Together with his brother-in-law William Trent, and Andrew Montour, Barney Curran and John Fraser, Croghan controlled fort-like storehouses about the forks of the Ohio, up the Allegheny and the Youghiogheny, on the south shore of Lake Erie, at the forks of the Muskingum, and even on the Scioto and Miami Rivers. From these trading posts, all of which developed into rude settlements of sorts, the Pennsylvanians distributed rum, gunpowder, lead and flints, as well as calicoes, ribbons, colored stockings, kettles, axes, bells, whistles and looking-glasses. In return, they collected a fine variety of pelts and skins--beaver, raccoon, otter, muskrat, mink, fisher, fox, deer, elk, and bear. Croghan’s pack traders, at times possibly numbering twenty-five men and driving a hundred or more mules altogether, followed the Ohio down to the falls and worked the streams that fed it. They were trading and fighting in what is now West Virginia and eastern Kentucky almost a quarter of a century before Daniel Boone. They bartered under the very guns of French forts, engaging in bloody skirmishes with the French and Indians and on occasion being taken as captives to Montreal and even to France. Croghan had his English competitors too. There were, for instance, the five Lowrey brothers, as aggressive and as rugged a lot of rivals as might have been found on any fur frontier. But all the Pennsylvanians were as one in their persistent encroachment on the French. Backed by factors in Philadelphia and Lancaster, including Shippen and Lawrence and the firm of Levy, Franks and Simon, both of which specialized in the Indian trade and in turn received credit from wealthy merchants of London and Bristol, these intrepid frontiersmen stubbornly picked away at the French trade. In one respect the Englishmen were fortunate. During King George’s War the French had trouble getting sufficient trade goods, and many Indians with whom they had been trading became contemptuous of them. It is said that, on one occasion, when a Frenchman only offered a single charge of powder for a beaver skin, the Indian with whom he was bartering “took up his Hatchet, and knock’d him on the head, and killed him upon the Spot.” Croghan and his Pennsylvanians took full advantage of the temporary French embarrassment, building up their annual business in pelts to a value of some 40,000 pounds sterling. It was the prospect of a share in this lucrative trade that motivated some wealthy Virginians, among them Thomas Lee and the Washingtons, who conceived the Ohio Company after the Treaty of Lancaster. While acting as a vehicle to establish England’s claim west of the mountains, the company as it was finally organized promised future dividends from land development in those parts. But there was the immediate prospect of rich gains from the fur trade, and little time was lost in lining up experienced Indian traders for the project.