The Character and Influence of the Indian Trade in Wisconsin Part 9

[Footnote 230: Biddle, an Indian agent, testified in 1822 that while the cost of transporting 100 wt. from New York to Green Bay did not exceed five dollars, which would produce a charge of less than 10 percent on the original cost, the United States factor charged 50 per cent additional. The United States capital stock was diminished by this trade, however. The private dealers charged much more. Schoolcraft in 1831 estimated that $48.34 in goods and provisions at cost prices was the average annual supply of each hunter, or $6.90 to each soul. The substantial accuracy of this is sustained by my data. See Sen. Doc., No.

90, 22d Cong., 1st Sess., II., 45; State Papers, No. 7, 18th Cong., 1st Sess., I.; State Papers, No. 54, 18th Cong., 2d Sess., III.; Schoolcraft's Indian Tribes, III., 599; Invoice Book, Amer. Fur Co., for 1820, 1821; Wis. Fur Trade MSS. in possession of Wisconsin Historical Society.]

[Footnote 231: The following is a typical account, taken from the books of Jacques Porlier, of Green Bay, for the year 1823: The Indian Michel bought on credit in the fall: $16 worth of cloth; a trap, $1.00; two and a half yards of cotton, $3.12-1/2; three measures of powder, $1.50; lead, $1.00; a bottle of whiskey, 50 cents, and some other articles, such as a gun worm, making in all a bill of about $25. This he paid in full by bringing in eighty-five muskrats, worth nearly $20; a fox, $1.00, and a moc.o.c.k of maple sugar, worth $4.00.]

[Footnote 232: A.J. Vieau, who traded in the thirties, gave me this information.]

[Footnote 233: For the value of the beaver at different periods and places consult indexes, under "beaver," in N.Y. Col. Docs,; Bancroft, Northwest Coast; Weeden, Economic and Social Hist. New Eng.; and see Morgan, American Beaver, 243-4; Henry, Travels, 192; 2 Penna. Archives, VI., 18; Servent, in Paris Ex. Univ. 1867, Rapports, VI., 117, 123; Proc. Wis. State Hist. Soc., 1889, p. 86.]

[Footnote 234: Minn. Hist. Colls. II., 46, gives the following table for 1836:

_St. Louis Prices._ _Minn. Price._ _Nett Gain._ Three pt. blanket = $3 25 60 rat skins at 20 cents = $12 00 $8 75 1-1/2 yds. Stroud = 2 37 60 rat skins at 20 cents = 12 00 9 63 1 N.W. gun = 6 50 100 rat skins at 20 cents = 20 00 13 50 1 lb. lead = 06 2 rat skins at 20 cents = 40 34 1 lb. powder = 28 10 rat skins at 20 cents = 2 00 1 72 1 tin kettle = 2 50 60 rat skins at 20 cents = 12 00 9 50 1 knife = 20 4 rat skins at 20 cents = 80 60 1 lb. tobacco = 12 8 rat skins at 20 cents = 1 60 1 38 1 looking gla.s.s = 04 4 rat skins at 20 cents = 80 76 1-1/2 yd.

scarlet cloth = 3 00 60 rat skins at 20 cents = 12 00 9 00

See also the table of prices in Senate Docs., No. 90, 22d Cong., 1st Sess.; II., 42 _et seq._]

[Footnote 235: Dougla.s.s, Summary, I., 176.]

[Footnote 236: Morgan, American Beaver, 243.]

[Footnote 237: Proc. Wis. Hist. Soc., 1889, pp. 92-98.]

[Footnote 238: Amer. State Papers, Ind. Affs., II., 66.]

[Footnote 239: Wis. Hist. Colls., XI., 220, 223.]

[Footnote 240: The centers of Wisconsin trade were Green Bay, Prairie du Chien, and La Pointe (on Madelaine island, Chequamegon bay). Lesser points of distribution were Milwaukee and Portage. From these places, by means of the interlacing rivers and the numerous lakes of northern Wisconsin, the whole region was visited by birch canoes or Mackinaw boats.]

[Footnote 241: Schoolcraft in Senate Doc. No. 90, 22d Cong., 1st Sess., II,. 43.]

[Footnote 242: Lawe to Vieau, in Wis. Fur Trade MSS. See also U.S.

Indian Treaties, and Wis. Hist. Colls., V., 236.]

[Footnote 243: House Ex. Docs., 19th Cong., 2d Sess., II., No. 7.]

