'Goods to clothe themselves': Native consumers, Native images on the Pennsylvania trading frontier, 1712--1730

One of William Penn's first orders to James Logan, his provincial secretary, was to obtain some of Albany's Native fur and deerskin market. Logan quickly became a major force in Pennsylvania's Native trade. His account and letter books document the nature and scope of his market and a wide network of frontier traders. This paper investigates the place of European trade cloth in Native lives, filling several gaps in Indian trade literature. Cloth and manufactured clothing played a much larger role in the economic and diplomatic worlds of frontier Pennsylvania than previously indicated. As active consumers in a lucrative trans-Atlantic economic system, Natives demanded high quality, traditionally equivalent materials for their use. This paper explores Native acquisition of European textiles and items of adornment, how they used them to create particular physical identities contingent upon context, and how the trade in cloth created and reinforced relationships between Natives and Europeans.