry in early America. And then I discovered that whenever there were mentions of cows or pigs or horses in the records there were often comment. About Indians

alongside it and so that it was it was looking at that puzzled why those two pieces of evidence would be appearing side by side so frequently that launched me on the project. But I think the animals appear so frequently because they are so essential to the process of colonization. I don't think the English could have been even remotely as successful as they were in settling the New World had they not brought animals with them and in the same story goes of course for other European groups the French the Spanish and so forth and who come to the New World Order the book just deals with the English. And because these animals are so essential and in fact outnumber the human colonists that it's almost inevitable that they would show up. Sooner or later but the sorts of sources they're showing up in are not just court records but more of just any kind of source you can find about 17th century America has animals or domestic animals in their one place or another. And again I think it's a signal about how

significant these animals were to the colonists. This is a point that I often try to bring out in my classes here at the university because at least you know most of us in urban or suburban areas don't have much contact with cows or pigs there are horses at least directly and we tend to forget that in times past things are absolutely critical to the communities of human beings who occupied the land. One of their I think important point something for Were people to keep in mind that you also comment on here just early on in the first few pages is the the role that the native people the Indian people played in the story of colonization and 80s often the case that they as the story has been written and certainly as it has been written by. Why European American historians that it seems that often they are cast as passive actors that is that not that that it acted up the story acted upon them. Not so much that they were active

in writing that story and it is the fact that they were active in making that story and that the the the two worlds the world of the European colonists in the world and their people while they were separate. They were really very tangled up together and that that is something that it's an important feature of this story and probably as we try to understand that time that is something that we really need to keep in mind. Oh absolutely. And many of the negotiations that I describe between Indians and colonists over animals and Indian negotiating as well to try to figure out ways to solve the the situation that preserves their own cultural integrity or autonomy as best they can. We tend to forget again because we know how the story turns out. It's also very easy to assume that the Kenyans are at some point going to disappear. Course they have never disappeared. That's that's a bit in and of itself but it's sometimes difficult to remember that were

really much of the first century of colonization and cancer are virtually equal partners I don't know that I would go quite that far but are very active in political situations military alliances trade and so forth. They're very much in the picture if not fully represented in the source material which as you say is produced by by European colonists. Our guest in this hour focus 580 Virginia John Anderson. She's in a story in that University of Colorado Boulder and she is an author of a book that takes a look at the role that domestic animals played in the making of early America. The title of her book is creatures of empire is published by the Oxford University Press and it's very interesting now and if you'd like to take a look at it you can seek it out and of course your questions are welcome. 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 toll free 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 1. Well I think probably it in important. Key couple of port key ideas to get across the

road to discuss at this point it goes back to the point you made a little bit earlier and that is that the Native Americans and the European colonists the way that they looked at the natural world and particularly the way that they looked at animals were very different because the native people didn't didn't have domestic animals and the whole idea that that could you could do such a thing was kind of foreign to them. And the Europeans though they had a very different sort of view and particularly had this kind of idea that somehow animal husbandry having domesticated animals was a mark of civilization. It was progress and that and also that they had this idea and I know I realize I'm like a lot of stuff out here really quick but they had this idea also that if the Indians could do that then they would also progress. They had this idea that the Indians would just get with the program and do it. Do things like they did and apparently had a difficult time understanding why it is the Indians thought that was that was kind of odd because it just wasn't part of their

experience. So let's talk about those things well first of all talk about the Native American attitude toward and toward nature and toward animals. OK. And it's really operated within the context of a very different cosmology which is again to see if you will. Humans place within the world and and nature and they tend not to recognize a sharp distinction between the natural and supernatural world. And so it was understood that what you know we would identify as elements of the natural environment whether it's treeing rivers were animals could have spiritual power. And because these animals had spiritual power they were not identified as being subordinate to humans in any way that humans exercised dominion over them. And because animals were thought to have spiritual power humans who wish to interact with the most specifically in terms of hunting them had to respect that spiritual power so we find. For

