l6 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 9/ 



first began to reach his area. The discovery of such materials may 

 offer an opportunity to determine approximately the time of occu- 

 pancy of the sites or levels in which they occurred. Sometimes it is 

 possible to identify beads or other trinkets with types known to have 

 been made at certain stated periods in Europe. There are, of course, 

 limitations to the method, and it must be used with due caution. Such 

 objects as glass beads, copper bells or ornaments, and other small 

 trinkets may have, and probably very often did, spread from village to 

 village and from tribe to tribe, wholly independent of the trader 

 after their original acquisition by the natives. They might thus 

 precede the white man by several years. Also it is possible that the 

 earliest traders left no written records, or that such as they may have 

 left were lost or for other reasons remain unknown today. Still, 

 where trade goods occur in small but consistent amounts in several 

 related and neighboring sites, it seems reasonable to believe that a 

 steady and direct, if perhaps limited, traffic had been established, and 

 that historical records may offer valid clues as to the approximate time 

 involved. It is theoretically possible that stray pieces reached the 

 central Plains indirectly from New Mexico through the expeditions 

 of Coronado (1541), Bonilla and Humana (1594), Ofiate (1601), and 

 others, or as a result of raids against the Spanish settlements or their 

 Apache and puebloan proteges. These, however, must have been 

 of minor consequence. As a matter of fact, the Spaniards credit the 

 rival French from Canada with introducing firearms, metal kettles, 

 axes, and the like to the Pawnee," but it is not certain just how early 

 this trade began. The first Frenchman to penetrate the region west 

 and south of the Great Lakes is generally believed to have been 

 Nicolet, who in 1634 visited the Winnebago and Illinois in what is 

 now southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois.'" Owing to the 

 hostility of the Iroquois and for other reasons, this voyage of explora- 

 tion was not immediately followed up. It seems extremely doubtful 

 that there was any appreciable commerce with tribes west of the 

 Missouri prior to about 1650. By 1680 the Spanish had reports of 

 French trade goods among the Pawnee on the Platte and in 1706 

 their Apache allies killed a French couple somewhere in what is now 

 northeastern Colorado. All this leads to the inference that regular 

 trade was established in the central Plains region sometime between 

 1650 and 1700. It is worth noting that from the first the Spanish 

 records relating to French activities in this area uniformly link with 



^"Thomas, 1935, pp. I2ff. 

 ^Butterfield, 1881. 



