Dans mon chemin, j'ai rencontréTrois cavalières, bien montées;L'on, lon, laridon daine,Lon, ton, laridon dai.Trois cavalières, bien montées,L'un à cheval, et l'autre à pied;L'on, lon, laridon daine,Lon, ton, laridon dai.
Dans mon chemin, j'ai rencontréTrois cavalières, bien montées;L'on, lon, laridon daine,Lon, ton, laridon dai.
Trois cavalières, bien montées,L'un à cheval, et l'autre à pied;L'on, lon, laridon daine,Lon, ton, laridon dai.
Arrived at Sault Ste. Marie, the fleet was often doubled by newcomers, so that sometimes sixty canoes swept their way along the north shore, the paddles marking sixty strokes a minute, while the rocks gave back the echoes of Canadian songs rolling out from five hundred lusty throats. And so they drew up at Grand Portage, near the present northeast boundary of Minnesota, now a sleepy, squalid little village, but then the general rendezvous where sometimes over a thousand men met; for, at this time, the company had fifty clerks, seventy interpreters, eighteen hundred and twenty canoe-men, and thirty-five guides. It sent annually to Montreal 106,000 beaver-skins, to say nothing of other peltries. When the proprietors from Montreal met the proprietors from the northern posts, and with their clerks gathered at the banquet in their large log hall to the number of a hundred, the walls hung with spoils of the chase, the rough tables furnished with abundance of venison, fish, bread, salt pork, butter, peas, corn, potatoes, tea, milk, wine andeau de vie, while, outside, the motley crowd of engages feasted on hulled corn and melted fat—was it not a trulybaronial scene? Clerks and engagés of this company, or its rival, the Hudson Bay Company, might winter one season in Wisconsin and the next in the remote north. For example, Amable Grignon, a Green Bay trader, wintered in 1818 at Lac qui Parle in Minnesota, the next year at Lake Athabasca, and the third in the hyperborean regions of Great Slave Lake. In his engagement he figures as Amable Grignon,of the Parish of Green Bay, Upper Canada, and he receives $400 "and found in tobacco and shoes and two doges," besides "the usual equipment given to clerks." He afterwards returned to a post on the Wisconsin river. The attitude of Wisconsin traders toward the Canadian authorities and the Northwestern wilds is clearly shown in this document, which brings into a line Upper Canada, "the parish of Green Bay," and the Hudson Bay Company's territories about Great Slave Lake![200]
How widespread and how strong was the influence of these traders upon the savages may be easily imagined, and this commercial control was strengthened by the annual presents made to the Indians by the British at their posts. At a time when our relations with Great Britain were growing strained, such a power in the Northwest was a serious menace.[201]In 1809 John Jacob Astor secured a charter from the State of New York, incorporating the American Fur Company. He proposed to consolidate the fur trade of the United States, plant an establishment in the contested Oregon territory, and link it with Michillimackinac (Mackinaw island) by way of the Missouri through a series of trading posts. In 1810 two expeditions of his Pacific Fur Company set out for the Columbia, the one around Cape Horn and the other by wayof Green bay and the Missouri. In 1811 he bought a half interest in the Mackinaw Company, a rival of the Northwest Company and the one that had especial power in Wisconsin and Minnesota, and this new organization he called the Southwest Company. But the war of 1812 came; Astoria, the Pacific post, fell into the hands of the Northwest Company, while the Southwest Company's trade was ruined.
Although the Green Bay court of justice, such as it was, had been administered under American commissions since 1803, when Reaume dispensed a rude equity under a commission of Justice of the Peace from Governor Harrison,[202]neither Green Bay nor the rest of Wisconsin had any proper appreciation of its American connections until the close of this war. But now occurred these significant events:
1. Astor's company was reorganized as the American Fur Company, with headquarters at Mackinaw island.[203]
2. The United States enacted in 1816 that neither foreign fur traders, nor capital for that trade, should be admitted to this country.[204]This was designed to terminate English influence among the tribes, and it fostered Astor's company. The law was so interpreted as not to exclude British (that is generally, French) interpreters and boatmen, who were essential to the company; but this interpretation enabled British subjects to evade the law and trade on their own account by having their invoices made out to some Yankee clerk, while they accompanied the clerk in the guise of interpreters.[205]In this way a number of Yankees came to the State.
3. In the year 1816 United States garrisons were sent to Green Bay and Prairie du Chien.[206]
4. In 1814 the United States provided for locating government trading posts at these two places.
The system of public trading houses goes back to colonial days. At first in Plymouth and Jamestown all industry was controlled by the commonwealth, and in Massachusetts Bay the stock company had reserved the trade in furs for themselves before leaving England.[207]The trade was frequently farmed out, but public "truck houses" were established by the latter colony as early as 1694-5.[208]Franklin, in his public dealings with the Ohio Indians, saw the importance of regulation of the trade, and in 1753 he wrote asking James Bowdoin of Massachusetts to procure him a copy of the truckhouse law of that colony, saying that if it had proved to work well he thought of proposing it for Pennsylvania.[209]The reply of Bowdoin showed that Massachusetts furnished goods to the Indians at wholesale prices and so drove out the French and the private traders. In 1757 Virginiaadopted the system for a time,[210]and in 1776 the Continental Congress accepted a plan presented by a committee of which Franklin was a member,[211]whereby £140,000 sterling was expended at the charge of the United Colonies for Indian goods to be sold at moderate prices by factors of the congressional commissioners.[212]The bearing of this act upon the governmental powers of the Congress is worth noting.
