Fifty years
before John Findlay,* one of this class of pioneers, led Daniel
Boone through Cumberland Gap, the trader's bands of horses roamed
the western slopes of the Appalachian Mountains and his cattle
grazed 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
paid in guns, knives, ammunition, vermilion paint, mirrors, and
cloth--lined kings' mantles, and hatted the Lords of Trade as
they strode to their council chamber in London to discuss his
business and to pass those regulations which might have seriously
hampered him but for his resourcefulness in circumventing them!
* The name is spelled in various ways: Findlay, Finlay, Findley.
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, raided his pack-horse caravans on the
march. Often, too, side by side with the red brothers of his
adoption, he fought in the intertribal wars.
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