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The Conquest of New France; A Chronicle of the Colonial Wars

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Title: The Conquest of New France; A Chronicle of the Colonial Wars

Author: George McKinnon Wrong

Editor: Allen Johnson


        
Release date: February 1, 2002 [eBook #3092]
                Most recently updated: January 8, 2021

Language: English

Original publication: S.l.: s.n., 1919

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3092


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CONQUEST OF NEW FRANCE; A CHRONICLE OF THE COLONIAL WARS ***
The Conquest of New France
By George M. Wrong

A Chronicle of the Colonial Wars

Volume 10 of the
Chronicles of America Series
∴
Allen Johnson, Editor
Assistant Editors
Gerhard R. Lomer
Charles W. Jefferys

Abraham Lincoln Edition





New Haven: Yale University Press
Toronto: Glasgow, Brook & Co.
London: Humphrey Milford
Oxford University Press
1918

Copyright, 1918
by Yale University Press
Contents

The Conquest of New France
Chapter         Chapter Title                         Page
I.      The Conflict Opens: Frontenac And Phips          1
II.     Quebec And Boston                               24
III.    France Loses Acadia                             44
IV.     Louisbourg And Boston                           67
V.      The Great West                                  97
VI.     The Valley Of The Ohio                         145
VII.    The Expulsion Of The Acadians                  164
VIII.   The Victories Of Montcalm                      178
IX.     Montcalm At Quebec                             198
X.      The Strategy Of Pitt                           210
XI.     The Fall Of Canada                             225
        Bibliographical Note                           239
        Index                                          241


THE CONQUEST OF NEW FRANCE

∴


CHAPTER I.

The Conflict Opens: Frontenac And Phips

Many centuries of European history had been marked by war almost
ceaseless between France and England when these two states first
confronted each other in America. The conflict for the New World was but
the continuation of an age-long antagonism in the Old, intensified now
by the savagery of the wilderness and by new dreams of empire. There was
another potent cause of strife which had not existed in the earlier
days. When, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the
antagonists had fought through the interminable Hundred Years' War, they
had been of the same religious faith. Since then, however, England had
become Protestant, while France had remained Catholic. When the rivals
first met on the shores of the New World, colonial America was still
very young. It was in 1607 that the English occupied Virginia. At the
same time the French were securing a foothold in Acadia, now Nova
Scotia. Six years had barely passed when the English Captain Argall
sailed to the north from Virginia and destroyed the rising French
settlements. Sixteen years after this another English force attacked and
captured Quebec. Presently these conquests were restored. France
remained in possession of the St. Lawrence and in virtual possession of
Acadia. The English colonies, holding a great stretch of the Atlantic
seaboard, increased in number and power. New France also grew stronger.
The steady hostility of the rivals never wavered. There was, indeed,
little open warfare as long as the two Crowns remained at peace. From
1660 to 1688, the Stuart rulers of England remained subservient to their
cousin the Bourbon King of France and at one with him in religious
faith. But after the fall of the Stuarts France bitterly denounced the
new King, William of Orange, as both a heretic and a usurper, and
attacked the English in America with a savage fury unknown in Europe.
From 1690 to 1760 the combatants fought with little more than pauses for
renewed preparation; and the conflict ended only when France yielded to
England the mastery of her empire in America. It is the story of this
struggle, covering a period of seventy years, which is told in the
following pages.

The career of Louis de Buade, Comte de Frontenac, who was Governor of
Canada from 1672 to 1682 and again from 1689 to his death in 1698,
reveals both the merits and the defects of the colonizing genius of
France. Frontenac was a man of noble birth whose life had been spent in
court and camp. The story of his family, so far as it is known, is a
story of attendance upon the royal house of France. His father and
uncles had been playmates of the young Dauphin, afterwards Louis XIII.
The thoughts familiar to Frontenac in his youth remained with him
through life; and, when he went to rule at Quebec, the very spirit that
dominated the court at Versailles crossed the sea with him.

A man is known by the things he loves. The things which Frontenac most
highly cherished were marks of royal favor, the ceremony due to his own
rank, the right to command. He was an egoist, supremely interested in
himself. He was poor, but at his country seat in France, near Blois, he
kept open house in the style of a great noble. Always he bore himself as
one to whom much was due. His guests were expected to admire his
indifferent horses as the finest to be seen, his gardens as the most
beautiful, his clothes as of the most effective cut and finish, the
plate on his table as of the best workmanship, and the food as having
superior flavor. He scolded his equals as if they were naughty children.

