The Trader
The trader was the first pathfinder. His caravans began the change of
purpose that was to come to the Indian warrior's route, turning it
slowly into the beaten track of communication and commerce. The
settlers, the rangers, the surveyors, went westward over the trails
which he had blazed for them years before. Their enduring works are
commemorated in the cities and farms which today lie along every ancient
border line; but of their forerunner's hazardous Indian trade nothing
remains. Let us therefore pay a moment's homage here to the trader, who
first--to borrow a phrase from Indian speech--made white for peace the
red trails of war.
He was the first cattleman of the Old Southwest. Fifty years before John
Findlay, ¹ one of this class of pioneers, led Daniel Boone through
Cumberland Gap, the trader's bands of horses roamed the western slopes
of the Appalachian Mountains and his cattle grazed among the deer on the
green banks of the old Cherokee (Tennessee) River. He was the pioneer
settler beyond the high hills; for he built, in the center of the Indian
towns, the first white man's cabin--with its larger annex, the trading
house--and dwelt there during the greater part of the year. He was
America's first magnate of international commerce. His furs--for which
he paid in guns, knives, ammunition, vermilion paint, mirrors, and
cloth--lined kings' mantles, and hatted the Lords of Trade as they
strode to their council chamber in London to discuss his business and to
pass those regulations which might have seriously hampered him but for
his resourcefulness in circumventing them!
¹ The name is spelled in various ways: Findlay, Finlay, Findley.
He was the first frontier warrior, for he either fought off or fell
before small parties of hostile Indians who, in the interest of the
Spanish or French, raided his pack-horse caravans on the march. Often,
too, side by side with the red brothers of his adoption, he fought in
the intertribal wars. His was the first educative and civilizing
influence in the Indian towns. He endeavored to cure the Indians of
their favorite midsummer madness, war, by inducing them to raise stock
and poultry and improve their corn, squash, and pea gardens. It is not
necessary to impute to him philanthropic motives. He was a practical man
and he saw that war hurt his trade: it endangered his summer caravans
and hampered the autumn hunt for deerskins.
In the earliest days of the eighteenth century, when the colonists of
Virginia and the Carolinas were only a handful, it was the trader who
defeated each successive attempt of French and Spanish agents to weld
the tribes into a confederacy for the annihilation of the English
settlements. The English trader did his share to prevent what is now the
United States from becoming a part of a Latin empire and to save it for
a race having the Anglo-Saxon ideal and speaking the English tongue.
The colonial records of the period contain items which, taken singly,
make small impression on the casual reader but which, listed together,
throw a strong light on the past and bring that mercenary figure, the
trader, into so bold a relief that the design verges on the heroic. If
we wonder, for instance, why the Scotch Highlanders who settled in the
wilds at the headwaters of the Cape Fear River, about 1729, and were
later followed by Welsh and Huguenots, met with no opposition from the
Indians, the mystery is solved when we discover, almost by accident, a
few printed lines which record that, in 1700, the hostile natives on the
Cape Fear were subdued to the English and brought into friendly alliance
with them by Colonel William Bull, a trader. We read further and learn
that the Spaniards in Florida had long endeavored to unite the tribes in
Spanish and French territory against the English and that the influence
of traders prevented the consummation. The Spaniards, in 1702, had
prepared to invade English territory with nine hundred Indians. The plot
was discovered by Creek Indians and disclosed to their friends, the
traders, who immediately gathered together five hundred warriors,
marched swiftly to meet the invaders, and utterly routed them. Again,
when the Indians, incited by the Spanish at St. Augustine, rose against
the English in 1715, and the Yamasi Massacre occurred in South Carolina,
it was due to the traders that some of the settlements at least were not
wholly unprepared to defend themselves.
The early English trader was generally an intelligent man; sometimes
educated, nearly always fearless and resourceful. He knew the one sure
basis on which men of alien blood and far separated stages of moral and
intellectual development can meet in understanding--namely, the truth of
the spoken word. He recognized honor as the bond of trade and the warp
and woof of human intercourse. The uncorrupted savage also had his plain
interpretation of the true word in the mouths of men, and a name for it.
He called it the "Old Beloved Speech"; and he gave his confidence to the
man who spoke this speech even in the close barter for furs.
We shall find it worth while to refer to the map of America as it was in
the early days of the colonial fur trade, about the beginning of the
eighteenth century. A narrow strip of loosely strung English settlements
stretched from the north border of New England to the Florida line.
North Florida was Spanish territory. On the far distant southwestern
borders of the English colonies were the southern possessions of France.
