The Character and Influence of the Indian Trade in Wisconsin | Page 6

were combined.[51] When Boone entered Kentucky he went with an Indian trader whose posts were on the Red river in Kentucky.[52] After the game decreased the hunter's clearing was occupied by the cattle-raiser, and his home, as settlement grew, became the property of the cultivator of the soil;[53] the manufacturing era belongs to our own time.
In the South, the Middle Colonies and New England the trade opened the water-courses, the trading post grew into the palisaded town, and rival nations sought to possess the trade for themselves. Throughout the colonial frontier the effects, as well as the methods, of Indian traffic were strikingly alike. The trader was the pathfinder for civilization. Nor was the process limited to the east of the Mississippi. The expeditions of Verenderye led to the discovery of the Rocky Mountains.[54] French traders passed up the Missouri; and when the Lewis and Clarke expedition ascended that river and crossed the continent, it went with traders and voyageurs as guides and interpreters. Indeed, Jefferson first conceived the idea of such an expedition[55] from contact with Ledyard, who was organizing a fur trading company in France, and it was proposed to Congress as a means of fostering our western Indian trade.[56] The first immigrant train to California was incited by the representations of an Indian trader who had visited the region, and it was guided by trappers.[57]
St. Louis was the center of the fur trade of the far West, and Senator Benton was intimate with leading traders like Chouteau.[58] He urged the occupation of the Oregon country, where in 1810 an establishment had for a time been made by the celebrated John Jacob Astor; and he fostered legislation opening the road to the southwestern Mexican settlements long in use by the traders. The expedition of his son-in-law Frémont was made with French voyageurs, and guided to the passes by traders who had used them before.[59] Benton was also one of the stoutest of the early advocates of a Pacific railway.
But the Northwest[60] was particularly the home of the fur trade, and having seen that this traffic was not an isolated or unimportant matter, we may now proceed to study it in detail with Wisconsin as the field of investigation.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 41: Charter of 1606.]
[Footnote 42: Ramsay, Tennessee, 63.]
[Footnote 43: On the Southwestern Indians see Adair, American Indians.]
[Footnote 44: Ramsay, 75.]
[Footnote 45: Spottswood's Letters, Virginia Hist. Colls., N.S., I., 67.]
[Footnote 46: Byrd Manuscripts, I., 180. The reader will find a convenient map for the southern region in Roosevelt, Winning of the West, I.]
[Footnote 47: Spottswood's Letters, I., 40; II., 149, 150.]
[Footnote 48: Ramsay, 64. Note the bearing of this route on the Holston settlement.]
[Footnote 49: Georgia Historical Collections, I., 180; II., 123-7.]
[Footnote 50: Spottswood. II., 331, for example.]
[Footnote 51: Ramsay, 65.]
[Footnote 52: Boone, Life and Adventures.]
[Footnote 53: Observations on the North American Land Co., pp. xv., 144, London, 1796.]
[Footnote 54: Margry, VI.]
[Footnote 55: Allen, Lewis and Clarke Expedition, I., ix.; vide post, pp. 70-71.]
[Footnote 56: Vide post, p. 71.]
[Footnote 57: Century Magazine, XLI., 759.]
[Footnote 58: Jessie Benton Frémont in Century Magazine, XLI., 766-7.]
[Footnote 59: Century Magazine, XLI., p. 759; vide post, p. 74.]
[Footnote 60: Parkman's works, particularly Old Régime, make any discussion of the importance of the fur trade to Canada proper unnecessary. La Hontan says: "For you must know that Canada subsists only upon the trade of skins or furs, three-fourths of which come from the people that live around the Great Lakes." La Hontan, I., 53, London, 1703.]

NORTHWESTERN RIVER SYSTEMS IN THEIR RELATION TO THE FUR TRADE.
The importance of physical conditions is nowhere more manifest than in the exploration of the Northwest, and we cannot properly appreciate Wisconsin's relation to the history of the time without first considering her situation as regards the lake and river systems of North America.
When the Breton sailors, steering their fishing smacks almost in the wake of Cabot, began to fish in the St. Lawrence gulf, and to traffic with the natives of the mainland for peltries, the problem of how the interior of North America was to be explored was solved. The water-system composed of the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes is the key to the continent. The early explorations in a wilderness must be by water-courses--they are nature's highways. The St. Lawrence leads to the Great Lakes; the headwaters of the tributaries of these lakes lie so near the headwaters of the rivers that join the Mississippi that canoes can be portaged from the one to the other. The Mississippi affords passage to the Gulf of Mexico; or by the Missouri to the passes of the Rocky Mountains, where rise the headwaters of the Columbia, which brings the voyageur to the Pacific. But if the explorer follows Lake Superior to the present boundary line between Minnesota and Canada, and takes the