s 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. 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. We read further and learn
that the Spaniards in Florida had