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The President also believed "there is no method more irresistable of obtaining lands" from the Indians "than by letting them get in debt [at factories] which when too heavy to be paid, they are always willing to lop off by a cession of land." (2) Understandably, Jefferson did not publicly reveal the last motive (3).
Like the objectives of the federal-Indian trade, the laws regulating it were complicated. Factors and agents performed different duties unless factors were designated to act in both capacities (4). Agents distributed annuities to tribes and arranged treaties. And they issued trading licenses as did other governmental officials. The government's frontier merchants complained about sanctioned competition and were irritated by the failure of agents and military personnel to stop unlicensed traders from entering the Indian country. These drawbacks seriously handicapped factor efforts to tie the Indians to the government and were instrumental in Congress' decision to close the government trading houses in the summer of 1822.
- Before the factory system ended, the government
had established thirty-one trading posts with the majority being located
along the Mississippi and its western tributaries.The one furtherest west
was Fort Osage, built in 1808 on the Missouri's southside near the present
Missouri-Kansas line. Others ranged from the Great Lakes as far south as
Alabama and Georgia.
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- 2. Thomas Jefferson to Secretary of War, Monticello, August 12, 1802, ibid., 60-61. Also see the
- letter of Jefferson's to Harrison previously cited. He termed it "private"and "unofficial." Ibid., 91.
- 3. American State Papers, Indian
Affairs , (2 vols., Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1832), I:685.
- 4. Edgar B. Wesley, Guarding the Frontier: A Study of Frontier Defense from 1815 to
- 1825 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1935), 31n. Hereafter cited as Wesley, Guarding
the Frontier. Agents
were assigned the additional duty of issuing presents to the Indians. Factors
did also even before 1811 when an act of that year
officially granted them that right as well as permission
to issue annuities. Agents, however, were the main distributors of both.
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