there was not enough unanimity of purpose among the New Englanders to
attack the foreigners who were standing in the way of their expanding
beaver traffic. For one thing, at that time, the dominant member of
the confederation was not too directly affected by Dutch resistance.
Massachusetts’ main inland fur traffic from Boston did not approach
Dutch territory, and her chief fur merchant, Simon Willard of Concord,
who spearheaded this traffic up the Merrimac River had yet to reach
even Lake Winnepesaukee, itself far separated from New Netherland
frontiers by natural boundaries.
Of course all New Englanders protested about the “murderous” Dutch
trade in arms for beaver. William Pynchon protested even about the
Hollanders supplying the distant Iroquois with firearms. But since all
the colonies of the confederation were guilty in some degree of this
practice, it is questionable whether the complaints sprang as much from
moral considerations as they did from vexation over the diversion of
beaver pelts to the more freehanded Hollanders.
In any case, while the New Englanders protested so virtuously about
the Dutch trade in firearms, they complained strenuously also about
Stuyvesant’s new excises on furs, and they took the occasion to pass
laws excluding the Hollanders from any trade with Indians under
their jurisdiction. Their jurisdiction, it seemed, now comprehended
everything along the coast east of Greenwich and unlimited claims to
the interior. This brought about a diplomatic showdown.
Governor Stuyvesant, in high bluff, journeyed to Hartford in 1650 for
a meeting with the Commissioners of the United Colonies. He offered a
valiant front, opening the negotiations with a letter of considerations
signed at Hartford but dated “in New Netherland.” When the New
England commissioners took exception, Stuyvesant explained that, as
the substance of the letter was agreed upon in Council at Manhattan,
it was so dated. However, if the commissioners would cease speaking
of Hartford “in New England,” he would not date his letters “in New
Netherland.”
This was not to be his only retreat. His territorial claims east
along the coast retreated from Cape Cod to Greenwich in the face of
accomplished fact. And he could only agree to a stabilization of the
border between New England and New Netherland at about where it had
been fixed already by English traders. Roughly, this was a line running
northerly from the vicinity of Greenwich that was at no point to come
within ten miles of Hudson’s River. The only Dutch reservation east of
that line was the Fort Good Hope trading post.
It was all very humiliating. However it appeared to have the redeeming
feature of halting by treaty any further encroachment on the heart of
the Dutch trading preserves. The all-important Iroquois trade was saved.
But only for the time being, as it turned out. Significantly enough,
although the treaty signed at Hartford was eventually ratified by the
States General in Holland, the English government never did get around
to doing so. It wasn’t necessary. England planned to take all of New
Netherland, in due time.
Meanwhile, the pressure on New Netherland was renewed, while the treaty
itself was violated, even repudiated, by the New Englanders.
To begin with, Cromwell’s Navigation Act was passed in 1651. It decreed
that goods imported into England must come in English ships or ships
belonging to the country in which the goods were produced. Since this
was specifically directed against the Dutch carrying trade, it soon
plunged England and Holland into a naval war, from which England may be
said to have emerged the victor even though she was soundly thrashed at
sea. But, although the British fleet had to take refuge in the Thames
while an exulting Dutch admiral sailed up and down the Channel with
a broom tied to the masthead of his flagship, the Navigation Act was
maintained in force.
While all this was going on overseas, New Haven and Connecticut
clamored for the conquest of their “noxious” Dutch neighbors.
So alarmed was Peter Stuyvesant in 1653 that he made last-ditch
preparations for the coming English onslaught. It was at this time
that the famous wall of palisades was built along the line of what
is still called “Wall” Street. This pale was intended to hinder any
possible land envelopment of New Amsterdam by the English. But once
again Massachusetts held back. She prevented outright war in America by
refusing to join in a military offensive against New Netherland.
The boundaries set up by the Treaty of Hartford were violated however.
By 1655 the English had pushed across the line at Greenwich, well into
present-day Westchester County. By 1659 Massachusetts itself was ready
to repudiate the treaty.
