long endeavored to unite the tribes in
Spanish and French territory against the English and that the influence
of traders prevented the consummation. The Spaniards, in 1702, had
prepared to invade English territory with nine hundred Indians. The
plot was discovered by Creek Indians and disclosed to their friends,
the traders, who immediately gathered together five hundred warriors,
marched swiftly to meet the invaders, and utterly routed them. Again,
when the Indians, incited by the Spanish at St. Augustine, rose against
the English in 1715, and the Yamasi Massacre occurred in South Carolina,
it was due to the traders that some of the settlements at least were not
wholly unprepared to defend themselves.

The early English trader was generally an intelligent man; sometimes
educated, nearly always fearless and resourceful. He knew the one sure
basis on which men of alien blood and far separated stages of moral and
intellectual development can meet in understanding--namely, the truth of
the spoken word. He recognized honor as the bond of trade and the warp
and woof of human intercourse. The uncorrupted savage also had his plain
interpretation of the true word in the mouths of men, and a name for it.
He called it the "Old Beloved Speech"; and he gave his confidence to the
man who spoke this speech even in the close barter for furs.

We shall find it worth while to refer to the map of America as it was
in the early days of the colonial fur trade, about the beginning of the
eighteenth century. A narrow strip of loosely strung English settlements
stretched from the north border of New England to the Florida line.
North Florida was Spanish territory. On the far distant southwestern
borders of the English colonies were the southern possessions of France.
The French sphere of influence extended up the Mississippi, and thence
by way of rivers and the Great Lakes to its base in Canada on the
borders of New England and New York. In South Carolina dwelt the Yamasi
tribe of about three thousand warriors, their chief towns only sixty
or eighty miles distant from the Spanish town of St. Augustine. On the
west, about the same distance northeast of New Orleans, in what is now
Alabama and Georgia, lay the Creek nation. There French garrisons held
Mobile and Fort Alabama. The Creeks at this time numbered over four
thousand warriors. The lands of the Choctaws, a tribe of even larger
fighting strength, began two hundred miles north of New Or