In his messages of 1791 and 1792 President Washington urged the need of promoting and regulating commerce with the Indians, and in 1793 he advocated government trading houses. Pickering, of Massachusetts, who was his Secretary of War with the management of Indian affairs, may have strengthened Washington in this design, for he was much interested in Indian improvement, but Washington's own experience had shown him the desirability of some such plan, and he had written to this effect as early as 1783.[213]The objects of Congressional policy in dealing with the Indians were stated by speakers in 1794 as follows:[214]1. Protection of the frontiersmen from the Indians, by means of the army. 2. Protection of the Indians from the frontiersmen, by laws regulating settlement. 3. Detachment of the Indians from foreign influence, by trading houses where goods could be got cheaply. In 1795 a small appropriation was made for trying the experiment of public trading houses,[215]and in 1796, the same year that the British evacuated the posts, the law which established the system was passed.[216]It was to be temporary, but by re-enactments with alterations it was prolonged until 1822, new posts being added from time to time. In substance the laws provided a certain capital for the Indian trade, the goods to be sold by salaried United Statesfactors, at posts in the Indian country, at such rates as would protect the savage from the extortions of the individual trader, whose actions sometimes provoked hostilities, and would supplant British influence over the Indian. At the same time it was required that the capital stock should not be diminished. In the course of the debate over the law in 1796 considerablelaissez fairesentiment was called out against the government's becoming a trader, notwithstanding that the purpose of the bill was benevolence and political advantage rather than financial gain.[217]President Jefferson and Secretary Calhoun were friends of the system.[218]It was a failure, however, and under the attacks of Senator Benton, the Indian agents and the American Fur Company, it was brought to an end in 1822. The causes of its failure were chiefly these:[219]The private trader went to the hunting grounds of the savages, while the government's posts were fixed. The private traders gave credit to the Indians, which the government did not.[220]The private trader understood the Indians, was related to them by marriage, and was energetic and not over-scrupulous. The government trader was a salaried agent not trained to the work. The private trader sold whiskey and the government did not. The British trader's goods were better than those of the government. The best business principles were not always followed by the superintendent. The system was far from effecting its object, for the Northwestern Indians had been accustomed to receive presents from the British authorities, and had small respect for a government that traded. Upon Wisconsin trade from 1814 to 1822 its influence was slight.
The goods used in the Indian trade remained much the same from the first, in all sections of the country.[222]They were chiefly blankets, coarse cloths, cheap jewelry and trinkets (including strings of wampum), fancy goods (like ribbons, shawls, etc.), kettles, knives, hatchets, guns, powder, tobacco, and intoxicating liquor.[223]These goods, shipped from Mackinaw, at first came by canoes or bateaux,[224]and in the later period by vessel, to a leading post, were there redivided[225]and sent to the various trading posts. The Indians, returning from the hunting grounds to their villages in the spring,[226]set the squaws to making maple sugar,[227]planting corn, watermelons, potatoes, squashes, etc., and a little hunting was carried on. The summer was given over to enjoyment, and in the early period to wars. In the autumn they collected their wild rice, or their corn, and again were ready to start for the hunting grounds, sometimes 300 miles distant. At this juncture the trader, licensed by an Indian agent, arrived upon the scene with his goods, without which no family could subsist, much less collect any quantity of furs.[228]These were bought on credit by the hunter, since he could not go on the hunt for the furs, whereby he paid for his supplies, without having goods and ammunition advanced for the purpose. This system of credits,[229]dating back to the French period, had become systematized so that books were kept, with each Indian's account. The amount to which the hunter was trusted was between $40 and $50, at cost prices, upon which the trader expected a gain of about 100 per cent, so that the average annual value of furs brought in by each hunter to pay his credits should have been between $80 and $100.[230]Theamount of the credit varied with the reputation of the hunter for honesty and ability in the chase.[231]Sometimes he was trusted to the amount of three hundred dollars. If one-half the credits were paid in the spring the trader thought that he had done a fair business. The importance of this credit system can hardly be overestimated in considering the influence of the fur trade upon the Indians of Wisconsin, and especially in rendering them dependent upon the earlier settlements of the State.