instance in the case of hunting that Indians believed that you couldn't just go out and hunt an animal successfully without first making a gesture an overture often in a ritualized sort of way to the spiritual protector of an animal. And then if you if you perform the proper rituals then you would in effect receive permission to hunt that particular animal off and you would have to enact certain rituals afterwards. One of the most important was if you successfully hunted an animal slaughtered it there to treat the bones in the right way burned them or in some cultures hung them from a tree so that they couldn't be desecrated by dogs or other animals and so the notion really one of. That's a partnership between human beings in the animal world. Not to mention on the part of the humans. So when it was that to the native people first encountered these animals

that the Europeans brought sheep and pigs and cows. Did they. Obviously they knew they knew what they were but because they would have been different from the wild animals that they would have been familiar with and would have hunted did they. Did they in a sense recognize that they were the same. Or did they somehow in their minds think that they were in some important way different from wild animals. How did they how did they think about these two categories the wild animals and the domesticated animals. It's a process a sort of learning process over the course of early colonization what looks like a fairly common process among Indians who first encountered English animals as they certainly recognize them as non-human creatures but precisely what they are they're not sure. And what happens at the start with the initial context your contact between these Indians and domestic animals. Often I should say. These contacts occur without any colonists being around to kind of negotiate the process. Indians attempt to assess the animal its

behavior its appearance and incorporate it into their own world on their own terms. So for instance we find very fragmentary evidence that suggests that Indians assumed that these domestic animals must also have some sort of spiritual power when they were trying to figure out what to call them. The initial process was to try to find an analogous animal indigenous animal. And the best example of this is when the Narragansetts first saw pigs they tried to figure out you know what is this pig. And they analyzed the behavior of the animal its size and so on and decided a pig was most like a woodchuck. So they used the Narragansett word for woodchuck initially to describe pigs. So at the start I think Indians attempt to say OK these are these are different animals but we can find a place for them in our own way of seeing the world that is not some. That's not a process thing. Colonists are going to accept it

because in effect what the Indians are doing are incorporating these animals as a new form of game which means they're free for the taking. And so the colonists insist that the Indians recognize these animals as being different. And as that that process goes on in the first decades of colonization one of the indicators of this is the Indians begin to change the terms they use to describe the animals they don't call pigs switchbacks anymore they call them pigs or the pig with the Narragansetts suffix stuck onto it so it's a kind of hybrid word English Narragansett word. But I think that when groups to change symbolizes this learning process as they say on the part of Indians that they can't just incorporate these animals in their own way they do have to recognize their difference. And of course eventually to recognize that that these animals unlike indigenous animals are property and they can't just hunt them at will.

Well that's that. Obviously there was is was a central point of conflict because to the Europeans if you saw his kind of wandering around loose you probably would assume that it belonged to someone as you have this idea that animals can be. And as someone but the native people if that really wasn't their idea it was you know if they saw a deer wandering out they would feel you could feel free to hunt that because that doesn't really belong to anybody and how difficult was it for them to to understand to understand and accept that idea that there are wild animals and that's one category but there are these other animals and that's a completely different different thing. Well it seems as if it it's pretty difficult from the number of cases we see in early judicial record court records where Indians are brought into English colonial Courts and are charged with killing an animal that has been designated as property I think they the Indians learned fairly quickly not to go out and

deliberately shoot an animal. The difficulty comes when bands set traps in the woods to hunt deer and other other native animals because in fact much Indian hunting is through trapping not shooting with bows and arrows and a cow wanders through I mean it's not penitents fault that the cow happens to step into the trap but then the cow then that then the Indian is still charged with destruction of. Property even if it was an accidental situation like that so I think it takes a bit of time for Indians to learn about this but but because the consequences are severe enough if they get caught that they do learn it right. But the friction continues with cases of trespass and accidental death of animals because as far as the English are concerned these are not accidents and the Indians must be held liable. We have a caller to bring into the conversation someone in Mahomet near by not too far away let's do that line number one. Hello.

