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
class 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 institutions 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 principal 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 Washington 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 illustrates 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 Washington from Paris inquiring about the best place
for a canal 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 canal 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
ship 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 asserts 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 shipped down
the Missouri instead of passing around Cape Horn, and the relation of
his early canal 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 canals, or called out canal
schemes that influenced the early development of the State. When
Washington, 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 passed 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 passed,
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 class 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 compass, but by an
instinct which leads them always the right way--to the lowest passes 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
Cumberland 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
Cumberland 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 Pass was no scientific discovery. Some people think
Frémont 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 pass; 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 passes 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."