Pelts and Palisades: The Story of Fur and the Rivalry for Pelts in Early America by Nathaniel C. Hale - HTML preview

XVII
 Westward the Fur Frontier of America

WITH the elimination of New Netherland in 1664 the main obstacle to British colonial policy had been removed. Laws providing for a more closely knit relationship between the colonies and the mother country, such as the Navigation Acts, could be enforced. Soldiers now backed up the merchants. Indeed, from this time the expansion of England’s imperial trade system in America would proceed at the point of a gun.

That it would expand however, and solidly, was because the English had what it took in addition to guns. They possessed all those stubborn qualities required of true empire builders, of colonizers. The farmers who pressed hard behind the fur traders were land-hungry, persistent and numerous. They kept the beaver traders, and the soldiers, on the move.

Although the English flag waved over America in 1664 from Spanish Florida to French Canada, it was planted only along the coast. The farthest inland post was Fort Albany on the Hudson, formerly Dutch Fort Orange. Beyond that, however, lay the boundless hinterland, a seemingly inexhaustible fur frontier to be rolled westward toward the South Sea, toward China!

Of course there was the matter of protecting the English flanks against the Spaniards and the French. On the left flank, in the south, this had been accomplished by the Carolina Patent which extended England’s claim in those parts far below Cape Fear to 31°, and later even farther, although Spain did manage to keep the border north of its stronghold at St. Augustine. On the right flank the French coastal boundary had been neatly settled, or so the British colonials thought, when the northernmost limit of the widely scattered lands granted to the Duke of York was placed at the St. Croix River, roughly 45°, which had been England’s traditional claim there.

THE TRADERS KEPT PUSHING THEIR BIRCH-BARK CANOES DEEPER INTO THE WILDERNESS.

Then, too, there was the matter of the French traders already in the northwestern hinterland. But, since England had inherited the Dutch trade with the Iroquois, those fierce savages were counted upon to act as buffer allies in the interior, to keep the French trade routes north of the lake country.

It was quite a surprise therefore to the British colonials when their penetration of the interior had hardly begun before Frenchmen were harassing their right flank. Their coastal border on the St. Croix River was forced back once more below the Penobscot, while in the interior the Mohawk valley itself was raided by French troops trying to wrest more southerly routes from the Iroquois.

And this was only the beginning of a bloody rivalry between the English and the French for fur and dominion in America, a rivalry that would keep the evershifting borders aflame for almost a hundred years—to culminate finally in the decisive French and Indian War of the eighteenth century.

The Frenchmen of the seventeenth century who followed the paths blazed by Samuel de Champlain had extended those paths farther and farther into the hinterland. Fur traders, explorers, soldiers, and Catholic priests who not infrequently bent to the paddles for discovery entirely on their own, all took part in this invasion of America.

Of course the Frenchmen who came to America were not colonizers, not true empire builders. There were few farmers among them. In the main they were adventurers. But they had grand plans, and they knew how to strike bargains and make treaties with the natives. So, although their lines of communication were much too thinly held, they kept pushing their birch-bark canoes deeper into the wilderness for trade and dominion.

In 1634, one of Champlain’s interpreters, Jean Nicollet, voyaged across the waters of Lake Michigan to establish trade with the natives in the Wisconsin region. He had supposed they would be an Oriental people, and his appearance at Green Bay in a damask gown richly embroidered in the Chinese manner impressed the Dacotahs no less than the thunder and lightning of his pistol. Believing him to be a white god, the savages were humbly acquiescent to Nicollet’s demand for skins, and he took full profit from the situation.

In another twenty-five years two intrepid fur-traders, Pierre Exprit Radisson and his sister’s husband Medard Chouart, Sieur des Grosseilliers, had looked upon the waters of the upper Mississippi River. Trading and hunting with the Sioux, they explored much of the vast country between the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. On this same expedition, it would appear, while his partner was ill in winter camp, Radisson investigated the region about Lake Superior and learned of Cree trade routes from that lake to the Great Bay of the North (Hudson’s Bay). In the end, after many blood-curdling adventures, he and his brother-in-law returned home to Three Rivers on the St. Lawrence with a fortune in beaver skins.

