CHAPTER 6

When a River Is a Border

Rivalries and Commercial Networks in the Riverine West

KIM M. GRUENWALD

In the eighteenth century the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers rose in late spring thanks to melting snow and again in the fall thanks to seasonal rain. As an army officer, Thomas Hutchins made a detailed study of the western waters and sent a report to Thomas Jefferson in February 1784. Hutchins wrote that the Wabash and Illinois Rivers rose in early February, and the Ohio in March. The Missouri also rose in March, and the Upper Mississippi soon thereafter. The flood of the Ohio came on suddenly or gradually depending on the weather, and lasted six to eight weeks. As for the Mississippi, high water lasted on the upper river even longer than that, and the waters could rise on the lower stretches from Natchez to New Orleans from January through June. The Mississippi could flow south at a rate of five miles an hour in the spring but slowed to two miles an hour in the summer and early fall. Because boats encountered sandbanks, islands, shoals, and downed trees year-round, the faster sections could actually be more dangerous to navigation in the spring. Though the French had sent boats with goods upriver to Illinois from New Orleans once a year in the past, it was a journey that took so long and so much manpower at the oars that almost all people and cargo went downstream only. People walked home one way or another—either up the Natchez Trace to settlements south of the Ohio, or by sailing from New Orleans to ports on the Atlantic Coast and then heading west.

The popular image of North American colonies growing in isolation from Europe has long been debunked by scholars of the Atlantic world, and now a new generation have tied the history of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to that story. Paul Mapp focused on the interaction between empires, studying the interior of North America and adding the Pacific Ocean to the mix while exploring what Europeans misunderstood about the continent and how it affected their calculations during the decades leading up to the Seven Years’ War. By the end of the conflict, France had given up on their plans, while England’s grew. Spain focused on using the lower Mississippi to defend other holdings, and Native Americans lost a crucial ally they had used to make demands of the British. François Furstenberg took up the story of the trans-Appalachian West as Atlantic history for the second half of the eighteenth century. In studying “the Long War for the West,” Furstenberg sifted through the various viewpoints and strategies of the English, French, Spanish, and Native Americans as all sought to control the region between 1754 and 1815. He recognized New Orleans as the focal point of many plans because of its location as the only outlet for trade beyond the mountains at that time. Furstenberg showed that far from being an isolated frontier, the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys were a key stage upon which the “sweeping forces of imperialism and global warfare” played out.1 When historians talk about the Long Eighteenth Century and the Long War for the West, they are placing war and imperial intrigue at the center of the narrative. But what of the people who actually made use of the western rivers during those years? For merchants, rivers were more than borders—they were arteries of trade. Their letter books, journals, ledgers, and other business records allow us to track the movement and networks of people and goods that would integrate east and west along waterways between Pittsburgh and New Orleans.2

The rivers themselves are at the center of the story. During the second half of the eighteenth century, the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys were borderlands—“the contested boundaries between colonial domains.”3 Each empire had its own concerns—the French wanted to use portages from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi to connect Atlantic trade from the St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico, while the Spanish focused their attention on protecting their assets to the south.4 Initially the British wanted to capture the fur trade by creating their own alliances with Native Americans, while Native Americans wanted to trade with whoever gave them the best prices without encroaching on their territory. The opposite banks of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers were often claimed by rivals during this period. After the British exiled the French from the Ohio Valley, the Shawnees wanted to protect their hunting grounds south of the Ohio River. The Spanish claimed territory west of the Mississippi River, while the English claimed control of the eastern bank. Many of the French remained, making the best of it under either Spanish or English rule. Europeans, colonists, and Native Americans eyed each other warily and traded with each other even while trying to press their advantage.

Nobody could travel faster than the current of a river, and as they made their way downstream, they were out in the open for all to see. Trees lined the banks, making river corridors the clearest path to destinations. It was an intimate setting with face-to-face meetings in boats, as well as stops on shore to exchange news or a meal when a settlement came into view. When people descended rivers, they couldn’t take a detour to avoid others as they might on the ocean or when they crossed the plains. The rivers were the artery of travel for everyone west of the Appalachian Mountains and avoiding fellow travelers was impossible.

The Atlantic world of colonial America had encompassed merchants extending their networks to the fall line of rivers that reached the coast from the Lower South to New England. Philadelphia merchants wanted to harness the downstream power of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and allow the Atlantic world to make landfall by extending that world of commerce across the Appalachian Mountains. Their work began with attempts by firms like Baynton, Wharton & Morgan and others before the American Revolution to corner the fur trade from one direction in Illinois and provide flour to a hungry port from another by way of the Gulf of Mexico. After the war, firms like Reed & Forde forged riverine networks all the way to New Orleans, sending goods downriver from Pittsburgh to a wave of settlers heading west. They completed the integration of east and west by sending oceangoing vessels to the southern port to export western produce to the Atlantic world in addition to selling goods. In the process, Philadelphia merchants took part in extinguishing Native American land titles, expanding slavery up the Mississippi River, and claiming a continental empire for the new United States. The purchase of Louisiana in 1803 meant that the Mississippi was a border no longer. One empire at last controlled both banks of the river, and Americans would expand to the Pacific via overland routes thereafter.

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When a young man named George Morgan apprenticed with two well-respected merchants named John Baynton and Thomas Wharton, Philadelphia merchants did most of their business with England, southern Europe, Madeira, and the West Indies, as well as participating in a lively trade with other ports along the coast. Then war broke out, and everything changed. The Seven Years’ War brought a flood of bills of exchange and a host of new trading opportunities including supplying the army and acquiring land in the Illinois country. By war’s end, the three men had established the firm of Baynton, Wharton & Morgan. As British colonists, they and other merchants transformed the port of Philadelphia, expanding its hinterland west and seeking land grants from the king beyond the Appalachian Mountains.5 The youngest partner found himself dispatched to Illinois, and there he developed a contentious relationship with French merchants and rivals from his own colony, as well as English officials. Despite the fact that the venture failed, Morgan would find himself entangled in the fate of the western waters to the end of his days.

