Dead Sheep and “Wild” Winter Vistas: The Crisis of Pastoral Landscapes in the Era of Anglo-Wabanaki Wars, 1675–1725

Living along the northern frontier of New England, the minister John Pike listed in a journal the date of every snowfall that he witnessed between 1682 and 1710, documenting large numbers of snowfalls and lengthy periods between first and last snow. Climate historians have identified this period as one of the coldest of the Little Ice Age, but it was also a time of war with Wabanaki Indians. Like many contemporaries, Pike also wrote extensively about Indian raids. Fears about long winters, great snows, and Wabanaki hostility converged in multiple English diaries, letters, and publications between 1675 and 1725, revealing a crisis of environmental imagination specific to this time of global cooling and frontier wars. By closely reading accounts of great snows and Indian attacks, this paper explores the ways that traumatic winter events—both natural and military—threatened settlers’ sense that New England’s pastoral landscapes would endure.

Great snows and long winters put practical strains on English patterns of travel, planting, and foddering. In peacetime, great snows trapped cattle and sheep and left them to freeze to death. In the aftermath of great snows in 1716-7, one Connecticut observer reported 1100 dead sheep. In aesthetic terms, great snows in springtime especially alarmed settlers, violating their expectation of vernal restoration. A snowstorm in late March 1709-10 left Samuel Sewall feeling “disheartened”: “Every thing look’d so wild with Snow on the Ground and Trees; that [I] was in pain lest I should Wander.” While producing disorientation for settlers, persistent snow cover simultaneously empowered Indians on snowshoes. In intermittent Anglo-Wabanaki Wars, frontier settlers saw family members killed and valuable livestock slaughtered; winter raids caused animal casualties numbering in the hundreds. Warfare and cold weather “undomesticated” the Northeast, and English colonists faced practical and aesthetic challenges as they reasserted mastery of the land.