[Footnote 244: For example see the Vieau Narrative in Wis. Hist. Colls., XI., and the Wis. Fur Trade MSS.]

[Footnote 245: Butler, Wild North Land; Robinson, Great Fur Land, ch.

xv.]

EFFECTS OF THE TRADING POST.

We are now in a position to offer some conclusions as to the influence of the Indian trading post.

I. Upon the savage it had worked a transformation. It found him without iron, hunting merely for food and raiment. It put into his hands iron and guns, and made him a hunter for furs with which to purchase the goods of civilization. Thus it tended to perpetuate the hunter stage; but it must also be noted that for a time it seemed likely to develop a cla.s.s of merchants who should act as intermediaries solely. The inter-tribal trade between Montreal and the Northwest, and between Albany and the Illinois and Ohio country, appears to have been commerce in the proper sense of the term[246] (_Kauf zum Verkauf_). The trading post left the unarmed tribes at the mercy of those that had bought firearms, and this caused a relocation of the Indian tribes and an urgent demand for the trader by the remote and unvisited Indians. It made the Indian dependent on the white man's supplies. The stage of civilization that could make a gun and gunpowder was too far above the bow and arrow stage to be reached by the Indian. Instead of elevating him the trade exploited him. But at the same time, when one nation did not monopolize the trade, or when it failed to regulate its own traders, the trading post gave to the Indians the means of resistance to agricultural settlement. The American settlers fought for their farms in Kentucky and Tennessee at a serious disadvantage, because for over half a century the Creeks and Cherokees had received arms and ammunition from the trading posts of the French, the Spanish and the English. In Wisconsin the settlers came after the Indian had become thoroughly dependent on the American traders, and so late that no resistance was made. The trading post gradually exploited the Indian's hunting ground.

By intermarriages with the French traders the purity of the stock was destroyed and a mixed race produced.[247] The trader broke down the old totemic divisions, and appointed chiefs regardless of the Indian social organization, to foster his trade. Indians and traders alike testify that this destruction of Indian inst.i.tutions was responsible for much of the difficulty in treating with them, the tribe being without a recognized head.[248] The sale of their lands, made less valuable by the extinction of game, gave them a new medium of exchange, at the same time that, under the rivalry of trade, the sale of whiskey increased.

II. Upon the white man the effect of the Indian trading post was also very considerable. The Indian trade gave both English and French a footing in America. But for the Indian supplies some of the most important settlements would have perished.[249] It invited to exploration: the dream of a water route to India and of mines was always present in the more extensive expeditions, but the effective practical inducement to opening the water systems of the interior, and the thing that made exploration possible, was the fur trade. As has been shown, the Indian eagerly invited the trader. Up to a certain point also the trade fostered the advance of settlements. As long as they were in extension of trade with the Indians they were welcomed. The trading posts were the pioneers of many settlements along the entire colonial frontier. In Wisconsin the sites of our princ.i.p.al cities are the sites of old trading posts, and these earliest fur-trading settlements furnished supplies to the farming, mining and lumbering pioneers. They were centers about which settlement collected after the exploitation of the Indian. Although the efforts of the Indians and of the great trading companies, whose profits depended upon keeping the primitive wilderness, were to obstruct agricultural settlement, as the history of the Northwest and of British America shows, nevertheless reports brought back by the individual trader guided the steps of the agricultural pioneer. The trader was the farmer's pathfinder into some of the richest regions of the continent. Both favorably and unfavorably the influence of the Indian trade on settlement was very great.

