Whitetail Empire, Part 2

George Galphin and the Indian Trade in the Era of the American Revolution

While much of their story is documented in colonial and financial records, few seem aware of the role deerskin traders played in the formative colonial era when empires were forged by might and trade. The story of George Galphin (1710-178?), deerskin trader to the Creeks from Ulster (Northern Ireland, part of the United Kingdom) is a good place to begin. His story is one of dynamic energy, cultural adaptation and business acumen.

From the mid-17^th century until the American Revolution, traders carried as many as a million hides a year from the villages of the Creek Confederation, a loose alliance of about thirty tribes, scattered throughout the future states of Georgia, Alabama, Florida, North Carolina and Tennessee. The most influential of these tribes were the Muscogee. Muscogee-speaking towns were clustered along the mid-Chattahoochee Valley in the late colonial period. The chiefs of this confederation were the first to approach Georgia founder, General James Oglethorpe, with entreaties for trade and friendship.  It is among these towns that Georgia’s colonial traders focused their efforts.

Conducting business as a trader was part of a complex undertaking.  London and other financial centers in Britain (which included Scotland, England, Wales and Ireland) provided the capital to equip traders, build warehouses, provide trade goods and hire colonials to manage the in-country trade houses. Charleston, and later Savannah and Augusta, were bases for the storage and dispersal of trade goods and hides, managing incoming overseas shipments and dealing with traders in the field. These houses organized and equipped pack trains of fifty to a hundred ponies to cross the insect and snake infested terrain between Augusta and the Chattahoochee Valley.  

Major traders lived in the villages where they traded. They were storekeepers as well as agents for the exchange of goods. They were typically married to Indian women and subjected to complex rules of etiquette and practice . The trader to the Creeks had to have a working knowledge of Hitchiti, the Creek trade language, and the Muscogee among whom he lived. Marriage to an Indian woman,  one from an important family and an influential clan was critical to success, in large part because property was held by households of women, extended matrilineal households that included grandmothers, mothers and sisters with their children and husbands. All the women of the household were members of the same clan. Husbands could not be members of their wife’s clan.

Confusing on a superficial level, this system is no more complicated than the politics and domestic relationships in a patriarchal setting such as Scotland, England or Ireland. There, marriages between close members of the same family were forbidden and clan politics often trumped personal preferences. Real property typically passed from father to eldest son.  The Creeks according to eighteenth century accounts viewed all whites as being of the same clan-or at least members of a clan other than the potential Creek wife.

When the trade was new, it was an honor to bringing a white trader into the family, though later the Creeks frowned on interracial marriage and might Creek relatives might disfigure a woman who made such a choice. 

Interestingly, Creeks in the colonial era had little interest in Christianity, even if married to a European. And, though they had been active in the trading of Indian captives for service as slaves in Carolina, they typically did not hold Africans as slaves, permitting runaway and free slaves sanctuary in small, parallel villages.  There are many exceptions to this, especially the slaves held by Creek chiefs and warriors who had received large land holdings in treaty negotiations. They of course had reason to utilize slaves in developing these plantations. 

At times the Creeks leaned heavily upon the experience of Africans who were familiar with European skills and manners. This practice has always suggested to me that many African slaves fled to the Creek lands and perhaps this is one reason Georgians felt such enmity toward the Creeks, especially Seminoles.

The traders’ stores in Creek towns were the property of their wives-though the contents were another matter and often became the subject of family disputes. The literature is rife with complaints by traders that their native wives shared too much of their trade stock with her extended family-goods passing in one door of the trader’s store and out another, so to speak. Such was the price of doing business.

Let me introduce you to one of the most prominent traders to the Southeastern Indians. George Galphin came to Charleston in 1737, leaving a wife behind in Ulster. He found employment with the Ulster- connected, Brown and Rae Trading Company, and was soon able to establish himself as the storekeeper at Coweta, principle town of the lower Creeks.

