The average outfit in the Creek trade in the early thirties consisted of three or four men and twenty to thirty horses, and this was probably characteristic. When William Byrd wrote of caravans of a hundred horses setting out across the piedmont from the falls of the James under the conduct of fifteen or sixteen persons 72 he probably described the outfits of several traders, who sought protection in company. [Note 72: Byrd, Writings] To be sure, there were Charles Town trading-firms which sent out quite as imposing trains as any that came from north of the Roanoke. Archibald McGillivray and Company employed one hundred and three horses between New Windsor and the Creeks, in charge of fifteen pack-horsemen besides the principal traders.