Wandering barnyard animals may have sparked some of this nation聮s bloodiest conflicts between early English settlers and American Indians, according to Virginia DeJohn Anderson, associate professor of American History at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Anderson has begun writing a book that will examine people and animals in 17th century America, focusing on New England and the Chesapeake colonies of Virginia and Maryland.
The project is supported by a $35,000, one-year postdoctoral research scholarship awarded by the New York-based American Council of Learned Societies. Anderson says the scholarship, one of only 66 awarded to 769 applicants nationwide, will enable her to take a year off to concentrate on writing the book.
In it Anderson will look at the colonization of America with particular reference to the introduction of English domestic animals such as pigs, cows, sheep and goats.
She examines the impact these creatures had on American Indians and how the colonization process meant the native people had to get used to the animals, as well as the human settlers.
"The Indians had very different ideas about animals and how to treat them," Anderson says.
Indian natives believed that animals were different from, but not necessarily subordinate to, humans 聳 an understanding quite different from that of the English whose notions of human domination of animals were based on the Bible.
"The whole concept of domestication probably was foreign to Indian cultures," suggests Anderson. Although there were contemporary reports that the Indians had dogs, she questions how domesticated they were, because English observers often compared them to wolves.
Imported cows and pigs were definitely new to native Americans and were to prove yet one more source of cross-cultural conflict.
Anderson says the big problem was that at the time these animals were imported to New England and the Chesapeake region, Indian communities had no fences protecting their crops and inevitably the roaming stock started causing damage.
The situation was further inflamed if Indians shot and killed one of the marauding animals and then had to answer in court for the destruction of property, a concept they found hard to fathom when applied to an animal.
These differences eventually flared into open conflict, the most serious instance being King Philip聮s War of 1675 in New England involving the Indian leader Metacom, called King Philip by the English settlers.
Anderson says that although there were around 150,000 English settlers in the New England and Chesapeake regions by the end of the 17th century, the human colonists were far outnumbered by their livestock.
She says there is some evidence that by around 1650 Indians began keeping pigs and in her book she hopes to examine the extent to which the native people adopted this particular trait of the colonists.