Beaver Dynamics

If you keep plugging at subjects of personal interest like I do, moving from one source to another — focused always on this place called home, it’s history, deep and shallow — you’re bound to stumble across something that instantly brings a big fuzzy picture into bright, stunning focus.

Well, glory be, I had one of those pull-it-all-together moments Tuesday morning before running the dogs. Sitting in my customary La-Z-Boy by the south window, wearing a wool cap of all things due to unseasonable cold and rain we so sorely needed, I was reading “Colonial Encounters in a Native Landscape,” by Columbia University anthropologist Nan A. Rothschild.

Go figure. It had to do with beavers. You know, those furry little buggers wreaking havoc on meadows, croplands and upland hollows countywide, a subject I have many times in different contexts discussed in this space over the years, usually pertaining to infamous 1996 Massachusetts Ballot Referendum “Question No. 1.” The overwhelming statewide vote in favor put an end to leg-hold trapping in the Bay State and brought back beavers with a vengeance.

Of course, that’s far from the only perspective we’ve touched upon here relative to beavers. A close second would be discussion of the Algonquian beaver myth associated with a Connecticut Valley landmark called Mt. Sugarloaf, that distinctive, twisted South Deerfield mountain which has served as a recognizable guidepost for faraway foot and float travelers since the first bipeds arrived in this fertile valley. It’s possible travelers knew it even before the unusual geological formation appeared with the Lake Hitchcock drainage some 14,000 years ago.

To refresh your memory, the myth tells of a giant, problematic beaver residing in Lake Hitchcock, eating fish and occasionally coming ashore to devour people. Hobomock, a spirit giant who shows up often in Northeastern Algonquian lore, was said to have killed the beaver by chasing it into the lake and smashing its neck with a well-placed blow from the trunk of an uprooted oak tree. The beast sunk to the bottom of the lake and showed only traces of its head, shoulders and back before the 200-mile-long glacial Lake Hitchcock burst through an obstruction near present-day Middletown, Conn., exposing the petrified carcass.

What some folks reading this may not know is that our beaver (Castor canadensis), which can grow to about 70 pounds but is more commonly in the 40-pound class, evolved from a much larger Pleistocene predecessor (Castoroides ohioensis), which was closer in size to our black bear. Fossil evidence shows giant beavers that likely weight 600 or 700 pounds, which begs the question as to whether that supposed “natural obstruction” damming a tight constriction in Rocky Hill, Conn., could have instead been a beaver dam. Don’t beavers usually reside in their own ponds? But we won’t go there on this little narrative. Back to Rothschild and the little tidbit that got my wheels spinning about what our landscape would have looked like during the early Connecticut Valley contact-period days of the Pynchons and Parsons.

What drew the Pynchons and Parsons here was beaver pelts, and William and John Pynchon monopolized Connecticut Valley fur trading by establishing a depot at Agawam, now Springfield, in 1636. Joseph Parsons, an ancestor generally associated with natal Northampton, was the Pynchon’s agent who probably would have known all the local Indian villages and fur-trapping clans of this corridor better than anyone of his era. It is likely that when he first started patrolling today’s Hampshire/Franklin hills and dales in the early 17th century, beaver dams and ponds were rampant on sluggish streams high and low in the landscape. But that would have soon changed when overharvesting of beavers removed them from the habitat, forcing trappers farther and farther north in search of the valuable pelts. Then, by the last quarter of the 17th century, the commodity had become difficult to come by indeed.

Rothschild discusses this phenomenon with a focus on the nearby Hudson and Mohawk valleys of upstate New York, then an important component of the Connecticut Valley fur-trade map. Rothschild describes the devastating impact local beaver extinction had on ecosystems, and what she articulates would definitely have also simultaneously, or even a little earlier, occurred here. Despite reading William Cronon’s classic “Changes in the Land” and Howard S. Russell’s lesser work, “Indian New England Before the Mayflower,” more than once, plus much else on the subject, I had never seen the dynamic laid out quite like Rothschild, who pulled her information from Dartmouth College scholar Colin Calloway’s “New Worlds For All.” Having read plenty of Calloway, a cutting-edge New England anthropologist, I was not familiar with the 1997 work Rothschild cited, but will soon add it to my collection of place-based scholarship.

What Rothschild describes is a diminishing wetland habitat that impacts many other important critters that depend on beaver ponds to survive. “The decline in beavers and their dams meant that pond levels were not maintained and species such as muskrat and otter were frozen or flooded out,” writes Rothschild. “Mink and raccoon could not get the frogs, suckers and snakes on which they normally fed as ponds dried up, becoming marshes and finally meadows. Migratory birds flew north to breed on ponds that could still be found in Maine. In some places, the absence of dams meant faster stream flow and changing fish habitats; it led to flooding and erosion.”

OK. So now put on your thinking cap and try to picture the watersheds our local tribes would have patrolled. We’re talking about streams like the Mill, Deerfield, Green, Millers, Sawmill, Falls and North rivers, and others reaching deeper. Once the beavers were removed by fur-trade overharvest, the landscape would have undergone a radical transition from a series of descending step-ponds and saturated wetlands to marsh and open spring holes perfect for colonial settlement in the bottomlands and uplands alike. By the Civil War era and even earlier, many of the 18th century hardscrabble farms established in what are now the towns of Conway, Whately, Williamsburg, Ashfield, Goshen and beyond had lost their thin, annually manured topsoil to erosion. A result was diminishing crop yield, which triggered a mass migration to fertile valleys in other states, such as Vermont, New York, western Pennsylvania, Ohio and on and on and on, clear through eventually to the West Coast in that romanticized process known to later participants and patriotic defenders as Manifest Destiny. Meanwhile, to the many tribes today called our First Peoples or Native Americans, it added up to dislocation and/or indiscriminate slaughter.

It all began right here, fellas, at, among other places, the Pynchon plantation described as a “market town” by late 20th century historian Stephen Innes in his acclaimed book, “Labor in a New Land,” about earliest Springfield’s economy.

Although I did not sit down here to condemn the Pynchon enterprise, let’s be real and admit that it wasn’t strategically established above the fledgling Connecticut settlements of Hartford, Wethersfield and Windsor in the name of conservation and fair trade. It was, with no apologies, an exploitive, colonial outpost seeking maximum profit.

Some of that Pynchon fortune likely still exists today, which cannot be said about the landscape our First Peoples maintained for more than 10,000 years.

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