Chapter VIII: Part 8

In fact at no time, until 1650, did the New Netherlanders give up any part of their claims south of Cape Cod, even though they hadn’t been able to stem the overland flood of English traders and settlers. In 1647 they did seize an Amsterdam ship, trading at New Haven without a license from the Dutch West India Company, and brought her into New Amsterdam where she was confiscated in spite of excited protests from New Haven. On land, however, they were overwhelmingly outnumbered. Furthermore, troubles at home, especially with the savages, kept them close to the valley of the Hudson after 1640.

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Curiously enough, the New Netherlanders’ troubles at home beginning in 1640 sprang largely from their sale of firearms to the distant Iroquois.

These lake country Indians, with practically inexhaustible supplies of the finest beaver, thought nothing of offering as many as twenty heavy skins in exchange for a musket. The great profit in this traffic had proved irresistible to the Dutchmen. So the authorities at Manhattan often winked at the illegal purveyance of arms and powder by their traders to such faraway savages. If their consciences bothered them at all, they were comforted by the knowledge that their Iroquois allies maintained a bulwark against competitive traders from French Canada, as well as against the enveloping English.

At the same time however, prompted strictly by self-preservation, the New Netherlanders clamped down hard on any “bosch-lopers” who sold arms among their Algonquin neighbors. This was good policy for the Hollanders of course, but it left the river tribes at the complete mercy of their ancient and terrible Iroquois enemies, especially the Mohawks, who descended upon them periodically to collect taxes.

Added to this touchy situation was the asininity of a reckless Dutch governor, one William Kieft, who himself attempted to collect taxes from these same river Indians for the support of his fortifications on Manhattan. When he adopted wholesale butchery and the surprise tactics of the Iroquois to enforce his demands for tribute, things became explosive. The Dutch found themselves waging a sanguinary five-year war against local tribes who in turn managed to terrorize Manhattan and the surrounding plantations.

This war, though sporadic and spotty, was fought with a thirst for blood on both sides. Massacres and other atrocities were committed by reds and whites alike, as the Indian league against the Hollanders spread up the Hudson above the Highlands. In 1643 a shallop coming down from Fort Orange with four hundred beaver skins taken in trade with the Mohawks was plundered, to signal a general massacre that resulted in the virtual evacuation of all the outlying plantations in the lower valley as surviving colonists fled to Fort Amsterdam.

It took a final annihilating blow, no less terrible than the recent English offensive against the Pequots, to end the war. And it was Captain John Underhill who delivered it with the same dreadful efficiency he had demonstrated during the Pequot campaign. Underhill, now a Boston “heretic” living under the jurisdiction of the West India Company, led 150 Dutch soldiers into the mountainous region north of Stamford where the remnant of the Indian league against the New Netherlanders had a strongly palisaded town. When it was all over 700 Indian corpses darkened the snow. The Dutch lost 15 men.

Only Kiliaen van Rensselaer’s patroonship far up the Hudson was spared the tomahawk during these Indian troubles. There, where the shrewd Amsterdam jeweler had purchased lands about Fort Orange embracing most of two present-day New York counties, the neighboring Mohawk allies of the Dutch provided complete protection from Algonquin depredations. While all was pandemonium on the lower river, both agriculture and trade flourished at Rensselaerwyck.

Nowhere in New Netherland, in fact, was there a livelier trade in pelts then or at any other time than at Van Rensselaer’s manor. And nowhere was this trade more unlicensed. In 1644 it was estimated that between three and four thousand furs had been carried off the manor illegally during a twelve month period. That is, illegally carried off in the eyes of the patroon, although he himself was shipping out pelts illegally as far as the authorities at Manhattan were concerned.

Van Rensselaer, however, recognized no jurisdiction from that quarter. He asserted that he held his patroonship directly from the States General and that he would buy and ship furs as he pleased without regard to any laws or taxes proclaimed by the West India Company’s representatives at New Amsterdam. And so he did.

He even built a fort of his own on a Hudson River island where he emphasized the independence of his feudal domain by enforcing the medieval principle of “staple right.” Every passing vessel, except those of the Dutch West India Company, must pay duty or deposit its cargo of pelts ashore where the patroon might buy these “staples” on his own terms. The skippers must strike their colors too, in homage to the lord of Rensselaerwyck.

Van Rensselaer also made it clear that company as well as private fur traders were to keep off his property. This caused much bitterness. Fort Orange, about which the patroon had established his domain, was the official post of the Dutch West India Company, the emporium where their traders traditionally bartered for beaver with the Iroquois. After Rensselaerwyck was established Fort Orange continued to be the commercial center of this profitable trade, so much so that the flourishing little trading village which sprang up there under the very cannon of the fort, and which was to grow into the strategically important city of Albany, was originally christened Beverwyck. Kiliaen van Rensselaer of course had no jurisdiction over Fort Orange, the company’s private precinct, but he considered Beverwyck within his domain. The resulting rivalry between his traders and the company’s representatives, with guns for the savages as bait for beaver, was anything but neighborly.

