s lakes of northern
Wisconsin, the whole region was visited by birch canoes or Mackinaw
boats.]

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

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

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

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

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

EFFECTS OF THE TRADING POST.

We are now in a position to offer some conclusions as to the influence
of the Indian trading post.

I. Upon the savage it had worked a transformation. It found him without
iron, hunting merely for food and raiment. It put into his hands iron
and guns, and made him a hunter for furs with which to purchase the
goods of civilization. Thus it tended to perpetuate the hunter stage;
but it must also be noted that for a time it seemed likely to develop a
class of merchants who should act as intermediaries solely. The
inter-tribal trade between Montreal and the Northwest, and between
Albany and the Illinois and Ohio country, appears to have been commerce
in the proper sense of the term[246] (_Kauf zum Verkauf_). The trading
post left the unarmed tribes at the mercy of those that had bought
firearms, and this caused a relocation of the Indian tribes and an
urgent demand for the trader by the remote and unvisited Indians. It
made the Indian dependent on the white man's supplies. The stage of
civilization that could make a gun and gunpowder was too far above the
bow and arrow stage to be reached by the Indian. Instead of elevating
him the trade exploited him. But at the same time, when one nation did
not monopolize the trade, or when it failed to regulate its own traders,
the trading post gave to the Indians the means of resistance to
agricultural settlement. The American settlers fought for their farms in
Kentucky and Tennessee at a serious disadvantage, because for over half
a century the Creeks and Cherokees had received arms and ammunition from
the trading posts of the French, the Spanish and the English. In
Wisconsin the settlers came after the Indian had become thoroughly
dependent on the American traders, and so late that no resistance was
made. The trading post gradually exploited the Indian's hunting ground.
By intermarriages with the