John Forbes and Company
Creek and Seminole Indians ceded large tracts of land to the firm as payments for their debts, and the Spanish governor ratified the title.
[4] Genealogical records suggest that John Forbes, though never married, had children with a widow in Mobile, Alabama, named Marie Isabelle Narbonne.
[6] Thomas Forbes, the older brother, probably arrived in Charles Town, South Carolina before the American Revolution and began meeting his future trading partners of Panton, Leslie and Company.
John Gordon and Company hired William Panton as a clerk in 1765 while importing goods from Europe that were sold to colonists and traded with the Cherokee and Creek (Muscogee) nations that controlled land west and south of the Southern colonies.
Another future partner and fellow Scotsman, John Leslie, began trading in the Charleston area before 1779, but primarily did business in East Florida.
[10] All of the partners of Panton, Leslie and Company were Scots who remained steadfast loyalists (referred to in the colonies as "Tories") during the Revolutionary War.
Owing to the hazards of staying in the rebelling colonies, in 1776 the partners moved to St. Augustine, Florida, which remained a haven for loyalists until the British government transferred the territory back to Spain in 1783 Peace of Paris.
When the Revolutionary War concluded, the British government transferred East and West Florida (which was under de facto Spanish control) to Spain.
The new governors viewed the Indian trade as a key element in controlling the territory, and soon learned that the Creeks in particular preferred to deal with Panton, Leslie and Company.
The son of a Scotsman, Lachlan McGillivray, and half-Creek woman named Sehoy Marchand of the Wind clan, Alexander studied in Charleston before the Revolutionary War and worked in a Savannah-based mercantile house.
Because Patriot troops had confiscated his lands in Georgia, he remained loyal to Britain, and came to favor trade with Panton, Leslie and Company.
Hides and furs brought in by the Indians were exchanged for woolen goods, cotton and linen cloth, handkerchiefs, leather shoes, saddles and bridles, rifles and muskets, gun flints, bullets, brass and tin kettles, axes, metal pots and pans, scissors, fishhooks, tobacco and pipes.
None of the tribes had developed the ability to manufacture cloth, iron goods, or glass, and firearms became essential not only for procuring deer hides but also for defending tribal lands against rivals and settlers from the American colonies.
All of the southeastern Indians became dependent on manufactured goods, and traditional crafts such as the ability to fashion stone-tipped knives and arrows diminished.
Like the Cherokee, Creeks took on many practices of European culture, including stable village life with agriculture based on corn, beans, squash, melons and cotton supplemented by raising cattle and hogs.
[1] During the same period, partners in Florida including John and James Innerarity, interpreter William Hambly and others sought payment from the Indians for bad debts.
Spanish authorities, including governor Vicente Folch, defended the company's duty-free status as a way of preventing incursions from American fur traders.
[21] Even after his negotiations on behalf of the United States, John Forbes insisted that the Lower Creeks and Seminoles owed his company a large debt due to their participation with William Augustus Bowles in two robberies of the trading post on the Wakulla River in 1792 and 1800.
The company had also issued credit to members of several tribes, including Creeks, Choctaws and Chickasaws, and claimed a total of over $192,000 was due to be repaid.
Meanwhile, his partners, James and John Innerarity and William Hambly, negotiated with 24 Creek and Seminole chiefs for land cessions as payment.
It contained over 1.4 million acres that ran from the barrier islands of Apalachicola Bay to the Upper Sweetwater Creek in present-day Liberty and Leon Counties.
The trading post included a building for storing hides, quarters for Negro slaves, and a cow pen for several hundred cattle that were raised nearby.
Probably foreseeing that Spain and the United States would negotiate a treaty that would jeopardize his claims, he sold the property to two merchants named Carnochan and Mitchel in 1817.
[28] In December, 1817, John Forbes sold most of the lands his company had acquired east of the Apalachicola River for $66,666 to two merchants from Savannah and Cuba named Richard Carnochan and Colin Mitchel.
[29] The lands of the Forbes Purchase were conveyed to Carnochan and Mitchel in the same year that John Quincy Adams and Luis de Onís began negotiating terms under which Spain ceded Florida to the United States.
[3] The first American settlers who moved into the territorial Florida Panhandle occupied what they considered unclaimed public land, but often was part of the Forbes grant.
The partners laid out a settlement called Colinton near their former trading post several miles north on the river, but most newcomers bypassed the town and built homes near the customs house at West Point.
Immediately after the favorable decision, the company hired Asa Hartfield to survey the area in an attempt to provide documentation that could validate land titles.