Travel accounts from early commercial ventures on behalf of Baynton, Wharton & Morgan reveal the international riverine world of western rivers as well as travelers’ awareness of Atlantic rivalries that spread to the interior. John Jennings made the journey on the Ohio from Fort Pitt to Fort Chartres in the spring of 1766 with the first five boats loaded with the firm’s goods. He kept a daily log of distances traveled, weather, and a description of what they saw on shore and the people they encountered. Other than one encounter that worried his party early on, they had a remarkably peaceful journey and met a wide variety of the region’s inhabitants, especially Native Americans. The boat crews took precautions, watching carefully for signs of trouble, but their fears never materialized. A party of Shawnees in four canoes traded fresh meat with them in exchange for biscuit and tobacco near the Scioto River. Jennings’s party traded for meat in a similar fashion with another group as they headed down the Ohio. Jennings mentioned small groups of what he labeled Indian cabins, the cabins of warriors, hunters’ cabins, and large Indian villages. Below the Falls of the Ohio they heard gunfire, and Jennings assumed Indians were hunting nearby. Heading up the Mississippi at last, when Jennings encountered “a large French boat,” his party put up their flag and rowed to shore to meet them. Nearly a month later, Jennings neared his destination in Illinois where he chauvinistically characterized the French he saw as “very bad” farmers. That summer George Morgan followed, and in letters to his wife, he echoed many of Jennings’s observations, tending to label everyone he encountered as either French, English, or Indian.6

As for descending the Mississippi River, at first Jennings belittled French farmers. As he traveled further south, both he and Morgan later described them as rivals producing wheat and utilizing slave labor to grow tobacco and other crops. When Jennings headed for the Gulf he encountered French hunting parties and more unidentified Native Americans in canoes. At Natchez he wrote of the presence of a new Spanish fort and an Acadian settlement beyond. The French settlement of Pointe Coupée impressed him, and he described a fort and church on the Spanish side of the river opposite. The local economy supported exports of indigo, rice, and maize.7 George Morgan also kept a journal of a trip from Kaskaskia to the Gulf of Mexico down the Mississippi River. He wrote of a Spanish meadow and made note of “French hunting parties” on both the English and Spanish shores. Morgan and his party ate buffalo meat on the trip, sometimes provided by others they met, and other times procured by a member of their own party. Once past Natchez and in the final stretch of his journey south, George Morgan encountered many more Frenchmen and Native Americans. He stated that there were a couple of Native American settlements and a “considerable French settlement with Fort & Garrison” on the Red River. There were more settlements along the Mississippi, some with “new French huts,” and Morgan saw fifty slaves at Pointe Coupée harvesting cypress trees to be floated to New Orleans the next spring. Several nearby planters owned three dozen slaves, more owned twenty, and newcomers owned a handful each. They grew cotton, rice, indigo, and tobacco. Other words used in reference to the French include villages, huts, and families. They were rivals for the territory as much as the fur trade.8

As for doing business on the western waters, the official Spanish position on the Mississippi was fairly rigid, especially once defined by the new governor in New Orleans as he tried to wrest trade away from the British and integrate the lower river more fully into the Spanish empire. Native Americans and French inhabitants were not interested in trading with the Spanish, who could not provide the manufactured goods that came from England and France. In 1769, the Spanish sent Alejandro O’Reilly, who had been born in Ireland but had risen through the ranks of the Spanish Army, to New Orleans to establish their rule. When O’Reilly arrived, he wrote, “I found the English entirely in possession of the commerce of the colony.” They traded with the German settlements and sold furs to France in exchange for goods. When it came to selling goods for specie, the English had the advantage because they sold their goods more cheaply than anyone else.9 In September O’Reilly issued a proclamation that outlawed the practice of meeting with or hosting any foreigners without passports, or providing transport or guides. Inhabitants were not allowed to buy merchandise from anyone on the Mississippi or any of the lakes without formal authorization from O’Reilly, and anyone violating that order would be fined with one-third of the money going to anyone who informed on such persons.10

Despite O’Reilly’s public proclamation, New Orleans needed flour, and O’Reilly would turn to another Irishman named Oliver Pollock to provide it. With the backing of Philadelphia merchants, Pollock took consignments of flour, rum, and lumber to the West Indies and sent back spices, molasses, and sugar. Over the course of five years, he plowed his profits into more ships and learned Spanish fluently enough to trade without a translator. While in Cuba, Pollock struck up a friendship with O’Reilly at his post in Havana before following him to New Orleans. O’Reilly allowed him to bring in flour at special rates in the late 1760s and early 1770s, and Pollock worked with the firm of Willing & Morris back in Philadelphia to fulfill the port’s needs. Historian Kathleen DuVal writes that Pollock managed to be English and Spanish simultaneously through the “Spanish trade privileges” he leveraged by way of personal relationships. Years later, Pollock characterized his early business as resting on the foundation of London dry goods, African slaves, and Philadelphia flour. O’Reilly’s successor opened up the lower Mississippi to even more English trade to keep the colony fed, and the flour trade continued through the end of the century.11

Borders were fluid in Illinois, as well, with Spanish territory on the opposite bank of the Mississippi River. Some French farmers had crossed over, unhappy that the British wanted to pay them with notes on New York or London that they couldn’t redeem. One knowledgeable observer wrote that the only “means of inducing many of those who have removed to the Spanish side, to return to our’s with their Cattle &tc.” was to offer them cash for their crops and meat. Others would follow if Morgan and others failed to “break their connextions with the people of New Orleans.” A few years later under even stricter British military rules, George Morgan noted that “no person whatever officer merchant or inhabitant can cross the river from either side without a written passport,” and said that the “poor inhabitants” lived in “a state of slavery.” But sometimes those who lived in the west found ways to use the boundaries to their advantage. Morgan wrote that after the death of a friend outside his cabin one night, one of the murderers “escapd over the river.”12