They were soon off again, however, on another extended trading expedition, this time to build a palisaded fort among savage tribes living north of Lake Superior and eventually to cross the wilderness to Hudson’s Bay. Radisson’s account of the perils encountered on this venture puts one in mind of Jason’s quest for the golden fleece—and the tale’s denouement is no less reminiscent of that ancient Greek legend. In any case, the brothers-in-law took along a particularly fine supply of merchandise on this expedition into what is now northwestern Ontario—knives, hatchets and swords, ivory combs and tin looking-glasses, awls, and needles—all those things designed to send the red men in breathless pursuit of beaver. And, when they returned home, they had the greatest single cargo of pelts ever before seen in America. Their convoy included a great fleet of fur-laden canoes, requiring hundreds of Indians to paddle them.

Such a kingly treasure was too much for the grasping French governor at Quebec to resist. What he couldn’t take away from Radisson and Des Grosseilliers in taxes he took away in fines. This, he informed them, was because they had gone on their journey without his personal permission. The share left for the two traders, who had taken the risks, opened the country and brought back the beaver, hardly compensated them for their labor. They quit Canada in disgust to cast their lot with the English, the important consequence of which was the birth of the great Hudson’s Bay Company.

Radisson and his brother-in-law first spent some time trying to interest merchants in Nova Scotia, then under British control, in establishing a fur trading post on Hudson’s Bay. An expedition did set out in an English ship but the captain turned back on encountering ice floes, due to the lateness of the season. Then the Frenchmen went to Boston, where they gained considerable interest in their project but not enough capital to launch it. Finally, in England, they obtained sufficient backing from Prince Rupert, cousin of King Charles II, to finance such a costly adventure.

In 1668 a trading post was established “at the bottom of Hudson’s Bay,” in the southernmost part of James Bay, and the first cargo of furs to arrive in England was magnificent enough to insure a royal charter. The king granted domain over all the vast area drained by waters flowing into Hudson’s Bay to Prince Rupert and seventeen associates, incorporating them in 1670 as the “Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading in Hudson’s Bay.” These merchant adventurers became virtual rulers over “Rupert’s Land,” approximately 1,400,000 square miles of territory, and so their successors of the Hudson’s Bay Company were to be for over 200 years.

After the English became entrenched on Hudson’s Bay, furs were diverted to them that otherwise would have been collected by the French. In time French traders became aggravated enough to make repeated attacks on the rival posts. Attempts to dislodge the English from the bay proved futile however. Although the “Honorable Company,” as the Hudson’s Bay Company was to become known, moved ponderously at times due to its conservative absentee directorship in England, it managed to endure and to expand at the expense of the French. In fact, it was destined to become the world’s largest fur trading organization. It would shift the course of trade to London, to make it the center of the western world’s fur market.

Meanwhile, the adventurous French were spurred on by the discovery of the upper Mississippi. Radisson called the Mississippi, in conjunction with the Missouri, the Forked River “because it has two branches, the one towards the west, the other towards the south, which we believe runs toward Mexico.” Jesuit priests, probing the hinterland, wrote that the savages assured them the Mississippi was “so noble a river that, at more than three hundred leagues’ distance from its mouth, it is larger than the one flowing before Quebec; for they declare it is more than a league wide.... Some warriors of this country, who tell us that they have made their way thither, declare that they saw there men resembling the French, who were splitting trees with long knives, and that some of them had houses on the water—for they thus expressed themselves in speaking of sawed boards and Ships”—and Spaniards!

Already, young Louis XIV had considered occupying the mouths of continental rivers emptying into the Gulf of Mexico to threaten the Spanish possessions there. If Radisson’s Forked River was really one of these waterways, the strategic value of such a move would be immensely enhanced. It would provide a backside approach from New France, an interior line of communications safe from Spanish attack. It was an intriguing prospect, to say the least.