Thank you good morning. I thought I just had two thoughts. One was I want to address the kinds of domestic animals and the Indians have dogs. And then if I just thought of this. Was there interbreeding of the dogs in today. And then that thing about the dog and then isn't this to some extent a conflict that's like between an agrarian hunter gatherers that I do think that I could devise that conflict. OK I get the two points here first about dogs. It's true that Indians had dogs and I've been using the term Indians all the way through this conversation but I should be specific here in the books in the book I deal with Algonquin Indians on the East Coast and they did have dogs. And one could argue that these were semi domesticated but typically when. People look at that animal domestication the animals are being specifically raised for word specific purposes. And while

native peoples in other parts of North America use dogs for hunting for carrying burdens and so on. The evidence for the eastern Oregon Queen suggests that the dog function if you will in Indian villages was extremely and attenuated. They were scavengers. They may have been a kind of early warning system barking when the intruder appeared and they may have been used for hunting but it's not quite clear so yes the dog is probably the one exception here but the Indian dogs among the Algonquins were not what we would typically recognize as fully domesticated certainly. And what was interesting to me is I found no evidence that when Indians saw pigs or cows or whatever that they drew any kind of analogy to dogs it was always to another wild animal. OK so that's the first part the second part. Oh and the interbreeding interbreeding between what dogs and native american dogs.

There may have or there may have been there. This is not the sort of thing that the English common to throw down about I think it's hard to find out. The other point about an agrarian vs. a hunter gatherer culture the native P.. People of the East Coast farmed they raised crops on a certain portion of their land and combine farming with hunting and gathering so that it's not quite an agrarian culture against a hunter gather one it's an agrarian culture without domestic animals versus an agrarian culture with domestic animals. I think it's a better way to see it and the colonists recognize that the Indians did do some farming and one of the concessions they were willing to make at one point in the encounters of the early decades was to help Indians build fences around their corn fields to help keep domestic animals out.

Indians had never had to build fences because if they do you're whatever gets in your cornfield you shoot it. It's only when you have domestic animals in the environment that it becomes a problem. And so it's two different agrarian cultures I would say coming together and it's the domestic animals that create the problem. Also interesting concept. Thank you. So I run into other questions are welcome 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 toll free 800 to 2 2 9 4 5 5 and they're just an illustration of yet another of these points of conflict between the between the native people in the European colonies is that the Europeans brought the animals and. The Europeans were very busy they had all kinds of things that they had tried to tried to do as they were trying to build places to live and establish a life. And sometimes the animals were just left to kind of fend for themselves and as they will they'll wander around they'll look for stuff to eat and they had this way of wandering into the farm fields of the Indians and eating well which made the Indians extremely unhappy. And no doubt also lead in some of those cases to Indian shooting

animals or enough cow wandered into your cornfield and started eating up your crop you're going to do something about it. So here yeah it was again yet another way that the two groups of people came into conflict as a result of the actions of result of the animals doing what it is they naturally do. Exactly and one of the Indian responses to this is often if they couldn't solve the problem. Well I should i should backtrack and one of the things that's interesting is at least initially colonists recognized the problem and it ended up in court also go to the English authorities with evidence of damage in the field and sometimes get recompense from the owner of the bad stuff. There's friction here but there are also attempts to smooth over the friction with typically English legal procedures. So there there there is that. But Indians will often respond by moving away. But as you say the animals are not well cared for and so what

happens is the animals sort of move out and went in vans of two three four miles away from English settlements they find that the animals don't make it to their cornfields and so as we move further into the 17th century Indians are getting quite frustrated because it's as if there's no place they can go where they can get away from these creatures. Two we talked a little bit about the native peoples view of animals in the natural world. And maybe I should give you the opportunity to do the same about the Europeans and and one sense you would have to think that the Europeans really weren't maybe weren't far enough from their pre-Christian years to have completely gotten rid of a similar kind of understanding about animals. And yet Bush here the operative force here is Christianity in changing the way and in setting up this sort of opposing view of the world as being

