His was the first
educative and civilizing influence in the Indian towns. He
endeavored to cure the Indians of their favorite midsummer
madness, war, by inducing them to raise stock and poultry and
improve their corn, squash, and pea gardens. It is not necessary
to impute to him philanthropic motives. He was a practical man
and he saw that war hurt his trade: it endangered his summer
caravans and hampered the autumn hunt for deerskins.
In the earliest days of the eighteenth century, when the
colonists of Virginia and the Carolinas were only a handful, it
was the trader who defeated each successive attempt of French and
Spanish agents to weld the tribes into a confederacy for the
annihilation of the English settlements. The English trader did
his share to prevent what is now the United States from becoming
a part of a Latin empire and to save it for a race having the
Anglo-Saxon ideal and speaking the English tongue.
The colonial records of the period contain items which, taken
singly, make small impression on the casual reader but which,
listed together, throw a strong light on the past and bring that
mercenary figure, the trader, into so bold a relief that the
design verges on the heroic. If we wonder, for instance, why the
Scotch Highlanders who settled in the wilds at the headwaters of
the Cape Fear River, about 1729, and were later followed by Welsh
and Huguenots, met with no opposition from the Indians, the
mystery is solved when we discover, almost by accident, a few
printed lines which record that, in 1700, the hostile natives on
the Cape Fear were subdued to the English and brought into
friendly alliance with them by Colonel William Bull, a trader.
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