The company’s management at Manhattan only quickened the tension when on occasion the authorities there confiscated firearms en route to the patroon of Rensselaerwyck. In one case, in 1644, a ship out of Holland for Rensselaerwyck was discovered to be carrying 4,000 pounds of powder and 700 guns intended for the Indian trade, and these munitions were seized with considerable show of propriety. But what then happened to them is not stated, although one well-informed old chronicler suggests that they got along probably in due course to the Iroquois as usual in return for their precious beaver. In any event, the confiscation represented only one slight interruption in the continuous flow of these murderous trade goods to the lake-country Indians.

The feud between the company and the patroonship on the upper Hudson really settled down to cases in 1648 after Kiliaen van Rensselaer died and his young son’s contumacious new commissary, Brandt van Slechtenhorst, took over the management of Rensselaerwyck. For, in the meantime, that little snappish captain, Peter Stuyvesant, had arrived in New Netherland as the West India Company’s Director General.

Stuyvesant was by way of being a reformer, so long as the reforms were in the company’s trade interests. One of his first acts to attract more settlers was to permit the popular election of “Nine Men” who, when called upon, were to assist the governor and the council in matters concerning the general welfare. But when the “Nine Men” proposed to serve the general welfare without being called upon by the governor, Peter Stuyvesant proceeded to knock them down. And when the right of appeal to the home government was suggested, the governor stamped about arrogantly on his pegleg and dared anyone to try it. He said he would make the appealer “a foot shorter, pack the pieces off to Holland, and let him appeal in that way!”

Brutally dictatorial though he may have been, the new governor was earnest nevertheless in all things, reforms included. He took very effective steps, for instance, to check the smuggling of beaver into New England where it could be traded tax-free for European goods. And, while setting up tighter export controls, he also increased the tax on furs. Furthermore, he not only forbade the sale of liquor to the natives but he tried his best to enforce the contraband on firearms for use as trade goods.

Naturally, such policies were obnoxious at Rensselaerwyck, where gun-running was popular and company taxes were not. There too the commissary, Brandt van Slechtenhorst, headstrong in pretensions to complete independence of the company, was itching to prove his insubordination.

So, when Stuyvesant, with his penchant for issuing autocratic proclamations, decreed a certain fast day not to van Slechtenhorst’s liking, the Commissary of Rensselaerwyck pounced upon it, rejecting it as an invasion of “the right and authority of the Lord Patroon.” When the governor went up the river to challenge his adversary he was met with open defiance.

It was Stuyvesant’s edict then that “no new ordinances affecting trade or commerce within the colony were to be made, unless with the assent of the provincial authorities.” Also, with regard to the company’s jealously guarded “precincts” about Fort Orange, no more buildings were to be erected at Beverwyck within range of the guns of the fortifications. Such encroachments on the company’s precincts rendered the fort insecure, the governor claimed. And further, he ordered, the wooden palisades of the fort were to be replaced with a stone wall, the stone to be quarried on an adjoining tract of land.

Van Slechtenhorst’s reply to all this was that he would build wherever he pleased because all the land around belonged to the patroon. He noted sarcastically that the patroon’s own trading house had once stood on the very border of the fort’s moat. No sooner had Stuyvesant departed than the wilful commissary went right ahead erecting houses, “even within pistol shot” of the palisades. Furthermore, he forbade the quarrying of stone for new walls to replace the palisades.

The feud, continuing unabated, was eventually referred to Holland where the States General sustained the Governor of New Netherland on every point. Although by this action the aspirations of the patroonship for independence were dashed beyond hope, van Slechtenhorst resisted stubbornly until 1652, when he was arrested and transported down to Manhattan. In the end also, the village of Beverwyck was officially declared free, to become a part of the “precincts” of Fort Orange.

Meanwhile, for Governor Stuyvesant, there was the more vital problem of the New Englanders who were hungrily gnawing away at Dutch fur trading territory.

XVI

_The English Close Their Coastal Ranks_

All during the trouble he was having with the patroon on the upper Hudson, Peter Stuyvesant was conducting a diplomatic holding action against the mounting pressure on his New England front. This was no easy task in the face of the darkening international situation abroad. After Charles I of England was beheaded in 1649, Cromwell’s jealousy of Dutch commerce had become threateningly obvious. War between the two nations was imminent. And Stuyvesant well knew that the “United Colonies of New England,” even without Cromwell’s soldiers, could overrun New Netherland with ease if they took concerted action. That possibility had been implicit in the founding purpose of their alliance in 1643.

