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. [Footnote: Cf. Babcock, Am. Nationality (Am. Nation, XIII.), chap. x.] Taught by this experience, the United States, at the close of the war, passed laws excluding aliens from conducting the Indian trade, and erected forts at Green Bay, Prairie du Chien, Chicago, and Fort Snelling. By order of Secretary of War Calhoun, Governor Cass, of Michigan, made an expedition in 1820 along the south shore of Lake Superior into Minnesota, to compel the removal of English flags and to replace British by American influence. [Footnote: Schoolcraft, Hist, of Indian Tribes, VI., 422; ibid., Narrative Journal; "Doty's Journal," in Wis. Hist. Soc., Collections, XIII., 163.] At the same time, an expedition under Major Long visited the upper waters of the Minnesota River on a similar errand. [Footnote: Keating, Long's Expedition.] An agent who was sent by the government to investigate the Indian conditions of this region in 1820, recommended that the country now included in Wisconsin, northern Michigan, and part of Minnesota should be an Indian reservation, from which white settlements should be excluded, with the idea that ultimately the Indian population should be organized as a state of the Union. [Footnote: Morse, Report on Indian Affairs in 1820.]
The Creeks and Cherokees, Choctaws, and Chickasaws of the Gulf region were more advanced towards civilization than the Indians of the northwest. While the latter lived chiefly by hunting and trapping, the southwestern Indians had developed a considerable agriculture and a sedentary life. For that very reason, however, they were the more obnoxious to the pioneers who pressed upon their territory from all sides; and, as we shall see, strenuous efforts were made to remove them beyond the Mississippi.