Nationality (Am. Nation, XIII.), chap. xv.]

A survey of the characteristics of the life of the far west shows
that, over Wisconsin and the larger part of Michigan, the Indian
trade was still carried on by methods introduced by the French.
[Footnote: Masson, Le Bourgeois de Nordwest; Parkman. Old Regime.]
Aster's American Fur Company practically controlled the trade of
Wisconsin and Michigan. It shipped its guns and ammunition,
blankets, gewgaws, and whiskey from Mackinac to some one of the
principal posts, where they were placed in the light birch canoes,
manned by French boatmen, and sent throughout the forests to the
minor trading-posts. Practically all of the Indian villages of the
tributaries of the Great Lakes and of the upper Mississippi were
regularly visited by the trader. The trading-posts became the nuclei
of later settlements; the traders' trails grew into the early roads,
and their portages marked out the location for canals. Little by
little the fur-trade was undermining the Indian society and paving
the way for the entrance of civilization. [Footnote: Turner,
Character and Influence of the Fur Trade in Wis., in Wis. Hist.
Soc., Transactions, 1889.]

In the War of 1812, all along the frontier of Indiana, Illinois, and
Missouri, as well as in the southwest, the settlers had drawn back
into forts, much as in the early days of the occupation of Kentucky
and Tennessee, and the traders and the Indians had been entirely
under the influence of Great Britain. In the negotiations at Ghent,
that power, having captured the American forts at Mackinac, Prairie
du Chien, and Chicago, tried to incorporate in the treaty a
provision for a neutral belt, or buffer state, of Indian territory
in the northwest, to separate Canada from the United States.