Chapter 6

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] The amount 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 activities of 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 the _chanson_ of 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]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 221: In an address before the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, on the Character and Influence of the Fur Trade in Wisconsin (Proceedings, 1889, pp. 86-98), I have given details as to Wisconsin settlements, posts, routes of trade, and Indian location and population in 1820.]

[Footnote 222: Wis. Hist. Colls., XI., 377. Compare the articles used by Radisson, _ante_, p. 29. For La Salle's estimate of amount and kind of goods needed for a post, and the profits thereon, see Penna. Archives, 2d series, VI., 18-19. Brandy was an important item, one beaver selling for a pint. For goods and cost in 1728 see a bill quoted by E.D. Neill, on p. 20, _Mag. West. Hist._, Nov., 1887, Cf. 4 Mass. Hist. Colls., III., 344; Byrd Manuscripts, I., 180 ff.; Minn. Hist. Colls., II., 46; Senate Doc. No. 90, 22d Cong., 1st Sess., II., 42 ff.]

[Footnote 223: Wis. Fur Trade MSS. Cf. Wis. Hist. Colls., XI., 377, and Amer. State Papers, Ind. Affs., II., 360. The amount of liquor taken to the woods was very great. The French Jesuits had protested against its use in vain (Parkman's Old Régime); the United States prohibited it to no purpose. It was an indispensable part of a trader's outfit. Robert Stuart, agent of the American Fur Company at Mackinaw, once wrote to John Lawe, one of the leading traders at Green Bay, that the 56 bbls. of whiskey which he sends is "enough to last two years, and half drown all the Indians he deals with." See also Wis. Hist. Colls., VII., 282; McKenney's Tour to the Lakes, 169, 299-301; McKenney's Memoirs, I., 19-21. An old trader assured me that it was the custom to give five or six gallons of "grog"--one-fourth water--to the hunter when he paid his credits; he thought that only about one-eighth or one-ninth part of the whole sales was in whiskey.]

[Footnote 224: A light boat sometimes called a "Mackinaw boat," about 32 feet long, by 6-1/2 to 15 feet wide amidships, and sharp at the ends.]

[Footnote 225: See Wis. Hist. Colls., II., 108.]

[Footnote 226: Minn. Hist. Colls., V., 263.]

[Footnote 227: See Wis. Hist. Colls., VII., 220, 286; III., 235; McKenney's Tour, 194; Schoolcraft, Ind. Tribes, II., 55. Sometimes a family made 1500 lbs. in a season.]

[Footnote 228: Lewis Cass in Senate Docs., No. 90, 22d Cong., 1st Sess., II., 1.]

[Footnote 229: See D'Iberville's plans for relocating Indian tribes by denying them credit at certain posts, Margry, IV., 597. The system was used by the Dutch, and the Puritans also; see Weeden, Economic and Social Hist. New Eng., I., 98. In 1765, after the French and Indian war, the Chippeways of Chequamegon Bay told Henry, a British trader, that unless he advanced them goods on credit, "their wives and children would perish; for that there were neither ammunition nor clothing left among them." He distributed goods worth 3000 beaver skins. Henry, Travels, 195-6. Cf. Neill, Minnesota, 225-6; N.Y. Col. Docs., VII., 543; Amer. State Papers, Ind. Affs., II., 64, 66, 329, 333-5; _North American Review_, Jan., 1826, p. 110.]

[Footnote 230: Biddle, an Indian agent, testified in 1822 that while the cost of transporting 100 wt. from New York to Green Bay did not exceed five dollars, which would produce a charge of less than 10 percent on the original cost, the United States factor charged 50 per cent additional. The United States capital stock was diminished by this trade, however. The private dealers charged much more. Schoolcraft in 1831 estimated that $48.34 in goods and provisions at cost prices was the average annual supply of each hunter, or $6.90 to each soul. The substantial accuracy of this is sustained by my data. See Sen. Doc., No. 90, 22d Cong., 1st Sess., II., 45; State Papers, No. 7, 18th Cong., 1st Sess., I.; State Papers, No. 54, 18th Cong., 2d Sess., III.; Schoolcraft's Indian Tribes, III., 599; Invoice Book, Amer. Fur Co., for 1820, 1821; Wis. Fur Trade MSS. in possession of Wisconsin Historical Society.]