In that year, it appears, the Hollanders made the mistake of
objecting too vigorously to being divested of the bulk of their
beaver trade by Boston merchants. The Bay Colony, claiming unlimited
western boundaries, had granted a tract in the Hudson valley to
merchants interested in establishing a fur trading post close by Fort
Orange itself. Then, as if this was not offensive enough to the New
Netherlanders, the Boston men boldly requested free use of the Hudson
River waterway to reach their new property. The overland route was too
difficult, they explained.
When Peter Stuyvesant angrily refused this request the Boston traders
persisted, bringing their case before the Commissioners of the United
Colonies. Whereupon those gentlemen announced airily that “The
agreement at Hartford that the English should not come within ten miles
of Hudson’s River, doth not prejudice the rights of the Massachusetts
in the upland country, nor give any rights to the Dutch there!” Only
the excitement generated by the Restoration in England quelled the
ensuing controversy long enough to forestall a local conflict.
This same year, only four years after the Dutch conquest of New Sweden,
English pressure commenced from the south. There, Governor Fendall
of Lord Baltimore’s Maryland colony was invading the Delaware valley
with men and ultimatums. He demanded that “the pretended Governor of
a people seated in Delaware Bay, within his Lordship’s Province ...
depart forth!” Otherwise, he declaimed, that part of his lordship’s
province “would be reduced to its due obedience under him.”
Stuyvesant, of course, refuted the Maryland claim. He pointed out
that Lord Baltimore’s patent gave him rights only to lands hitherto
uncultivated by Christians. But the English pressure in that quarter,
once commenced, was maintained with the same stubborn persistence as
that on the New England front. The British were closing their ranks on
the eastern seaboard of America. The squeeze was on New Netherland.
The Dutch governor fought desperately for the life of his colony. He
had been plagued with Indian uprisings in the valley of the Hudson,
pirates in Long Island Sound and English plotters in New Amsterdam
itself. Now the very life’s breath of his colony was being squeezed
out, for, in addition to the loss of Indian trade to the trespassing
Englishmen, Peter Stuyvesant also had to contend with the stifling
effects of the new British Navigation Acts. These laws had not been
relaxed in any degree since Cromwell’s death. On the contrary, they had
been tightened upon the restoration of the crown.
But, since the Navigation Acts were almost as obnoxious to the English
colonies as they were to the Dutch, ways were found in America to
circumvent them. Intercolonial trade practices developed that soon
baffled the monopoly-minded merchants of London and Bristol. Stuyvesant
discovered, for instance, that he could exchange negroes and “other
merchandise” for Virginia tobacco, and then reship the English product
via New Amsterdam. Thus, goods intended for British bottoms were being
carried by the Dutch to foreign markets, in spite of the English
navigation laws.
Under these circumstances, from the British viewpoint, there was
only one thing left to do. Whatever remained of Dutch authority and
jurisdiction in America would have to be stamped out by military force.
To accomplish this the English had only to take the Hudson River. It
was not only the main highway to the fur stores of the Iroquois, it was
the key to military control of the continent. And it could be seized at
small cost, the Council of Foreign Plantations suggested.
Whereupon James, Duke of York, persuaded his brother, Charles II,
to grant him title to various lands in America including all the
territory between the Delaware and Connecticut Rivers, and to finance
an expedition against New Amsterdam. The English did not bother even to
declare war, since, as the king curiously put it, New Amsterdam “did
belong to England before, but the Dutch drove our people out of it.” A
conglomeration of assumptions hardly warranted by any facts!
Someone has written that the conquest of New Netherland by the force
sent out by the Duke of York was “a mere bit of bellicose etiquette.”
Others have been more direct, calling it “bold robbery.” In any case,
when Colonel Richard Nicolls arrived off Fort Amsterdam in the late
summer of 1664, with four frigates and five times the fire power of
Stuyvesant’s guns, New Amsterdam became New York without a shot being
fired. So did Fort Orange up the river. It only remained then for
Sir Robert Carr to descend upon the Delaware settlements to force the
allegiance of all those seated there, and New Netherland ceased to
exist.