The terms “upper” and “lower” is misleading. The lower towns were nearer the colonial outposts of the British, the “upper” towns further west and inland. In practice, references to the “upper Creeks” meant those living farther into the interior in what would become the state of Alabama.

 Galphn took readily to the business, learning the Hitchiti trade language from traders and visiting Creeks. He mastered the art of assessing the quality and value of hides and learned the methods of negotiations that were required to carry on the day- to- day business.

A surprising number of Creek women who were married to soldiers and traders lived in Carolina. Mary Musgrove (Cossaponakeesa), a key figure in the establishment of Savannah and interpreter for Georgia founder, General James Oglethorpe, was married to a Goose Creek trader and living near Charleston when news came that a colony was to be created on Creek lands in what would become the colony of Georgia. With the founding of Savannah and later Augusta, midway up the Savannah River on the Carolina border, Galphin was sent as an agent to strengthen the Brown and Rae trade base at Silver Bluff, a small settlement near the shoals of the Savannah River on the Carolina side of the river.  Oglethorpe’s insistence that Georgia traders be licensed in Georgia prompted the “gentlemen” of Brown and Rae to operate an office in Augusta as well  Charleston. He would become a partner in schemes to bring Ulster settlers to the Carolina and Georgia colonies, protestant settlers who were preferred over Catholic immigrants. The Carolina government even paid a bounty for protestant arrivals, so anxious was it to attract settlers to the upcountry where the Cherokees were often a threat.

Galphin must have seemed a good choice to become the resident trader to the Lower Creeks.  His language skills, knowledge of the business and the challenges of trade through wilderness areas learned on trips to Silver Bluff must all have contributed to this decision-and he must surely have proved himself honest, diligent and adaptable. British regulation of the trade was imperfect, but licensed traders were to charge standardized rates, so many hides for various specific trade items, a list that included iron tools, tomahawks, knives and guns, gun powder, and -of perhaps greatest importance-cloth. Cloth is sometimes overlooked in discussions of the Indian trade, but it would be difficult to imagine the trade without cloth as its mainstay-the Creeks had given up or lost the practice of weaving and the English import business in cloth from formerly French Indian was essential to the British economy. In fact, it can be argued that protecting the import trade made the British navy the greatest in the world, while thread spun in Indian fueled British textile mills, which in turn sparked the industrialization Great Britain. In the early stage of contact first gifts were presented to open relations, trinkets and mirrors served as ice breakers, but practical goods were the real basis of trade and “practical” can be defined as iron and cloth.

All this changed in 1763. Victorious in the French and Indian War, the British became convinced (influenced to some degree no doubt by the enormous profits enjoyed by shareholders in the trading companies) that they had to protect the Indian trade in the new territories and they had to prevent the unregulated-and unsanctioned flow of American settlers into the former French lands, an “invasion” that had gone on long before 1763, but accelerated afterward.  Keep in mind that until the British victory, there was a French military and trade presence along the boundaries claimed by the colony of Georgia. France’s defeat altered the way in which the Savannah government and Georgia pioneers thought of the west.

Still further south, along the Gulf of Mexico, was the Spanish presence in Florida-another source of rivalry for the trades of the backcountry. This situation also changed in 1763 when the British gained control of Florida, only to cede it back after the American Revolution. But throughout, it was mainly the British-owned trading companies that supplied and controlled the Florida traders. And the Creeks always preferred English-made goods.

The British Proclamation of 1763 banning settlement west of the Appalachians, was accompanied by restrictions on trade licensing. The result was a dramatic decline in the deerskin trade, as many unlicensed and unscrupulous traders entered the nations to despoil them of their hides using rum and dishonest practices. This practice in the Creek lands undermined the positions of the licensed traders as well, and a hundred- year old trade system collapsed, leaving many Creek villages poverty stricken.

A generational and gender conflict arose in the Georgia backcountry as older men and women grew angry and confused about who or what was to blame for their suffering while younger hunters traded in the field for quicker return without the wait for processing and without the authority of chiefly controls. Reliance on the trade had brought progress of a sort but ultimately at great societal cost.  This anxiety colored white-Creek relations in the era of the American Revolution.

