The Indian trade of the Virginians was not limited to the Ohio country.
As in the case of Massachusetts Bay, the trade had been provided for
before the colony left England,[41] and in times of need it had
preserved the infant settlement. Bacon's rebellion was in part due to
the opposition to the governor's trading relations with the savages.
After a time the nearer Indians were exploited, and as early as the
close of the seventeenth century Virginia traders sought the Indians
west of the Alleghanies.[42] The Cherokees lived among the mountains,
"where the present states of Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, and the
Carolinas join one another."[43] To the west, on the Mississippi, were
the Chickasaws, south of whom lived the Choctaws, while to the south of
the Cherokees were the Creeks. The Catawbas had their villages on the
border of North and South Carolina, about the headwaters of the Santee
river. Shawnese Indians had formerly lived on the Cumberland river, and
French traders had been among them, as well as along the
Mississippi;[44] but by the time of the English traders, Tennessee and
Kentucky were for the most part uninhabited. The Virginia traders
reached the Catawbas, and for a time the Cherokees, by a trading route
through the southwest of the colony to the Santee. By 1712 this trade
was a well-established one,[45] and caravans of one hundred pack-horses
passed along the trail.[46]
The Carolinas had early been interested in the fur trade. In 1663 the
Lords Proprietors proposed to pay the governor's salary from the
proceeds of the traffic. Charleston traders were the rivals of the
Virginians in the southwest. They passed even to the Choctaws and
Chickasaws, crossing the rivers by portable boats of skin, and sometimes
taking up a permanent abode among the Indians. Virginia and Carolina
traders were not on good terms with each other, and Governor Spottswood
frequently made complaints of the actions of the Carolinians. His
expedition across the mountains in 1716, if his statement is to be
trusted, opened a new way to the transmontane Indians, and soon
afterwards a trading company was formed under his patronage to avail
themselves of this new route.[47] It passed across the Blue Ridge into
the Shenandoah valley, and down the old Indian trail to the Cherokees,
who lived along the upper Tennessee. Below the bend at the Muscle Shoals
the Virginians met the competition of the French traders from New
Orleans and Mobile.[48]
The settlement of Augusta, Georgia, was another important trading post.
Here in 1740 was an English garrison of fifteen or twenty soldiers, and
a little band of traders, who annually took about five hundred
pack-horses into the Indian country. In the spring the furs were floated
down the river in large boats.[49] The Spaniards and the French also
visited the Indians, and the rivalry over this trade was an important
factor in causing diplomatic embroilment.[50]
The occupation of the back-lands of the South affords a prototype of the
process by which the plains of the far West were settled, and also
furnishes an exemplification of all the stages of economic development
existing contemporaneously. After a time the traders were accompanied to
the Indian grounds by _hunters_, and sometimes the two callings were
combined.[51] When Boone entered Kentucky he went with an Indian trader
whose posts were on the Red river in Kentucky.[52] After the game
decreased the hunter's clearing was occupied by the _cattle-raiser_, and
his home, as settlement grew, became the property of the _cultivator of
the soil_;[53] the _manufacturing era_ belongs to our own time.
In the South, the Middle Colonies and New England the trade opened the
water-courses, the trading post grew into the palisaded town, and rival
nations sought to possess the trade for themselves. Throughout the
colonial frontier the effects, as well as the methods, of Indian traffic
were strikingly alike. The trader was the pathfinder for civilization.
Nor was the process limited to the east of the Mississippi. The
expeditions of Verenderye led to the discovery of the Rocky
Mountains.[54] French traders passed up the Missouri; and when the Lewis
and Clarke expedition ascended that river and crossed the continent, it
went with traders and voyageurs as guides and interpreters. Indeed,
Jefferson first conceived the idea of such an expedition[55] from
contact with Ledyard, who was organizing a fur trading company in
France, and it was proposed to Congress as a means of fostering our
western Indian trade.[56] The first immigrant train to California was
incited by the representations of an Indian trader who had visited the
region, and it was guided by trappers.[57]
St. Louis was the center of the fur trade of the far West, and Senator
Benton was intimate with leading traders like Chouteau.[58] He urged the
occupation of the Oregon country, where in 1810 an establishment had for
a time been made by the celebrated John Jacob Astor; and he fostered
legislation opening the road to the southwestern Mexican settlements
long in use by the traders. The expedition of his son-in-law Frémont was
made with French voyageurs, and guided to the passes by traders who had
used them before.[59] Benton was also one of the stoutest of the early
advocates of a Pacific railway.
But the Northwest[60] was particularly the home of the fur trade, and
having seen that this traffic was not an isolated or unimportant matter,
we may now proceed to study it in detail with Wisconsin as the field of
investigation.