something that was there for human beings to manage and to use which was not something that the native people would have and certainly not away the native people would have seen it. Right the predominant framework within which English colonists view the role of animals was the Christian framework. One of the material from Genesis wherein the word gives humans dominion over creatures of the earth and to use as they will. And certainly this this is the key to domestication domestication is in many ways just the legal expression of human dominion over animals. And this is clearly as I said the dominant way that colonists thought about the relationship between humans and animals. What I also found though is that there's this undertone of pre-Christian ideas that are expressed most directly in residual folklore about animals that animals can predict the weather that the stork leaving the chimney of the house

procedures for death. Of someone living in the House that the spoken word lingers in England and in some ways the folklore would have been a closer match to the Indian cosmology regarding animals than the Christian one. But this folklore element in English culture is really diminishing at precisely the time that colonization occur as part particularly in the context of the Protestant Reformation and so it doesn't operate to act as a point of contact between English culture and Indian culture and in fact it complicates matters in some ways because there is an analogy in English culture that might link up with Indian views of animals but it's not one that's going to create good relations between the two. And I think the closest analogy I could find was in English witchcraft where the belief was that which is often accompanied by the diabolical helpers that took the shape of animals

and hence any notion of animals and spiritual power from the English side with evil was diabolical and to the extent to which the Torah Indian descriptions relations you know explanations of animals with spiritual power. The Indians but the English excuse me would probably see that as diabolical when in fact the English were prone to describe Indian religion as. Witchcraft So you know the rest of the non-Christian undertone on the English side but it doesn't serve to smooth things over with Indians. I'm sure that in the years of early America that the European colonists had to engage in some subsistence hunting. What did they think about hunting and hunting in English culture. It was thought to be a sport. It was generally associated with aristocrats in England men of leisure from

hunted in their own deer parks and so on and so hunting from the English point of view it's tied up in notions of hierarchy. Again there were game laws in England that restricted who could hunt and who couldn't hunt. Hunting was associated with property rights because rights to hunt were connected with ownership of land people could hunt on land they own but not elsewhere and typically those who owned land were aristocrats. So what it what it did is tend to make English colonists who observed Indians hunting to associate Indian hunters with men of leisure which is of course not. Hunting is a subsistence activity among the Americans so it leads to a point of confusion. And and this this characterization of Indian men as you know Raese which is the common you know of the description that they use a lot of the record is based on this this idea of hunting as leisure also is based on a misunderstanding of the gender

division of labor among Indians because in most native societies Indian women carry out the work of horticulture farming. And then the men hunt and an English culture of course. Men do the bulk of agricultural work. And so the experience of hunting in England tended to make Indians excuse me make English colonists look at Indians and say well the women are doing all the work and the men are just out there having fun hunting. So hunting creates again another sort of cultural set of cultural misunderstandings. One other element I would just want to throw in here is that it's not clear how much subsistence hunting colonists actually did particularly New England. It doesn't seem right colonists did. Hunting at all. There was maybe some in the south in the Chesapeake but what you often find against gather evidence for work is that what colonists did was hire Indians to hunt because being Indians were better at it than the English. The colonists who are coming over are

not by and large aristocrats with any kind of hunting experience and so they often found it more efficient to have Indians do that job for them. We have some other color some people who would like to get in on the conversation. We'll go next to a caller in Charleston line number four. Hello. Yes. Hope it's not too much too quick. But my vision of West and the buffalo herds be in the introduction. Domesticated cattle and the conflict there. And then as subsets not subsystem but as agrarian types move to the west I'm thinking of Oklahoma land rush and then the conflicts between cattle barons and the homesteader. And I wonder if you have covered any of that. That's really well beyond the confines of the time period that I cover in my

book. But one of the things I do argue is that if you want to think about Western expansion even after the American Revolution as a form of colonization by Euro-Americans it's done by your own American people. Plus livestock and creates certainly conflicts with native peoples and as you suggest conflict among Europeans or Euro Americans but different kinds of subsistence practices. So it's like a later chapter of the story that I have chapter run of. Thank you. Then I think that that is in important point that you seem to be arguing is that the kind of the kind of pattern that we have seen that one sees here in early America. In these particular places along the Eastern Seaboard it does repeat is repeated as the Europeans move west. Oh exactly and also in other colonies. When I was working on this project one of the things that was interesting is I kept finding similar sorts of stories in South