John Jennings stored that first shipment of goods mostly at Kaskaskia in the spring of 1766, with a small portion sent to Fort Chartres. When George Morgan arrived a few months later he opened a store at Cahokia and one in Vincennes two years after that before finally settling down to run the business at Kaskaskia. Morgan intended to trade English goods to Native Americans for furs and dry goods and groceries to his French neighbors in exchange for cattle and wheat. Selling provisions such as meat and flour to soldiers brought in reasonable profits, as did sales to the Royal Department of Indian Affairs.13 Atlantic rivalries meant forts and soldiers, and Philadelphia merchants found them to be a ready market.

Atlantic rivalries also emerged in the interior in the form of competition over the purchase of forced migrants. George Morgan sold slaves to the French in Illinois. An associate named James Rumsey purchased more than three dozen Africans for the firm in Jamaica and brought them down the Ohio River from Fort Pitt to Illinois in 1767. In December Morgan wrote to his partners that Rumsey would arrive just as a group of Frenchmen planned to leave for New Orleans in search of labor. Morgan offered them slaves in exchange for pelts, specie, bills of exchange, or produce to be paid in May, and they stayed to make deals with him instead. Morgan intended to sell slaves for 400 dollars or more, and wrote that “we have it in our power to make a monopoly of all the flour in the country by purchasing it with negroes.” But it soon became apparent that there were more slave-traders in the market. In February, Morgan wrote to his partners that sixty slaves were expected from New Orleans in the near future, apparently undercutting his sales.14

The fur trade also turned out to be a disappointment when Morgan consistently lost out to French traders, partly because British regulations stipulated that he could not go to the Native American tribes in search of furs—they had to come to him. But historian Jacob Lee concludes that George Morgan’s failure in Illinois went beyond British regulations. Morgan and his French neighbors had actually united against the first English officer in charge, but that relationship deteriorated over time. Accompanied by a Seneca named Silver Heels with connections back east, Morgan found himself excluded from Native American kinship networks in Illinois. Illinois peoples had been marrying French traders and planters and each other across tribal lines for decades, and because they had retained control over their lands, they had resisted Pontiac’s call for rebellion in 1763. They didn’t like the English much, finding them arrogant, and there was no way for Morgan to break into Illinois society with a wife and other ties back in Philadelphia. He just didn’t fit in.15

When it came to trading with French inhabitants, Morgan was at a disadvantage there, too, for the observations noted above. The French preferred to trade with New Orleans as they always had—Morgan didn’t seem to have anything special to offer in the end. In New Orleans they could get cheaper goods and use their produce to pay for them. Thus, business did not go as planned. Baynton, Wharton & Morgan had heavily invested in goods, but large enough quantities of furs had not yet arrived from the west to pay their debts. In the fall of 1767, they threw up their hands and invited their creditors to look at their books; the creditors decided that the situation was not as bad as they feared. Eight of their creditors came together as a Board of Trustees to supervise their business over the next three years. All expected great profits to come from the Illinois venture.16 Instead, Philadelphia merchants’ economic affairs fluctuated for several more years. In 1768 as tensions on the seaboard rose, the British moved their troops east, abandoning military contracts, and British merchants did deals with the French, cutting out colonial merchants and keeping the fur trade out of American hands. The British decommissioned a number of forts and sold Fort Pitt to Alexander Ross in 1772.17

Though Baynton, Wharton & Morgan failed, George Morgan continued to increase his knowledge of western waters. On his very first trip down the Ohio, he struck up a friendship with Ensign Thomas Hutchins, who would eventually be named the first (and only) Geographer of the United States in 1781 and go on to leave his mark on land surveys in the northwest thereafter. Morgan and Hutchins both recognized that understanding the courses of the western rivers would be the key to settling the interior. In the early 1770s, while Hutchins worked on a map of western rivers, George Morgan wrote to a third party seeking information about the upper Mississippi: “Engineer Hutchins a particular friend of mine is about publishing a map of the interior rivers and lakes in American.” Morgan sent a proposal from Hutchins to Wharton in London hoping to find a publisher. Hutchins had been surveying all the Ohio’s tributaries with an eye toward settlement. Morgan wrote to Hutchins that “great dependence is placed pointing out the best water communication between the west branch of the Susquehanna & the Allegheny River & the Potomack & the Yahagany or Cheat River.” Morgan wrote Hutchins that he had been promised a map from a Father Harding that was “a very exact draft of the River Mississippi from Fort Chartres to its sources.” He also wrote about a map of the Monongahela and Little Kanawha, and later, about adding other rivers.18

During the American Revolution George Morgan served as Indian agent at Pittsburgh. Afterwards, still convinced that he could make a fortune in the west, he got together a group of investors to petition Congress to sell them two million acres of land in the Illinois Country. His continuing interest in the west would bring him into contact with two men Spain charged with the task of protecting the empire’s interests on the Mississippi a year earlier: the Spanish minister to the United States, Don Diego de Gardoqui, and the governor of Louisiana, Esteban Miró. They closed the river to American navigation, but let it be known that American settlers would be welcome on the west bank if they pledged loyalty to Spain. They promised free trade, land grants, and religious freedom to Americans willing to settle in their territory, and a number of Americans applied. In the summer of 1788, Gardoqui found someone, perhaps their mutual friend Thomas Hutchins, to tell Morgan to apply to the king to establish a colony on the banks of the Mississippi. Morgan did so, backing out of his deal with Congress.19