It was a fact that defense against the Indians had motivated the New Englanders not much more than the animosity they nurtured against their Dutch neighbors, an animosity born of rivalry for the fur trade. After the alliance, English fur factors became even more aggressive. The men of New Haven, who were especially bitter about being cut off from the Indian trade, boldly encroached on Dutch preserves when they ascended the Housatonic valley and set up a trucking station on the Naugatuck River within sixty miles of Fort Orange. And traders from the upper Connecticut valley probed deeply into traditional Dutch territory in their efforts to tap the beaver stores of the Iroquois.

But, in the years immediately following the formation of the league, there was not enough unanimity of purpose among the New Englanders to attack the foreigners who were standing in the way of their expanding beaver traffic. For one thing, at that time, the dominant member of the confederation was not too directly affected by Dutch resistance. Massachusetts’ main inland fur traffic from Boston did not approach Dutch territory, and her chief fur merchant, Simon Willard of Concord, who spearheaded this traffic up the Merrimac River had yet to reach even Lake Winnepesaukee, itself far separated from New Netherland frontiers by natural boundaries.

Of course all New Englanders protested about the “murderous” Dutch trade in arms for beaver. William Pynchon protested even about the Hollanders supplying the distant Iroquois with firearms. But since all the colonies of the confederation were guilty in some degree of this practice, it is questionable whether the complaints sprang as much from moral considerations as they did from vexation over the diversion of beaver pelts to the more freehanded Hollanders.

In any case, while the New Englanders protested so virtuously about the Dutch trade in firearms, they complained strenuously also about Stuyvesant’s new excises on furs, and they took the occasion to pass laws excluding the Hollanders from any trade with Indians under their jurisdiction. Their jurisdiction, it seemed, now comprehended everything along the coast east of Greenwich and unlimited claims to the interior. This brought about a diplomatic showdown.

Governor Stuyvesant, in high bluff, journeyed to Hartford in 1650 for a meeting with the Commissioners of the United Colonies. He offered a valiant front, opening the negotiations with a letter of considerations signed at Hartford but dated “in New Netherland.” When the New England commissioners took exception, Stuyvesant explained that, as the substance of the letter was agreed upon in Council at Manhattan, it was so dated. However, if the commissioners would cease speaking of Hartford “in New England,” he would not date his letters “in New Netherland.”

This was not to be his only retreat. His territorial claims east along the coast retreated from Cape Cod to Greenwich in the face of accomplished fact. And he could only agree to a stabilization of the border between New England and New Netherland at about where it had been fixed already by English traders. Roughly, this was a line running northerly from the vicinity of Greenwich that was at no point to come within ten miles of Hudson’s River. The only Dutch reservation east of that line was the Fort Good Hope trading post.

It was all very humiliating. However it appeared to have the redeeming feature of halting by treaty any further encroachment on the heart of the Dutch trading preserves. The all-important Iroquois trade was saved.

But only for the time being, as it turned out. Significantly enough, although the treaty signed at Hartford was eventually ratified by the States General in Holland, the English government never did get around to doing so. It wasn’t necessary. England planned to take all of New Netherland, in due time.

Meanwhile, the pressure on New Netherland was renewed, while the treaty itself was violated, even repudiated, by the New Englanders.

To begin with, Cromwell’s Navigation Act was passed in 1651. It decreed that goods imported into England must come in English ships or ships belonging to the country in which the goods were produced. Since this was specifically directed against the Dutch carrying trade, it soon plunged England and Holland into a naval war, from which England may be said to have emerged the victor even though she was soundly thrashed at sea. But, although the British fleet had to take refuge in the Thames while an exulting Dutch admiral sailed up and down the Channel with a broom tied to the masthead of his flagship, the Navigation Act was maintained in force.

While all this was going on overseas, New Haven and Connecticut clamored for the conquest of their “noxious” Dutch neighbors. So alarmed was Peter Stuyvesant in 1653 that he made last-ditch preparations for the coming English onslaught. It was at this time that the famous wall of palisades was built along the line of what is still called “Wall” Street. This pale was intended to hinder any possible land envelopment of New Amsterdam by the English. But once again Massachusetts held back. She prevented outright war in America by refusing to join in a military offensive against New Netherland.

The boundaries set up by the Treaty of Hartford were violated however. By 1655 the English had pushed across the line at Greenwich, well into present-day Westchester County. By 1659 Massachusetts itself was ready to repudiate the treaty.