Carolina in Pennsylvania in Ohio and I gave a brief thought to covering it on a larger expanse of large geographical expanse but then tried to figure out if I could ever finish the book before I retired. So riveted it to the 17th century East Coast. But it is the same story. Because Europeans European Americans cannot conceive of settling the land without ride stock husbandry is just so embedded in their own culture that they cannot imagine not having it and so it is. These animals accompany Europeans wherever they go. The same stories in Australia New Zealand and that's a guess again we made we made this point more than once but. I do think that it's there it's important that there is in the minds of the Europeans there's this link between sit between civilization and progress and domestic animals and animal husbandry and interestingly also Christianity all all four of those things all get

they they're all holding hands right and it is so much of an assumption they don't even fewer but it's necessary to explain the connection and I have an excellent example for how this works. And one of the chapters I discovered that were bounty rather was passed in Virginia now of course moves are predators and they prey on domestic animals. And so the colonists want to get rid of as many walls as possible. One of the things they thought would be a useful tactic is to hire Indians to kill the well for them. And in this case in Virginia this act was encouraging Indians to hunt wolves but the reward they would get for doing so was very interesting it was it was a cow and that the statute basically says essentially for every move that I think it is that that the Indians bring in they'll get a cow because it will bring them to civility and Christianity something right with just a blanket statement didn't

explain why but when you look into this subject a little bit more you can see the connections that were unconscious on the part of the English. First of all again. Having domesticated animals is an expression of Dominion human dominion over animals which is sanctioned by Scripture. So there's the connection to Christianity but also that laws such as perjury was brought to inculpate certain kinds of behavior that were identified as civil people who owned animals were prudent they were good stewards of the creatures and the land it was for. They rose early in the morning and worked hard all day and took care of these creatures and so it was thought that these behavioral aspects were also integral to civility. And it's so bound up there that it's that the colonists never even question the state of the culture without domestic animals could be civil. Roger Williams will moon founder of Rhode Island at one point

is urging as you say urging Indians to acquire these animals and he's very blunt about it he says they will move from barbarism to civility by having cattle. Let's talk with someone else a listener in Champaign. Line 1. Hello. Hello. Your description of the English settlers and attitude toward hunting is really interesting because the English are probably only separated by two or two hundred fifty hears from a period when hunting was strictly for the nobility but not exactly for sport. It was to prepare to acquire meat for the nobilities table because there weren't large numbers of meat animals and the animals were largely beasts of burden and they were only slaughtered in the fall of the year when the surplus animals were butchered and the meat would be gone within a couple of weeks.

No the only time the commoners ate meat Well certainly were. That's true among commoners and there have been historians to try to figure out the statistics of exactly how much meat your average English person ate and much of it would have been bacon from pigs bitch or keeper animals to keep the aristocrats would have had greater amounts of access to beef or not every day. One of the interesting things is at least within the context of Europe the English and the Dutch I prefer the. People who would have had the highest quantities of meat and also a lot of dairy products as the other element here in their diets. What's interesting is because the economists bring over these domestic animals and raise them in such numbers. There is some evidence to suggest English colonists in the new rule probably ate more meat on a more regular schedule than English people did in the 17th century.

