western tribes and organized them as allies. To keep the Iroquois off
his back he furnished his red friends with more guns and taught them
how to palisade their villages against the attacks of their fierce
overlords. This done, in 1682 he was able to launch the fleet of canoes
that carried a motley company of some fifty white men and Indians,
including squaws and papooses, to the desolate delta country at the
mouth of the Mississippi River. There, he erected a cross, sang the
_Te Deum_ and gave the name of “Louisiana” to the vast domain he now
claimed in the name of France. Then he re-embarked with his company for
the Illinois country.
It was a tortuous voyage back up the river. La Salle sickened and
nearly died. Recovering at last, he went on to France where he
organized and embarked on the expedition that was to end his short but
historic career.
After setting out for the Gulf of Mexico with a well-equipped fleet of
ships and a full complement of traders and their families, La Salle was
first attacked by the Spaniards; then he failed to locate the mouth
of the Mississippi. In final desperation he built a palisaded fort
hundreds of miles west of his goal on what is now called Matagorda
Bay. In that strange country the young French leader was killed
by discontents among his own men following an argument over the
apportionment of some buffalo meat.
But La Salle’s grand scheme did not die with him. While the Spaniards,
who carried on a flourishing business in hides in New Mexico, were
not long in searching out all that remained of the French colony and
taking over the neighboring country called “Texas,” they didn’t occupy
the strategic region about the mouth of the Mississippi River. By 1699
Pierre le Moyne, Sieur d’Iberville, a Canadian, had planted a colony
on Biloxi Bay in what is now Mississippi, and in another three years
a strongly palisaded fort was built close by at Mobile, to become the
capital of Louisiana.
French trading citadels soon dotted the Mississippi valley--New Orleans
in the delta, Forts Rosalie, Chartres and St. Antoine to comprehend
the length of the great river itself, Fort d’Huiller on the Minnesota,
Pimitoui on the Illinois, and Fort Orleans on the Missouri. Half-breed
camps, conglomerate communities sprang up--Cahokia, Kaskaskia, Natchez,
Natchitoches, and others. The natives, and even the outlawed _coureurs
des bois_, found ready, local markets for their peltries in exchange
for trade goods and supplies. And, while deep-laden canoes and company
boats plied the alluvial waters of the Mississippi River to and from
its mouth, ships from France set a course direct to the Gulf of
Mexico--to the new French fur emporium in America.
In the meantime, the main path of the fur traders, the line of
communication between Canada and Louisiana, was shortened by a
far-sighted Gascon merchant named Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac.
When he palisaded his trading citadel at Detroit in 1699, on the
strait connecting Lake Erie and Lake Huron, he brought about such a
concentration of Indian commerce and military power in those parts that
within a few years portages between streams feeding western Lake Erie
and the Ohio River could be effected with relative safety from Iroquois
attack. And, when French fur traders began dipping their paddles in
the Ohio River, thousands of square miles of territory were added to
France’s mid-continent conquest.
Not only had the French completely encircled the English colonies
strung out along the Atlantic seaboard, they had now begun to spread
their occupation eastward toward the Appalachian Mountains, behind
which they hoped to contain the English permanently.
* * * * *
Meanwhile, trail-blazing traders from Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania
and New York had come upon the Appalachians and were searching out that
mountainous barrier to further westward expansion.
Sir William Berkeley, Governor of Virginia, had an especial interest
in the mountains and the country beyond. As agent in America for the
Hudson’s Bay Company he hoped to help break the French monopoly on the
hinterland trade by exploiting the western territory from Virginia.
As early as 1669 he sent out John Lederer, a German, who ranged the
eastern slopes of the Blue Ridge, north and south, for many miles.
Even before that, Abraham Wood and other traders with commissions from
the governor had bartered far to the southwest among the headwaters of
Carolina coastal rivers.
They transported their wares on pack horses, 150 to 200 pounds on
each animal, making twenty miles or more a day on their journeys when
forage was plentiful. With guns, powder and shot as prime trade goods
they visited tribes who had previously bartered with the Spaniards of
Florida. They took hatchets, kettles, iron tools, colorful blankets and
a variety of trinkets to villages never before visited by white men.