The system left the Indians at the mercy of the trader when one nation monopolized the field, and it compelled them to espouse the cause of one or other when two nations contended for supremacy over their territory. At the same time it rendered the trade peculiarly adapted to monopoly, for when rivals competed, the trade was demoralized, and the Indian frequently sold to a new trader the furs which he had pledged in advance for the goods of another. When the American Fur Company gained control, they systematized matters so that there was no competition between their own agents, and private dealers cut into their trade but little for some years. The unit of trade was at first the beaver skin,or, as the pound of beaver skin came to be called, the "plus."[232]The beaver skin was estimated at a pound and a half, though it sometimes weighed two, in which case an allowance was made. Wampum was used for ornament and in treaty-making, but not as currency. Other furs or Indian commodities, like maple sugar and wild rice, were bought in terms of beaver. As this animal grew scarcer the unit changed to money. By 1820, when few beaver were marketed in Wisconsin, the term plus stood for one dollar.[233]The muskrat skin was also used as the unit in the later days of the trade.[234]In the southern colonies the pound of deer skin had answered the purpose of a unit.[235]
The goods being trusted to the Indians, the bands separated for the hunting grounds. Among the Chippeways, at least, each family or group had a particular stream or region where it exclusively hunted and trapped.[236]Not only were the hunting grounds thus parcelled out; certain Indians were apportioned to certain traders,[237]so that the industrial activitiesof Wisconsin at this date were remarkably systematic and uniform. Sometimes the trader followed the Indians to their hunting grounds. From time to time he sent his engagés (hired men), commonly five or six in number, to the various places where the hunting bands were to be found, to collect furs on the debts and to sell goods to those who had not received too large credits, and to the customers of rival traders; this was called "running a deouine."[238]The main wintering post had lesser ones, called "jack-knife posts,"[239]depending on it, where goods were left and the furs gathered in going to and from the main post. By these methods Wisconsin was thoroughly visited by the traders before the "pioneers" arrived.[240]
The kind and amount of furs brought in may be judged by the fact that in 1836, long after the best days of the trade, a single Green Bay firm, Porlier and Grignon, shipped to the American Fur Company about 3600 deer skins, 6000 muskrats, 150 bears, 850 raccoons, besides beavers, otters, fishers, martens, lynxes, foxes, wolves, badgers, skunks, etc., amounting to over $6000.
None of these traders became wealthy; Astor's company absorbed the profits. It required its clerks, or factors, to pay an advance of 81-1/2 per cent on the sterling cost of the blankets, strouds, and other English goods, in order to cover the cost of importation and the expense of transportation from New York to Mackinaw. Articles purchased in New York were charged with 15-1/3 per cent advance for transportation, and each class of purchasers was charged with 33-1/3 per cent advance as profit on the aggregate amount.[241]
I estimate, from the data given in the sources cited on page 63, note, that in 1820 between $60,000 and $75,000 worth of goods was brought annually to Wisconsin for the Indian trade. An average outfit for a single clerk at a main post was between $1500 and $2000, and for the dependent posts between $100 and $500. There were probably not over 2000 Indian hunters in the State, and the total Indian population did not much exceed 10,000. Comparing this number with the early estimates for the same tribes, we find that, if the former are trustworthy, by 1820 the Indian tribes that remained in Wisconsin had increased their numbers. But the material is too unsatisfactory to afford any valuable conclusion.
After the sale of their lands and the receipt of money annuities, a change came over the Indian trade. The monopoly held by Astor was broken into, and as competition increased, the sales of whiskey were larger, and for money, which the savage could now pay. When the Indians went to Montreal in the days of the French, they confessed that they could not return with supplies because they wasted their furs upon brandy. The same process now went on at their doors. The traders were not dependent upon the Indian's success in hunting alone; they had his annuities to count on, and so did not exert their previous influence in favor of steady hunting. Moreover, the game was now exploited to a considerable degree, so that Wisconsin was no longer the hunter's paradise that it had been in the days of Dablon and La Salle. The long-settled economic life of the Indian being revolutionized, his business honesty declined, and credits were more frequently lost. The annuities fell into the traders' hands for debts and whiskey. "There is no less than near $420,000 of claims against the Winnebagoes," writes a Green Bay trader at Prairie du Chien, in 1838, "so that if they are all just, the dividend will be but very small for each claimant, as there is only $150,000 to pay that."[242]
By this time the influence of the fur trader had so developed mining in the region of Dubuque, Iowa, Galena, Ill., and southwestern Wisconsin, as to cause an influx of American miners, and here began a new element of progress for Wisconsin. The knowledge of these mines was possessed by the early French explorers, and as the use of firearms spread they were worked more and more by Indians, under the stimulus of the trader. In 1810 Nicholas Boilvin, United States Indian agent at Prairie du Chien, reported that the Indians about the lead mines had mostly abandoned the chase and turned their attention to the manufacture of lead, which they sold to fur traders. In 1825 there were at least 100 white miners in the entire lead region,[243]and by 1829 they numbered in the thousands.
Black Hawk's war came in 1832, and agricultural settlement sought the southwestern part of the State after that campaign. The traders opened country stores, and their establishments were nuclei of settlement.[244]In Wisconsin the Indian trading post was a thing of the past.
The birch canoe and the pack-horse had had their day in western New York and about Montreal. In Wisconsin the age of the voyageur continued nearly through the first third of this century. It went on in the Far Northwest in substantially the same fashion that has been here described, until quite recently; and in the great North Land tributary to Hudson Bay thechansonof the voyageur may still be heard, and the dog-sledge laden with furs jingles across the snowy plains from distant post to distant post.[245]
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 stockwas 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 ofthe 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 inthe 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 valuabletrade 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 aroad. 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 scientificdiscovery. 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."