The trading post was the strategic point in the rivalry of France and England for the Northwest. The American colonists came to know that the land was worth more than the beaver that built in the streams, but the mother country fought for the Northwest as the field of Indian trade in all the wars from 1689 to 1812. The management of the Indian trade led the government under the lead of Franklin and Was.h.i.+ngton into trading on its own account, a unique feature of its policy. It was even proposed by the Indian Superintendent at one time that the government should manufacture the goods for this trade. In providing a new field for the individual trader, whom he expected the government trading houses to dispossess, Jefferson proposed the Lewis and Clarke expedition, which crossed the continent by way of the Missouri and the Columbia, as the British trader, Mackenzie, had before crossed it by way of Canadian rivers. The genesis of this expedition ill.u.s.trates at once the comprehensive western schemes of Jefferson, and the importance of the part played by the fur trade in opening the West. In 1786, while the Annapolis convention was discussing the navigation of the Potomac, Jefferson wrote to Was.h.i.+ngton from Paris inquiring about the best place for a ca.n.a.l between the Ohio and the Great Lakes.[250] This was in promotion of the project of Ledyard, a Connecticut man, who was then in Paris endeavoring to interest the wealthiest house there in the fur trade of the Far West. Jefferson took so great an interest in the plan that he secured from the house a promise that if they undertook the scheme the depot of supply should be at Alexandria, on the Potomac river, which would be in connection with the Ohio, if the ca.n.a.l schemes of the time were carried out. After the failure of the negotiations of Ledyard, Jefferson proposed to him to cross Russia to Kamschatka, take s.h.i.+p to Nootka Sound, and thence return to the United States by way of the Missouri.[251] Ledyard was detained in Russia by the authorities in spite of Jefferson's good offices, and the scheme fell through. But Jefferson himself a.s.serts that this suggested the idea of the Lewis and Clarke expedition, which he proposed to Congress as a means of fostering our Indian trade.[252] Bearing in mind his instructions to this party, that they should see whether the Oregon furs might not be s.h.i.+pped down the Missouri instead of pa.s.sing around Cape Horn, and the relation of his early ca.n.a.l schemes to this design, we see that he had conceived the project of a transcontinental fur trade which should center in Virginia.

Astor's subsequent attempt to push through a similar plan resulted in the foundation of his short-lived post of Astoria at the mouth of the Columbia. This occupation greatly aided our claim to the Oregon country as against the British traders, who had reached the region by way of the northern arm of the Columbia.

In Wisconsin, at least, the traders' posts, placed at the carrying places around falls and rapids, pointed out the water powers of the State. The portages between rivers became ca.n.a.ls, or called out ca.n.a.l schemes that influenced the early development of the State. When Was.h.i.+ngton, at the close of his military service, inspected the Mohawk valley and the portages between the headwaters of the Potomac and the Ohio, as the channels "of conveyance of the extensive and valuable trade of a rising empire,"[253] he stood between two eras--the era with which he was personally familiar, when these routes had been followed by the trader with the savage tribes,[254] and the era which he foresaw, when American settlement pa.s.sed along the same ways to the fertile West and called into being the great trunk-lines of the present day.[255] The trails became the early roads. An old Indian trader relates that "the path between Green Bay and Milwaukee was originally an Indian trail, and very crooked, but the whites would straighten it by cutting across lots each winter with their jumpers, wearing bare streaks through the thin covering, to be followed in the summer by foot and horseback travel along the shortened path."[256] The process was typical of a greater one. Along the lines that nature had drawn the Indians traded and warred; along their trails and in their birch canoes the trader pa.s.sed, bringing a new and a transforming life. These slender lines of eastern influence stretched throughout all our vast and intricate water-system, even to the Gulf of Mexico, the Pacific, and the Arctic seas, and these lines were in turn followed by agricultural and by manufacturing civilization.

In a speech upon the Pacific Railway delivered in the United States Senate in 1850, Senator Benton used these words: "There is an idea become current of late ... that none but a man of science, bred in a school, can lay off a road. That is a mistake. There is a cla.s.s of topographical engineers older than the schools, and more unerring than the mathematics. They are the wild animals--buffalo, elk, deer, antelope, bears, which traverse the forest, not by compa.s.s, but by an instinct which leads them always the right way--to the lowest pa.s.ses in the mountains, the shallowest fords in the rivers, the richest pastures in the forest, the best salt springs, and the shortest practicable routes between remote points. They travel thousands of miles, have their annual migrations backwards and forwards, and never miss the best and shortest route. These are the first engineers to lay out a road in a new country; the Indians follow them, and hence a buffalo-road becomes a war-path. The first white hunters follow the same trails in pursuing their game; and after that the buffalo-road becomes the wagon-road of the white man, and finally the macadamized or railroad of the scientific man. It all resolves itself into the same thing--into the same buffalo-road; and thence the buffalo becomes the first and safest engineer. Thus it has been here in the countries which we inhabit and the history of which is so familiar. The present national road from c.u.mberland over the Alleghanies was the military road of General Braddock; which had been the buffalo-path of the wild animals. So of the two roads from western Virginia to Kentucky--one through the gap in the c.u.mberland mountains, the other down the valley of the Kenhawa. They were both the war-path of the Indians and the travelling route of the buffalo, and their first white acquaintances the early hunters.

Buffaloes made them in going from the salt springs on the Holston to the rich pastures and salt springs of Kentucky; Indians followed them first, white hunters afterwards--and that is the way Kentucky was discovered.

