Chapter 2

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.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 41: Charter of 1606.]

[Footnote 42: Ramsay, Tennessee, 63.]

[Footnote 43: On the Southwestern Indians see Adair, American Indians.]

[Footnote 44: Ramsay, 75.]

[Footnote 45: Spottswood's Letters, Virginia Hist. Colls., N.S., I., 67.]

[Footnote 46: Byrd Manuscripts, I., 180. The reader will find a convenient map for the southern region in Roosevelt, Winning of the West, I.]

[Footnote 47: Spottswood's Letters, I., 40; II., 149, 150.]

[Footnote 48: Ramsay, 64. Note the bearing of this route on the Holston settlement.]

[Footnote 49: Georgia Historical Collections, I., 180; II., 123-7.]

[Footnote 50: Spottswood. II., 331, for example.]

[Footnote 51: Ramsay, 65.]

[Footnote 52: Boone, Life and Adventures.]

[Footnote 53: Observations on the North American Land Co., pp. xv., 144, London, 1796.]

[Footnote 54: Margry, VI.]

[Footnote 55: Allen, Lewis and Clarke Expedition, I., ix.; _vide post_, pp. 70-71.]

[Footnote 56: _Vide post_, p. 71.]

[Footnote 57: _Century Magazine_, XLI., 759.]

[Footnote 58: Jessie Benton Frémont in _Century Magazine_, XLI., 766-7.]

[Footnote 59: _Century Magazine_, XLI., p. 759; _vide post_, p. 74.]

[Footnote 60: Parkman's works, particularly Old Régime, make any discussion of the importance of the fur trade to Canada proper unnecessary. La Hontan says: "For you must know that Canada subsists only upon the trade of skins or furs, three-fourths of which come from the people that live around the Great Lakes." La Hontan, I., 53, London, 1703.]

NORTHWESTERN RIVER SYSTEMS IN THEIR RELATION TO THE FUR TRADE.

The importance of physical conditions is nowhere more manifest than in the exploration of the Northwest, and we cannot properly appreciate Wisconsin's relation to the history of the time without first considering her situation as regards the lake and river systems of North America.

When the Breton sailors, steering their fishing smacks almost in the wake of Cabot, began to fish in the St. Lawrence gulf, and to traffic with the natives of the mainland for peltries, the problem of how the interior of North America was to be explored was solved. The water-system composed of the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes is the key to the continent. The early explorations in a wilderness must be by water-courses--they are nature's highways. The St. Lawrence leads to the Great Lakes; the headwaters of the tributaries of these lakes lie so near the headwaters of the rivers that join the Mississippi that canoes can be portaged from the one to the other. The Mississippi affords passage to the Gulf of Mexico; or by the Missouri to the passes of the Rocky Mountains, where rise the headwaters of the Columbia, which brings the voyageur to the Pacific. But if the explorer follows Lake Superior to the present boundary line between Minnesota and Canada, and takes the chain of lakes and rivers extending from Pigeon river to Rainy lake and Lake of the Woods, he will be led to the Winnipeg river and to the lake of the same name. From this, by streams and portages, he may reach Hudson bay; or he may go by way of Elk river and Lake Athabasca to Slave river and Slave lake, which will take him to Mackenzie river and to the Arctic sea. But Lake Winnipeg also receives the waters of the Saskatchewan river, from which one may pass to the highlands near the Pacific where rise the northern branches of the Columbia. And from the lakes of Canada there are still other routes to the Oregon country.[61] At a later day these two routes to the Columbia became an important factor in bringing British and Americans into conflict over that territory.

In these water-systems Wisconsin was the link that joined the Great Lakes and the Mississippi; and along her northern shore the first explorers passed to the Pigeon river, or, as it was called later, the Grand Portage route, along the boundary line between Minnesota and Canada into the heart of Canada.

It was possible to reach the Mississippi from the Great Lakes by the following principal routes:[62]

1. By the Miami (Maumee) river from the west end of Lake Erie to the Wabash, thence to the Ohio and the Mississippi.

2. By the St. Joseph's river to the Wabash, thence to the Ohio.

3. By the St. Joseph's river to the Kankakee, and thence to the Illinois and the Mississippi.

4. By the Chicago river to the Illinois.

5. By Green bay, Fox river, and the Wisconsin river.

6. By the Bois Brulé river to the St. Croix river.

Of these routes, the first two were not at first available, owing to the hostility of the Iroquois.

