Oo-koo-koo, complacent in his own sagacity in having
detected a difference in the speech of the new-comers from the English
which he had been accustomed to hear in Charlestown, and animated by a
wish to believe, hearkened with the more credulity to an expansive
fiction detailed by the specious Irishman as to their mission here.
They were awaiting the coming of certain pettiaugres from New
Orleans,--a long journey by way of the Mississippi, the Ohio, the
Cherokee, and the Tennessee rivers,--with a cargo of French goods
cheaper than the English. They designed to establish a trading-post at
some convenient point, out of reach of the grasping British, and thus to
compete with the monopoly of the Cherokee commerce which the English
government sought to foster. And then, to furnish a leaven of truth to
this mass of lies, he detailed, with such a relish as only an Irishman
can feel in a happy incongruity, that the French, having no market in
old France for deerskins, the chief commodity of barter that the Indians
possessed, disposed of them to ships of the British colonies, from New
York and elsewhere, lured thus to New Orleans, in exchange for English
cloths and other British manufactures, which the French then
surreptitiously furnished to the Indians of the British alliance,
underselling them on every hand.
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