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| Same Job, Same Time, Different Place. Left:Indian Trader on Virginia's Frontier. Right:Pedlar in the the City.
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From source:Alvord and Bidgood, 1912:32-33
"Fort Henry [Petersburg, VA in the mid 1600's] was a place like Augusta, Georgia, in the middle of the eighteenth century or Chicago in the early nineteenth, or any one of a dozen others that come to mind as examples of the western frontier town and military and trading center. In it were conducted all the familiar activities of similar settlements of a later period...
Garrisons were from time to time provided by the Assembly. Later, in the last decade of the seventeenth and early years of the eighteenth century, one of the squadrons of rangers went out, at stated intervals, from its palisades to beat about the country for hostiles. Just across the river was situated the principal village or "town" of the Appomattox Indians, who furnished ... messengers, hunters, porters, and courageous and faithful guides. At its warehouses were fitted out the pack-trains of the Indian traders. Sometimes these traders were the servants or paid agents of [Abraham] Wood or of his associates, sometimes they were free traders, "of substance and reputation," who received goods on credit, and contracted to pay for them at a stipulated price. Wood imported from England the varied articles of barter, chiefly
Guns, Powder, Shot, Hatchets (which the Indians call Tomahawks), Kettles, red and blue Planes, Duffields, Stroud- water blankets, and some Cutlary Wares, Brass Rings and other Trinkets. These Wares are made up into Packs and Carryed upon Horses, each Load being from one hundred, fifty to two hundred Pounds, with which they are able to travel about twenty miles a day, if Forage happen to be plentiful.
In the early days, before the competition of Charleston began to be felt, the pack-trains might count a hundred horses. Guided by only fifteen or sixteen men they filed off with tinkling bells southward along the Occoneechee path to visit the Indians of the South Carolina and Georgia piedmont, or even to swing around the end of the Appalachian mountains and track northward again to the Cherokee." Chiefs of distant tribes, like the "king" of the Cherokee, came in with their followers to trade and treat with Wood and received suitable entertainment; though rival traders and the Indians of the nearer tribes, anxious to retain their position as middlemen, tried by force or fraud to intercept them and frequently succeeded.
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