On these occasions the appearance of that strange animal, the horse,
strung with tinkling bells and packing unbelievable wealth on his back,
created more awe among the savages than the bearded white man himself.
In 1671 the Virginians crossed the southerly ridges into the New River
valley, and in another two years young Gabriel Arthur opened commerce
with the Cherokees in the terminal hills of the Appalachians. He
and his partner, James Needham, had some extraordinary experiences.
Needham, a much older man of some experience in the Indian trade, was
murdered by the savages on this venture. Arthur himself escaped burning
only through the intervention of a Cherokee chief who, during the midst
of the torture, adopted him into the tribe.
The Cherokee chief dressed and armed Arthur as a brave and sent him out
with raiding war parties. In the first such instance, the Virginian
seems to have joined willingly enough in a murderous surprise attack
on a Spanish mission settlement in West Florida. In another, he helped
slaughter some sleeping native villagers one night in the vicinity of
Port Royal, South Carolina, on the promise of the Cherokees that no
Englishmen in those parts would be harmed during the raid. Arthur later
said he could tell that one English family was celebrating Christmas
when his war party crept by their hut.
In still another instance, Arthur went all the way to the banks of the
Ohio with his Cherokee chief to attack a Shawnee village. There he was
badly wounded and captured, but released with some reverence when he
scrubbed himself and exhibited his white skin to the amazed savages.
After making his way back to the country of his Cherokee friends, the
young Virginian finally returned to his own kind on the James River,
richly laden with furs and trade treaties.
Henry Woodward, Carolina’s resourceful pioneer, found evidence of the
Virginians’ trade on the backside of Lord Ashley’s proprietary in
1674. Woodward, who saved the fledgling colony at Charles Towne from
bankruptcy by developing a trade in pelts and skins with the hinterland
savages, visited the palisaded village of the Westoes that year. There,
high up the Savannah River, he found the natives already “well provided
with arms, ammunition, tradeing cloath & other trade from ye northward
for which at set times of ye year they truck drest deare skins furrs &
young Indian slaves.”
Governor Berkeley’s traders were indeed carrying on a highly profitable
commerce. So much so, that in the interests of those profits, it was
claimed, the governor permitted favored hinterland tribes to pillage
Virginia tobacco planters with impunity. In any case Berkeley, who
operated gainfully in his capacity as a British fur factor, did not
respond with enough enthusiasm to the planters’ demands for protection,
and a civil war resulted in 1676 that set back the colony’s economy by
years. The rebellion was led by a fiery, twenty-nine-year-old patriot
named Nathaniel Bacon. Before he died suddenly of a camp malady, Bacon
chased the governor across the Chesapeake Bay to the Eastern Shore and
burned Jamestown, the capital of Virginia, to the ground. With Bacon’s
death the revolt collapsed and twenty-three prominent insurgent leaders
were hanged by the governor in an orgy of personal revenge.
But, if Governor Berkeley had won the war over the fur trade, it was a
merchant at the Falls of the James River who prospered most. There, at
his store, William Byrd maintained a fine stock of calico, red coats,
beads, knives, guns and Barbadian brandy for the pack-traders who
sought out beaver pelts among remote Indian villages in the interior.
So successful was Byrd that by the early 1680’s he dominated the
hinterland trading paths of Virginia and Carolina. From this commerce
he created the fortune that bought enough slaves and tobacco lands to
promote his family to a position among the wealthiest in the colony,
while the great hogsheads of pelts that he shipped yearly down the
James River to England contributed in no small way to the support of
Britain’s growing empire.
Henry Woodward and his Carolinians driving straight west avoided the
trading paths of the Virginians, as well as the Appalachian Mountains,
to invade the preserves of Spanish Florida. This took them to the
headwaters of rivers emptying into the Gulf of Mexico, to the villages
of the Creeks, where the Spaniards had previously monopolized the
trade in deerskins and Indian slaves. The Carolinians diverted much
of this profitable commerce to newly located Charleston. Thousands
upon thousands of deerskins were shipped yearly to England, to be
manufactured into a variety of articles. Hundreds of Indian slaves were
supplied to New England and Virginia, and to Barbados where the rate of
mortality on the hot sugar plantations insured a steady demand.
