Chapter 7

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."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 246: Notwithstanding Kulischer's assertion that there is no room for this in primitive society. _Vide_ Der Handel auf den primitiven Culturstufen, in _Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft_, X., No. 4, p. 378. Compare instances of inter-tribal trade given _ante_, pp. 11, 26.]

[Footnote 247: On the "_metis_," _boís-brulés_, or half-breeds, consult Smithsonian Reports, 1879, p. 309, and Robinson, Great Fur Land, ch. iii.]

[Footnote 248: Minn. Hist. Colls., V., 135; Biddle to Atkinson, 1819, in Ind. Pamphlets, Vol. I, No. 15 (Wis. Hist. Soc. Library).]

[Footnote 249: Parkman, Pioneers of France, 230; Carr, Mounds of the Mississippi, p. 8, n. 8; Smith's Generall Historie, I., 88, 90, 155 (Richmond, 1819).]

[Footnote 250: Jefferson, Works, II., 60, 250, 370.]

[Footnote 251: Allen's Lewis and Clarke Expedition, p. ix (edition of 1814. The introduction is by Jefferson).]

[Footnote 252: Jefferson's messages of January 18, 1803, and February 19, 1806. See Amer. State Papers, Ind. Affs., I., 684.]

[Footnote 253: See Adams, Maryland's Influence upon Land Cessions to U.S., J.H.U. Studies, 3d Series, No. I., pp. 80-82.]

[Footnote 254: _Ibid._ _Vide ante_, p. 41.]

[Footnote 255: Narr. and Crit. Hist. Amer., VIII., 10. Compare Adams, as above. At Jefferson's desire, in January and February of 1788, Washington wrote various letters inquiring as to the feasibility of a canal between Lake Erie and the Ohio, "whereby the fur and peltry of the upper country can be transported"; saying: "Could a channel once be opened to convey the fur and peltry from the Lakes into the eastern country, its advantages would be so obvious as to induce an opinion that it would in a short time become the channel of conveyance for much the greater part of the commodities brought from thence." Sparks, Washington's Works, IX., 303, 327.]

[Footnote 256: Wis. Hist. Colls., XI., 230.]

[Footnote 257: Cong. Rec., XXIII., 57. I found this interesting confirmation of my views after this paper was written. Compare _Harper's Magazine_, Sept. 1890, p. 565.]

[Footnote 258: The traffic in furs in the Middle Ages was enormous, says Friedlander, Sittengeschichte, III., 62. Numerous cities in England and on the Continent, whose names are derived from the word "beaver" and whose seals bear the beaver, testify to the former importance in Europe of this animal; see _Canadian Journal_, 1859, 359. See Du Chaillu, Viking Age, 209-10; Marco Polo, bk. iv., ch. xxi. "Wattenbach, in _Historische Zeitschrift_, IX., 391, shows that German traders were known in the lands about the Baltic at least as early as the knights.]