The English had closed ranks on the coasts of America. British colonies
now stretched out in line, unbroken by foreigners, from Spanish Florida
to French Canada--one united front--for trade, for war.
British demands at Fort Amsterdam having proved to be moderate,
the Dutch remained as good subjects, thus establishing the early
cosmopolitan character of Manhattan. Many of the burghers had openly
sided with the English anyway during the surrender negotiations,
apparently with the happy prospect of ridding themselves of their
waspish little governor. Stuyvesant himself, retiring to private life,
developed a warm friendship with his English successor, Governor
Nicolls, each apparently holding the other in high esteem.
And, in the official seal of New York, full recognition was given to
the little furred animal that had so properly occupied a prominent
place in the seal of the Dutch colony. _Castor canadensis_ appeared
twice, in fact, within the shield of the British seal. Even after the
American Revolution, after the eagle had supplanted the crown in the
seal of New York, these two beavers remained there as a permanent
reminder of the important role of fur in the genesis of our greatest
port.
XVII
_Westward the Fur Frontier of America_
With the elimination of New Netherland in 1664 the main obstacle to
British colonial policy had been removed. Laws providing for a more
closely knit relationship between the colonies and the mother country,
such as the Navigation Acts, could be enforced. Soldiers now backed
up the merchants. Indeed, from this time the expansion of England’s
imperial trade system in America would proceed at the point of a gun.
That it would expand however, and solidly, was because the English had
what it took in addition to guns. They possessed all those stubborn
qualities required of true empire builders, of colonizers. The farmers
who pressed hard behind the fur traders were land-hungry, persistent
and numerous. They kept the beaver traders, and the soldiers, on the
move.
Although the English flag waved over America in 1664 from Spanish
Florida to French Canada, it was planted only along the coast. The
farthest inland post was Fort Albany on the Hudson, formerly Dutch Fort
Orange. Beyond that, however, lay the boundless hinterland, a seemingly
inexhaustible fur frontier to be rolled westward toward the South Sea,
toward China!
Of course there was the matter of protecting the English flanks against
the Spaniards and the French. On the left flank, in the south, this had
been accomplished by the Carolina Patent which extended England’s claim
in those parts far below Cape Fear to 31°, and later even farther,
although Spain did manage to keep the border north of its stronghold
at St. Augustine. On the right flank the French coastal boundary had
been neatly settled, or so the British colonials thought, when the
northernmost limit of the widely scattered lands granted to the Duke of
York was placed at the St. Croix River, roughly 45°, which had been
England’s traditional claim there.
[Illustration: THE TRADERS KEPT PUSHING THEIR BIRCH-BARK CANOES DEEPER
INTO THE WILDERNESS.]
Then, too, there was the matter of the French traders already in the
northwestern hinterland. But, since England had inherited the Dutch
trade with the Iroquois, those fierce savages were counted upon to act
as buffer allies in the interior, to keep the French trade routes north
of the lake country.
It was quite a surprise therefore to the British colonials when their
penetration of the interior had hardly begun before Frenchmen were
harassing their right flank. Their coastal border on the St. Croix
River was forced back once more below the Penobscot, while in the
interior the Mohawk valley itself was raided by French troops trying to
wrest more southerly routes from the Iroquois.
And this was only the beginning of a bloody rivalry between the English
and the French for fur and dominion in America, a rivalry that would
keep the evershifting borders aflame for almost a hundred years--to
culminate finally in the decisive French and Indian War of the
eighteenth century.
* * * * *
The Frenchmen of the seventeenth century who followed the paths blazed
by Samuel de Champlain had extended those paths farther and farther
into the hinterland. Fur traders, explorers, soldiers, and Catholic
priests who not infrequently bent to the paddles for discovery entirely
on their own, all took part in this invasion of America.
Of course the Frenchmen who came to America were not colonizers, not
true empire builders. There were few farmers among them. In the main
they were adventurers. But they had grand plans, and they knew how to
strike bargains and make treaties with the natives. So, although their
lines of communication were much too thinly held, they kept pushing
their birch-bark canoes deeper into the wilderness for trade and
dominion.
