"Lands fit for use":Native Subsistence Patterns and European Agricultural Landscaping in the Colonial Hudson Valley Jason R. Sellers (bio) The French Jesuit Isaac Jogues visited New Netherland in 1643, later writing of the Dutch colony's history, "The first comers found lands fit for use, deserted by the savages, who formerly had fields here. Those who came later have cleared the woods." Even the visiting missionary quickly recognized the colonists' good fortune in finding lands cleared by previous Native inhabitants. But his description also illustrated the rapidity with which the limited European population began transforming the Hudson Valley's other environments to facilitate farming. That process would be neither systematic nor entirely predictable, creating challenges for the valley's inhabitants.1 Scholars considering the environmental history of New Netherland and colonial New York often extrapolate from William Cronon's classic study of New England, Changes in the Land. Scholarship more explicitly grounded on the Hudson River corridor tends to focus especially on the dramatic changes Americans engineered to advance industry and facilitate river navigation during the nineteenth century. Recently, scholars such as Theodore Steinberg have pushed back the timeline of environmental changes to the colonial era, the area around today's New York City drawing most of the scrutiny because of its long, thoroughly transformative, and relatively well-documented history. Although fewer studies have considered the colony as a whole, Anne-Marie Cantwell and Diana diZerega Wall have argued that the combined influences of Native, European, and African cultures necessarily [End Page 293] produced in New Netherland a unique physical landscape, albeit one reminiscent of the United Provinces.2 This essay contributes to these conversations by considering the small-scale changes colonists introduced throughout the Hudson Valley, and the localized environmental impacts of an expanding agricultural landscape. Using colonial administrative and land records, correspondence between colonial officials, and narrative accounts, it argues that Native Americans of the Hudson Valley repurposed their disused agricultural lands to position European colonies as new resource zones within a diverse regional landscape. Over the course of the seventeenth century, colonists clearing additional forests and draining wetlands to expand their agricultural capacity initiated changes to the physical landscape that altered local environments. Colonial farmers and Native neighbors alike struggled with the unintended consequences of those changes, but the former continued to expand the valley's farmlands, undermining the multifaceted Native subsistence strategies that had originally allowed for the integration of Dutch settlements into the regional landscape. ________ Both Native and European manmade agricultural landscapes overlaid geological formations that shaped colonial geographies. The Hudson River begins in the Adirondack Mountains and flows south for over 300 miles before reaching the Atlantic Ocean, its watershed draining over 13,000 square miles. Moving south from its rugged mountainous origins, the river flattens and widens as it reaches the lowlands of the Hudson Valley, and most of its tributaries. The softer sedimentary rock bed from Albany to the northern Catskills allows the channel to meander and expand horizontally, forming bordering marshes and swamps. Swelling seasonally with heavy rains and snowmelt, it deposits the alluvium that forms the fertile soil of the upper estuary's banks, and islands, shoals and sandbars in the [End Page 294] main channel. Harder rock formations less subject to erosion underlie the straighter, narrower sections of the river at the Palisades and Highlands. The transition between those zones allows the river to widen to form Haverstraw Bay, Newburgh Bay and the Tappan Zee. The distinct geological formations gave rise to a wide variety of terrestrial and marine habitats throughout the Hudson Valley, European visitors commenting particularly on wetlands and heavy forests. It was along the lower 150 miles, where the river becomes a tidal estuary after its confluence with the Mohawk River, that colonists created Dutch New Netherland and English New York.3 Focused on extending their maritime world via small outposts that tapped into an independent arena of land-based Native trade partners, early Dutch visitors rarely ventured far from the Hudson River's main channel. Sparse settlement clustered around trading posts limited their contact with Native Americans, and Dutch authors often generalized the Hudson Valley's inhabitants as "River Indians." Although their descriptions...