Spanish resistance in the south, the extinction of deer and the
elimination of whole tribes of Indians who succumbed to slavery, kept
the Charleston traders pushing ever toward the unknown west, across the
headwaters of the Chattahoochee and the Alabama and into the valley of
the Tennessee River. Before the turn of the century they had reached
the lands of the Chickasaw Indians bordering on the Mississippi River,
where their bright trade goods soon brought in all the available deer
in those parts. There, they were busily helping the Chickasaws make
war on their neighbors, the Choctaws, to procure slaves in lieu of the
skins, when the French arrived.
French forts and a French alliance with the Choctaws halted this
English advance into the lower valley of the Mississippi. Even so,
the Carolina traders had pushed the English frontier farther west, by
hundreds of miles, than any other colonials would do during the next
half century.
North of Virginia in the latter part of the seventeenth century the
two major areas of the fur trade among the English colonies were New
England and New York.
The New England trade, exhausting itself, was on the decline. It had
been blocked from expansion by national and political barriers in
the west and by the hostility of the French in the north. Raids and
counter raids, with the Indians used as allies on both sides, kept the
borders between the French and the New Englanders alive with savage
horrors. And, because of the prolonged hostilities in Europe these
conditions would continue into the next century, until 1763, long after
competition for pelts was no longer a controlling motive in that area.
The main fur trade of the colonies in the north after the fall of New
Netherland was New York’s hinterland traffic, that which had been
inherited from the Dutch. All wilderness paths led to Albany, even
those made by the _coureurs des bois_ and their copper-hued families
packing their illegal furs to the Hudson when they could not do
business with their own countrymen at Montreal. In 1679, it was said,
there were over 500 of these French renegades living among the Indians.
And to Albany, of course, came not only the beaver of the Five Nations
but the peltries of vassal tribes deep in the hinterland for whom the
Iroquois acted as middlemen.
The Five Nations were jealous enough of their trade and sovereignty
to visit swift vengeance on any vassals who tried to deal direct
with the white men, as happened to the Illinois in 1680 when those
distant natives sold their pelts to La Salle. For the same reason
they also tried to keep white pack traders from pushing farther into
the west, where they might exchange their wares direct with the less
sophisticated natives. It was a losing battle however.
* * * * *
By the turn of the century, traders from New York, Pennsylvania and
Virginia were working the Appalachian passes for beaver and otter. In
another twenty years many were squeezing through the more northerly
gaps into the valley of the Ohio River. By then, the pressure of
immigrant families upon the land east of the mountains had commenced in
earnest. Palatine farmers were flowing up the valley of the Mohawk in
great numbers, and land-hungry Ulster Scots were scrambling through the
Susquehanna valley and southward up the Shenandoah.
The fur trader as usual had searched out the country. Then, while he
was still exploiting it for his own purposes, he had to make way for
the farmer. The two could never blend, not after the frontier began
to roll westward. Farmers spoiled the trade. The pioneer traders could
only move on to more fertile trading grounds, to open new territory
which itself would later be taken up by farmers.
Of course, Indian titles had to be extinguished before settlers could
legally move into the lands opened up by the fur traders. Some tribes
were a bit troublesome about this detail. The Delaware kicked up an
especially bloody fuss on the Pennsylvania frontier. They had more than
a suspicion that they had been swindled by the “Walking Purchase.”
When William Penn, the founding proprietor of the Quaker colony, bought
land from the Delaware tribe, the extent of the purchase was limited to
the distance a man could go in 1¹⁄₂ days. But, when the time came in
1737 for Penn’s son to measure this off, he did not have it walked off
as the Indians had presumed it would be done. To cover the distance,
the Quaker employed trained white athletes, runners! It was even
suspected that the white runners may have used horses concealed along
the route, that is, after they were out of sight of the Indians who
panted along behind them full of Penn’s rum, according to some accounts.
Things settled down rather quickly however when James Logan, that
astute Pennsylvanian who guided the Indian policy of the colony,
treated generously with the Iroquois to keep the Delaware in line. The
Delaware, in fear of their fierce overlords in the north, vacated most
of their lands east of the mountains and joined the equally unhappy
Shawnee in the upper Ohio valley. There they listened malevolently to
French traders and soldiers who promised a red-handed revenge.