The French sphere of influence extended up the Mississippi, and thence
by way of rivers and the Great Lakes to its base in Canada on the
borders of New England and New York. In South Carolina dwelt the Yamasi
tribe of about three thousand warriors, their chief towns only sixty or
eighty miles distant from the Spanish town of St. Augustine. On the
west, about the same distance northeast of New Orleans, in what is now
Alabama and Georgia, lay the Creek nation. There French garrisons held
Mobile and Fort Alabama. The Creeks at this time numbered over four
thousand warriors. The lands of the Choctaws, a tribe of even larger
fighting strength, began two hundred miles north of New Orleans and
extended along the Mississippi. A hundred and sixty miles northeast of
the Choctaw towns were the Chickasaws, the bravest and most successful
warriors of all the tribes south of the Iroquois. The Cherokees, in part
seated within the Carolinas, on the upper courses of the Savannah River,
mustered over six thousand men at arms. East of them were the Catawba
towns. North of them were the Shawanoes and Delawares, in easy
communication with the tribes of Canada. Still farther north, along the
Mohawk and other rivers joining with the Hudson and Lake Ontario stood
the "long houses" of the fiercest and most warlike of all the savages,
the Iroquois or Six Nations.
The Indians along the English borders outnumbered the colonists perhaps
ten to one. If the Spanish and the French had succeeded in the
conspiracy to unite on their side all the tribes, a red billow of
tomahawk wielders would have engulfed and extinguished the English
settlements. The French, it is true, made allies of the Shawanoes, the
Delawares, the Choctaws, and a strong faction of the Creeks; and they
finally won over the Cherokees after courting them for more than twenty
years. But the Creeks in part, the powerful Chickasaws, and the Iroquois
Confederacy, or Six Nations, remained loyal to the English. In both
North and South it was the influence of the traders that kept these red
tribes on the English side. The Iroquois were held loyal by Sir William
Johnson and his deputy, George Croghan, the "King of Traders." The
Chickasaws followed their "best-beloved" trader, James Adair; and among
the Creeks another trader, Lachlan McGillivray, wielded a potent
influence.
Lachlan McGillivray was a Highlander. He landed in Charleston in 1735 at
the age of sixteen and presently joined a trader's caravan as pack-horse
boy. A few years later he married a woman of the Creeks. On many
occasions he defeated French and Spanish plots with the Creeks for the
extermination of the colonists in Georgia and South Carolina. His action
in the final war with the French (1760), when the Indian terror was
raging, is typical. News came that four thousand Creek warriors,
reinforced by French Choctaws, were about to fall on the southern
settlements. At the risk of their lives, McGillivray and another trader
named Galphin hurried from Charleston to their trading house on the
Georgia frontier. Thither they invited several hundred Creek warriors,
feasted and housed them for several days, and finally won them from
their purpose. McGillivray had a brilliant son, Alexander, who about
this time became a chief in his mother's nation--perhaps on this very
occasion, as it was an Indian custom, in making a brotherhood pact, to
send a son to dwell in the brother's house. We shall meet that son again
as the Chief of the Creeks and the terrible scourge of Georgia and
Tennessee in the dark days of the Revolutionary War.
The bold deeds of the early traders, if all were to be told, would
require a book as long as the huge volume written by James Adair, the
"English Chickasaw." Adair was an Englishman who entered the Indian
trade in 1785 and launched upon the long and dangerous trail from
Charleston to the upper towns of the Cherokees, situated in the present
Monroe County, Tennessee. Thus he was one of the earliest pioneers of
the Old Southwest; and he was Tennessee's first author. "I am well
acquainted," he says, "with near two thousand miles of the American
continent"--a statement which gives one some idea of an early trader's
enterprise, hardihood, and peril. Adair's "two thousand miles" were
twisting Indian trails and paths he slashed out for himself through
uninhabited wilds, for when not engaged in trade, hunting, literature,
or war, it pleased him to make solitary trips of exploration. These seem
to have led him chiefly northward through the Appalachians, of which he
must have been one of the first white explorers.
A many-sided man was James Adair--cultured, for his style suffers not by
comparison with other writers of his day, no stranger to Latin and
Greek, and not ignorant of Hebrew, which he studied to assist him in
setting forth his ethnological theory that the American Indians were the
descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. Before we dismiss his
theory with a smile, let us remember that he had not at his disposal the
data now available which reveal points of likeness in custom, language
formation, and symbolism among almost all primitive peoples. The
formidable title-page of his book in itself suggests an author keenly
observant, accurate as to detail, and possessed of a versatile and
substantial mind. Most of the pages were written in the towns of the
Chickasaws, with whom he lived "as a friend and brother," but from whose
"natural jealousy" and "prying disposition" he was obliged to conceal
his papers. "Never," he assures us, "was a literary work begun and
carried on with more disadvantages!"