I think that's quite pop probable. Actually I was thinking of the 14 hundreds and earlier when I said hunting was actually an economic activity actually by fourteen hundred I think the agricultural revolution had started and there was probably more meat even for the commoner. But in the High Middle Ages and earlier there was very little meat in the northern European diet they just left mechanical means of preparing fodder for the winter. Right well I'm afraid I'm not an expert on medieval England so I can't speak to that and I'm sure you're right on that. And are all I know is that certainly by the 17th century. Venison in particular was thought to be a kind of luxury. It's an interesting insight into the difference in attitude between the endianness family the settler. Yes exactly. Very interesting the way you describe the dogs in the east among the Eastern Indians. That sounds very

much like the state of some of the people are describing as the domestication of the dog. But well really it's becoming a dog. Yeah it stems quite far back I think. As much as 10000 years ago archaeologists are able to distinguish between the remains of animals that can be identified as wolves and ones as dogs. So the distinction goes far back. But one of the odd facts I discovered about this is the piece one piece of evidence that these Indian dogs were not fully domesticated as they were described as howling rather than barking. And apparently only fully domesticated dogs bark that's supposed to be true. Well thank you it's most interesting. Well thank you for the call we have about 15 minutes left in this part of focus 580 where looking at how it is that domestic animals helped certainly played a role in the shaping of early America and our guest is Virginia John

Anderson. She's associate professor of history at University of Colorado Boulder and he's author of the entire book that explores this subject it's titled creatures of Empire and it's published by the Oxford University Press. If you're interested you can seek it out and questions you're welcome to. 3 3 3 9 4 5 5 toll free 800 to 2 2 9 4 5. We have talked about it about that. The animal is being sort of an agent of conflict or a reason for conflict between Native people and between the Europeans and about the fact that the Europeans had a tendency to let the animals wander because they had plenty to do and the animals could sort of take care of themselves and that got and that caused trouble between the Europeans and the Indians if the if the animals belong to the Europeans who happened to wander into Indian farm fields and and chow down. But I think you also make the argument that perhaps the Europeans didn't

fully appreciate just how much land would be required for this kind of animal husbandry that they had in mind. And and that there may indeed have been a kind of a deliberate use of animals or at least allowing them to just do what they were going to do as a way of almost making the taking of Indian land inevitable and that certainly was it does get us around to the conflict over land. Oh exactly. One of the issues that's involved here comes back to your original question about environmental context for studying history. And if we can step back a bit the English colonists who are coming to the new world are coming from. And in England where the landscape has been sculpted for centuries to suit rive stock the keeping of livestock so you have enclosed pastors.

You have to a certain extent by this point and effort to raise certain kinds of particularly nutritious grasses in their own pastors. And so you can feed our in a larger number of animals on a smaller pasture in England just because it's been prepared in this way and sustain those herds when the colonists to come to the New World they don't have time they're building their houses they're building their fences and. And so on they don't have the time to includes pastors for their animals and so they do let them wander at large in the Chesapeake area they're at large pretty much only year round in women they do have to bring them in during the winter or else they're not going to survive. But these animals are left to their own devices and what they're doing is insisting on what natural grasses exist in the New World natural grasses that if they evolved over centuries without animals be present these grasses are by and large the rest nutritious and so on and so

the animals have to basically eat a lot more of this grass to get what nutrients they need and so they do expand out over large amounts of land. The Congress had no idea about this I think when they came over they assume that the. Or simply going to be able to replicate English practices. But it doesn't work that way. So these animals are occupying much more land than the colonists expected. And this helps explain the puzzle which which is always appeared when you look at some of the very early settlements in New England where you have settlers in places like Cambridge Massachusetts where the town is three or four years old. There may be a couple of hundred people there it's a fairly large town in terms geographical extent and these colonists are petitioning the local government for more land because they say they're running out of room. And you sort of look at it and think well how can they be running out of room when it's not the people who are running out of room it's the animals that are running out of room because you need so much more acreage. There are various

statistics that are given its estimates but maybe 5 to 10 times more land if it's just natural meadow to sustain livestock than an English pasture. So at first this spreading out of the animals is of the simply an adaptation on the part of the colonists to raise the animals they need to live as they wish to live. What you describe. This process of the deliberate deployment of animals on Indian land is something that develops over the course of the seventeenth century. It is much more frequent by the 16th sixties and 16th seventies that it is than it was earlier. In part because relations have been with Indians and other aspects have deteriorated by that point in time. Also because this isn't a time when a second generation of colonists are maturing. You know young men and women who will be going out and starting their own farms for those farms are going to need livestock for those livestock they're going to need a lot more land so there's a demographic pressure

