’sang

Digging ginseng for sale to China being one of the few ways Appalachian residents have of making a little cash money off the land, I was interested to learn that Daniel Boone was one of the first Kentuckians to try to exploit this particular natural resource.

Here, from Frontiersman. Daniel Boone and the Making of America (LSU Press, 2008), is what Meredith Mason Brown has to say about the ginseng trade in the late 17^th century:

Boone’s ginseng efforts [in 1787-1788] reflected that Kentucky, though on America’s western frontier, was part of a global economy. The Chinese treasured ginseng, which was believed to increase mental activity and potency—perhaps because its forked root, to one possessed of a strong imagination, looked vaguely like a two-legged human (its Chinese name, jen-shen, means “man-shaped”). Ginseng roots that were old and wrinkled were particularly esteemed because the plant’s long life was thought to be transferable to its consumer, For many years wild ginseng root had been exported from North America, much of it ultimately for the Chinese market, ever since a French Jesuit priest reported his discovery of ginseng in the woods near Montreal. The total recorded amount of ginseng shipped from Britain’s continental American colonies in 1770 was over thirty-seven tons. In February 1784 the Empress of China, the first American ship to trade with China after the Treaty of Paris was signed, sailed from New York harbor with almost thirty tons of ginseng in her cargo. The backers of the voyage, including the American merchant Robert Morris, made a fortune, selling to the Chinese primarily ginseng from western Virginia and Pennsylvania and selling to the Americans Chinese tea, silk, cotton, and porcelain. After the ship returned to New York in May 1785, the success of the venture was widely reported in the American press. The Chinese had paid five dollars a pound for the ginseng that made up most of the ship’s cargo. [p. 213]

One thing I just noticed in keying this text in is how far Brown goes to distance himself from any belief in sympathetic magic: “was believed.” “looked vaguely,” “to one possessed of a strong imagination.”

The other thing to notice is that it was then and has been since the merchants who make the fortune from such trade. The supplier takes the risks and gets little. Boone’s efforts, like all of his efforts to strike it rich after the Revolution, didn’t pay out. Though he shipped enough root in the spring of 1788 to yield the modern equivalent of half a million dollars, his keelboat was swamped when it ran into a log-jam and his ginseng was damaged. And then, it turned out that he wasn’t the only frontiersman shipping ’sang. By the time his sons got their goods to Philadelphia, the market was glutted and prices had plummeted.

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