[Footnote 231: The following is a typical account, taken from the books of Jacques Porlier, of Green Bay, for the year 1823: The Indian Michel bought on credit in the fall: $16 worth of cloth; a trap, $1.00; two and a half yards of cotton, $3.12-1/2; three measures of powder, $1.50; lead, $1.00; a bottle of whiskey, 50 cents, and some other articles, such as a gun worm, making in all a bill of about $25. This he paid in full by bringing in eighty-five muskrats, worth nearly $20; a fox, $1.00, and a mocock of maple sugar, worth $4.00.]

[Footnote 232: A.J. Vieau, who traded in the thirties, gave me this information.]

[Footnote 233: For the value of the beaver at different periods and places consult indexes, under "beaver," in N.Y. Col. Docs,; Bancroft, Northwest Coast; Weeden, Economic and Social Hist. New Eng.; and see Morgan, American Beaver, 243-4; Henry, Travels, 192; 2 Penna. Archives, VI., 18; Servent, in Paris Ex. Univ. 1867, Rapports, VI., 117, 123; Proc. Wis. State Hist. Soc., 1889, p. 86.]

[Footnote 234: Minn. Hist. Colls. II., 46, gives the following table for 1836:

_St. Louis Prices._ _Minn. Price._ _Nett Gain._ Three pt. blanket = $3 25 60 rat skins at 20 cents = $12 00 $8 75 1-1/2 yds. Stroud = 2 37 60 rat skins at 20 cents = 12 00 9 63 1 N.W. gun = 6 50 100 rat skins at 20 cents = 20 00 13 50 1 lb. lead = 06 2 rat skins at 20 cents = 40 34 1 lb. powder = 28 10 rat skins at 20 cents = 2 00 1 72 1 tin kettle = 2 50 60 rat skins at 20 cents = 12 00 9 50 1 knife = 20 4 rat skins at 20 cents = 80 60 1 lb. tobacco = 12 8 rat skins at 20 cents = 1 60 1 38 1 looking glass = 04 4 rat skins at 20 cents = 80 76 1-1/2 yd. scarlet cloth = 3 00 60 rat skins at 20 cents = 12 00 9 00

See also the table of prices in Senate Docs., No. 90, 22d Cong., 1st Sess.; II., 42 _et seq._]

[Footnote 235: Douglass, Summary, I., 176.]

[Footnote 236: Morgan, American Beaver, 243.]

[Footnote 237: Proc. Wis. Hist. Soc., 1889, pp. 92-98.]

[Footnote 238: Amer. State Papers, Ind. Affs., II., 66.]

[Footnote 239: Wis. Hist. Colls., XI., 220, 223.]

[Footnote 240: The centers of Wisconsin trade were Green Bay, Prairie du Chien, and La Pointe (on Madelaine island, Chequamegon bay). Lesser points of distribution were Milwaukee and Portage. From these places, by means of the interlacing rivers and the numerous lakes of northern Wisconsin, the whole region was visited by birch canoes or Mackinaw boats.]

[Footnote 241: Schoolcraft in Senate Doc. No. 90, 22d Cong., 1st Sess., II,. 43.]

[Footnote 242: Lawe to Vieau, in Wis. Fur Trade MSS. See also U.S. Indian Treaties, and Wis. Hist. Colls., V., 236.]

[Footnote 243: House Ex. Docs., 19th Cong., 2d Sess., II., No. 7.]

[Footnote 244: For example see the Vieau Narrative in Wis. Hist. Colls., XI., and the Wis. Fur Trade MSS.]

[Footnote 245: Butler, Wild North Land; Robinson, Great Fur Land, ch. xv.]

EFFECTS OF THE TRADING POST.

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.