“Pioneers of the Old Southwest”^1,  Chapter III,  The Trader, (Excerpt)

“The trader was the first pathfinder.² His caravans began the change of purpose that that was to come to be the Indian warrior’s route, turning it slowly into the beaten track of communication and commerce. The settlers, the rangers, the surveyors, went westward over the trails which he had blazed for them tears before. Their enduring works are commemorated in the cities and farms which today lie along every ancient border line; but of their forerunner’s hazardous Indian trade nothing remains. Let us therefore pay a moment’s homage here to the trader, who first — to borrow a phrase from Indian speech — made white for peace the red trails of war.

He was the first cattleman of the Old Southwest. Fifty years before John Findlay, one of this class of pioneers, led Daniel Boone through the Cumberland Gap, the trader’s bands of horses roamed the western slopes of the Appalachian Mountains and his cattle grazes among the deer on the green banks of the old Cherokee (Tennessee) River. He was the pioneer settler beyond the high hills; for he built in the center of the Indian towns, the first white man’s cabin — with its larger annex, the trading house — and dwelt there during the greater part of the year. He was America’s first magnate of international commerce. His furs — for which he had paid in guns, knives, ammunition, vermilion paint, mirrors, and cloth — lined king’s mantels, and hatted the Lords of Trade³ as they strode to their council chamber in London to discuss his business and to pass on those regulations which might have seriously hampered him but for his resourcefulness in circumventing them.

He was the first frontier warrior, for he either fought off or fell before small parties of hostile Indians who, in the interest of the Spanish or French, ⁴ raider his pack-horse caravans on the march. Often, too, side by side with his red brothers of his adoption, ⁵ he fought the in the intertribal wars …”

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1. From : Pioneers of the Old Southwest, a Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground; by Constance Lindsay Skinner, 1919, Yale University Press, pp. 52-53.

2. The first Carolina trader among the Chickasaw was Thoms Welch, as early as 1698; English traders, Virginians or Carolinians, were reported by the French to be among the Overhill.

. The European demand for furs was gigantic. Between 1700 and 1715, i.e., one million deer hides were shipped through the Port of Charles Town (Charleston) alone. Competition from white hunters also hurried the depletion these resources. As more animals were taken, this caused an environmental impact which forced Indians to hunt farther from home. The Indians became accustomed to the trade goods, and in time, became indebted for those trade goods. In the end, they could only pay their debts with their land.

4. “Jean du Charleville, who was a youthful assistant of an anonymous trader who had established a trading post at ‘French Lick’ on the Cumberland about 1710 … Those traders were preceded in the Tennessee Country by two French renegades, Martin Chartier on the Cumberland in 1689, and Jean Couture on the Tennessee by 1696.”
(From: Annals of Tennessee, by J. G. M. Ramsey, 1853, East Tennessee Historical Society edition, 1967, annotation section, by Stanley Folmsbee, p. 750.)

5. The traders were the first to penetrate Indian Country. They were white men living on the edge of civilization, or in some cases, living among the Indians, and very often taking an Indian wife. Some became almost Indian but only a few left records. One who left much was James Adair, the “English Chickasaw” who wrote Adair’s History of the American Indians.” London 1775.  Indian Traders on Muscle Shoals of the Tennessee River.  “Two Hundred Years at Muscle Shoals.” (Excerpt)

“Both the French and the English contended for the Indian trade along the western waters; the French planted a post at Muscle Shoals before 1715. Because of the increasing importance of trade with the whites the Cherokee planted villages near Muscle Shoals area in the last quarter of the eighteenth century … Oka Kapassa was established about 1770 … about one mile west of present Tuscumbia … This site was resorted to by neighboring Indians for the purpose of trading with the French who still persisted on the Wabash [river, after the French and Indian War], and became the source of great vexation and numerous outrages to the Cumberland settlements about our present Nashville. After the murder of his brother by plunderers from Oka Passa, Col. James Robertson resolved on the destruction of the Indian village … In the latter part of 1787, Col. Robertson with a volunteer force of about 130 men and two Chickasaw Indians as guides … fell upon the town … Twenty-six Indians were killed; three French traders and a white woman met a similar fate … sent the six remaining French traders away with a division of the goods taken–the goods consisted of ‘stores of tafia,² sugar, coffee, cloth, blankets, knives, powder, tomahawks, tobacco, and other articles suitable to Indian commerce’ … ”
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1. From: Two Hundred Years at Muscle Shoals, by Nina Leftwich Tuscumbia Alabama, 1935, pp. 12 &c 13.

2. Tafia, a crude and violent rum drink, the pirates employed it to disinfect wounds, cure migraines, lend courage in battle and celebrate after a victorious raid. They carried this firewater to all the ports of the Caribbean. Apparently, some Tafia also found its way to Oka Passa.