Se-quo-yah first exercised his genius in making an improved kind of wooden milk-pans and skimmers for his mother.  Then he built her a milk-house, with all suitable conveniences, on one of those grand springs that gurgle from the mountains of the old Cherokee Nation.  As a climax, he even helped her to milk her cows; and he cleared additions to her fields, and worked on them with her.  She contrived to get a petty stock of goods, and traded with her countrymen.  She taught Se-quo-yah to be a good judge of furs.  He would go on expeditions with the hunters, and would select such skins as he wanted for his mother before they returned.  In his boyish days the buffalo still lingered in the valleys of the Ohio and Tennessee.  On the one side the French sought them.  On the other were the English and Spaniards.  These he visited with small pack-horse trains for his mother.

For the first hundred years the European colonies were of traders rather than agriculturists.  Besides the fur trade, rearing horses and cattle occupied their attention.  The Indians east of the Mississippi, and lying between the Appallachian Mountains and the Gulf, had been agriculturists and fishermen.  Buccaneers, pirates, and even the regular navies or merchant ships of Europe, drove the natives from the haunted coast.  As they fell back, fur traders and merchants followed them with professions of regard and extortionate prices.  Articles of European manufacture—­knives, hatchets, needles, bright cloths, paints, guns, powder—­could only be bought with furs.  The Indian mother sighed in her hut for the beautiful things brought by the Europeans.  The warrior of the Southwest saw with terror the conquering Iroquois, armed with the dreaded fire-arms of the stranger.  When the bow was laid aside, or handed to the boys of the tribe, the warriors became the abject slaves of traders.  Guns meant gunpowder and lead.  These could only come from the white man.  His avarice guarded the steps alike to bear-meat and beaver-skins.  Thus the Indian became a wandering hunter, helpless and dependent.  These hunters traveled great distances, sometimes with a pack on their backs weighing from thirty to fifty pounds.  Until the middle of the eighteenth century horses had not become very common among them, and the old Indian used to laugh at the white man, so lazy that he could not walk.  A consuming fire was preying on the vitals of an ancient simple people.  Unscrupulous traders, who boasted that they made a thousand per cent, held them in the most abject thrall.  It has been carefully computed that these hunters worked, on an average, for ten cents a day.  The power of their old village chiefs grow weaker.  No longer the old men taught the boys their traditions, morals, or religion.  They had ceased to be pagans, without becoming Christians.