In 1634, one of Champlain’s interpreters, Jean Nicollet, voyaged across
the waters of Lake Michigan to establish trade with the natives in the
Wisconsin region. He had supposed they would be an Oriental people,
and his appearance at Green Bay in a damask gown richly embroidered in
the Chinese manner impressed the Dacotahs no less than the thunder and
lightning of his pistol. Believing him to be a white god, the savages
were humbly acquiescent to Nicollet’s demand for skins, and he took
full profit from the situation.
In another twenty-five years two intrepid fur-traders, Pierre
Exprit Radisson and his sister’s husband Medard Chouart, Sieur des
Grosseilliers, had looked upon the waters of the upper Mississippi
River. Trading and hunting with the Sioux, they explored much of the
vast country between the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. On this
same expedition, it would appear, while his partner was ill in winter
camp, Radisson investigated the region about Lake Superior and learned
of Cree trade routes from that lake to the Great Bay of the North
(Hudson’s Bay). In the end, after many blood-curdling adventures,
he and his brother-in-law returned home to Three Rivers on the St.
Lawrence with a fortune in beaver skins.
They were soon off again, however, on another extended trading
expedition, this time to build a palisaded fort among savage tribes
living north of Lake Superior and eventually to cross the wilderness
to Hudson’s Bay. Radisson’s account of the perils encountered on this
venture puts one in mind of Jason’s quest for the golden fleece--and
the tale’s denouement is no less reminiscent of that ancient Greek
legend. In any case, the brothers-in-law took along a particularly
fine supply of merchandise on this expedition into what is now
northwestern Ontario--knives, hatchets and swords, ivory combs and tin
looking-glasses, awls, and needles--all those things designed to send
the red men in breathless pursuit of beaver. And, when they returned
home, they had the greatest single cargo of pelts ever before seen
in America. Their convoy included a great fleet of fur-laden canoes,
requiring hundreds of Indians to paddle them.
Such a kingly treasure was too much for the grasping French governor
at Quebec to resist. What he couldn’t take away from Radisson and
Des Grosseilliers in taxes he took away in fines. This, he informed
them, was because they had gone on their journey without his personal
permission. The share left for the two traders, who had taken the
risks, opened the country and brought back the beaver, hardly
compensated them for their labor. They quit Canada in disgust to cast
their lot with the English, the important consequence of which was the
birth of the great Hudson’s Bay Company.
Radisson and his brother-in-law first spent some time trying to
interest merchants in Nova Scotia, then under British control, in
establishing a fur trading post on Hudson’s Bay. An expedition did set
out in an English ship but the captain turned back on encountering ice
floes, due to the lateness of the season. Then the Frenchmen went to
Boston, where they gained considerable interest in their project but
not enough capital to launch it. Finally, in England, they obtained
sufficient backing from Prince Rupert, cousin of King Charles II, to
finance such a costly adventure.
In 1668 a trading post was established “at the bottom of Hudson’s Bay,”
in the southernmost part of James Bay, and the first cargo of furs to
arrive in England was magnificent enough to insure a royal charter.
The king granted domain over all the vast area drained by waters
flowing into Hudson’s Bay to Prince Rupert and seventeen associates,
incorporating them in 1670 as the “Governor and Company of Adventurers
of England Trading in Hudson’s Bay.” These merchant adventurers became
virtual rulers over “Rupert’s Land,” approximately 1,400,000 square
miles of territory, and so their successors of the Hudson’s Bay Company
were to be for over 200 years.
After the English became entrenched on Hudson’s Bay, furs were diverted
to them that otherwise would have been collected by the French. In time
French traders became aggravated enough to make repeated attacks on
the rival posts. Attempts to dislodge the English from the bay proved
futile however. Although the “Honorable Company,” as the Hudson’s Bay
Company was to become known, moved ponderously at times due to its
conservative absentee directorship in England, it managed to endure and
to expand at the expense of the French. In fact, it was destined to
become the world’s largest fur trading organization. It would shift the
course of trade to London, to make it the center of the western world’s
fur market.
