Let us therefore pay a moment's homage here to the trader, who first--to borrow a phrase from Indian speech--made white for peace the red trails of war.
He was the first cattleman of the Old Southwest.

Fifty years before John Findlay, * one of this class of pioneers, led Daniel Boone through Cumberland Gap, the trader's bands of horses roamed the western slopes of the Appalachian Mountains and his cattle grazed among the deer on the green banks of the old Cherokee (Tennessee) River.

He was the pioneer settler beyond the high hills; for he built, in the center of the Indian towns, the first white man's cabin--with its larger annex, the trading house--and dwelt there during the greater part of the year.

He was America's first magnate of international commerce.

His furs--for which he paid in guns, knives, ammunition, vermilion paint, mirrors, and cloth--lined kings' mantles, and hatted the Lords of Trade as they strode to their council chamber in London to discuss his business and to pass those regulations which might have seriously hampered him but for his resourcefulness in circumventing them! * The name is spelled in various ways: Findlay, Finlay, Findley.
He was the first frontier warrior, for he either fought off or fell before small parties of hostile Indians who, in the interest of the Spanish or French, raided his pack-horse caravans on the march.