French traders the purity of the stock was
destroyed and a mixed race produced.[247] The trader broke down the old
totemic divisions, and appointed chiefs regardless of the Indian social
organization, to foster his trade. Indians and traders alike testify
that this destruction of Indian institutions was responsible for much of
the difficulty in treating with them, the tribe being without a
recognized head.[248] The sale of their lands, made less valuable by the
extinction of game, gave them a new medium of exchange, at the same time
that, under the rivalry of trade, the sale of whiskey increased.

II. Upon the white man the effect of the Indian trading post was also
very considerable. The Indian trade gave both English and French a
footing in America. But for the Indian supplies some of the most
important settlements would have perished.[249] It invited to
exploration: the dream of a water route to India and of mines was always
present in the more extensive expeditions, but the effective practical
inducement to opening the water systems of the interior, and the thing
that made exploration possible, was the fur trade. As has been shown,
the Indian eagerly invited the trader. Up to a certain point also the
trade fostered the advance of settlements. As long as they were in
extension of trade with the Indians they were welcomed. The trading
posts were the pioneers of many settlements along the entire colonial
frontier. In Wisconsin the sites of our principal cities are the sites
of old trading posts, and these earliest fur-trading settlements
furnished supplies to the farming, mining and lumbering pioneers. They
were centers about which settlement collected after the exploitation of
the Indian. Although the efforts of the Indians and of the great
trading companies, whose profits depended upon keeping the primitive
wilderness, were to obstruct agricultural settlement, as the history of
the Northwest and of British America shows, nevertheless reports brought
back by the individual trader guided the steps of the agricultural
pioneer. The trader was the farmer's pathfinder into some of the richest
regions of the continent. Both favorably and unfavorably the influence
of the Indian trade on settlement was very great.

The trading post was the strategic point in the rivalry of France and
England for the Northwest. The American colonists came to know that the
land was worth more than the beaver that built in the streams, but the