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Looking at the Ledgers: Sauk and Mesquakie Trade Debts, 1820-1840 Royce Kurtz The extension of credit to Native Americans was the ruination of the fur-trading companies according to their main offices, but the financial mainspring of the hunt according to the wintering traders; it was an unconscionable lure to an ingenuous savage according to missionaries, but a necessity against starvation according to Native American chiefs and headmen. Wherever the fur trade flourished in North America, barter/credit became a way of life and the accumulating debts became the trade's most controversial issue. Even modern scholars have viewed these cumulative debts as the cause of the decline of independent , self-sufficient Native American communities. Trade debts were the insidious vehicle for foreign state domination. i For all the ink spilled over Indian indebtedness, scholars have neglected the most obvious source in creating their models of barter/credit-the account books recording these transactions. Rather, scholars have relied on the testimony of the traders and government officials, but these descriptions are summary statements that emphasize the problems and tensions of credit relations more than its workaday intricacies. Knowledge of the actual working of credit arrangements leads to a revision of these generally accepted descriptions. In analyzing the credit arrangements for the Sauk and Mesquakie of Iowa territory (also known as the Sac and Fox), I made use of half a dozen surviving credit ledgers spanning a time period from 1819 to 1841.2 Three of the ledgers covered a consecutive period-1826, 1827, and 1828, the very height of the trade in furs and hides in Iowa territory. Combined with inventories, daybooks, journals, letters, and government reports, a detailed picture of the 1820s foreign trade relations of the Sauk and Mesquakie emerges, and with data from a later ledger, 1840/41, a glimpse of a disastrously altered world sets these earlier years in stark relief. The ledgers reveal that at the height of the trade in the 1820s, reasons for acquiring and repaying trade debts were more complex and variable than would be assumed by the testimony of traders, bureaucrats, and chiefs. There was no standardized kit of essential goods passed out to individual hunters in the fall of each year by the trader. Rather, the hunter could exercise a number of economic 143 ROYCE KURTZ options regarding credit and even participation in the trade. These credit arrangements south of the Great Lakes changed quickly after the 1820s. The trade switched from one centered on hides to a trade based on proceeds from land sales. When the trade moved away from fur procurement, a whole series of changes followed. The seasonal emphasis on fall credits with a spring repayment disappeared. Credit no longer supplied goods related to the hunt and its ultimate return in furs. With furs no longer the payment, the individual hunter ceased to be the locus for debt responsibility. Credit loosed from its grounding in the hunt and the return in furs evolved quickly into a very different system. I will first describe the functional relations of credit in the 1820s and then point out how these elements changed to create the 1840s credit pattern. During the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the Sauk and Mesquakie, two closely allied nations, lived in villages scattered along the Mississippi River from Prairie du Chien to the Des Moines River. In the first quarter of the nineteenth century they numbered roughly 4,500 souls, and 1,100 warriors hunted the forests and prairies of Illinois, Iowa, and northern Missouri. The annual hunting cycle began with the major fall deer hunt starting in October. The whole nation left their summer villages to hunt the wooded borders of midwestern rivers and streams. In early spring (March or April), the Sauk and Mesquakie hunters dispersed from their maple sugar camps to hunt muskrat and waterfowl. Finally, small parties left the summer villages in July to hunt deer and buffalo, returning in time for the fall harvest.3 When the American Fur Company moved into the Upper Midwest to take over British trading interests after the War of 1812, the Sauk and Mesquakie had already been regular participants in the fur and hide trade for one hundred fifty years, and the system of credit had been operative at least since the early 1750s.4 George Davenport and Russell Farnham represented the American Fur Company in the 1820s, and it is their ledgers dating from 1826-1828 that provide a detailed snapshot of...

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