Wild by Nature: North American Animals Confront Colonization by Andrea Smalley (review)

In Wild by Nature, Andrea Smalley asks readers to consider wild animals not simply as commodities desired by European Americans, but also as participants in and resistors to North American colonialism. With perceptive prose, Smalley examines legal codes, treaties, governmental regulations, newspapers, diaries, and colonial promotional rhetoric to cover extensive ground, venturing from the Chesapeake Bay to the Southern Plains, and from the 16th through the 19th century, to track encounters among European Americans, wild animals, and Indigenous peoples. Beaver, wolves, fish, deer, and bison assisted, stymied, and altered European Americans’ colonizing visions by influencing legal definitions of possession and stimulating conflicts between private property notions and common hunting and fishing access. Rather than passively watching as European Americans marched through the land, through their physiology and behavior patterns and their value as marketable goods, these wild animals both resisted and assisted the colonizing process and in doing so, changed the colonizers’ laws and regulations concerning wild animals and private property regimes.

Wild by Nature opens with the first encounters of Europeans, in particular the English, with indigenous animals. To encourage colonization, early English promotional literature painted exotic pictures of the rich abundance of New World animals. By manipulating Old World class tensions related to elite control of hunting and possession of game, promoters highlighted the colonies’ cornucopia of wild game as free for the taking. Potential and actual colonists embraced this rhetoric, treating New World wild animals as common property and common marketable goods. In so doing, however, their competition led to legal confrontations and even violence. Smalley concentrates on instances where wild animals instigated warfare, disputes over private property and regulation, capital accumulation or loss, and Indian dispossession. Beaver pelts and white-tailed deer skins drew European Americans westward, while the threats wolves posed to livestock joined concerns about access to mobile fish to force colonizers to clarify and adapt Old World notions of private versus common property regimes and access to animals, as well as the meaning of ordered civilization.

Smalley’s work has implications for the history of colonization, environmental and agricultural history, rangeland management, and the history of hunting and fishing regulation. For example, the hunting of white-tailed deer and subsequent depletion of their populations in the East led hunters such as Daniel Boone to move farther west. In their quest to provide skins for the market, Boone and other hunters violated property boundaries and Indigenous lands claims. Smalley turns next to bison, whose economic value, along with their social and feeding habits, encouraged European American occupation of the Southern Plains and incited violence, like the 1874 Red River War, which generated conflict between trespassing bison hunters, the American government, settlers, and Indigenous peoples. Following bison-related violence, American legal and regulatory control solidified from the East Coast to the Southern Plains, culminating in the enclosure and attempted control of wild animals in parks and preserves in the 19th and 20th century.

Smalley links her choice of species to the amount of regulatory legislation they inspired or forced colonists to change. While this makes sense, it also prioritizes creatures seen to have commercial value (or who threatened valuable livestock as was the case with wolves). Her argument about animals affecting legal codes through the nature of their physiology and behavior patterns, however, would seem to fit other, less marketable creatures caught up in European American colonization, including mountain lions, bears, and even insects. Wild by Nature nonetheless succeeds in demonstrating that wild animals, by their very nature, challenged and changed colonial presumptions about human control over the process of North American colonization as expressed in legal regimes and private property.