Despite these disabilities the author wrote a book of absorbing
interest. His intimate sympathetic pictures of Indian life as it was
before the tribes had been conquered are richly valuable to the lover of
native lore and to the student of the history of white settlement. The
author believes, as he must, in the supremacy of his own race, but he
nevertheless presents the Indians' side of the argument as no man could
who had not made himself one of them. He thereby adds interest to those
fierce struggles which took place along the border; for he shows us the
red warrior not as a mere brute with a tomahawk but as a human creature
with an ideal of his own, albeit an ideal that must give place to a
better. Even in view of the red man's hideous methods of battle and
inhuman treatment of captives, we cannot ponder unmoved Adair's
description of his preparations for war--the fasting, the abstention
from all family intercourse, and the purification rites and prayers for
three days in the house set apart, while the women, who might not come
close to their men in this fateful hour, stood throughout the night till
dawn chanting before the door. Another poetic touch the author gives us,
from the Cherokee--or Cheerake as he spells it--explaining that the
root, chee-ra, means fire. A Cherokee never extinguished fire save on
the occasion of a death, when he thrust a burning torch into the water
and said, Neetah intahah--"the days appointed him were finished." The
warrior slain in battle was held to have been balanced by death and it
was said of him that "he was weighed on the path and made light." Adair
writes that the Cherokees, until corrupted by French agents and by the
later class of traders who poured rum among them like water, were
honest, industrious, and friendly. They were ready to meet the white man
with their customary phrase of good will: "I shall firmly shake hands
with your speech." He was intimately associated with this tribe from
1735 to 1744, when he diverted his activities to the Chickasaws.
It was from the Cherokees' chief town, Great Telliko, in the
Appalachians, that Adair explored the mountains. He describes the pass
through the chain which was used by the Indians and which, from his
outline of it, was probably the Cumberland Gap. He relates many
incidents of the struggle with the French--manifestations even in this
remote wilderness of the vast conflict that was being waged for the New
World by two imperial nations of the Old.
Adair undertook, at the solicitation of Governor Glen of South Carolina,
the dangerous task of opening up trade with the Choctaws, a tribe
mustering upwards of five thousand warriors who were wholly in the
French interest. Their country lay in what is now the State of
Mississippi along the great river, some seven hundred miles west and
southwest of Charleston. After passing the friendly Creek towns the
trail led on for 150 miles through what was practically the enemy's
country. Adair, owing to what he likes to term his "usual good fortune,"
reached the Choctaw country safely and by his adroitness and substantial
presents won the friendship of the influential chief, Red Shoe, whom he
found in a receptive mood, owing to a French agent's breach of
hospitality involving Red Shoe's favorite wife. Adair thus created a
large pro-English faction among the Choctaws, and his success seriously
impaired French prestige with all the southwestern tribes. Several times
French Choctaws bribed to murder him, waylaid Adair on the trail--twice
when he was alone--only to be baffled by the imperturbable
self-possession and alert wit which never failed him in emergencies.
Winning a Choctaw trade cost Adair, besides attacks on his life, £2200,
for which he was never reimbursed, notwithstanding Governor Glen's
agreement with him. And, on his return to Charleston, while the Governor
was detaining him "on one pretext or another," he found that a new
expedition, which the Governor was favoring for reasons of his own, had
set out to capture his Chickasaw trade and gather in "the expected great
crop of deerskins and beaver... before I could possibly return to the
Chikkasah Country." Nothing daunted, however, the hardy trader set out
alone.
In the severity of winter, frost, snow, hail and heavy rains succeed
each other in these climes, so that I partly rode and partly swam to the
Chikkasah country; for not expecting to stay long below [in Charleston]
I took no leathern canoe. Many of the broad, deep creeks... had now
overflowed their banks, ran at a rapid rate and were unpassable to any
but desperate people:... the rivers and swamps were dreadful by rafts of
timber driving down the former and the great fallen trees floating in
the latter.... Being forced to wade deep through cane swamps or woody
thickets, it proved very troublesome to keep my firearms dry on which,
as a second means, my life depended.
Nevertheless Adair defeated the Governor's attempt to steal his trade,
and later on published the whole story in the Charleston press and sent
in a statement of his claims to the Assembly, with frank observations on
His Excellency himself. We gather that his bold disregard of High
Personages set all Charleston in an uproar!