Of all the colonies that fell to the English, as we have seen, New York alone had a water-system that favored communication with the interior, tapping the St. Lawrence and opening a way to Lake Ontario. Prevented by the Iroquois friends of the Dutch and English from reaching the Northwest by way of the lower lakes, the French ascended the Ottawa, reached Lake Nipissing, and passed by way of Georgian Bay to the islands of Lake Huron. As late as the nineteenth century this was the common route of the fur trade, for it was more certain for the birch canoes than the tempestuous route of the lakes. At the Huron islands two ways opened before their canoes. The straits of Michillimackinac[63] permitted them to enter Lake Michigan, and from this led the two routes to the Mississippi: one by way of Green bay and the Fox and Wisconsin, and the other by way of the lake to the Chicago river. But if the trader chose to go from the Huron islands through Sault Ste. Marie into Lake Superior, the necessities of his frail craft required him to hug the shore, and the rumors of copper mines induced the first traders to take the south shore, and here the lakes of northern Wisconsin and Minnesota afford connecting links between the streams that seek Lake Superior and those that seek the Mississippi,[64] a fact which made northern Wisconsin more important in this epoch than the southern portion of the state.

We are now able to see how the river-courses of the Northwest permitted a complete exploration of the country, and that in these courses Wisconsin held a commanding situation,[65] But these rivers not only permitted exploration; they also furnished a motive to exploration by the fact that their valleys teemed with fur-bearing animals. This is the main fact in connection with Northwestern exploration. The hope of a route to China was always influential, as was also the search for mines, but the practical inducements were the profitable trade with the Indians for beaver and buffaloes and the wild life that accompanied it. So powerful was the combined influence of these far-stretching rivers, and the "hardy, adventurous, lawless, fascinating fur trade," that the scanty population of Canada was irresistibly drawn from agricultural settlements into the interminable recesses of the continent; and herein is a leading explanation of the lack of permanent French influence in America.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 61: Narr. and Crit. Hist. Amer., VIII., 10-11.]

[Footnote 62: Narr. and Crit. Hist. Amer., IV., 224, n. 1; Margry, V. See also Parkman, Montcalm and Wolfe, I., map and pp. 38-9, 128.]

[Footnote 63: Mackinaw.]

[Footnote 64: See Doty's enumeration, Wis. Hist. Colls., VII., 202.]

[Footnote 65: Jes. Rels., 1672, p. 37; La Hontan, I., 105 (1703).]

WISCONSIN INDIANS.[66]

"All that relates to the Indian tribes of Wisconsin," says Dr. Shea, "their antiquities, their ethnology, their history, is deeply interesting from the fact that it is the area of the first meeting of the Algic and Dakota tribes. Here clans of both these wide-spread families met and mingled at a very early period; here they first met in battle and mutually checked each other's advance." The Winnebagoes attracted the attention of the French even before they were visited. They were located about Green bay. Their later location at the entrance of Lake Winnebago was unoccupied, at least in the time of Allouez, because of the hostility of the Sioux. Early authorities represented them as numbering about one hundred warriors.[67] The Pottawattomies we find in 1641 at Sault Ste. Marie,[68] whither they had just fled from their enemies. Their proper home was probably about the southeastern shore and islands of Green bay, where as early as 1670 they were again located. Of their numbers in Wisconsin at this time we can say but little. Allouez, at Chequamegon bay, was visited by 300 of their warriors, and he mentions some of their Green bay villages, one of which had 300 souls.[69] The Menomonees were found chiefly on the river that bears their name, and the western tributaries of Green bay seem to have been their territory. On the estimates of early authorities we may say that they had about 100 warriors.[70] The Sauks and Foxes were closely allied tribes. The Sauks were found by Allouez[71] four leagues[72] up the Fox from its mouth, and the Foxes at a place reached by a four days' ascent of the Wolf river from its mouth. Later we find them at the confluence of the Wolf and the Fox. According to their early visitors these two tribes must have had something over 1000 warriors.[73] The Miamis and Mascoutins were located about a league from the Fox river, probably within the limits of what is now Green Lake county,[74] and four leagues away were their friends the Kickapoos. In 1670 the Miamis and Mascoutins were estimated at 800 warriors, and this may have included the Kickapoos. The Sioux held possession of the Upper Mississippi, and in Wisconsin hunted on its northeastern tributaries. Their villages were in later times all on the west of the Mississippi, and of their early numbers no estimate can be given. The Chippeways were along the southern shore of Lake Superior. Their numbers also are in doubt, but were very considerable.[75] In northwestern Wisconsin, with Chequamegon bay as their rendezvous, were the Ottawas and Hurons,[76] who had fled here to escape the Iroquois. In 1670 they were back again to their homes at Mackinaw and the Huron islands. But in 1666, as Allouez tells us, they were situated at the bottom of this beautiful bay, planting their Indian corn and leading a stationary life. "They are there," he says, "to the number of eight hundred men bearing arms, but collected from seven different nations who dwell in peace with each other thus mingled together."[77] And the Jesuit Relations of 1670 add that the Illinois "come here from time to time in great numbers as merchants to procure hatchets, cooking utensils, guns, and other things of which they stand in need." Here, too, came Pottawattomies, as we have seen, and Sauks.

