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Merchant Representatives and the French River World, 1763–1803
by
Robert Englebert
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The French empire in North America came to an abrupt end with the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1763.1 With the "scratch of a pen," as Colin G. Calloway has explained it, the map of North America was drastically altered.2 New France and the Illinois Country on the east side of the Mississippi River became British territory, and the Spanish took possession of the west side of the Mississippi and New Orleans. These were the first in a series of changes that would dramatically transform North America's geopolitical landscape in the years between 1763 and 1803. The Royal Proclamation, the Quebec Act, the American Revolution, Jay's Treaty, and the Louisiana Purchase led to a continual redrawing of territorial boundaries and various attempts to control these new borders. However, as Calloway notes, "Imperial politics did not always or immediately alter existing social realities. On the peripheries of empire, many of the same people continued business as usual."3 |
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The social reality on the ground was slow to change, and French settlements continued much as they had before—tied together by a commercial system of traders and merchants traveling along the waterways of North America to form what was in essence a French river world. For an entire generation, the numbers of Spanish, British, and Anglo-Americans in the heart of North America remained modest. By the time of the Lewis and Clark expedition (1803), however, the territories west of the Mississippi had begun to enter the mainstream of American consciousness, which ushered in a new era of American western expansion. The expedition was a precursor to the waves of western migration that eventually flooded the interior of North America. In the face of these changes, the French river world was notably pliant, adapting and transforming itself as needed. Many of the social and commercial linkages that defined the French river world persisted into the 1830s, buoyed by the hundreds of French Canadian voyageurs who were hired by the American Fur Company of St. Louis.4 Because the French river world sustained a remarkable continuity of social and commercial exchanges on the ground, it took nearly a century for it to come apart. One might argue that the French river world was far more resilient than the official geopolitical French Empire in North America ever had been. |
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