Before heading down the Ohio, Morgan sent a report to Gardoqui in November. He warned that the western population was growing, and the people resented taxes from an American government that couldn’t guarantee them access to markets. Spain needed to act fast, Morgan insisted, for the Ohio Valley had all the raw materials needed to manufacture their own goods if they failed to gain access to New Orleans. On the journey downriver, Morgan noted that Kentuckians were on the fence about allying with Spain and were interested in a British spy’s propaganda currently making the rounds about the legality of seizing New Orleans. Morgan rated freedom of religion and free trade to be the most important factors that would dictate the west’s loyalty in the end.20

George Morgan promised to bring many families with him and take an oath of allegiance to the King of Spain if his demands were met. Morgan wanted to be in control of the colony—appointing officials, distributing land, and heading two militia units. He wanted a rank in the Spanish Army equivalent to his rank in the United States, one thousand acres of land for his wife and each of his children, a salary, and word of the king’s protection over his family. His land grant was to be opposite the mouth of the Ohio, and he insisted that the king promise free trade, support for schools, and freedom of religion. The colony would provide a port of entry for Americans who wanted to trade with the Spanish in New Orleans, he argued. Give him all that, he proposed to the king, and Spain would control trade west of the Allegheny Mountains. Alas, various intrigues scuttled those plans, and Morgan abandoned the colony of New Madrid after only a year. But the venture showed that George Morgan both looked backward, turning to the tried-and-true method of petitioning a king for land, and forward, articulating the role that the rivers would play in the years to come. Merchants and settlers alike wanted access to markets, and only the western waters could provide it. Morgan belonged to a group of Atlantic world merchants willing to give their loyalty to either a British or a Spanish king, choosing whoever would serve their purpose at the time.21

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When thirteen of the British colonies declared independence, Philadelphia became a national port, and then for a time the new nation’s capital. As citizens rather than subjects, a new generation of merchants sought to connect east and west along the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and corner the market on land warrants issued by states in an attempt to raise money to pay war debts. As they looked beyond the Appalachians, newly independent Americans believed that seizing land from Native Americans and selling it to settlers would kill two birds with one stone: First, it would provide funds to pay the new nation’s debts and invest in the future, and second, it would provide land to help citizens in the new republic start off right in their quest to create “kingless self-government” based on a landed citizenry.22 Thomas Doerflinger characterized the merchants of revolutionary Philadelphia as men driven by “a vigorous spirit of enterprise.” They took risks and developed innovative business methods and networks to get ahead. In addition to serving in the army, John Reed got his start as a trader during the American Revolution. An army official out to make a profit from his position helped Reed to plan a venture that included taking a load of goods to Boston by public wagon and exchanging them for saddles and medicine, among other things, making contact with various quartermasters along the way. Reed later spent time in the West Indies and tried his hand at opening a store in Wilmington, Delaware—he was still trying to collect on those accounts years later. Reed took Standish Forde as a partner after the war, and the two men imported dry goods from England and speculated in western lands, hoping to sell both quickly at a profit. Instead, the postwar economic depression nearly did them in, and by the late 1780s, Reed & Forde began casting their net wider in an effort to pay their debts.23 Reed & Forde’s business would look quite different from that of Baynton, Wharton & Morgan as Americans flooded west.

Like many others, including some of the wealthiest and most influential men on the eastern seaboard, John Reed and Standish Forde speculated in hundreds of thousands of acres of land in western Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky. Initial surveys indicated that their lands off a branch of the Monongahela contained iron ore, and they sent out feelers trying to find an experienced man to establish an ironworks, hoping to supply “all the settlements on the western waters.” Whenever Reed and Forde wrote of land, they emphasized easy river access to markets. Once they boasted that farmers would be able to drive cattle to the headwaters of the Potomac, as well as shipping flax, hemp, and tobacco by the same route. Other lands lay closer to Philadelphia or Baltimore trade routes, and settlers passing through on their way to Kentucky were said to provide another ready market.24 The partners purchased a flour mill on Ten Mile Creek, a branch of the Monongahela River, near Redstone, nearly 40 miles south of the Ohio River’s headwaters at Pittsburgh to process the settlers’ wheat into flour and ship it south to New Orleans. After the American Revolution, Pittsburgh grew as men of commerce used their prime location to outfit settlers coming from the south and the east, heading for new homes in the Ohio Valley.25 As for Philadelphia goods destined for western markets, warehouses were needed to store goods when the Ohio ran low in the summer and winter, awaiting the river’s rise in the spring and fall.

The partners had debts to pay and land to sell, so they continued expanding their network to New Orleans, providing markets for settlers by linking the headwaters of the Ohio to the Gulf of Mexico and beyond. Reed and Forde used their partnership to take a very hands-on approach to business. In the fall, one or the other—they usually took turns—made their way across the mountains from Philadelphia to tend to business in Pittsburgh and its hinterland, and then moved on to Kentucky before heading down the Mississippi to Natchez and New Orleans. Forde made the journey in late 1788 or early 1789, Reed went west in the fall of 1789, and then Forde a year later. The partner who stayed behind sent letters with updates about prices in Philadelphia, Natchez, New Orleans, and Europe with any acquaintance who happened to be heading across the mountains, hoping to advise the traveler on the best way to invest their cash, goods, or flour, or perhaps the best way to collect their debts with news of notes that had been protested. During Reed’s trip over the winter of 1789–90, intelligence did not flow back east quickly, which is evident because Forde sent letter after letter asking for news so that he could arrange insurance for the trip.26