At the mouth of Fox river[78] we find another mixed village of Pottawattomies, Sauks, Foxes, and Winnebagoes, and at a later period Milwaukee was the site of a similar heterogeneous community. Leaving out the Hurons, the tribes of Wisconsin were, with two exceptions, of the Algic stock. The exceptions are the Winnebagoes and the Sioux, who belong to the Dakota family. Of these Wisconsin tribes it is probable that the Sauks and Foxes, the Pottawattomies, the Hurons and Ottawas and the Mascoutins, and Miamis and Kickapoos, were driven into Wisconsin by the attacks of eastern enemies. The Iroquois even made incursions as far as the home of the Mascoutins on Fox river. On the other side of the state were the Sioux, "the Iroquois of the West," as the missionaries call them, who had once claimed all the region, and whose invasions, Allouez says, rendered Lake Winnebago uninhabited. There was therefore a pressure on both sides of Wisconsin which tended to mass together the divergent tribes. And the Green bay and Fox and Wisconsin route was the line of least resistance, as well as a region abounding in wild rice, fish and game, for these early fugitives. In this movement we have two facts that are not devoid of significance in institutional history: first, the welding together of separate tribes, as the Sauks and Foxes, and the Miamis, Mascoutins and Kickapoos; and second, a commingling of detached families from various tribes at peculiarly favorable localities.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 66: On these early locations, consult the authorities cited by Shea in Wis. Hist. Colls., III., 125 _et seq._, and by Branson in his criticism on Shea, _ibid._ IV., 223. See also Butterfield's Discovery of the Northwest in 1634, and _Mag. West. Hist._, V., 468, 630; and Minn. Hist. Colls., V.]

[Footnote 67: Some early estimates were as follows: 1640, "Great numbers" (Margry, I., 48); 1718, 80 to 100 warriors (N.Y. Col. Docs., IX., 889); 1728, 60 or 80 warriors (Margry, VI., 553); 1736, 90 warriors (Chaurignerie, cited in Schoolcraft's Indian Tribes, III., 282); 1761, 150 warriors (Gorrell, Wis. Hist. Colls., I., 32).]

[Footnote 68: Margry, I., 46.]

[Footnote 69: Jes. Rels., 1667, 1670.]

[Footnote 70: 1718, estimated at 80 to 100 warriors (N.Y. Col. Docs., IX.,889); 1762, estimated at 150 warriors (Gorrell, Wis. Hist. Colls., I., 32).]

[Footnote 71: Jes. Rels., 1670.]

[Footnote 72: French leagues.]

[Footnote 73: 1670, Foxes estimated at 400 warriors (Jes. Rels., 1670); 1667, Foxes, 1000 warriors (Jes. Rels., 1667); 1695, Foxes and Mascoutins, 1200 warriors (N.Y. Col. Docs., IX., 633); 1718, Sauks 100 or 120, Foxes 500 warriors (2 Penn. Archives, VI., 54); 1728, Foxes, 200 warriors (Margry, V.); 1762, Sauks and Foxes, 700 warriors (Gorrell, Wis. Hist. Colls., I., 32). This, it must be observed, was after the Fox wars.]

[Footnote 74: Jes. Rels., 1670; Butterfield's Discovery of the Northwest.]

