Smuggler Nation (21 page)

But even though alcohol provided fuel for the fur trade, its negative repercussions inspired prohibitions dating back to the early colonial period.
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We therefore need to briefly return to this earlier era as the starting point of our story. The settlers in the British colonies were
exceptionally heavy drinkers by today’s standards, with rum and its various concoctions the drink of choice. According to one estimate, by 1770 each colonist imbibed an average of three pints of alcohol per week—the equivalent of about seven shots per day.
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Extending such heavy drinking to Native American communities with no previous exposure to alcohol had devastating consequences. It also greatly alarmed white colonists. “It was not the amount Indians drank that concerned colonists, it was the way they behaved when they drank,” explains historian Peter Mancall.
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“The most noteworthy aspect of Indian drinking styles, and the feature that most often caught the attention of colonial observers, was Indians’ insistence on drinking to the point of intoxication.”
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Other alcohol researchers have pointed to the widespread Indian drinking pattern of “maximal dosing” that exhausts available alcohol supplies in the absence of social controls.
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Such bouts of binge drinking reinforced white stereotypes of Indians as out-of-control “savages,” morally deficient, and racially inferior. It also ignited intense fear and anxiety. Terror-stricken by the specter of bands of inebriated natives running wild through white settlements, legislatures in almost all the American colonies at various points banned the selling of alcohol to Indians.
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British General Jeffrey Amherst also attempted to prohibit alcohol sales to Indians in the west during the Seven Years War and its aftermath. When Pontiac launched an unsuccessful attack on the British fort at Detroit in 1763, the commander of the British troops, Major Henry Gladwin, advised Amherst that the most effective reprisal would be to lift the alcohol ban: “[I]f yr. Excellency still intends to punish them further for their barbarities, it might easily be done without any expense to the Crown, by permitting a free sale of rum, which will destroy them more effectually than fire and sword.”
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Later, an English trader paid an Indian from the Peoria tribe a barrel of rum to kill Pontiac.
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Colonial efforts to restrict the Indian alcohol trade met stiff merchant resistance. In March 1764, seventy-two Albany fur traders sent a petition to the Lords of Trade in London requesting that they allow them to trade freely and to reject the prohibitionist pleas of Iroquois tribal leaders. They argued that “other Tribes with whom your Petitioners carry on a far more considerable Trade, look upon such a Prohibition as the greatest Indignity, and as an encroachment on their liberty to
trade.” They also warned that cutting off the alcohol supply would devastate the fur trade: “[W]hen the Indians have nothing farther to provide for than bare necessities, a very small quantity of Furs in Trade will abundantly supply that defect, Whereas when the Vent of Liquors is allow’d amongst them, it spurs them on to an unwaried application in hunting in order to supply the Trading Places with Furs and Skins in Exchange for Liquors.”
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Some British officials were persuaded by such blunt economic arguments, well aware of the growing importance of the fur trade for imperial commercial interests in North America. Sir William Johnson, superintendent of Indian affairs, commented, “With regard to the sale of Rum … the [fur] Trade will never be so Extensive without it.” Without the liquor trade, “the Indians can purchase their cloathing with half the quantity of Skins, which will make them Indolent, and lessen the furr Trade.”
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In 1770, Johnson reported that fur traders brought with them little else to trade other than alcohol “because the profits upon it are so considerable.”
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Indian leaders, unable to curtail rampant alcohol abuse in their tribes, often made appeals to the colonists to cut the supply. As a Shawnee spokesman declared in July 1771, “It is You that make the Liquor, and to you we must look to Stop it.”
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Colonial authorities often replied that they could impose laws but do little to actually enforce them. As the governor of Pennsylvania told a group of Indians in 1722, “The sale of Rum shall be prohibited..., but the Woods are so thick & dark we cannot see what is done in them.”
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Presiding over negotiations between provincial officials and Iroquois leaders in Philadelphia in 1736, James Logan commented: “The Traders of all Nations find the Indians are so universally fond of Rum, that they will not deal without it.” He added, “We have made many Laws against carrying it … but the Woods have no Streets like Philadelphia, the Paths in them are endless, & they cannot be stopt.”
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Beyond sustaining the lucrative fur trade, rum also helped induce Indians to negotiate and sign treaties. In his
Autobiography
, Benjamin Franklin recounted how he and his fellow negotiators used rum as a diplomatic tool in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1753, enticing Indians to sign a treaty by promising to reward them with plenty of rum at the conclusion of the talks.
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Similarly, George Cadagan informed South
Carolina Governor James Glen in March 1751 that supplying rum was essential to getting Indians to the negotiating table, noting that it was “impossible for me or any other without Rum to be very useful on such Occasions.”
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So even as colonial authorities passed laws against the selling of alcohol to Indians, alcohol was also strategically used in negotiations with them.

“Rum was a potent ethnic cleanser,” Ian Williams notes in tracing the history of rum in early America. “It was not just the effect of alcohol and binge drinking on the individuals, their families, and their societies that prepared for the spread of European settlement; by tying the Indians into the transatlantic trading system, rum helped transform and destroy their subsistence economies. It lubricated the move of the colonists westward and across the Appalachians.”
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Colonial leaders were well aware of the lethal effects of the illicit rum trade in Indian country, as evident in this startling passage from Benjamin Franklin’s
Autobiography
: “… if it be the Design of Providence to extirpate these Savages in order to make room for Cultivators of the Earth, it seems not improbable that Rum may be the appointed means. It has already annihilated all the Tribes who formally inhabited the Sea-Coast.”
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Whiskey and Westward Expansion in the Nineteenth Century

Rum was displaced by whiskey as the drink of choice in the aftermath of the American Revolution, a shift in drinking habits reinforced and accelerated by the logistical challenges of westward expansion. As historians Mark Edward Lender and James Kirby Martin point out, “Both molasses and finished rum were too bulky and expensive to ship far inland, and as the eighteenth-century settlement line advanced, frontiersmen shifted their loyalties to grain whiskeys. Indeed, whiskey was particularly suited to the frontier. Grain was plentiful … and a single bushel of surplus corn, for example, yielded three gallons of whiskey. This assured a plentiful liquor supply for Westerners and gave them a marketable commodity, which both kept longer and was easier to transport to market than grain.”
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As a commodity and form of currency, whiskey had ideal properties: it was high value relative to weight, non-perishable, and could be watered down for even greater profits. And
last but not least, quick and addictive consumption created its own demand for more supply.