Trade within the Ohio Valley itself had grown since Morgan’s sojourn in Illinois. Forde instructed Reed to visit Lancaster, Hagerstown, Clarksburg, and Morgantown to collect debts and seek out goods, then to take charge of the flour at their own mill and visit others along the Monongahela so that they could send as large a cargo as possible south. He mentioned a “clever fellow” he’d met the year before who could give his partner advice on which mills were the most trustworthy. Reed was to purchase oil at Redstone to go with the kegs of paint the partners intended to send downriver and to purchase butter and whiskey, as well as skins and furs. Forde wrote with news of a tinman heading Reed’s way, and asked him to find tin in Pittsburgh for the artisan and take payment in cups that would sell well in Natchez.27

Personal networks were all well and good, but the river always had its say in the end—Forde’s journal a year later makes that clear. During most of November 1790 he traveled from town to town, conducting business along the various rivers and streams of the Upper Ohio Valley. He spent a couple of days waiting for wagons with goods to arrive from the east at Redstone on the Monongahela, then loaded the goods and flour onto boats and headed for the Ohio’s headwaters at Pittsburgh. Before reaching Wheeling, Forde and his men had to unload flour, drag the boats forward, then reload as they tried to move downstream. The river’s course proved to be deeper thereafter, and they made good time to Louisville at the Falls of the Ohio.28 The falls consisted of a two-mile stretch of rapids nearly 600 miles below Pittsburgh and represented the one major navigational hazard on the river’s journey to the Mississippi. George Rogers Clark settled there on the southern bank with others during the Revolution and attacked Native Americans to the north. Just as the growth of a commercial center was inevitable at the Ohio’s headwaters, so too was the growth of such a town at the point where goods would either have to be moved by portage around the falls from one set of boats above to another below, or be stored, waiting for the river to rise enough for boats to make it over the rocky narrows.29 Once over the falls, Forde purchased flatboats and a Kentucky boat at Shippingport below, but bad weather forced them to stop on shore as they floated toward the Mississippi. They broke through ice on the lower reaches of the Ohio, and then had to contend with low water and sandbars on the Mississippi. They arrived at New Madrid about seven weeks after leaving Pittsburgh.30

The partners didn’t intend for all of the flour shipped from the Ohio’s headwaters to reach the mouth of the Mississippi. From Natchez in January 1792, John Reed directed William Shannon, one of their agents following behind him with the cargo, to sell a barrel here and there when he could, if there was a profit to be found. Reed wrote him to be on the lookout for any chance to trade flour for indigo, too, which was bringing in good prices in Europe. A man couldn’t be too long en route, however, for the flour that arrived down south first brought the best prices.31 Because everyone had to ship their cargo during the time of high water, gluts in the market and falling prices in New Orleans were common.

European rivalries continued to require attention as Forde headed for the Gulf Coast. Once Reed & Forde’s goods reached the lower Mississippi, a new array of commercial tasks awaited the partners. The British had taken possession of West Florida and Natchez, Mississippi, after the Seven Years’ War, and the settlement grew during the Revolution as a refuge for Loyalists. Settlers from the region “provided a lasting larder for New Orleans.” Flour was in high demand throughout Louisiana, and in Cuba as well. By the early 1780s, Natchez was the largest town in the region north of New Orleans with a population of 1,000 free men and 300 slaves. Residents sent regular shipments of indigo and cotton, as well as corn and tobacco, south to the Gulf of Mexico. Newcomers from the United States brought large herds of cattle in the 1780s. The Spanish encouraged further growth for a couple years by guaranteeing a market for American tobacco in 1788. The Natchez District became best known for cotton production a decade later, after the invention of the cotton gin.32

A man named David Ferguson ran their store there. In the summer of 1790, he wrote that the hot weather might lead to spoiled flour. Flour prices were high, but there was little cash to be had, and most sales had to be done by credit. Ferguson also bartered flour for furs. Prospects were gloomy, however, and he advised against another shipment of goods. Planters had had their tobacco refused the past spring, and Ferguson used caution when extending credit. The next year, Ferguson proved much more optimistic—cash sales had been brisk, he wrote, and he expected to sell a big tobacco crop. A Mr. Cochran seemed to be their main competition, and Ferguson told the partners that their rival’s selection of goods was “much better calculated for this place.” He expected to have $700 or $800 on hand in cash for Reed when he arrived, and there would be a big crop coming in from contracts he’d made. That fall Ferguson reported that plenty of men from Kentucky were content to sell their tobacco for goods in Natchez rather than making the trip all the way to New Orleans. The tobacco crop was so good that year that many used it in order to settle their debts with the firm. In 1792, Ferguson wrote to Reed downriver that “the sales have been much better this spring than they have been since your commencement of business here.” Unfortunately, Reed’s reply from New Orleans the next week contained the bad news that the tobacco inspections had not gone well, which would curtail payments. The river’s navigational challenges weren’t the only setbacks merchants faced when doing business on the western waters.33

In addition to their river ventures, Reed & Forde was one of the first firms to send oceangoing vessels regularly to the port of New Orleans starting in 1789. They used well-connected men in Philadelphia to obtain passports allowing them to trade in New Orleans when the Spanish closed the port to American trade. Scholars have weighed in on early New Orleans often: Daniel Usner labeled the lower Mississippi Valley a frontier exchange economy, François Furstenberg called it a hot spot, John Clark called it a pawn, and Arthur Whitaker wrote of its significance nearly a century ago—it was clearly the key to getting goods to market from the interior.34 But holding New Orleans wasn’t easy because both the French and Spanish found that the soil around the city just wouldn’t support food crops—they needed flour from Illinois or Pennsylvania, so exceptions to strict trade policies were made time and again just to keep those who lived there fed. The industries that did grow up along the Mississippi relied on slaves for labor. Reed & Forde first sent cigars, tea, and sugar, and took payment early on in the form of beaver, otter, bear, and deer skins. A couple years later the payments took the form of tobacco and commercial notes. Tobacco came through New Orleans from both Kentucky and Natchez. Natchez plantations also supplied indigo. In 1791, five of the nine ships that arrived in New Orleans from Philadelphia came with “cargoes that were consigned wholly or in large part to Reed and Forde.” The partners hoped to get better prices for their western cargoes that year in France rather than England, and they began shipping flour and cheese to New Orleans.35