Adair is tantalizingly modest about his own deeds. He devotes pages to
prove that an Indian rite agrees with the Book of Leviticus but only a
paragraph to an exploit of courage and endurance such as that ride and
swim for the Indian trade. We have to read between the lines to find the
man; but he well repays the search. Briefly, incidentally, he mentions
that on one trip he was captured by the French, who were so,
well acquainted with the great damages I had done to them and feared
others I might occasion, as to confine me a close prisoner... in the
Alebahma garrison. They were fully resolved to have sent me down to
Mobile or New Orleans as a capital criminal to be hanged... but I
doubted not of being able to extricate myself some way or other. They
appointed double centries over me for some days before I was to be sent
down in the French King's large boat. They were strongly charged against
laying down their weapons or suffering any hostile thing to be in the
place where I was kept, as they deemed me capable of any mischief....
About an hour before we were to set off by water I escaped from them by
land.... I took through the middle of the low land covered with briers
at full speed. I heard the French clattering on horseback along the
path... and the howling savages pursuing..., but my usual good fortune
enabled me to leave them far enough behind....
One feels that a few of the pages given up to Leviticus might well have
been devoted to a detailed account of this escape from "double centries"
and a fortified garrison, and the plunge through the tangled wilds, by a
man without gun or knife or supplies, and who for days dared not show
himself upon the trail.
There is too much of "my usual good fortune" in Adair's narrative; such
luck as his argues for extraordinary resources in the man. Sometimes we
discover only through one phrase on a page that he must himself have
been the hero of an event he relates in the third person. This seems to
be the case in the affair of Priber, which was the worst of those
"damages" Adair did to the French. Priber was "a gentleman of curious
and speculative temper" sent by the French in 1736 to Great Telliko to
win the Cherokees to their interest. At this time Adair was trading with
the Cherokees. He relates that Priber,
more effectually to answer the design of his commission... ate, drank,
slept, danced, dressed, and painted himself with the Indians, so that it
was not easy to distinguish him from the natives,--he married also with
them, and being endued with a strong understanding and retentive memory
he soon learned their dialect, and by gradual advances impressed them
with a very ill opinion of the English, representing them as fraudulent,
avaritious and encroaching people; he at the same time inflated the
artless savages with a prodigious high opinion of their own importance
in the American scale of power.... Having thus infected them... he
easily formed them into a nominal republican government--crowned their
old Archi-magus emperor after a pleasing new savage form, and invented a
variety of high-sounding titles for all the members of his imperial
majesty's red court.
Priber cemented the Cherokee empire "by slow but sure degrees to the
very great danger of our southern colonies." His position was that of
Secretary of State and as such, with a studiedly provocative arrogance,
he carried on correspondence with the British authorities. The colonial
Government seems, on this occasion, to have listened to the traders and
to have realized that Priber was a danger, for soldiers were sent to
take him prisoner. The Cherokees, however, had so firmly "shaked hands"
with their Secretary's admired discourse that they threatened to take
the warpath if their beloved man were annoyed, and the soldiers went
home without him--to the great hurt of English prestige. The Cherokee
empire had now endured for five years and was about to rise "into a far
greater state of puissance by the acquisition of the Muskohge, Chocktaw
and the Western Mississippi Indians," when fortunately for the history
of British colonization in America, "an accident befell the Secretary."
It is in connection with this "accident" that the reader suspects the
modest but resourceful Adair of conniving with Fate. Since the military
had failed and the Government dared not again employ force, other means
must be found; the trader provided them. The Secretary with his Cherokee
bodyguard journeyed south on his mission to the Creeks. Secure, as he
supposed, he lodged overnight in an Indian town. But there a company of
English traders took him into custody, along with his bundle of
manuscripts presumably intended for the French commandant at Fort
Alabama, and handed him over to the Governor of Georgia, who imprisoned
him and kept him out of mischief till he died.
As a Briton, Adair contributed to Priber's fate; and as such he approves
it. As a scholar with philosophical and ethnological leanings, however,
he deplores it, and hopes that Priber's valuable manuscripts may "escape
the despoiling hands of military power." Priber had spent his leisure in
compiling a Cherokee dictionary; Adair's occupation, while domiciled in
his winter house in Great Telliko, was the writing of his Indian
Appendix to the Pentateuch. As became brothers in science, they had
exchanged notes, so we gather from Adair's references to conversations
and correspondence. Adair's difficulties as an author, however, had been
increased by a treacherous lapse from professional etiquette on the part
of the Secretary: "He told them [the Indians] that in the very same
manner as he was their great Secretary, I was the devil's clerk, or an
accursed one who marked on paper the bad speech of the evil ones of
darkness." On his own part Adair admits that his object in this
correspondence was to trap the Secretary into something more serious
than literary errata. That is, he admits it by implication; he says the
Secretary "feared" it. During the years of their duel, Adair apparently
knew that the scholarly compiler of the Cherokee dictionary was secretly
inciting members of this particular Lost Tribe to tomahawk the
discoverer of their biblical origin; and Priber, it would seem, knew
that he knew!
