through them by force. [Footnote: Va. State Papers, iv., 630.]

The most successful traders were of course those who contrived to
establish relations with some one in New Orleans, or perhaps in Natchez,
who would act as their agent or correspondent. The profits from a
successful trip made amends for much disaster, and enabled the trader to
repeat his adventure on a larger scale. Thus, among the papers of George
Rogers Clark there is a letter from one of his friends who was living in
Kaskaskia in 1784, and was engaged in the river trade. [Footnote: Draper
MSS. Letter of John Williams, June 20, 1784.] The letter was evidently
to the writer's father, beginning "My dear daddy." It describes how he
had started on one trip to New Orleans, but had been wrecked; how,
nothing daunted, he had tried again with a cargo of forty-two beeves,
which he sold in New Orleans for what he deemed the good sum of $738;
and how he was about to try his luck once more, buying a bateau and
thirty bushels of salt, enough to pickle two hundred beeves.

Risks of the Traders.

The traders never could be certain when their boats would be seized and
their goods confiscated by some Spanish officer; nor when they started
could they tell whether they would or would not find when they reached
New Orleans that the Spanish authorities had declared the navigation
closed. In 1783 and the early part of 1784 traders were descending the
Mississippi without overt resistance from the Spaniards, and were
selling their goods at a profit in New Orleans. In midsummer of 1784 the
navigation of the river was suddenly and rigorously closed. In 1785 it
was again partially opened; so that we find traders purchasing flour in
Louisville at twenty-four shillings a hundred-weight, and carrying it
down stream to sell in New Orleans at thirty dollars a barrel. By summer
of the same year the Spaniards were again shutting off traffic, being in
great panic over a rumored piratical advance by the frontiersmen, to
oppose which they were mustering their troops and making ready their
artillery. [Footnote: Draper MSS. J. Girault to William Clark, July 22,
1784; May 23, 1785; July 2, 1785; certificate of French merchants
testified to by Miro in 1785.]

Among the articles the frontier traders received for their goods horses
held a high place. [Footnote: _Do_. Girault to Clark July 9, 1784.] The
horse trade was risky, as in driving them up to Kentucky many were
drowned, or played o