Mississippi Wide and Wild (pages 73-80)
(page 71, par. 2, line 3) a variety of wild animal skins The shipment included 106 beavers, 4 otters, 9 foxes, and 25 wildcats, who had sacrificed their lives and skins to Samuel S.’s enterprise. He did not dabble in deer skins, in which the Indians excelled in hunting and preparation. Perhaps the disrupted trade caused by the Northwest Indian War, or Samuel’s lack of confidence in judging their quality, dissuaded him from dealing in deerskins. An indeterminate number of the animal pelts may have been harvested by Indians and come to him via intermediaries. Samuel S. did not take note, and seems to have been indifferent to, the origins of the pelts and the shifting dynamics of the trade in animal skins.
While a hundred beavers may represent quite a few large, semi-aquatic rodent corpses, these shipment numbers represented a regional fur trade that was actually in decline. The frontier forests and streams had been hunted and trapped for marketable skins for over a century. Even in advance of settlers clearing forests for fenced and plowed fields, the Midwest woodlands and prairie ecosystems were systematically altered by sustained and increasingly lethal hunting.
Whereas semi-nomadic Indian Nations for millennia had hunted these same animals for sustenance and skins with spears and bow and arrows, the lethality of musketry and the appetite of the international trade in furs, placed the Natives, and the fur bearing animals themselves, in an unsustainable situation. In Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America. Silverman details the dynamics of Indians integrating muskets into a hunting and trader accommodative economy in the Western borderlands. Indians generally craved the European manufactured trade goods – guns, iron pots, silver jewelry, wool blankets, and the like. The imports oft times forced Native craftsmanship into decline. With muskets, powder, and ball, Indians more efficiently hunted down animals for their furs; and exchanged them for the desirable goods from Colonial European and later American traders. Though not technologically capable of manufacturing firearms themselves, Indian Nations assured steady access to the technology through diplomacy, trading, and raiding.
The more successful the hunts, the more disrupted the ecosystems in the wild. In other contexts, economists have labeled this situation as the ‘failure of the commons.’ In this case, the pre-settlement Indian hunting grounds of Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Northwest Territory did not belong to any entity that could enforce long-term sustainability of the hunting, trapping, and modest scale subsistence farming. By the eighteenth century, Indians tribes and frontiersmen armed with muskets and some rifles were incentivized to hunt as many animals as they could find and kill, in competition with one another. By asserting their role as soldiers on the front lines of the international fur trade, driven by competing French, English, and Spanish imperial ambitions, the Indians emerged as one of the long-term agents of the demise of virgin Ohio Valley and Northwest Territory lands they had inherited from their ancestors.
An example from Samuel S. Forman’s cargo illustrates the dynamic. Biologists tell us that a single North American wildcat ranges over a territory of twenty-five square miles, an integral part of an ecosystem of vegetation, predators and prey. Those twenty-five wildcat skins were part of a modest shipment by the standards of the time, hunted and prepared by skilled Indian hunters, or their mountain men competitors, and now entered into the international fur trade. Those speckled feline furs represented the permanent disruption of 625 square miles of frontier ecosystems, all in advance of any settler felling a tree, pasturing cattle, or setting the plow to virgin alluvial soil.
(page 74, par. 1, line 6) “The sailor, it seems, had taken a little too much whiskey” Forman and Draper, Journey Down the Ohio and Mississippi 1888, p. 42.
(page 74, par. 2, line 7) “Had he not been chained, he would have deserted” Forman Autobiography, Historical Magazine 1869.
(page 75, par. 1, line 1) “espied a fresh moccasin track” Forman and Draper, Ibid, p. 43.
(page 75, par. 3, line 4) “recovered our speech” Ibid, p. 43-44. Samuel S. Forman made light of the situation in his characteristically self-deprecating matter when recounting it years later. Clearly he and fellow travelers were terrified of encountering hostile Indians.
(page 76, par. 1, lines 2-3) “we were fast upon a planter—that is, the body of a tree firmly embedded in the river bottom.” Later observers gave additional names to the peculiar Mississippi riverine hazards to navigation: “Planters,” “Sawyers,” and “Bayous and wood islands” Forman and Draper, Ibid, p.44. Cramer, Zadok, The Ohio and Mississippi Navigator, p. 18, defines the hazards and how to avoid them in this popular guidebook intended for boatmen and immigrants. It ran through many additions in the early 19th century. Twain, Mark, and J.C. Levenson. Life on the Mississippi. pp. 78-79: “The whole vast face of the stream was black with drifting dead logs, broken boughs, and great trees that had caved in and been washed away… at night the difficulty was mightily increased; every now and then a huge log, lying deep in the water, would suddenly appear right under our bows, coming head on; no use trying to avoid it… Now and then we would hit one of these sunken logs a rattling bang, dead in the center…and it would stun the boat in a way that was very uncomfortable to passengers…. We often hit white logs, in the dark, for we could not see them till we were right on them; but a black log is a pretty distinct object in the night.”
(page 76, par. 3, line 5) “dirty soap suds and pure water together” Forman and Draper, Op. cit., p. 44. “Too loose to plow and too muddy to drink” is attributed to Mark Twain.
(page 77, par. 4, line 6) the Indians “lent a hand in the rowing” Forman and Draper, Op. cit., p. 46.