Adair shows, inferentially, that land encroachment was not the sole
cause of those Indian wars with which we shall deal in a later chapter.
The earliest causes were the instigations of the French and the rewards
which they offered for English scalps. But equally provocative of Indian
rancor were the acts of sometimes merely stupid, sometimes dishonest,
officials; the worst of these, Adair considered, was the cheapening of
the trade through the granting of general licenses.
Formerly each trader had a license for two [Indian] towns.... At my
first setting out among them, a number of traders... journeyed through
our various nations in different companies and were generally men of
worth; of course they would have a living price for their goods, which
they carried on horseback to the remote Indian countries at very great
expences.... [The Indians] were kept under proper restraint, were easy
in their minds and peaceable on account of the plain, honest lessons
daily inculcated on them... but according to the present unwise plan,
two and even three Arablike peddlars sculk about in one of those
villages... who are generally the dregs and offs-courings of our
climes... by inebriating the Indians with their nominally prohibited and
poisoning spirits, they purchase the necessaries of life at four and
five hundred per cent cheaper than the orderly traders.... Instead of
showing good examples of moral conduct, beside the other part of life,
they instruct the unknowing and imitating savages in many diabolical
lessons of obscenity and blasphemy.
In these statements, contemporary records bear him out. There is no
sadder reading than the many pleas addressed by the Indian chiefs to
various officials to stop the importation of liquor into their country,
alleging the debauchment of their young men and warning the white man,
with whom they desired to be friends, that in an Indian drink and blood
lust quickly combined.
Adair's book was published in London in 1775. He wrote it to be read by
Englishmen as well as Americans; and some of his reflections on liberty,
justice, and Anglo-Saxon unity would not sound unworthily today. His
sympathies were with "the principles of our Magna Charta Americana"; but
he thought the threatened division of the English-speaking peoples the
greatest evil that could befall civilization. His voluminous work
discloses a man not only of wide mental outlook but a practical man with
a sense of commercial values. Yet, instead of making a career for
himself among his own caste, he made his home for over thirty years in
the Chickasaw towns; and it is plain that, with the exception of some of
his older brother traders, he preferred the Chickasaw to any other
society.
The complete explanation of such men as Adair we need not expect to find
stated anywhere--not even in and between the lines of his book. The
conventionalist would seek it in moral obliquity; the radical, in a
temperament that is irked by the superficialities that comprise so large
a part of conventional standards. The reason for his being what he was
is almost the only thing Adair did not analyze in his book. Perhaps, to
him, it was self evident. We may let it be so to us, and see it most
clearly presented in a picture composed from some of his brief sketches:
A land of grass and green shade inset with bright waters, where deer and
domestic cattle herded together along the banks; a circling group of
houses, their white-clayed walls sparkling under the sun's rays, and,
within and without, the movement of "a friendly and sagacious people,"
who "kindly treated and watchfully guarded" their white brother in peace
and war, and who conversed daily with him in the Old Beloved Speech
learned first of Nature. "Like towers in cities beyond the common size
of those of the Indians" rose the winter and summer houses and the huge
trading house which the tribe had built for their best beloved friend in
the town's center, because there he would be safest from attack. On the
rafters hung the smoked and barbecued delicacies taken in the hunt and
prepared for him by his red servants, who were also his comrades at home
and on the dangerous trail. "Beloved old women" kept an eye on his small
sons, put to drowse on panther skins so that they might grow up brave
warriors. Nothing was there of artifice or pretense, only "the needful
things to make a reasonable life happy." All was as primitive, naive,
and contented as the woman whose outline is given once in a few strokes,
proudly and gayly penciled: "I have the pleasure of writing this by the
side of a Chikkasah female, as great a princess as ever lived among the
ancient Peruvians or Mexicans, and she bids me be sure not to mark the
paper wrong after the manner of most of the traders; otherwise it will
spoil the making good bread or homony!"
His final chapter is the last news of James Adair, type of the earliest
trader. Did his bold attacks on corrupt officials and rum peddlers--made
publicly before Assemblies and in print--raise for him a dense cloud of
enmity that dropped oblivion on his memory? Perhaps. But, in truth, his
own book is all the history of him we need. It is the record of a man.
He lived a full life and served his day; and it matters not that a mist
envelops the place where unafraid he met the Last Enemy, was "weighed on
the path and made light."