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

Virginia DeJohn Anderson

IN the middle of the seventeenth century, any English colonist in 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 1656 statute, for every eight wolves' heads brought to the county commissioner, the native hunters' "King or Great Man" would be presented with a cow. This reward, Virginia's burgesses insisted, would "be a step to civilizing" the Indians "and 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" in any ensuing conflict. Each cow bestowed on Indians in this way thus served not just as a bounty but also as an emissary of English-ness. The burgesses' confidence in the civilizing power of cattle, however, reflected their general belief in English cultural superiority more clearly than their actual experience as livestock owners in the New World. 1	1
Embedded in the 1656 statute was a bundle of assumptions about the ways in 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 in hand with conversion to Christianity. (Another provision of the 1656 law outlined a plan whereby Indians could leave their children with colonists to be brought up "in Christianity, civillity and the knowledge of necessary trades.") In addition, the burgesses assumed that property ownership would instill in native leaders a sense of responsibility they currently lacked because they had no private estates. But why animal property? Why a cow?2	2
The burgesses felt no need to spell out their meaning, for they presumed that everyone--at least every civilized person--knew what it meant to keep a cow and thus how cow-keeping could reform Indians. The possession of domestic animals fulfilled the scriptural injunction that humans exercise dominion over the creatures of the earth, a responsibility that Indians largely ignored. People who combined livestock-keeping with arable farming enjoyed a more sedentary way of life than those who merely chased game through the woods.3 Keeping cattle (rather than more self-sufficient creatures such as pigs and goats) encouraged steady habits: the animals needed careful management, and their keepers in turn needed to rise early, work hard, and plan for the future. Since properly managed cattle grazed in fenced pastures, their presence improved the land and reinforced their owners' property rights. Raising livestock, then, was integral to civilized living.4	3
But if English-style livestock husbandry was a measure of civility, Chesapeake colonists themselves fell short of the mark. The same practices the burgesses wanted the Indians to adopt were under siege in the English plantations, a development that was certainly apparent by 1656. Chesapeake farmers had adapted their animal husbandry to conserve scarce labor and minimize "improving" alterations to the land and in the process strayed far from English methods. Because European visitors, and not the colonists themselves, commented most extensively on the nature of these changes, settlers may have been unaware of how far they had diverged from "civilized" husbandry. What the consequences of that divergence might be--and how, in particular, it might affect the colonists' legal control over their animal property--only emerged when Chesapeake practices were compared to English standards. Confronted by the unorthodox nature of their husbandry, Chesapeake planters had to defend their own civility in ways they could scarcely have anticipated.	. . .