Then, in 1673, a fur trader and mine prospector named Louis Joliet together with a Jesuit priest, Father Jacques Marquette, descended the Mississippi far enough to learn that it assuredly did flow into the Gulf of Mexico. Whereupon the French not only tasted the stimulating prospect of threatening Spanish possessions there, they excitedly envisioned an inland empire of trading citadels stretching from the Gulf of St. Lawrence, through the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Valley, to the Gulf of Mexico. The continent would be theirs, with great ports of entry at the distantly separated mouths of the St. Lawrence and Mississippi Rivers. The English colonies would be completely encircled—to be pinned down on the coast, or eliminated!

Chief among those who developed this grand commercial strategy for dominion over the heart of America was Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle, who as Commandant of Fort Frontenac at the western outlet of Lake Ontario had built up a thriving trade with the northwestern savages. Much to the annoyance of the Iroquois he furnished these Algonquin tribes with guns, powder and lead, as well as less deadly goods, in return for their furs. La Salle’s profits from this commerce were huge. But he was an eager young man. The prospect of an enormous trade for buffalo hides, deerskins, beaver, bear, otter and raccoon in the Mississippi valley beckoned him to conquest. In 1678, on his promise to King Louis that he would Christianize the natives, establish a line of forts from the lakes to the mouth of the Mississippi and open a direct route to France through the Gulf of Mexico, he was granted a monopolistic trade patent to all the lands drained by the mighty river.

It was to be four years however before La Salle reached the mouth of the Mississippi, even on an initial exploratory expedition, for he was to make one false start after another.

If the Iroquois had been unhappy before, they were more so when La Salle, entering into his new domain, palisaded a trading post called Fort Crevecouer—the present site of Peoria, Illinois. They almost annihilated the Illinois with whom the Frenchmen were trading there, this being one of the tribes over which the Five Nations maintained their tyrannous lordship. Henri de Tonti, La Salle’s lieutenant in command of the fort at the time these human tigers descended on their vassals, was given the choice of being burned along with some Illinois captives or departing forthwith. He chose to depart. Curiously enough, however, not without a superb stock of furs for his inconvenience, all provided for him with typical savage capriciousness.

There were other opponents with whom La Salle had to contend during this period of trial. Jesuit priests, who drove a profitable trade for beaver among the savages while saving souls, objected not only to the monopoly granted La Salle but to the Franciscan priests who accompanied him and who competed in both commercial and spiritual fields. And there were still others who made mischief. Coureurs des bois, those renegade Frenchmen trading in the wilderness without license and illegally selling their furs to the English at Albany, were not averse to conspiring against the new monopoly that threatened their independence. There were hundreds of these savage-like white men, some originally of the French petty nobility, living among the Indians. Many of them had squaw wives, no consciences and little compunction about stirring up a war against their own countrymen if it fattened their pocketbooks.

In the end, however, La Salle established trading relations with the western tribes and organized them as allies. To keep the Iroquois off his back he furnished his red friends with more guns and taught them how to palisade their villages against the attacks of their fierce overlords. This done, in 1682 he was able to launch the fleet of canoes that carried a motley company of some fifty white men and Indians, including squaws and papooses, to the desolate delta country at the mouth of the Mississippi River. There, he erected a cross, sang the Te Deum and gave the name of “Louisiana” to the vast domain he now claimed in the name of France. Then he re-embarked with his company for the Illinois country.

It was a tortuous voyage back up the river. La Salle sickened and nearly died. Recovering at last, he went on to France where he organized and embarked on the expedition that was to end his short but historic career.

After setting out for the Gulf of Mexico with a well-equipped fleet of ships and a full complement of traders and their families, La Salle was first attacked by the Spaniards; then he failed to locate the mouth of the Mississippi. In final desperation he built a palisaded fort hundreds of miles west of his goal on what is now called Matagorda Bay. In that strange country the young French leader was killed by discontents among his own men following an argument over the apportionment of some buffalo meat.