The firm they did the most business with was Coxe & Clark, who also provided the most direct link between the ports. Daniel W. Coxe brought his good Philadelphia name to the partnership and Daniel W. Clark brought his facility for languages and working the angles in New Orleans—he had gotten his start there under Spanish rule years before. In March 1793, Daniel W. Coxe and Daniel Clark Jr. wrote to Reed & Forde that they had formed a new firm, hoping that together they would be able to facilitate more business for “our Friends.” They believed that trade in New Orleans would grow, especially if war broke out between England and France, and Spain would be drawn in. They mentioned trade with the Spanish Empire specifically, stating that the government “will doubtless continue to wink at the mode in which the business is carried out.” It would be Daniel Clark’s connections that got the job done. Clark wrote personally to the Philadelphia partners a couple weeks later that competition with Coxe had been harming both of their businesses, and he expected to have even more trade for the firm now that Coxe had become his partner.36

Unfortunately for Reed & Forde, they failed rather spectacularly shortly after the turn of the century: Land sales stagnated, they lost brigs to privateers in the 1790s, new Spanish policies forced them to close their store in Natchez, the Whiskey Rebellion disrupted trade in Philadelphia at a crucial juncture when “the shoemakers with whom we have contracted have all been on campaign against the Western Insurgents,” and they failed to fulfill a contract in New Orleans.37 Others followed in their footsteps, however, as rivals from not only Philadelphia, but Baltimore and New York, as well, flooded into New Orleans after Pinckney’s Treaty in 1795 in anticipation of opening up trade on the Mississippi River. Spain relinquished New Orleans back to France in 1800, and President Thomas Jefferson engineered the purchase of Louisiana in 1803 to ensure western farmers would retain access to Atlantic trade. The purchase doubled the size of the new nation and extended its claims west to the Rocky Mountains. Rivals claimed opposite banks of the western rivers no longer.

Philadelphia merchants like Reed & Forde made it seem possible to claim the trans-Mississippi West for the United States by creating strong ties between east and west through commercial ventures along the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. They supported both industry and trade rather than simply selling land and recording deeds as fast as they could. Indeed, one partner or the other was often at hand when there was business to be done in the west—they used their partnership to best advantage with an almost constant flow of information across the mountains. John Reed and Standish Forde completed the circuit from Philadelphia to New Orleans along the rivers and from New Orleans back to Philadelphia by way of the Atlantic Ocean. Though Philadelphia lost its advantage to New York in the port of New Orleans itself after the signing of Pinckney’s Treaty, it would be Philadelphia merchants who continued to supply residents of the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys with eastern goods by shipping them overland to Pittsburgh and then downriver before steamboats arrived to take goods upriver from New Orleans after the War of 1812.38

*  *  *

By chance, the year 1806 would be a momentous one for George Morgan, John Reed, and Standish Forde. Though Morgan had sought the approval of the King of Spain just over a decade and a half before, when Aaron Burr stopped by his home in western Pennsylvania on his way west to pursue plans to separate it from the east, George Morgan acted the only way the loyal citizen of a republic could: He informed his president of the danger. Cleaving the continent in two had seemed possible in the years immediately following the Revolution, but such schemes were bound to fail after the Louisiana Purchase. That same year Forde signed a document ending his partnership with Reed, probably to protect assets when he fell ill. Writing that they would start anew if he recovered, Forde noted that they had been in business for twenty-five years. Unfortunately, he died two days later.39 Though not quite a full generation apart in age, George Morgan, John Reed, and Standish Forde pursued their businesses in different eras: one as the merchant of a colonial port, and the other pair as merchants of a national port. What they had in common was their pursuit of integrating the eastern half of the continent into the trade world of the Atlantic seaboard along western waters not fully under the control of any one empire.

The year 1806 also saw the return of the Lewis and Clark expedition. After their half-century of relying on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, perhaps it only seemed natural for Americans to head up another river—the Missouri—to explore the Louisiana Purchase and beyond. Though Lewis and Clark failed to find a Northwest Passage, they succeeded in focusing the new nation’s attention on the trans-Mississippi West, ushering in a new century of settlement by overland journeys and railroads. Philadelphia merchants laid the groundwork for those continental ambitions by laying claim to the trans-Appalachian West through the creation of commercial networks that extended from Pittsburgh to New Orleans along the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers during the second half of the eighteenth century. As for the western rivers, in the nineteenth century, Americans would erase the centuries-old Native American routes and portages with canals and land reclamation projects from the shores of Lake Michigan to the Gulf Coast, trying to assert dominance by destroying the landscape.40

What shall we call the critical half-century between the eras of oceangoing ships and the overland journeys west from the Mississippi? United States historiography recognizes the North, the South, the mid-Atlantic, the Midwest, the West, and the borderlands. Previous scholars of “the frontier in the formative years” simply called it “the trans-Appalachian West.”41 It’s interesting that the history of the trans-Mississippi West doesn’t have much to do with the Mississippi River, and the most salient geographical features of the trans-Appalachian West are in fact the Ohio and Mississippi rivers rather than the Appalachian Mountains. Of course, early historiography traced frontier history from east to west, until borderlands historians came along to shift the focus to the movement of peoples who started from the southwest. But the Riverine West deserves a category of its own. It’s all about moving downstream along the most efficient route for goods to travel and having to share that journey with peoples of all nations, including Native American confederacies, because rivals claimed opposite banks.