Just as authorities in the colonial era attempted to impose controls on the sale of alcohol to Indians, so too did the nascent federal government—with equally poor results. Beginning with the Trade and Intercourse Act of 1802, Congress authorized the president to restrict the “vending or distribution of spirituous liquors to Indians,” and this was amended in 1822 to allow for greater search and confiscation of alcohol in Indian country.
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The federal ban was further tightened in 1832 and 1834 and again in 1847.
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Territorial laws restricting alcohol sales to Indians also proliferated in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, from Illinois and Michigan down to Louisiana and Mississippi.
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Alcohol policy was increasingly restrictive on paper, but enforcement was anemic and had little effect in curtailing supplies. Indeed, as historian William Unrau documents, “the more restrictive Indian prohibition became … the greater the amount of alcohol consumed by Indians.”
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Federal Indian agents were almost routinely reporting that “illicit alcohol was destroying the tribes more rapidly than gunpowder or the advance of white yeomen with the plow.”
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Not only was there limited capacity to police the alcohol trade in the country’s vast and remote frontier regions, but there was also little political will to prioritize the problem, reflected in the minimalist fines and penalties imposed in cases where there were actual convictions. There was no broad societal outcry about the devastating impact of alcohol on Indian tribes; the nation’s burgeoning temperance movement was primarily based in the East and urban in focus. Lethargic enforcement on the remote western frontier went largely unnoticed despite the occasional complaints by high-minded officials and calls on the part of missionaries for abstinence.

Illicit alcohol continued to be the most important lubricant for the Indian trade, and supplies grew rapidly in the first half of the nineteenth century as white traders and settlers extended their westward march. “The farther west the white man proceeded,” notes Unrau, “the more alcohol figured as a necessary staple in both private and government relations with the Indians.”
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Even as alcohol smuggling violated federal law and frustrated what little enforcement existed, it ultimately
contributed to the larger government objective of pacifying native populations and enlarging the area of white settlement. The alcohol trade prohibitions nevertheless allowed the government to formally express disapproval of the commerce while largely turning a blind eye to those who engaged in it—often including its own frontier agents. Indeed, there were reports of Indians purchasing alcohol at military outposts throughout the West.
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The intensely competitive nature of the fur trade created a powerful added incentive to sell alcohol in defiance of government laws. Traders used alcohol to gain the upper hand or at least keep up with competitors. Fur traders were especially reluctant to give up selling alcohol, given that there were no assurances competitors would do the same. This meant that regardless of its legal status alcohol was an “indispensable” trade item.
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As Colonel J. Snelling, the commander at the Detroit garrison, wrote to the secretary of war in August 1825, “He who has the most whisky, generally carries off the most furs.”
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Similarly, a contemporary fur trader and liquor smuggler on the Upper Missouri wrote in his memoir, “It must be remembered that liquor, at that early day, was the principal and most profitable article of trade, although it was strictly prohibited by law.”
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Fur traders relied on all sorts of creative evasive maneuvers to get around the alcohol ban. Superintendent of Indian Affairs Thomas L. McKenney reported in February 1826 that “the forbidden and destructive article is considered so essential to a lucrative commerce, as not only to still those feelings [of revulsion] but to lead the traders to brave the most imminent hazards, and evade, by various methods, the threatened penalties of the law.”
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Some smugglers transported flat kegs overland by pack mule rather than by boat to avoid river inspection stations. Others camouflaged their illicit liquid cargo within containers for licit goods, such as flour barrels, that would likely be overlooked by a superficial inspection. A favorite ploy was to obtain a license from the Indian Office for fur company boatmen to carry a daily supply of alcohol officially for their own personal use. This boatman allowance was easily abused and impossible to supervise. In a particularly blatant case in 1832, the fur trader William Sublette was granted a permit for 450 gallons of whiskey when in fact he traveled overland and his “boatmen” were entirely fictional. St. Louis Superintendent Lewis Clark reported
to officials in Washington that the profits from illicit sales are so great that “very little of the liquor taken to the Indian country is actually used by the boatmen.”
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The most glaring and exploited loophole in the federal prohibition was that the law did not technically cover selling alcohol to Indians in non–Indian designated country. Consequently, whiskey vendors would set up shop just outside of Indian lands. In an 1847 letter to the governors of Missouri, Arkansas, and Iowa, Secretary of War William L. Marcy asked for their help in dismantling the whiskey traffic: “The most stringent laws have been passed by Congress for this purpose, but as these are operative only in Indian country, they fail to reach the most prolific source of this great evil, which is within the limits of the States adjoining our Indian territory.”
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Indian Agent John Beach reported to his superiors in 1832 that along the Wisconsin-Iowa frontier “two-thirds of the frontier population was engaged in trading with the Indians with whiskey as the bait.”
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Another loophole was that the law technically covered only non-Indians selling alcohol to Indians, creating an opening and incentive for Indians to enter the illicit trade as middlemen. According to Unrau, “Indians selling to Indians was the most convenient and profitable way for non-Indian suppliers outside of Indian country to evade the law.”
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