But La Salle’s grand scheme did not die with him. While the Spaniards, who carried on a flourishing business in hides in New Mexico, were not long in searching out all that remained of the French colony and taking over the neighboring country called “Texas,” they didn’t occupy the strategic region about the mouth of the Mississippi River. By 1699 Pierre le Moyne, Sieur d’Iberville, a Canadian, had planted a colony on Biloxi Bay in what is now Mississippi, and in another three years a strongly palisaded fort was built close by at Mobile, to become the capital of Louisiana.

French trading citadels soon dotted the Mississippi valley—New Orleans in the delta, Forts Rosalie, Chartres and St. Antoine to comprehend the length of the great river itself, Fort d’Huiller on the Minnesota, Pimitoui on the Illinois, and Fort Orleans on the Missouri. Half-breed camps, conglomerate communities sprang up—Cahokia, Kaskaskia, Natchez, Natchitoches, and others. The natives, and even the outlawed coureurs des bois, found ready, local markets for their peltries in exchange for trade goods and supplies. And, while deep-laden canoes and company boats plied the alluvial waters of the Mississippi River to and from its mouth, ships from France set a course direct to the Gulf of Mexico—to the new French fur emporium in America.

In the meantime, the main path of the fur traders, the line of communication between Canada and Louisiana, was shortened by a far-sighted Gascon merchant named Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac. When he palisaded his trading citadel at Detroit in 1699, on the strait connecting Lake Erie and Lake Huron, he brought about such a concentration of Indian commerce and military power in those parts that within a few years portages between streams feeding western Lake Erie and the Ohio River could be effected with relative safety from Iroquois attack. And, when French fur traders began dipping their paddles in the Ohio River, thousands of square miles of territory were added to France’s mid-continent conquest.

Not only had the French completely encircled the English colonies strung out along the Atlantic seaboard, they had now begun to spread their occupation eastward toward the Appalachian Mountains, behind which they hoped to contain the English permanently.

Meanwhile, trail-blazing traders from Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania and New York had come upon the Appalachians and were searching out that mountainous barrier to further westward expansion.

Sir William Berkeley, Governor of Virginia, had an especial interest in the mountains and the country beyond. As agent in America for the Hudson’s Bay Company he hoped to help break the French monopoly on the hinterland trade by exploiting the western territory from Virginia. As early as 1669 he sent out John Lederer, a German, who ranged the eastern slopes of the Blue Ridge, north and south, for many miles. Even before that, Abraham Wood and other traders with commissions from the governor had bartered far to the southwest among the headwaters of Carolina coastal rivers.

They transported their wares on pack horses, 150 to 200 pounds on each animal, making twenty miles or more a day on their journeys when forage was plentiful. With guns, powder and shot as prime trade goods they visited tribes who had previously bartered with the Spaniards of Florida. They took hatchets, kettles, iron tools, colorful blankets and a variety of trinkets to villages never before visited by white men. On these occasions the appearance of that strange animal, the horse, strung with tinkling bells and packing unbelievable wealth on his back, created more awe among the savages than the bearded white man himself.

In 1671 the Virginians crossed the southerly ridges into the New River valley, and in another two years young Gabriel Arthur opened commerce with the Cherokees in the terminal hills of the Appalachians. He and his partner, James Needham, had some extraordinary experiences. Needham, a much older man of some experience in the Indian trade, was murdered by the savages on this venture. Arthur himself escaped burning only through the intervention of a Cherokee chief who, during the midst of the torture, adopted him into the tribe.

The Cherokee chief dressed and armed Arthur as a brave and sent him out with raiding war parties. In the first such instance, the Virginian seems to have joined willingly enough in a murderous surprise attack on a Spanish mission settlement in West Florida. In another, he helped slaughter some sleeping native villagers one night in the vicinity of Port Royal, South Carolina, on the promise of the Cherokees that no Englishmen in those parts would be harmed during the raid. Arthur later said he could tell that one English family was celebrating Christmas when his war party crept by their hut.

