II. Upon the white man the effect of the Indian trading post was also very considerable. The Indian trade gave both English and French a footing in America. But for the Indian supplies some of the most important settlements would have perished.[249] It invited to exploration: the dream of a water route to India and of mines was always present in the more extensive expeditions, but the effective practical inducement to opening the water systems of the interior, and the thing that made exploration possible, was the fur trade. As has been shown, the Indian eagerly invited the trader. Up to a certain point also the trade fostered the advance of settlements. As long as they were in extension of trade with the Indians they were welcomed. The trading posts were the pioneers of many settlements along the entire colonial frontier. In Wisconsin the sites of our principal cities are the sites of old trading posts, and these earliest fur-trading settlements furnished supplies to the farming, mining and lumbering pioneers. They were centers about which settlement collected after the exploitation of the Indian. Although the efforts of the Indians and of the great trading companies, whose profits depended upon keeping the primitive wilderness, were to obstruct agricultural settlement, as the history of the Northwest and of British America shows, nevertheless reports brought back by the individual trader guided the steps of the agricultural pioneer. The trader was the farmer's pathfinder into some of the richest regions of the continent. Both favorably and unfavorably the influence of the Indian trade on settlement was very great.
The trading post was the strategic point in the rivalry of France and England for the Northwest. The American colonists came to know that the land was worth more than the beaver that built in the streams, but the mother country fought for the Northwest as the field of Indian trade in all the wars from 1689 to 1812. The management of the Indian trade led the government under the lead of Franklin and Washington into trading on its own account, a unique feature of its policy. It was even proposed by the Indian Superintendent at one time that the government should manufacture the goods for this trade. In providing a new field for the individual trader, whom he expected the government trading houses to dispossess, Jefferson proposed the Lewis and Clarke expedition, which crossed the continent by way of the Missouri and the Columbia, as the British trader, Mackenzie, had before crossed it by way of Canadian rivers. The genesis of this expedition illustrates at once the comprehensive western schemes of Jefferson, and the importance of the part played by the fur trade in opening the West. In 1786, while the Annapolis convention was discussing the navigation of the Potomac, Jefferson wrote to Washington from Paris inquiring about the best place for a canal between the Ohio and the Great Lakes.[250] This was in promotion of the project of Ledyard, a Connecticut man, who was then in Paris endeavoring to interest the wealthiest house there in the fur trade of the Far West. Jefferson took so great an interest in the plan that he secured from the house a promise that if they undertook the scheme the depot of supply should be at Alexandria, on the Potomac river, which would be in connection with the Ohio, if the canal schemes of the time were carried out. After the failure of the negotiations of Ledyard, Jefferson proposed to him to cross Russia to Kamschatka, take ship to Nootka Sound, and thence return to the United States by way of the Missouri.[251] Ledyard was detained in Russia by the authorities in spite of Jefferson's good offices, and the scheme fell through. But Jefferson himself asserts that this suggested the idea of the Lewis and Clarke expedition, which he proposed to Congress as a means of fostering our Indian trade.[252] Bearing in mind his instructions to this party, that they should see whether the Oregon furs might not be shipped down the Missouri instead of passing around Cape Horn, and the relation of his early canal schemes to this design, we see that he had conceived the project of a transcontinental fur trade which should center in Virginia. Astor's subsequent attempt to push through a similar plan resulted in the foundation of his short-lived post of Astoria at the mouth of the Columbia. This occupation greatly aided our claim to the Oregon country as against the British traders, who had reached the region by way of the northern arm of the Columbia.