Meanwhile, the adventurous French were spurred on by the discovery of
the upper Mississippi. Radisson called the Mississippi, in conjunction
with the Missouri, the Forked River “because it has two branches, the
one towards the west, the other towards the south, which we believe
runs toward Mexico.” Jesuit priests, probing the hinterland, wrote that
the savages assured them the Mississippi was “so noble a river that, at
more than three hundred leagues’ distance from its mouth, it is larger
than the one flowing before Quebec; for they declare it is more than a
league wide.... Some warriors of this country, who tell us that they
have made their way thither, declare that they saw there men resembling
the French, who were splitting trees with long knives, and that some
of them had houses on the water--for they thus expressed themselves in
speaking of sawed boards and Ships”--and Spaniards!
Already, young Louis XIV had considered occupying the mouths of
continental rivers emptying into the Gulf of Mexico to threaten the
Spanish possessions there. If Radisson’s Forked River was really one of
these waterways, the strategic value of such a move would be immensely
enhanced. It would provide a backside approach from New France, an
interior line of communications safe from Spanish attack. It was an
intriguing prospect, to say the least.
Then, in 1673, a fur trader and mine prospector named Louis Joliet
together with a Jesuit priest, Father Jacques Marquette, descended the
Mississippi far enough to learn that it assuredly did flow into the
Gulf of Mexico. Whereupon the French not only tasted the stimulating
prospect of threatening Spanish possessions there, they excitedly
envisioned an inland empire of trading citadels stretching from the
Gulf of St. Lawrence, through the Great Lakes and the Mississippi
Valley, to the Gulf of Mexico. The continent would be theirs, with
great ports of entry at the distantly separated mouths of the St.
Lawrence and Mississippi Rivers. The English colonies would be
completely encircled--to be pinned down on the coast, or eliminated!
Chief among those who developed this grand commercial strategy for
dominion over the heart of America was Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la
Salle, who as Commandant of Fort Frontenac at the western outlet of
Lake Ontario had built up a thriving trade with the northwestern
savages. Much to the annoyance of the Iroquois he furnished these
Algonquin tribes with guns, powder and lead, as well as less deadly
goods, in return for their furs. La Salle’s profits from this commerce
were huge. But he was an eager young man. The prospect of an enormous
trade for buffalo hides, deerskins, beaver, bear, otter and raccoon
in the Mississippi valley beckoned him to conquest. In 1678, on his
promise to King Louis that he would Christianize the natives, establish
a line of forts from the lakes to the mouth of the Mississippi and open
a direct route to France through the Gulf of Mexico, he was granted a
monopolistic trade patent to all the lands drained by the mighty river.
It was to be four years however before La Salle reached the mouth of
the Mississippi, even on an initial exploratory expedition, for he was
to make one false start after another.
If the Iroquois had been unhappy before, they were more so when La
Salle, entering into his new domain, palisaded a trading post called
Fort Crevecouer--the present site of Peoria, Illinois. They almost
annihilated the Illinois with whom the Frenchmen were trading there,
this being one of the tribes over which the Five Nations maintained
their tyrannous lordship. Henri de Tonti, La Salle’s lieutenant in
command of the fort at the time these human tigers descended on their
vassals, was given the choice of being burned along with some Illinois
captives or departing forthwith. He chose to depart. Curiously enough,
however, not without a superb stock of furs for his inconvenience, all
provided for him with typical savage capriciousness.
There were other opponents with whom La Salle had to contend during
this period of trial. Jesuit priests, who drove a profitable trade
for beaver among the savages while saving souls, objected not only
to the monopoly granted La Salle but to the Franciscan priests who
accompanied him and who competed in both commercial and spiritual
fields. And there were still others who made mischief. _Coureurs des
bois_, those renegade Frenchmen trading in the wilderness without
license and illegally selling their furs to the English at Albany, were
not averse to conspiring against the new monopoly that threatened their
independence. There were hundreds of these savage-like white men, some
originally of the French petty nobility, living among the Indians. Many
of them had squaw wives, no consciences and little compunction about
stirring up a war against their own countrymen if it fattened their
pocketbooks.