In still another instance, Arthur went all the way to the banks of the Ohio with his Cherokee chief to attack a Shawnee village. There he was badly wounded and captured, but released with some reverence when he scrubbed himself and exhibited his white skin to the amazed savages. After making his way back to the country of his Cherokee friends, the young Virginian finally returned to his own kind on the James River, richly laden with furs and trade treaties.

Henry Woodward, Carolina’s resourceful pioneer, found evidence of the Virginians’ trade on the backside of Lord Ashley’s proprietary in 1674. Woodward, who saved the fledgling colony at Charles Towne from bankruptcy by developing a trade in pelts and skins with the hinterland savages, visited the palisaded village of the Westoes that year. There, high up the Savannah River, he found the natives already “well provided with arms, ammunition, tradeing cloath & other trade from ye northward for which at set times of ye year they truck drest deare skins furrs & young Indian slaves.”

Governor Berkeley’s traders were indeed carrying on a highly profitable commerce. So much so, that in the interests of those profits, it was claimed, the governor permitted favored hinterland tribes to pillage Virginia tobacco planters with impunity. In any case Berkeley, who operated gainfully in his capacity as a British fur factor, did not respond with enough enthusiasm to the planters’ demands for protection, and a civil war resulted in 1676 that set back the colony’s economy by years. The rebellion was led by a fiery, twenty-nine-year-old patriot named Nathaniel Bacon. Before he died suddenly of a camp malady, Bacon chased the governor across the Chesapeake Bay to the Eastern Shore and burned Jamestown, the capital of Virginia, to the ground. With Bacon’s death the revolt collapsed and twenty-three prominent insurgent leaders were hanged by the governor in an orgy of personal revenge.

But, if Governor Berkeley had won the war over the fur trade, it was a merchant at the Falls of the James River who prospered most. There, at his store, William Byrd maintained a fine stock of calico, red coats, beads, knives, guns and Barbadian brandy for the pack-traders who sought out beaver pelts among remote Indian villages in the interior. So successful was Byrd that by the early 1680’s he dominated the hinterland trading paths of Virginia and Carolina. From this commerce he created the fortune that bought enough slaves and tobacco lands to promote his family to a position among the wealthiest in the colony, while the great hogsheads of pelts that he shipped yearly down the James River to England contributed in no small way to the support of Britain’s growing empire.

Henry Woodward and his Carolinians driving straight west avoided the trading paths of the Virginians, as well as the Appalachian Mountains, to invade the preserves of Spanish Florida. This took them to the headwaters of rivers emptying into the Gulf of Mexico, to the villages of the Creeks, where the Spaniards had previously monopolized the trade in deerskins and Indian slaves. The Carolinians diverted much of this profitable commerce to newly located Charleston. Thousands upon thousands of deerskins were shipped yearly to England, to be manufactured into a variety of articles. Hundreds of Indian slaves were supplied to New England and Virginia, and to Barbados where the rate of mortality on the hot sugar plantations insured a steady demand.

Spanish resistance in the south, the extinction of deer and the elimination of whole tribes of Indians who succumbed to slavery, kept the Charleston traders pushing ever toward the unknown west, across the headwaters of the Chattahoochee and the Alabama and into the valley of the Tennessee River. Before the turn of the century they had reached the lands of the Chickasaw Indians bordering on the Mississippi River, where their bright trade goods soon brought in all the available deer in those parts. There, they were busily helping the Chickasaws make war on their neighbors, the Choctaws, to procure slaves in lieu of the skins, when the French arrived.

French forts and a French alliance with the Choctaws halted this English advance into the lower valley of the Mississippi. Even so, the Carolina traders had pushed the English frontier farther west, by hundreds of miles, than any other colonials would do during the next half century.

North of Virginia in the latter part of the seventeenth century the two major areas of the fur trade among the English colonies were New England and New York.

The New England trade, exhausting itself, was on the decline. It had been blocked from expansion by national and political barriers in the west and by the hostility of the French in the north. Raids and counter raids, with the Indians used as allies on both sides, kept the borders between the French and the New Englanders alive with savage horrors. And, because of the prolonged hostilities in Europe these conditions would continue into the next century, until 1763, long after competition for pelts was no longer a controlling motive in that area.

