"Goods to clothe themselves": native consumers, native images on the Pennsylvania trading frontier, 1712-1730
Date
2004
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
One of William Penn’s first orders to James Logan, his provincial secretary, was to obtain some of Albany’s Native fur and deerskin market. Logan quickly became a major force in Pennsylvania’s Native trade, laboring to obtain goods Native customers would buy. His account and letter books document the nature and scope of his market and the network of traders he extended from Philadelphia to the eastern Ohio River Valley ☐ This paper utilizes Logan’s accounts and the archaeological record from Conestoga Town, one of the largest eighteenth-century trading and treaty towns on the Pennsylvania frontier, to investigate the place of European trade cloth in Native lives. This paper fills several gaps in Indian trade literature. European acquisition of furs and skins dominated the literature to date. Cloth and manufactured clothing played a much larger role in the economic and diplomatic worlds of frontier Pennsylvania than previously indicated. ☐ As active consumers in one of the most lucrative trans-Atlantic economic systems, Natives demanded high quality, traditionally equivalent materials for their use. This paper explores Native acquisition of European textiles and items of adornment, how they used them to create particular physical identities contingent upon context, and how the trade in cloth created and reinforced relationships between Natives and Europeans.