Traders like Galphin could become wealthy and influential agents, interlocutors between Indians and European or colonial administrators, even as spies and diplomats. Apart from military incursions for purposes of mapping and exploration, who else could be more valuable in learning the intentions of Native leaders, or of the arrival of European competitors.

When they retired from the trade, men like Galpin had typically accumulated property and were planters, sawmill operators, and -especially important-operators of cow pens. From these cattle stations, rangers spread out to graze their herds and round them up for market drives to cities like Savannah and Charleston-or even Philadelphia during the Revolution. Mary Musgrove’s rewards for her services to the Savannah colonists included the right to operate a cow pen just up the Savannah River from the city.

 It was in their roles as livestock men that whites often ran afoul of the Creeks. Even branded cattle in the bush were often claimed as wild game to be harvested by Creek warriors. Local officials faced difficult challenges in trying to keep rangers’ and their herds off Creek lands-though there is evidence they did attempt to do so. Log Leaf forests are relatively open because the trees grow at some distance from each other, leaving ground and sunlight for the round-bladed “wire grass.” As livestock ranging or “ranching” spread across the coastal plains through the long leaf pine forests, Creeks resisted and complained of white interloping on their lands. The Creeks came to regard cattle and the salt used by herdsmen to collect scattered stock into herds as confrontational symbols of white culture. Any negative effects of cattle herding in the backcountry on whitetail deer populations could have been a factor in the decline of the trade, and a cause for Creek frustration over the practice. This has not been established by research so far as I am aware. Likewise, despite anecdotal accounts, serious study of the alleged Creek practice of  domesticating whitetail deer has not been published of which I am aware.

(Just an aside: the study of fire ecology is leading to progressively more scientific research in this field, but one effect discovered is that burning at different times of the year can result in an increase in the nutritional value of plants available to wildlife, such as the whitetail deer. If Native Americans were aware of this in the pre-discovery timeframe, they may well have continued the practice of burning at specific times of the year to enhance deer and other animal populations. Much effort has gone into studying prescriptive burning today to improve timber harvests, most specifically in pine forests.)

Galpin settled at Silver Bluff as a planter, horse trader and ultimately peacekeeper between Creeks and the Crown. Initially his Creek wife Metawney came with him, bringing their sons to be educated in English, according to the ways of other Native American sons of British military officers and deerskin traders. It should be born in mind that Silver Bluff existed in a different time and place than plantations of the cotton era after about 1800. While there were both slaves and free Blacks, as well as Native Americans living there, this was a time when skilled workers could command some independence and Galphin encouraged the formation of a Black Baptist Church at Silver Bluff-perhaps the first in America. It might be too much to argue that a very different mixed- blood society, relatively free of racial bounds was emerging there and could have spread- creating a very different south.

Metawney left to return to her own home in the Creek villages of the Chattahoochee, evidently finding little self-fulfillment in the new life at Silver Bluff. Galphin eventually married a white woman, though he also had other children by both Black and Native American women. His sons by Metawnee, were members of their mother’s clan and family and as often happened they remained with their mother until adulthood. They benefitted later from their father’s influence and wealth and were heirs named in Galphin’s will, a will that left bequests for all his family members inspiring years of legal wrangling.

 In the decade before revolution spread to Georgia, Galphin’s role became critical. Galphin was host to William Bartram, the intrepid naturalist and plant collector, and friend to John Adair, trader to the upper Creeks. Both were chroniclers of the early southern frontier. Their writings would inform future generations seeking to understand Native Americans. Unfortunately, Galphin has left us no autobiography and we encounter him almost entirely in official colonial and business records. His memories would undoubtedly ranked with Adair’s and perhaps added to Bartram’s descriptions of the natural environment with which he was so well schooled by the Native Americans with whom he enjoyed years of intimate relationships.  He was an adviser to Georgia’s capable Royal Governor situated in Savannah, though he would find it in his own interest to support the revolutionaries.