The main fur trade of the colonies in the north after the fall of New Netherland was New York’s hinterland traffic, that which had been inherited from the Dutch. All wilderness paths led to Albany, even those made by the coureurs des bois and their copper-hued families packing their illegal furs to the Hudson when they could not do business with their own countrymen at Montreal. In 1679, it was said, there were over 500 of these French renegades living among the Indians. And to Albany, of course, came not only the beaver of the Five Nations but the peltries of vassal tribes deep in the hinterland for whom the Iroquois acted as middlemen.

The Five Nations were jealous enough of their trade and sovereignty to visit swift vengeance on any vassals who tried to deal direct with the white men, as happened to the Illinois in 1680 when those distant natives sold their pelts to La Salle. For the same reason they also tried to keep white pack traders from pushing farther into the west, where they might exchange their wares direct with the less sophisticated natives. It was a losing battle however.

By the turn of the century, traders from New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia were working the Appalachian passes for beaver and otter. In another twenty years many were squeezing through the more northerly gaps into the valley of the Ohio River. By then, the pressure of immigrant families upon the land east of the mountains had commenced in earnest. Palatine farmers were flowing up the valley of the Mohawk in great numbers, and land-hungry Ulster Scots were scrambling through the Susquehanna valley and southward up the Shenandoah.

The fur trader as usual had searched out the country. Then, while he was still exploiting it for his own purposes, he had to make way for the farmer. The two could never blend, not after the frontier began to roll westward. Farmers spoiled the trade. The pioneer traders could only move on to more fertile trading grounds, to open new territory which itself would later be taken up by farmers.

Of course, Indian titles had to be extinguished before settlers could legally move into the lands opened up by the fur traders. Some tribes were a bit troublesome about this detail. The Delaware kicked up an especially bloody fuss on the Pennsylvania frontier. They had more than a suspicion that they had been swindled by the “Walking Purchase.”

When William Penn, the founding proprietor of the Quaker colony, bought land from the Delaware tribe, the extent of the purchase was limited to the distance a man could go in 1¹⁄₂ days. But, when the time came in 1737 for Penn’s son to measure this off, he did not have it walked off as the Indians had presumed it would be done. To cover the distance, the Quaker employed trained white athletes, runners! It was even suspected that the white runners may have used horses concealed along the route, that is, after they were out of sight of the Indians who panted along behind them full of Penn’s rum, according to some accounts.

Things settled down rather quickly however when James Logan, that astute Pennsylvanian who guided the Indian policy of the colony, treated generously with the Iroquois to keep the Delaware in line. The Delaware, in fear of their fierce overlords in the north, vacated most of their lands east of the mountains and joined the equally unhappy Shawnee in the upper Ohio valley. There they listened malevolently to French traders and soldiers who promised a red-handed revenge.

So successful was the Indian policy in general, however, that on the outbreak of King George’s War in 1744 between England and France, the Iroquois were cajoled into granting the English practically all the Ohio valley and sealing the bargain with an alliance to help protect the property against the French who were already there. In fact, commissioners from Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania, meeting with an Iroquois delegation around the council fire at Lancaster, obtained “a Deed recognizing the King’s right to all the Lands that are, or shall be, by his Majesty’s appointment, in the Colony of Virginia.”

As far as the Virginians were concerned those lands by ancient charter stretched all the way to the South Sea, wherever that was, although they were willing to settle for the Ohio valley for the time being. Nor did the Quaker colony seriously dispute Virginia’s claim at the time, even though nearly all of the fur traders beyond the mountains, who were now aggressively competing with the French, were Pennsylvanians.

Chief among these was George Croghan. He had not arrived in Pennsylvania from Dublin until 1741, but he was established in trade on the Ohio River well before King George’s War. By 1746 he had a number of storehouses on Lake Erie itself. From the bustling base of his operations in the 1740’s near Harris Ferry (Harrisburg) on the Susquehanna, and later from Aughwick farther west, he and his various partners directed effective attacks on French trade in the Ohio valley.