[Footnote 75: In 1820 those in Wisconsin numbered about 600 hunters.]

[Footnote 76: On these Indians consult, besides authorities already cited, Shea's Discovery, etc. lx.; Jes. Rels.; Narr. and Crit. Hist. of Amer., IV., 168-170, 175; Radisson's Voyages; Margry, IV., 586-598.]

[Footnote 77: Jes. Rels., 1666-7.]

[Footnote 78: Jes. Rels., 1670.]

PERIODS OF THE WISCONSIN INDIAN TRADE.

The Indian trade was almost the sole interest in Wisconsin during the two centuries that elapsed from the visit of Nicolet in 1634 to about 1834, when lead-mining had superseded it in the southwest and land offices were opened at Green Bay and Mineral Point; when the port of Milwaukee received an influx of settlers to the lands made known by the so-called Black Hawk war; and when Astor retired from the American Fur Company. These two centuries may be divided into three periods of the trade: 1. French, from 1634 to 1763; 2. English, from 1763 to 1816; 3. American, from 1816 to 1834.

FRENCH EXPLORATION IN WISCONSIN.

Sagard,[79] whose work was published in 1636, tells us that the Hurons, who traded with the French, visited the Winnebagoes and the Fire Nation (Mascoutins),[80] bartering goods for peltries. Champlain, the famous fur-trader, who represented the Company of the Hundred Associates,[81] formed by Richelieu to monopolize the fur trade of New France and govern the country, sent an agent named Jean Nicolet, in 1634,[82] to Green bay and Fox river to make a peace between the Hurons and the Winnebagoes in the interests of inter-tribal commerce. The importance of this phase of the trade as late as 1681 may be inferred from these words of Du Chesneau, speaking of the Ottawas, and including under the term the Petun Hurons and the Chippeways also: "Through them we obtain beaver, and although they, for the most part, do not hunt, and have but a small portion of peltry in their country, they go in search of it to the most distant places, and exchange for it our merchandise which they procure at Montreal." Among the tribes enumerated as dealing with the Ottawas are the Sioux, Satiks, Pottawattomies, Winnebagoes, Menomonees and Mascoutins--all Wisconsin Indians at this time. He adds: "Some of these tribes occasionally come down to Montreal, but usually they do not do so in very great numbers because they are too far distant, are not expert at managing canoes, and because the other Indians intimidate them, in order to be the carriers of their merchandise and to profit thereby."[83]

It was the aim of the authorities to attract the Indians to Montreal, or to develop the inter-tribal communication, and thus to centralize the trade and prevent the dissipation of the energies of the colony; but the temptations of the free forest traffic were too strong. In a memoir of 1697, Aubert de la Chesnaye says:

"At first, the French went only among the Hurons, and since then to Missilimakinak, where they sold their goods to the savages of the places, who in turn went to exchange them with other savages in the depths of the woods, lands and rivers. But at present the French, having licenses, in order to secure greater profit surreptitiously, pass all the 'Ottawas and savages of Missilimakinak in order to go themselves to seek the most distant tribes, which is very displeasing to the former. _It is they, also, who have made excellent discoveries;_ and four or five hundred young men, the best men of Canada, are engaged in this business.... They have given us knowledge of many names of savages that we did not know; and four or five hundred leagues more remote are others who are unknown to us."[84]

Two of the most noteworthy of these _coureurs de bois_, or wood-rangers, were Radisson and Groseilliers.[85] In 1660 they returned to Montreal with 300 Algonquins and sixty canoes laden with furs, after a voyage in which they visited, among other tribes, the Pottawattomies, Mascoutins, Sioux, and Hurons, in Wisconsin. From the Hurons they learned of the Mississippi, and probably visited the river. They soon returned from Montreal to the northern Wisconsin region. In the course of their wanderings they had a post at Chequamegon bay, and they ascended the Pigeon river, thus opening the Grand Portage route to the heart of Canada. Among their exploits they induced England to enter the Hudson Bay trade, and gave the impetus that led to the organization of the Hudson Bay Company. The reports which these traders brought back had a most important effect in fostering exploration in the Northwest, and led to the visit of Menard, who was succeeded by Allouez, the pioneers of the Jesuits in Wisconsin.[86] Radisson gives us a good account of the early Wisconsin trade. Of his visit to the Ottawas he says: