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.