Maintaining the peace was critical to Galphin.  He had acquired a vast property in Georgia known as  “Old Town,” formerly a cleared communal farmland of the Creeks (or their predecessors- remember the Creeks are a relatively new confederacy at the time).  He renamed it Galphinton. Here he would build a second residence and plantation and would establish a secondary trading post. He entered into schemes to bring settlers to both Carolina and to the Ogeechee frontier where Galphinton was located. He was following the example of other entrepreneurs throughout the colonies. This was a way to profit from influence and initiative. On the eve of the revolution he and his partners in Ireland brought 400 Ulster families to found the community known as Queensboro, located near Galphinton -and also near the future site of Louisville, Georgia’s first permanent capital after the new state government was set up following the revolution

Galphin was cautiously sympathetic to the American independence movement, but his fellow Irishmen at Queensborough initially were not. New in the land, they felt they needed the protection of the crown. When Georgia revolted, they protested their loyalty and found themselves surrounded by distrustful settlers. Not a member of the Queesborough party, but a new arrival from England, Thomas (“Burn Foot”)Brown was accosted by the local Committee of Public Safety in Augusta, tied up and an attempt was made to burn him to force a conversion to the revolutionary cause. He managed to escape and later commanded British irregulars and Creeks in the assault on Savannah that led to the capture of the city. Perhaps Queensborough fears were excited by this and similar incidents, so after some confusion, the hapless Queensborough settlers withdrew their opposition to the Whig revolt. Unfortunately,  the energy of the enterprise was spent and the township disintegrated.

Meanwhile, Galphin used his Silver Bluff residence as a kind of fort and stockpile to maintain trade with the Creeks-hoping to keep them out of the war rising in Georgia. Silver Bluff is just across the Savannah from the river road that brought British troops to Augusta, and was again exposed when the British forces withdrew from that city after the disastrous campaign that ended in the battles of Cowpens and Kings Mountain in Carolina. Perhaps out of revenge, they ransacked Galphin’s stores and appropriated or destroyed the trader’s stockpile of goods. Galphin seems to have died during these events.

Is Galphin a patriot who managed to maintain peace with the Creeks? The answer is “yes” and “no.” While his motives have been described in differing ways, it is difficult to be definitive about this. He served as revolutionary Georgia’s official representative to the Creeks and other tribes, and the British certainly held him responsible for working against their interests. But Galpin did not leave any writings to clearly establish motives. Certainly, he favored a Whig outcome, certainly he hoped to discourage the Creeks from supporting the British.

The Creeks were of two minds about the revolutionary struggle. Young men defied old leadership in part because of the trials endured with the collapse of the trade. Brown organized raids on frontier settlements by Creek raiding parties and led them in the fighting in an around Augusta. But young men deprived of a livelihood and living in tumultuous times are often tempted to serve violent causes rather than follow the calmer council of older family members, especially if there is the promise of adventure and gifts involved. Brown could promise both. There was no centralized authority within the Creek Confederacy. Villages and individuals chose their own course of action, with or without the blessings of chiefs or mothers. After the revolution, years would pass without incident, but the deerskin trade was all but dead-as George Washington pointed out in an address to the tribes after his election as the first executive under the new Constitution of 1789.

 British trading companies continued to be active along the gulf coast-despite the fact that Spain regained control of La Florida after the American Revolution. The British had their hands full with the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon back in Europe and on the high seas.  White intrigues among the Creeks and their splinter tribe, the Seminoles, would keep the gulf borderlands in a volatile volatile, while the rise of the cotton economy would put a premium on Creek lands, increasingly the object of would- be planters, investment companies and adventurers.  This would culminate in the Red Stick War, a sideshow perhaps to the War of 1812, but from the Native American perspective a disaster of the first magnitude, one in which even friendly Creeks were stripped of most of their lands.