In more than a hundred years no nearer or better routes have been found; and science now makes her improved roads exactly where the buffalo's foot first marked the way and the hunter's foot afterwards followed him.

So all over Kentucky and the West; and so in the Rocky Mountains. The famous South Pa.s.s was no scientific discovery. Some people think Fremont discovered it. It had been discovered forty years before--long before he was born. He only described it and confirmed what the hunters and traders had reported and what they showed him. It was discovered, or rather first seen by white people, in 1808, two years after the return of Lewis and Clark, and by the first company of hunters and traders that went out after their report laid open the prospect of the fur trade in the Rocky Mountains.

"An enterprising Spaniard of St. Louis, Manuel Lisa, sent out the party; an acquaintance and old friend of the Senator from Wisconsin who sits on my left [General Henry Dodge] led the party--his name Andrew Henry. He was the first man that saw that pa.s.s; and he found it in the prosecution of his business, that of a hunter and trader, and by following the game and the road which they had made. And that is the way all pa.s.ses are found. But these traders do not write books and make maps, but they enable other people to do it."[257]

Benton errs in thinking that the hunter was the pioneer in Kentucky. As I have shown, the trader opened the way. But Benton is at least valid authority upon the Great West, and his fundamental thesis has much truth in it. A continuously higher life flowed into the old channels, knitting the United States together into a complex organism. It is a process not limited to America. In every country the exploitation of the wild beasts,[258] and of the raw products generally, causes the entry of the disintegrating and transforming influences of a higher civilization.

"The history of commerce is the history of the intercommunication of peoples."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 246: Notwithstanding Kulischer's a.s.sertion that there is no room for this in primitive society. _Vide_ Der Handel auf den primitiven Culturstufen, in _Zeitschrift fur Volkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft_, X., No. 4, p. 378. Compare instances of inter-tribal trade given _ante_, pp. 11, 26.]

[Footnote 247: On the "_metis_," _bois-brules_, or half-breeds, consult Smithsonian Reports, 1879, p. 309, and Robinson, Great Fur Land, ch.

iii.]

[Footnote 248: Minn. Hist. Colls., V., 135; Biddle to Atkinson, 1819, in Ind. Pamphlets, Vol. I, No. 15 (Wis. Hist. Soc. Library).]

[Footnote 249: Parkman, Pioneers of France, 230; Carr, Mounds of the Mississippi, p. 8, n. 8; Smith's Generall Historie, I., 88, 90, 155 (Richmond, 1819).]

[Footnote 250: Jefferson, Works, II., 60, 250, 370.]

[Footnote 251: Allen's Lewis and Clarke Expedition, p. ix (edition of 1814. The introduction is by Jefferson).]

[Footnote 252: Jefferson's messages of January 18, 1803, and February 19, 1806. See Amer. State Papers, Ind. Affs., I., 684.]

[Footnote 253: See Adams, Maryland's Influence upon Land Cessions to U.S., J.H.U. Studies, 3d Series, No. I., pp. 80-82.]

[Footnote 254: _Ibid._ _Vide ante_, p. 41.]

[Footnote 255: Narr. and Crit. Hist. Amer., VIII., 10. Compare Adams, as above. At Jefferson's desire, in January and February of 1788, Was.h.i.+ngton wrote various letters inquiring as to the feasibility of a ca.n.a.l between Lake Erie and the Ohio, "whereby the fur and peltry of the upper country can be transported"; saying: "Could a channel once be opened to convey the fur and peltry from the Lakes into the eastern country, its advantages would be so obvious as to induce an opinion that it would in a short time become the channel of conveyance for much the greater part of the commodities brought from thence." Sparks, Was.h.i.+ngton's Works, IX., 303, 327.]

[Footnote 256: Wis. Hist. Colls., XI., 230.]

[Footnote 257: Cong. Rec., XXIII., 57. I found this interesting confirmation of my views after this paper was written. Compare _Harper's Magazine_, Sept. 1890, p. 565.]

[Footnote 258: The traffic in furs in the Middle Ages was enormous, says Friedlander, Sittengeschichte, III., 62. Numerous cities in England and on the Continent, whose names are derived from the word "beaver" and whose seals bear the beaver, testify to the former importance in Europe of this animal; see _Canadian Journal_, 1859, 359. See Du Chaillu, Viking Age, 209-10; Marco Polo, bk. iv., ch. xxi. "Wattenbach, in _Historische Zeitschrift_, IX., 391, shows that German traders were known in the lands about the Baltic at least as early as the knights.]