274 TRANSACTIONS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. [ Vou. III. 
in favour of George Forsyth who has treated me with the greatest 
kindness and is ready to serve me in anything I should ask. I have had 
several offers by my two old employers to leave Niagara and live with 
them in Canada, but I believe I shall continue here which I prefer to 
Canada, the popular place where everything is carried on with the great- 
est gaiety, and this is a place which you may say is almost out of the 
world, in the woods, and frequented by nothing but Indians except the 
people of the garrison. . . . . At this place is carried on a great 
business which consumes every year 430,000 sterling worth of merchan- 
dise of all sorts which is mostly retailed to the Indians. We employ four 
clerks of which I am the senior. [or the first two years my salary was 
but small, but I have now (and I flatter myself that there is not a clerk 
in these parts that has so much) about fifty guineas per annum, being 
found food and washing. By carrying ona correspondence with my 
friend Mr. Cruikshank who supplies me with silver work, such as the 
Indians wear, which I dispose of to the merchants in the upper country, 
and the profit arising therefrom is sufficient to find me in clothes.” 
In 1767, Sir William Johnson reported the presence of unlicensed 
traders at Toronto, but it seems to have been abandoned altogether as the 
trading-station soon afterwards. Even the trail leading to Lake Simcoe 
was little used, and the Trent valley route became almost forgotten. 
Benjamin Frobisher said in 1785:—“I have seen several persons who 
have gone from hence (Montreal) to Lake Huron by the carrying place 
of Toronto, but have only met with one who set out from the Bay of 
Kentie and that so far back as the year 1761 and the knowledge he seems 
to have of the country he travelled through I consider very imperfect.” 
The commerce of Oswego had steadily declined since the conquest. 
Instead of forty or fifty traders as in 1750, but one named Parlow 
remained in the summer of 1779. His property was pillaged and his 
buildings burnt by a party of Americans and Indians sent for that 
purpose from Fort Stanwix and he then took shelter in the small fort 
recently built on Carleton Island. Other traders followed him there and 
for a few years a fair trade was carried on with the neighboring Indians. 
The continuance of the war occasioned everywhere an enormous rise in 
prices and a great scarcity of imported goods. 
The scarcity of coin and in fact of any medium of exchange probably - 
accrued to the benefit of the traders. Gold, silver, and even copper 
coins of most Euopean countries passed current. In addition to the 
ordinary French and English pieces, Spanish moidores, pistareens, 
pistoles, and dollars, the Johannes of Portugal and Caroline of Germany 
were in common circulation. 
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