Notes

1. Adapted from Gruenwald, Kim M. Philadelphia Merchants on Western Waters: Commerce and Empire in the Riverine West, 1750–1803. © 2025 Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted by permission.
2. 1.  Paul W. Mapp, The Elusive West and the Contest for Empire, 1713–1763 (University of North Carolina Pres, 2011); François Furstenberg, “The Significance of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier in Atlantic History,” American Historical Review 113, no. 3 (June 2008): 647–77.
3. 2.  See for example, Elizabeth Urban Alexander, “Daniel Clark: Merchant Prince of New Orleans,” in Nexus of Empire: Negotiating Loyalty and Identity in the Revolutionary Borderlands, 1760s–1820s, ed. Gene Allen Smith and Sylvia L. Hilton (University Press of Florida, 2010), 242–43; James Alton James, Oliver Pollock: The Life and Times of an Unknown Patriot (D. Appleton-Century, 1937), 1–3; Kathleen DuVal, Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution (Random House, 2015), 35–38.
4. 3.  Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History,” American Historical Review 104, no. 3 (1999): 814–41, esp. 816. See also David E. Narrett, Adventurism and Empire: The Struggle for Mastery in the Louisiana-Florida Borderlands, 1762–1803 (University of North Carolina Press, 2015); Matthew Salafia, Slavery’s Borderland: Freedom and Bondage Along the Ohio River (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).
5. 4.  For French plans, see John William Nelson, Muddy Ground: Native Peoples, Chicago’s Portage, and the Transformation of a Continent (University of North Carolina Press, 2023).
6. 5.  Max Savelle, George Morgan, Colony Builder (Columbia University Press, 1932), chapter 1; Harry D. Berg, “Economic Consequences of the French and Indian War for Philadelphia Merchants,” Pennsylvania History 13, no. 3 (July 1946), 185–93; Jacob M. Price, “Economic Function and the Growth of American Port Towns in the Eighteenth Century,” Perspectives in American History 8 (1974): 123–86; Mark Abbott Stern, David Franks: Colonial Merchant (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010).
7. 6.  John Jennings, “Journal from Fort Pitt to Fort Chartres in the Illinois Country,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 31, no. 2 (1907), 145–56; Peter Marshall, “Lord Hillsborough, Samuel Wharton and the Ohio Grant, 1769–1775,” English Historical Review 80, no. 317 (October 1965): 717–39; Savelle, George Morgan; George Morgan letters in The New Regime, 1765–1767, ed. Clarence Walworth Alvord and Clarence Edward Carter (Illinois State Historical Library, 1916), 311–16.
8. 7.  John Jennings, “John Jennings’ Journal at Fort Chartres, and Trip to New Orleans, 1768,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 31, no. 3 (1907): 304–10; Sylvia L. Hilton, “Spanish Louisiana in Atlantic Contexts,” in Louisiana: Crossroads of the Atlantic World, ed. Cecile Vidal (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 69–74.
9. 8.  Alvord and Carter, eds., The New Regime, 438–48.
10. 9.  Margaret Fisher Dalrymple, The Merchant of Manchac: The Letterbooks of John Fitzpatrick, 1768–1790 (Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 9; Hilton, “Spanish Louisiana,” 76–77.
11. 10.  O’Reilly Proclamation, 1769, New Orleans, http://cdm16313.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/LPC/id/281, accessed December 20, 2016.
12. 11.  James, Oliver Pollock, 1–21, 53–56; DuVal, Independence Lost, 35–43.
13. 12.  George Croghan to General Gage, 12 January 1767, in Alvord and Carter, New Regime, 479–81; Memo 9 May, 1770, George Morgan Letterbook, Baynton, Wharton, and Morgan Papers, Pennsylvania State Library, Harrisburg (hereafter BWMP).
14. 13.  Savelle, George Morgan, 31–36.
15. 14.  Clarence Walworth Alvord and Clarence Edwin Carter, eds., Trade and Politics, 1767–1769 (Illinois State Historical Library, 1921), 126, 128, 135, 140, 161–62, 181, 225, 331, 348.
16. 15.  Jacob Lee, Masters of the Middle Waters: Indian Nations and Colonial Ambitions Along the Mississippi (Harvard University Press, 2019), 148–50; Robert Michael Morrissey, Empire by Collaboration: Indians, Colonists, and Governments in Colonial Illinois Country (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015) 206–211; Savelle, George Morgan, 39–46.
17. 16.  Savelle, George Morgan, 46–7.
18. 17.  Walter S. Dunn Jr., Opening New Markets: The British Army and the Old Northwest (Praeger, 2002), 132–36.
19. 18.  Morgan to Hutchins, 19 December 1770; Morgan to Wharton, 21 December 1771; Morgan to Hutchins, 18 February 1772; Morgan to Hutchins, 27 February 1772, George Morgan Letterbook, BWMP.
20. 19.  Savelle, George Morgan, 176–228.
21. 20.  Ibid., 209–210; Bruce Tyler, “The Mississippi River Trade, 1784–1788,” Louisiana History 12, no. 3 (Summer 1971): 255–67; Paul A. Gilje, Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights in the War of 1812 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 131.
22. 21.  Savelle, George Morgan, 205–6. For an excellent account of Wilkinson and Miró squaring off against Gardoqui and Morgan, see Narrett, Adventurism and Empire, 169–86. Narrett labels Morgan, Pollock, and others in Louisiana as adventurers: anyone who risked money in a commercial venture, and who used intrigue, rumor, and deception in the borderlands where imperial control was weak, shifting allegiance at will. Ibid., 1–7.
23. 22.  Michael A. Blaakman, Speculation Nation: Land Mania in the Revolutionary American Republic (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023), 7–19, 15 (quote).
