Pat Flannery wrote:



Alain Fournier wrote:

I don't think that was direct trade though; they'd trade with a tribe
who would trade with another tribe, who would....and soon, you'd have
materials thousands of miles from their point of origin.



They would (and still do) come from quite far away to meet in pow-wows

Yeah, but pre-horse, "quite far away" would probably mean 100 miles at
most. When your prime means of movement are foot and dog trellis you
move at around 3 mph tops, and that doesn't include sleep or eating,
which are going to take around half the day. So a journey of 100 miles
is going to take around 60 hours, and you can extrapolate from there. At
some point the amount of food you are going to have to carry with you
(you'll be able to supplement it some on the way via hunting and
gathering, but you wouldn't want to count on it) is going to get excessive.

If you are hunting and gathering at home it doesn't make much difference
doing it on the road, so yes you can count on that for your food.
Pre-horse, travel wasn't limited to walking. Canoes are quite old.
It doesn't go faster than walking (faster going down the river
slower going up) but you can carry heavier loads, which is important
if you want to trade. The big pow-wows were held about once a
decade, and they could take months to get there, they did travel
from quite far away, but ... (see below)

After the horse arrived on the scene, maybe 300 miles at most. We had a
meeting site for tribes here in Jamestown at the junction of the James
and Pipestem rivers- I get the feeling that most of the tribes that met
here came from a radius of around 100 miles, if even that.

I remember learning the information I wrote above at the National
Museum of Civilization in Ottawa. I think, I remember that those
pow-wows were held pre-Columbus but I'm not sure about the time
frame. Maybe the big ones were only after the introduction of the
horse.

Alain Fournier