(page 77, par. 5) a band independent of the Northwest Indian Federation In 1789 some Delaware and Shawnee relocated to near New Madrid with Spanish encouragement. DuVal, Kathleen. The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent., p. 160; Treuer, Anton, Karenne Wood, et al. Indian Nations of North America, pp. 166-167.
(page 78, par. 1, line 4) “as politely as Lord Chesterfield could have done” Another anecdote comes from this same meal. See Forman and Draper, Ibid, p. 46. After the dinner, Mr. Gano “set the example of pitching the fork into the beef, as we used, in our school days, to pitch the fork into the ground.” The Indian visitors, not knowing what to make of the odd behavior, “one after the other imitated the captain, and very dexterously pitched their forks also into the beef.” Samuel S. thought this was great fun, speculating that the Indians, “thinking, probably, that it was a white man’s ceremony that should be observed.” The “pitching incident” had not offended the puzzled visitors. A modern observer would probably label the white hosts’ behavior as a practical joke at best or a ‘micro-aggression’ at worst.
(page 78, par. 4, line 2) L’Anse à la Graisse or, as Americans knew it, New Madrid Another American, George Morgan (1743-1810), held a large land grant there to people an American settler colony for the Spanish on the far west side of the Mississippi River. The Forman wagon train had earlier passed Morgan’s estate Prospect Farm in Princeton, New Jersey, from which enslaved Michael Hoy escaped during the Revolutionary War.
Morgan, whose career included being a merchant and Indian agent, had obtained a huge Spanish land grant at New Madrid, under the same policy benefitting General David Forman. Without prior approval of his Spanish hosts, he sought to sell subdivided parcels of his free land to Americans willing to settle across the Mississippi and become Spanish citizens. He attracted few American settlers to New Madrid and alienated the Spanish governor of Luisiana by his attempt to directly monetize lands the Spanish intended to be gratis to settlers. The Spanish decided that they wanted to provide grants of free land without the intermediation of for-profit land speculator companies or entrepreneurial individuals. The Spanish revoked his grant and privileges.
George Washington also repudiated Morgan’s scheme as contrary to American interests in the West. Morgan returned east to the United States. New Madrid, where Samuel S. Forman had spent several agreeable days on his 1790 flatboat trip to Natchez, never grew beyond a small settlement and Spanish army garrison. See: Narrett, David. Adventurism and Empire: The Struggle for Mastery in the Louisiana-Florida Borderlands, pp. 178-186; and Savelle, Max. George Morgan: Colony Builder, pp. 206-226.
(page 78, par. 4) The multicultural community there, with its Spanish commandant, left a favorable and lasting impression for its fine food and hospitality The Spanish commandant of the post spent days personally welcoming and entertaining Samuel S. Forman and fellow boat captains of their flatboat convoy. Samuel S. provides a number of colorful details, including a community celebration featuring a woman known as Cherokee Katie, a celebrated local beauty serving as queen of the ball. Forman and Draper, Ibid, p. 47-50, for Samuel S. Forman’s visit to New Madrid and his interactions with their cloyingly solicitous host. Lyman Draper’s cites Gayarre’s History of the Spanish Domination of Louisiana: “in July, I789, Pierre Foucher, a lieutenant of the regiment of Louisiana, was sent, with two sergeants, two corporals, and thirty soldiers, to build a fort at New Madrid, and take the civil and military command of that district, with instructions to govern those new colonists in such a way as to make them feel that they had found among the Spaniards the state of ease and comfort of which they were in quest.”
(page 78, par. 6) Peter Bryon Bruin (1756-1827) Forman and Draper, Ibid, pp. 51-52 and footnote. Peter Bruin was a substantial citizen in the region, one who figured prominently in the future U.S. Mississippi Territory. Draper provides an authoritative sketch: “Colonel Peter Bryan Bruin, son of an Irish gentleman, who had become implicated in the Irish Rebellion of 1756, and confiscation and exile were his penalty. He brought with him to America his only son, who was reared a merchant. In the War of the Revolution, he entered Morgan’s famous riflemen as a lieutenant, shared in the assault on Quebec, where he was made a prisoner, and confined in a prison ship, infected with small-pox, for six months. He was finally exchanged, and at length promoted to the rank of major, serving to the end of the war. Soon after settling near the mouth of Bayou Pierre, he was appointed alcalde, or magistrate, under the Spanish Government; and when the Mississippi Territory was organized, in 1798, he was appointed one of the three territorial judges, remaining in office until he resigned, in 1810. He lived till a good old age, was a devoted patriot, and a man of high moral character.” Draper did not mention that, like his peers in Natchez, Bruin owned many black slaves, whose labors enabled his wealth and lifestyle. Unlike the Formans, who essentially transplanted an entire enslaved New Jersey agricultural group of largely intact African American families into Spanish Natchez, Bruin probably acquired slaves shipped in from the Caribbean and perhaps directly from Africa, who came into the Natchez District via New Orleans. He may have brought some with him from his native Virginia.
Coincidentally, Bruinsburgh much later was the site of the largest U.S. military amphibious landing up until that time during Ulysses S. Grant’s 1863 campaign to capture Vicksburg from the Confederates. Due to shifts over time in the course of the Mississippi River, most of Bruinsburgh known to either Samuel S. Forman in 1790 or General Grant’s in 1863 has been obliterated.