Together with his brother-in-law William Trent, and Andrew Montour, Barney Curran and John Fraser, Croghan controlled fort-like storehouses about the forks of the Ohio, up the Allegheny and the Youghiogheny, on the south shore of Lake Erie, at the forks of the Muskingum, and even on the Scioto and Miami Rivers. From these trading posts, all of which developed into rude settlements of sorts, the Pennsylvanians distributed rum, gunpowder, lead and flints, as well as calicoes, ribbons, colored stockings, kettles, axes, bells, whistles and looking-glasses. In return, they collected a fine variety of pelts and skins—beaver, raccoon, otter, muskrat, mink, fisher, fox, deer, elk, and bear.

Croghan’s pack traders, at times possibly numbering twenty-five men and driving a hundred or more mules altogether, followed the Ohio down to the falls and worked the streams that fed it. They were trading and fighting in what is now West Virginia and eastern Kentucky almost a quarter of a century before Daniel Boone. They bartered under the very guns of French forts, engaging in bloody skirmishes with the French and Indians and on occasion being taken as captives to Montreal and even to France.

Croghan had his English competitors too. There were, for instance, the five Lowrey brothers, as aggressive and as rugged a lot of rivals as might have been found on any fur frontier. But all the Pennsylvanians were as one in their persistent encroachment on the French. Backed by factors in Philadelphia and Lancaster, including Shippen and Lawrence and the firm of Levy, Franks and Simon, both of which specialized in the Indian trade and in turn received credit from wealthy merchants of London and Bristol, these intrepid frontiersmen stubbornly picked away at the French trade.

In one respect the Englishmen were fortunate. During King George’s War the French had trouble getting sufficient trade goods, and many Indians with whom they had been trading became contemptuous of them. It is said that, on one occasion, when a Frenchman only offered a single charge of powder for a beaver skin, the Indian with whom he was bartering “took up his Hatchet, and knock’d him on the head, and killed him upon the Spot.” Croghan and his Pennsylvanians took full advantage of the temporary French embarrassment, building up their annual business in pelts to a value of some 40,000 pounds sterling.

It was the prospect of a share in this lucrative trade that motivated some wealthy Virginians, among them Thomas Lee and the Washingtons, who conceived the Ohio Company after the Treaty of Lancaster. While acting as a vehicle to establish England’s claim west of the mountains, the company as it was finally organized promised future dividends from land development in those parts. But there was the immediate prospect of rich gains from the fur trade, and little time was lost in lining up experienced Indian traders for the project.

Thomas Cresap, a clever Yorkshireman, who operated a trading post in the mountains near the junction of the North and South Branches of the Potomac River, became an organizing member of the Ohio Company. So lavishly hospitable was Cresap to the Indians and others with whom he did business that he was known to them as “Big Spoon,” but to his Pennsylvania trading competitors he was an undercutting Marylander not above committing murder for a beaver skin. Certain it is that he had once been carted off in irons, after some “rascality” on the Maryland-Pennsylvania border, to spend a year in prison at Philadelphia.

In any case the aristocratic tidewater Virginians counted “Colonel Cressup” a key member of their Ohio Company. The Marylander’s trading paths already led to the Youghiogheny, the Monongahela, and the Ohio. So, the fort-like establishment he maintained on Virginia’s northwestern frontier served as a convenient base from which the company commenced its well-financed operations in the Ohio valley.

Employed by the company were some former associates of George Croghan. Among them were Andrew Montour, a colorful half-breed of coureur des bois stock, and Croghan’s brother-in-law William Trent. With the aid of experienced men like these, Thomas Cresap was soon proving his worth to his tidewater partners and to the British Empire.