24. 23.  Thomas Doerflinger, A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia (W. W. Norton, 1986), 157–64, 216, 234, 295; Price, “Economic Function and the Growth of American Port Towns in the Eighteenth Century,” 123–86; Arthur P. Whitaker, “Reed and Forde, Merchant Adventurers of Philadelphia: Their Trade with Spanish New Orleans,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 61, no. 3 (July 1937): 237–62.
25. 24.  Redstone was the site of an old fort at a good spot to ford the Monongahela River—the site is now Brownsville, Pennsylvania. Reed & Forde to Ephraim Grant, 3 June 1787, Letterbook; Reed & Forde to Charles Steward, 3 June 1787, Letterbook; Reed & Forde to James Groome, 8 September 1788, Letterbook; Reed & Forde to Joseph Thompson, 14 September 1788, Letterbook; Reed and Forde Papers, 1759–1823, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (hereafter referred to as R&F).
26. 25.  Richard C. Wade, The Urban Frontier: Pioneer Life in Early Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Lexington, Louisville, and St. Louis (University of Chicago Press, 1964), 7–13, 44–45. For the mill, see letters between Reed & Forde and Caleb Copeland in Letterbook and Correspondence, various dates between November 1788 and February 1792, R&F.
27. 26.  John Reed to Standish Forde, 11 June 1789, 6 July 1789, Letterbook; Standish Forde to John Reed, undated November 1789, 25 November 1789, 7 December 1789, 10 December 1789, 7 January 1790; Standish Forde to John Reed, 28 October 1791, 5 December 1791, Correspondence, R&F; Standish Forde to John Reed, 7 June 1793, 19 June 1793, Letterbook, R&F.
28. 27.  Standish Forde to John Reed, undated November 1789, 25 November 1789, Letterbook, R&F.
29. 28.  John W. Jordan, “Notes of a Journey to New Madrid, Tennessee, 1790,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 36, no. 2 (1912): 209–16, esp. 209–12.
30. 29.  Wade, The Urban Frontier, 13–18, 64–66; Wallace Carson, “Transportation and Traffic on the Ohio and Mississippi Before the Steamboat,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 7, no. 1 (June 1920): 26–38, esp. 29, 34n32.
31. 30.  Jordan, “Notes of a Journey to New Madrid,” 212–6; Reginald Horsman, The Frontier in the Formative Years, 1783–1815 (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), 64; Ralph Lee Woodward Jr., “Spanish Commercial Policy in Louisiana, 1763–1803,” Louisiana History 44, no. 2 (Spring 2003): 133–64, esp. 151–52. One of their partners in a venture to New Orleans, John Lewis, had similar troubles with cold weather and ice the year before: see John Lewis to Reed & Forde, 8 February 1789, Correspondence, R&F.
32. 31.  John Reed to William Shannon, 22 January 1792; David Ferguson to Reed & Forde, 5 August 1791, Correspondence, R&F. For more on trade for provisions from Pittsburgh along the Ohio, see Randolph C. Downes, “Trade in Frontier Ohio,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 16, no. 4 (1930): 467–94, esp. 473.
33. 32.  Woodward, “Spanish Commercial Policy,” 145–46 (quote), 151–53; Susan Gaunt Stearns, Empire of Commerce: The Closing of the Mississippi and the Opening of Atlantic Trade (University of Virginia Press, 2024), 136–52; Horsman, The Frontier in the Formative Years, 56–58.
34. 33.  David Ferguson to Reed & Forde, 10 June 1790, 4 July 1790, 5 August 1791 (first quote), 20 November 1791, 28 March 1792 (second quote), 3 April 1792, Correspondence, R&F.
35. 34.  Whitaker, “Reed and Forde,” 245–58; John G. Clark, New Orleans, 1718–1812: An Economic History (Louisiana State University Press, 1970); Arthur Preston Whitaker, The Mississippi Question, 1796–1803: A Study in Trade, Politics, and Diplomacy (D. Appleton-Century, 1934) and The Spanish-American Frontier, 1783–1795: The Westward Movement and the Spanish Retreat in the Mississippi Valley (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1927); Daniel H. Usner, Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley Before 1783 (University of North Carolina Press, 1992).
36. 35.  Whitaker, “Reed and Forde,” 251 (quote); Day Book, 1785–1791, R&F; Daniel Hodge to Reed & Forde, 29 May, 11 June, 7 August, and 10 September 1789; James Jones to Reed & Forde, 5 October 1789; Thomas Dunsford to Reed & Forde, 19 July 1790; Standish Forde to John Reed, 5 December 1791, all in Correspondence, R&F; Ship Records, Ulali, R&F; Linda K. Salvucci, “Atlantic Intersections: Early American Commerce and the Rise of the Spanish West Indies (Cuba),” Business History Review 79, no. 4 (Winter 2005), 781–809.
37. 36.  Alexander, “Daniel Clark,” 241–45; Coxe & Clark to Reed & Forde, 6 March 1793, and Daniel Clark, Jr. to Reed & Forde, 16 March 1793, R&F.
38. 37.  Whitaker, “Reed and Forde,” 255–60 (Reed & Forde quote 255).
39. 38.  Whitaker, The Mississippi Question, 142, and Kim M. Gruenwald, River of Enterprise: The Commercial Origins of Regional Identity in the Ohio Valley, 1790–1850 (Indiana University Press, 2002).
40. 39.  Savelle, George Morgan, 234–35; Standish Forde Memo, April 26, 1806, box 10, R&F.
41. 40.  Christopher Morris, The Big Muddy: An Environmental History of the Mississippi and Its Peoples from Hernando de Soto to Hurricane Katrina (Oxford University Press, 2012); and Nelson, Muddy Ground.
42. 41.  Horsman, Frontier in the Formative Years; Malcolm J. Rohrbough, The Trans-Appalachian Frontier: Peoples, Societies, and Institutions, 1775–1850 (Oxford University Press, 1978).