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chapter three New Lines Drawn in may 1768, Joseph Rigby, an agent of the Philadelphia trading firm of Baynton , Wharton, and Morgan, noted in a letter to his employers that he hoped to forward the lead he was holding at the company’s warehouse in Carlisle with the troops who would soon be “going up” to Fort Pitt.1 Although at first glance this seems a routine correspondence, it was not. Rigby’s presence in Carlisle and the description he offered of his activities in town confirmed how much Carlisle had changed in the seventeen years since its founding. It was no longer a remote village, or even a developing crossroads of migration and retail commerce. Instead, the town functioned as an essential way station in a longdistance fur and skin trade that stretched from Native American communities of the early American West to major Atlantic world markets in Great Britain. Carlisle, in short, had become—in one important respect at least—exactly the kind of place in-between Penn envisioned. Long-established Native paths led the town’s many traders and haulers west to the Native peoples of the Ohio Valley who hunted, trapped, and processed the pelts that supplied this trade. Roads built by provincial officials and local colonists led to Baltimore, but they also connected town merchants to the export markets of Philadelphia. Equally significant was the presence of outsiders. With their warehouses and agents like Rigby positioned in Carlisle, firms like Philadelphia’s Baynton, Wharton, and Morgan had staked their own space on the townscape. Their arrival heralded Carlisle’s role as what Governor Hamilton had once described as a depository of the fur and skin trade for the colony. 12704-A Town In-Between (Ridner).indd 75 12704-A Town In-Between (Ridner).indd 75 2/2/10 10:35:49 AM 2/2/10 10:35:49 AM 76 chapter three But Carlisle was also much more. Roads and fur trading brought not just Philadelphians but fear to town. And during the late 1760s, in the wake of the Native violence unleashed during the Seven Years’ War and then Pontiac’s Uprising, these fears assumed the forefront of townspeople’s consciousness. These fears cast Carlisle as a central stage for expressions of hostility toward Native peoples and the traders—sometimes outsiders, sometimes their neighbors—who served their interests. Carlisle thus grew contentious; it divided upon itself. Within this climate of hatred and suspicion, pelts and trade goods took on new, more ominous meaning as reminders of potentially predatory Native peoples and the destruction they might wage on the town and its Scots-Irish inhabitants. For many townspeople, the trade thus became something to be resisted because it heralded danger: those men who trafficked with Indians were soon the targets of intense suspicion and antagonism. Joseph Rigby knew this well. He worked nervously that May in consequence . Earlier that spring townspeople had begun to confront trade agents whom they suspected of supplying Native peoples with the tools of their destruction. Rigby was one of those whom they suspected. As he reported anxiously to his employers in the same letter: “We are Surrounded by Ja-bt -s- [Jacobites?] who are continually prying into every Waggon and package that comes to the Gate to know the Contents, and often ask whether, there is any powder or Lead going back to kill the Sc-th [Scotch] Irishmen.”2 The climate in Carlisle, he made clear, was tense. His neighbors, he knew, were furious. Believing there were traitors in their midst, they feared for their lives. But he was scared as well. Rigby wanted to serve his employers, but he and other agents were unsure what townspeople would do next. In response, they found themselves employed in increasingly clandestine work; to keep the trade moving they had to hide goods from their neighbors and conceal shipments as they went out. Rigby’s note confirmed these tactics as well as his desperation. He sent the firm’s lead west with the troops that May as a cover. Local Scots-Irish colonists, he knew, might well sabotage a shipment hauled by packhorsemen, but troops were another matter; colonists would leave them alone.3 To get the trade goods west and serve the interests of his employers, therefore, he went against the will of neighbors. Such extraordinary times, his note implied, required extraordinary measures; this was anything but routine practice. Rigby’s note and the mood of contention it relates raises intriguing...

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