The threat was too obvious to be ignored by the French. They laid plans to push the English back over the mountains. Already, a French army detachment, using a traders’ portage between the eastern end of Lake Erie and Lake Chautauqua, had gone down to the Ohio via the Allegheny River, planting lead plates along both streams as a warning to trespassers. Already, French-led and French-inspired Indian raids had taken the lives of English traders, as well as those of their native hosts. In one case a prominent Indian chief allied with the English had been boiled and eaten by some Ottawas led by a French half-breed, all without discouraging the Englishmen it seemed. Now, in 1753, a French army of 1,000 men headed down the Allegheny from Canada, to begin building a line of forts along the line of the previously planted lead plates.

Forts were built first at present-day Erie on the lake and at the head of French Creek to secure a portage. Then, John Frazer’s trading post at Venango on the Allegheny was taken and converted to a fortification. There the French troops, bogged down with sickness, dug in for the winter.

That is where Major George Washington found them when he carried a note from the Governor of Virginia to their commanding officer suggesting that they all retire promptly to Canada. This, the Frenchmen said, they had no intention of doing. In the spring they would push on, down the Allegheny, to the strategic Forks of the Ohio.

Even as the French army was building canoes that winter for its advance on the Ohio, Thomas Cresap and William Trent were supervising the construction of an English fort at the forks of the river. They now represented the Governor of Virginia and the King of England, as well as the Ohio Company, all of whom were one and the same as far as the Ohio valley was concerned. In fact Trent, the fur trader in the employ of the Ohio Company, had been commissioned a captain by Governor Dinwiddie of Virginia to command the new fort and oppose the French.

But when spring and the French came to the Forks of the Ohio, Captain Trent was absent. He said he was looking for recruits; some suspected he was ferrying his beaver to a safer spot. The ensign in command yielded the English fort in the face of overwhelming odds, and the French built an impressive citadel in its place, which they named Fort DuQuesne to honor the Canadian governor of that name.

Washington, now Colonel Washington, who was advancing from Virginia with his militia to Trent’s support, was much too late. He was forced to content himself with palisading a defensive position along the road at Great Meadows. There at Fort Necessity, as he called it, he warded off as best he could the large number of French troops who came out to engage him.

That summer of 1754 Washington surrendered. When he led his militiamen back over the Alleghenies, the Frenchmen had succeeded in their purpose. The English were out of the Ohio valley.

However, the American phase of the Seven Years’ War had commenced—two years before it was officially declared in Europe. The critical contest known on this continent as the French and Indian War was under way, and the very next year General Edward Braddock arrived with his British regulars to direct the campaign.

The strategic plan decided upon encompassed a four-fold attack upon the French at DuQuesne, Crown Point, Niagara, and in Nova Scotia. General Braddock himself assumed the DuQuesne assignment, the most important immediate objective. But he failed on this mission, his abortive attempt to reach the Forks of the Ohio ending in the disastrous rout of his troops and his own death.

It was not until 1758 that General John Forbes forced the evacuation of the fort at the Forks of the Ohio. The French then abandoned the entire valley. Fort DuQuesne became Fort Pitt and the English were in control of the Ohio River.

The war was savagely fought out on all fronts in America. Other French citadels fell—Louisburg, Frontenac, Niagara, Ticonderoga, and Crown Point. Eventually, Quebec and Montreal, those ancient fortresses on the St. Lawrence River, capitulated to the British. Then, in 1763, by the Treaty of Paris, France ceded Canada and all her territory east of the Mississippi River to Great Britain, except for one small plot encompassing New Orleans. Spain likewise ceded Florida.

The English flanks no longer needed protection. The way west was open and the frontier was boundless!

Settlers spilled through the gaps of the Appalachians, into Ohio, Kentucky, Illinois. And the fur traders, making way for them as they pressed upon their trading grounds, pushed on, ever westward, across the plains after the turn of the century to the Rocky Mountains and the coastal rivers of the Pacific.

But the era of the early fur trader, typified by the white trader and the Indian hunter, had come to an end. As the frontier began rolling across the great plains of America, the white man became trapper as well as trader. When he took over the function of the Indian, who had formerly caught the beaver, a whole new conception of the fur trade in America was born. A new era commenced—that of the fur trapper.

The fur trader of early America had played out his historically important role.