but the courage on the part of the English but it is certainly combined with a greater amount of shall we say assertiveness on the part of the colonists to occupied land that they had once been willing to try to share with Indians. We have some of the callers let's talk with them. Two in Champaign starting with line 1. Hello Mr. Straker. I'm thinking there are some parallels with the extinction of Aboriginals in Tasmania where the agriculturalists moved in and occupied the more fertile land and the Aboriginals would basically stone age people would move in and and hunt down the cattle and then get lynched and exterminated to extinction right with a very very rapid. And so I see some power that's very interesting. Yeah and what's interesting too is the argument the justification as I understand it that the English or European settlers in Australia used to appropriate

the land exactly the same thing you see in colonial America and see the indigenous peoples are not using it properly. Yes thank you thank you. Another caller this is also champagne I believe your lie number two. Hello 11. Yeah I this is that in the afternoon conversation in the big picture. But there's two detail that is going to glance at me hoping that when you point to ask about that person you mention it will be in Virginia whereby Indians are encouraged to exchange equals for one cow and I'm just wondering how successful that was because it seems an odd transaction with the presumption that the wolf was something that in the intent learn to sort of live with and valued somewhat I'm assuming have had some spiritual presence in their cosmology and stuff like that in exchange for the cow which you've been explaining really made no sense in their system. Berman's going how are people actually went in for that transaction.

It's hard to tell exactly because records weren't kept of that sort of thing. And it's true that Indians are seen as having special politics. Black wants apparently because they are quite rare and rarity was something that seemed to be an indicator of spiritual power. Indian certainly doing some good hunting as far as we know and although Indians did perceive the other animals as having a spiritual connection they were soon willing as I understand it even if they found a wolf eating the carcass of a deer which had been caught in a trap that they would kill. As a predator in that particular instant as I think one of the competitor in the earlier with the idea of killing one of his predators and then the other question is the relationship of a dog that you described earlier which was interesting to me and then to say that Indian dogs were semi-wild. I know a little bit about you know communities where there are and are wild dogs and their breeding through

a lot so you get more down to the sort of median standard dogs away from the sort of the freakish breeds that have been selectively bred in Europe and wondering what this is a really silly question what sort of dog the colonists brought with them and if they were so I think they would have seen very strange beasts of Indians having been sort of average while all of their experience thing is very selectively bred European dogs that could be very large or very small and very much like that. Not really a question at all because so far as we know of what kind of dogs the English brought that 100 describes most specifically the records are wrong on both counts. They're loud and they are on occasion turned against Indians used to American Indians and clearly the Indians are frightened of these creatures because they were so much larger than the dogs the Indians were used to.

But thank you very much. All right thinks we are getting very close to the to the end of our time and I think it's a it's quite a fascinating story are there. I don't know if this is straining to make a connection but are do you think there are any lessons for our time in learning this story the best. Excellent question and one I thought about a lot because there's a sense in which studying the subject the tendency is to blame the Europeans I mean and then there's the rot that that is certainly troubling in their behavior with regard to the Indians but one of the things that struck me as most tragic about the story is that at base what we have here are two groups of people occupying the same land trying to do it according to their own ways of life. And those two prophecies come into conflict. The colonists did not bring animals to antagonize Indians and yet that ends up being where the story goes. And so I think

just to remind us of the unintended consequences of actions that we take and we maybe maybe maybe doing things with the Best wishes in the world but it doesn't work out that way. Well if you are interested in reading more on this story look for the book it's titled creatures of Empire how domestic animals transformed early America published by the Oxford University Press by our guest Virginia John Anderson she is associate professor of history university of Colorado Boulder and Professor Anderson thank you very much for talking with us. Thank you.