In that year, it appears, the Hollanders made the mistake of objecting too vigorously to being divested of the bulk of their beaver trade by Boston merchants. The Bay Colony, claiming unlimited western boundaries, had granted a tract in the Hudson valley to merchants interested in establishing a fur trading post close by Fort Orange itself. Then, as if this was not offensive enough to the New Netherlanders, the Boston men boldly requested free use of the Hudson River waterway to reach their new property. The overland route was too difficult, they explained.

When Peter Stuyvesant angrily refused this request the Boston traders persisted, bringing their case before the Commissioners of the United Colonies. Whereupon those gentlemen announced airily that “The agreement at Hartford that the English should not come within ten miles of Hudson’s River, doth not prejudice the rights of the Massachusetts in the upland country, nor give any rights to the Dutch there!” Only the excitement generated by the Restoration in England quelled the ensuing controversy long enough to forestall a local conflict.

This same year, only four years after the Dutch conquest of New Sweden, English pressure commenced from the south. There, Governor Fendall of Lord Baltimore’s Maryland colony was invading the Delaware valley with men and ultimatums. He demanded that “the pretended Governor of a people seated in Delaware Bay, within his Lordship’s Province ... depart forth!” Otherwise, he declaimed, that part of his lordship’s province “would be reduced to its due obedience under him.”

Stuyvesant, of course, refuted the Maryland claim. He pointed out that Lord Baltimore’s patent gave him rights only to lands hitherto uncultivated by Christians. But the English pressure in that quarter, once commenced, was maintained with the same stubborn persistence as that on the New England front. The British were closing their ranks on the eastern seaboard of America. The squeeze was on New Netherland.

The Dutch governor fought desperately for the life of his colony. He had been plagued with Indian uprisings in the valley of the Hudson, pirates in Long Island Sound and English plotters in New Amsterdam itself. Now the very life’s breath of his colony was being squeezed out, for, in addition to the loss of Indian trade to the trespassing Englishmen, Peter Stuyvesant also had to contend with the stifling effects of the new British Navigation Acts. These laws had not been relaxed in any degree since Cromwell’s death. On the contrary, they had been tightened upon the restoration of the crown.

But, since the Navigation Acts were almost as obnoxious to the English colonies as they were to the Dutch, ways were found in America to circumvent them. Intercolonial trade practices developed that soon baffled the monopoly-minded merchants of London and Bristol. Stuyvesant discovered, for instance, that he could exchange negroes and “other merchandise” for Virginia tobacco, and then reship the English product via New Amsterdam. Thus, goods intended for British bottoms were being carried by the Dutch to foreign markets, in spite of the English navigation laws.

Under these circumstances, from the British viewpoint, there was only one thing left to do. Whatever remained of Dutch authority and jurisdiction in America would have to be stamped out by military force. To accomplish this the English had only to take the Hudson River. It was not only the main highway to the fur stores of the Iroquois, it was the key to military control of the continent. And it could be seized at small cost, the Council of Foreign Plantations suggested.

Whereupon James, Duke of York, persuaded his brother, Charles II, to grant him title to various lands in America including all the territory between the Delaware and Connecticut Rivers, and to finance an expedition against New Amsterdam. The English did not bother even to declare war, since, as the king curiously put it, New Amsterdam “did belong to England before, but the Dutch drove our people out of it.” A conglomeration of assumptions hardly warranted by any facts!

Someone has written that the conquest of New Netherland by the force sent out by the Duke of York was “a mere bit of bellicose etiquette.” Others have been more direct, calling it “bold robbery.” In any case, when Colonel Richard Nicolls arrived off Fort Amsterdam in the late summer of 1664, with four frigates and five times the fire power of Stuyvesant’s guns, New Amsterdam became New York without a shot being fired. So did Fort Orange up the river. It only remained then for Sir Robert Carr to descend upon the Delaware settlements to force the allegiance of all those seated there, and New Netherland ceased to exist.

The English had closed ranks on the coasts of America. British colonies now stretched out in line, unbroken by foreigners, from Spanish Florida to French Canada--one united front--for trade, for war.

British demands at Fort Amsterdam having proved to be moderate, the Dutch remained as good subjects, thus establishing the early cosmopolitan character of Manhattan. Many of the burghers had openly sided with the English anyway during the surrender negotiations, apparently with the happy prospect of ridding themselves of their waspish little governor. Stuyvesant himself, retiring to private life, developed a warm friendship with his English successor, Governor Nicolls, each apparently holding the other in high esteem.

And, in the official seal of New York, full recognition was given to the little furred animal that had so properly occupied a prominent place in the seal of the Dutch colony. _Castor canadensis_ appeared twice, in fact, within the shield of the British seal. Even after the American Revolution, after the eagle had supplanted the crown in the seal of New York, these two beavers remained there as a permanent reminder of the important role of fur in the genesis of our greatest port.

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.