So successful was the Indian policy in general, however, that on the
outbreak of King George’s War in 1744 between England and France, the
Iroquois were cajoled into granting the English practically all the
Ohio valley and sealing the bargain with an alliance to help protect
the property against the French who were already there. In fact,
commissioners from Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania, meeting with an
Iroquois delegation around the council fire at Lancaster, obtained “a
Deed recognizing the King’s right to all the Lands that are, or shall
be, by his Majesty’s appointment, in the Colony of Virginia.”
As far as the Virginians were concerned those lands by ancient charter
stretched all the way to the South Sea, wherever that was, although
they were willing to settle for the Ohio valley for the time being. Nor
did the Quaker colony seriously dispute Virginia’s claim at the time,
even though nearly all of the fur traders beyond the mountains, who
were now aggressively competing with the French, were Pennsylvanians.
Chief among these was George Croghan. He had not arrived in
Pennsylvania from Dublin until 1741, but he was established in trade
on the Ohio River well before King George’s War. By 1746 he had a
number of storehouses on Lake Erie itself. From the bustling base of
his operations in the 1740’s near Harris Ferry (Harrisburg) on the
Susquehanna, and later from Aughwick farther west, he and his various
partners directed effective attacks on French trade in the Ohio valley.
Together with his brother-in-law William Trent, and Andrew Montour,
Barney Curran and John Fraser, Croghan controlled fort-like storehouses
about the forks of the Ohio, up the Allegheny and the Youghiogheny,
on the south shore of Lake Erie, at the forks of the Muskingum, and
even on the Scioto and Miami Rivers. From these trading posts, all of
which developed into rude settlements of sorts, the Pennsylvanians
distributed rum, gunpowder, lead and flints, as well as calicoes,
ribbons, colored stockings, kettles, axes, bells, whistles and
looking-glasses. In return, they collected a fine variety of pelts and
skins--beaver, raccoon, otter, muskrat, mink, fisher, fox, deer, elk,
and bear.
Croghan’s pack traders, at times possibly numbering twenty-five men
and driving a hundred or more mules altogether, followed the Ohio down
to the falls and worked the streams that fed it. They were trading and
fighting in what is now West Virginia and eastern Kentucky almost a
quarter of a century before Daniel Boone. They bartered under the very
guns of French forts, engaging in bloody skirmishes with the French and
Indians and on occasion being taken as captives to Montreal and even to
France.
Croghan had his English competitors too. There were, for instance, the
five Lowrey brothers, as aggressive and as rugged a lot of rivals as
might have been found on any fur frontier. But all the Pennsylvanians
were as one in their persistent encroachment on the French. Backed by
factors in Philadelphia and Lancaster, including Shippen and Lawrence
and the firm of Levy, Franks and Simon, both of which specialized in
the Indian trade and in turn received credit from wealthy merchants of
London and Bristol, these intrepid frontiersmen stubbornly picked away
at the French trade.
In one respect the Englishmen were fortunate. During King George’s War
the French had trouble getting sufficient trade goods, and many Indians
with whom they had been trading became contemptuous of them. It is said
that, on one occasion, when a Frenchman only offered a single charge
of powder for a beaver skin, the Indian with whom he was bartering
“took up his Hatchet, and knock’d him on the head, and killed him upon
the Spot.” Croghan and his Pennsylvanians took full advantage of the
temporary French embarrassment, building up their annual business in
pelts to a value of some 40,000 pounds sterling.
It was the prospect of a share in this lucrative trade that motivated
some wealthy Virginians, among them Thomas Lee and the Washingtons, who
conceived the Ohio Company after the Treaty of Lancaster. While acting
as a vehicle to establish England’s claim west of the mountains, the
company as it was finally organized promised future dividends from land
development in those parts. But there was the immediate prospect of
rich gains from the fur trade, and little time was lost in lining up
experienced Indian traders for the project.
Thomas Cresap, a clever Yorkshireman, who operated a trading post in
the mountains near the junction of the North and South Branches of
the Potomac River, became an organizing member of the Ohio Company.
