Animals into the Wilderness: The Development of Livestock Husbandry in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake

Abstract

N the middle of the seventeenth century, any English colonist Virginia who killed a wolf earned a bounty of one hundred pounds of tobacco. Indians who performed the same service received a rather different reward. According to the terms of a I656 statute, for every eight wolves' heads brought to the county commissioner, the native hunters' King or Great Man would presented with a cow. This reward, Virginia's burgesses insisted, would be a step to the Indians to making them Christians. It would also dissuade them from attacking their English neighbors, since cattle-owning sachems would have something to hazard & loose besides their lives any ensuing conflict. Each cow bestowed on Indians this way thus served not just as a bounty but also as an emissary of English-ness. The burgesses' confidence the civilizing power of cattle, however, reflected their general belief English cultural superiority more clearly than their actual experience as livestock owners the New World.' Embedded the 1656 statute was a bundle of assumptions about the ways which English behavior offered a model for Indian improvement. Foremost among these was the firm belief that civility--the adoption of an English mode of living-went hand hand with conversion to Christianity. (Another provision of the I656 law outlined a plan whereby Indians could leave their children with colonists to brought up in Christianity, civillity and the knowledge of necessary trades.) In addition, the burgesses assumed that property ownership would instill Virginia DeJohn Anderson is an associate professor of history at the University