The trouble was, however, that thousands of Indians got
no brandy at all, while a relatively small number obtained too much
of it. What they got, moreover, was poor stuff, most of it, and well
diluted with water. The Indian drank to get drunk, and when brandy
constituted the other end of the bargain he would give for it the very
furs off his back.
But if the Jesuits exaggerated the amount of brandy used in the trade,
they did not exaggerate its demoralizing effect upon both the Indian
and the trader. They believed that brandy would wreck the Indian's
body and ruin his soul. They were right; it did both. It made of every
western post, in the words of Father Carheil, a den of "brutality and
violence, of injustice and impiety, of lewd and shameless conduct, of
contempt and insults." No sinister motives need be sought to explain
the bitterness with which the blackrobes cried out against the
iniquities of a system which swindled the redskin out of his furs and
debauched him into the bargain. Had the Jesuits done otherwise
than fight it from first to last they would have been false to the
traditions of their Church and their Order. They were, when all is
said and done, the truest friends that the North American Indian has
ever had.
The effects of the fur trade upon both Indians and French were
far-reaching. The trade changed the red man's order of life, took him
in a single generation from the stone to the iron age, demolished his
old notions of the world, carried him on long journeys, and made him a
different man.
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