So lavishly hospitable was Cresap to the Indians and others with whom
he did business that he was known to them as “Big Spoon,” but to his
Pennsylvania trading competitors he was an undercutting Marylander
not above committing murder for a beaver skin. Certain it is that
he had once been carted off in irons, after some “rascality” on the
Maryland-Pennsylvania border, to spend a year in prison at Philadelphia.
In any case the aristocratic tidewater Virginians counted “Colonel
Cressup” a key member of their Ohio Company. The Marylander’s trading
paths already led to the Youghiogheny, the Monongahela, and the
Ohio. So, the fort-like establishment he maintained on Virginia’s
northwestern frontier served as a convenient base from which the
company commenced its well-financed operations in the Ohio valley.
Employed by the company were some former associates of George Croghan.
Among them were Andrew Montour, a colorful half-breed of _coureur des
bois_ stock, and Croghan’s brother-in-law William Trent. With the aid
of experienced men like these, Thomas Cresap was soon proving his worth
to his tidewater partners and to the British Empire.
The threat was too obvious to be ignored by the French. They laid plans
to push the English back over the mountains. Already, a French army
detachment, using a traders’ portage between the eastern end of Lake
Erie and Lake Chautauqua, had gone down to the Ohio via the Allegheny
River, planting lead plates along both streams as a warning to
trespassers. Already, French-led and French-inspired Indian raids had
taken the lives of English traders, as well as those of their native
hosts. In one case a prominent Indian chief allied with the English had
been boiled and eaten by some Ottawas led by a French half-breed, all
without discouraging the Englishmen it seemed. Now, in 1753, a French
army of 1,000 men headed down the Allegheny from Canada, to begin
building a line of forts along the line of the previously planted lead
plates.
Forts were built first at present-day Erie on the lake and at the head
of French Creek to secure a portage. Then, John Frazer’s trading post
at Venango on the Allegheny was taken and converted to a fortification.
There the French troops, bogged down with sickness, dug in for the
winter.
That is where Major George Washington found them when he carried a note
from the Governor of Virginia to their commanding officer suggesting
that they all retire promptly to Canada. This, the Frenchmen said, they
had no intention of doing. In the spring they would push on, down the
Allegheny, to the strategic Forks of the Ohio.
Even as the French army was building canoes that winter for its advance
on the Ohio, Thomas Cresap and William Trent were supervising the
construction of an English fort at the forks of the river. They now
represented the Governor of Virginia and the King of England, as well
as the Ohio Company, all of whom were one and the same as far as the
Ohio valley was concerned. In fact Trent, the fur trader in the employ
of the Ohio Company, had been commissioned a captain by Governor
Dinwiddie of Virginia to command the new fort and oppose the French.
But when spring and the French came to the Forks of the Ohio, Captain
Trent was absent. He said he was looking for recruits; some suspected
he was ferrying his beaver to a safer spot. The ensign in command
yielded the English fort in the face of overwhelming odds, and the
French built an impressive citadel in its place, which they named Fort
DuQuesne to honor the Canadian governor of that name.
Washington, now Colonel Washington, who was advancing from Virginia
with his militia to Trent’s support, was much too late. He was forced
to content himself with palisading a defensive position along the road
at Great Meadows. There at Fort Necessity, as he called it, he warded
off as best he could the large number of French troops who came out to
engage him.
That summer of 1754 Washington surrendered. When he led his militiamen
back over the Alleghenies, the Frenchmen had succeeded in their
purpose. The English were out of the Ohio valley.
However, the American phase of the Seven Years’ War had commenced--two
years before it was officially declared in Europe. The critical contest
known on this continent as the French and Indian War was under way, and
the very next year General Edward Braddock arrived with his British
regulars to direct the campaign.
The strategic plan decided upon encompassed a four-fold attack upon the
French at DuQuesne, Crown Point, Niagara, and in Nova Scotia. General
Braddock himself assumed the DuQuesne assignment, the most important
immediate objective. But he failed on this mission, his abortive
attempt to reach the Forks of the Ohio ending in the disastrous rout of
his troops and his own death.
It was not until 1758 that General John Forbes forced the evacuation
of the fort at the Forks of the Ohio. The French then abandoned the
entire valley. Fort DuQuesne became Fort Pitt and the English were in
control of the Ohio River.