User:Issybooks/sandbox

The British Indian Trade in Southern U.S.

One of the most important names in the history of the area in which I live, Aiken, S.C., which is just about fifteen miles from the Georgia border. Indians and Indian Traders were very important to the early history here, and I made myself the primary student concerning George Galphin, who was noted as one of the primary Indian Traders, living here in this area from 1737 when he came from Antrim in North Ireland to work as a trader for the firm Rae and Brown. He built the first real brick house in this area at Silver Bluff on the Savannah River. He lived there until his death in 1780, during the Revolutionary War. Back in the old country he left a wife, a widowed mother, four living sisteers and a brother, as listed on estate papers filed by his mother, Barbara Rankin Galphin, after his father, Thomas' death in 1734. An employs of the Rae family in Ireland, he was sent to Charles Town, South Carolina to join their prestigious company there because he was a very talented and intelligence young man, as well as being noted for his great honesty. Free of family, free of Europen, Galphin was ready to anything necessary to build his own fortune. In American he knew he was freer that a man could be anywhere else in the world. Charles Town bustled with boat traffie from ports around the world all coming to trade in this, the most properous in all of the British Colonies anywhere. That lively traffic consisted of every kind of boat, and every size. Sailboats, flatboats made of logs and stacked high with cut boards, and barrels of turpentine, large and small pirogues bearing bundles of deer hides. And even live merchandise, slaves Africa.