Yet there was genius in this showy court figure. In 1669, when the
Venetian Republic had asked France to lend her an efficient soldier to
lead against the rampant Turk, the great Marshal Turenne had chosen
Frontenac for the task. Crete, which Frontenac was to rescue, the Turk
indeed had taken; but, it is said, at the fearful cost of a hundred and
eighty thousand men. Three years later, Frontenac had been sent to
Canada to war with the savage Iroquois and to hold in check the
aggressive designs of the English. He had been recalled in 1682, after
ten years of service, chiefly on account of his arbitrary temper. He had
quarreled with the Bishop. He had bullied the Intendant until at one
time that harried official had barricaded his house and armed his
servants. He had told the Jesuit missionaries that they thought more of
selling beaver-skins than of saving souls. He had insulted those about
him, sulked, threatened, foamed at the mouth in rage, revealed a
childish vanity in regard to his dignity, and a hunger insatiable for
marks of honor from the King--"more grateful," he once said, "than
anything else to a heart shaped after the right pattern."

France, however, now required at Quebec a man who could do the needed
man's tasks. The real worth of Frontenac had been tested; and so, in
1689, when England had driven from her shores her Catholic king and when
France's colony across the sea seemed to be in grave danger from the
Iroquois allies of the English, Frontenac was sent again to Quebec to
subdue these savages and, if he could, to destroy in America the power
of the age-long enemy of his country.

Perched high above the St. Lawrence, on a noble site where now is a
public terrace and a great hotel, stood the Château St. Louis, the scene
of Frontenac's rule as head of the colony. No other spot in the world
commanded such a highway linking the inland waters with the sea. The
French had always an eye for points of strategic value; and in holding
Quebec they hoped to possess the pivot on which the destinies of North
America should turn. For a long time it seemed, indeed, as if this
glowing vision might become a reality. The imperial ideas which were
working at Quebec were based upon the substantial realities of trade.
The instinct for business was hardly less strong in these keen
adventurers than the instinct for empire. In promise of trade the
interior of North America was rich. Today its vast agriculture and its
wealth in minerals have brought rewards beyond the dreams of two hundred
years ago. The wealth, however, sought by the leaders of that time came
from furs. In those wastes of river, lake, and forest were the richest
preserves in the world for fur-bearing animals.

This vast wilderness was not an unoccupied land. In those wild regions
dwelt many savage tribes. Some of the natives were by no means without
political capacity. On the contrary, they were long clever enough to pit
English against French to their own advantage as the real sovereigns in
North America. One of them, whose fluent oratory had won for him the
name of Big Mouth, told the Governor of Canada, in 1688, that his people
held their lands from the Great Spirit, that they yielded no lordship to
either the English or the French, that they well understood the weakness
of the French and were quite able to destroy them, but that they wished
to be friends with both French and English who brought to them the
advantages of trade. In sagacity of council and dignity of carriage some
of these Indians so bore themselves that to trained observers they
seemed not unequal to the diplomats of Europe. They were, however, weak
before the superior knowledge of the white men. In all their long
centuries in America they had learned nothing of the use of iron. Their
sharpest tool had been made of chipped obsidian or of hammered copper.
Their most potent weapons had been the stone hatchet or axe and the bow
and arrow. It thus happened that, when steel and gunpowder reached
America, the natives soon came to despise their primitive implements.
More and more they craved the supplies from Europe which multiplied in a
hundred ways their strength in the conflict with nature and with man. To
the Indian tribes trade with the French or English soon became a vital
necessity. From the far northwest for a thousand miles to the bleak
shores of Hudson Bay, from the banks of the Mississippi to the banks of
the St. Lawrence and the Hudson, they came each year on laborious
journeys, paddling their canoes and carrying them over portages, to
barter furs for the things which they must have and which the white man
alone could supply.

The Iroquois, the ablest and most resolute of the native tribes, held
the lands bordering on Lake Ontario which commanded the approaches from
both the Hudson and the St. Lawrence by the Great Lakes to the spacious
regions of the West. The five tribes known as the Iroquois had shown
marked political talent by forming themselves into a confederacy. From
the time of Champlain, the founder of Quebec, there had been trouble
between the French and the Iroquois. In spite of this bad beginning, the
French had later done their best to make friends with the powerful
confederacy. They had sent to them devoted missionaries, many of whom
met the martyr's reward of torture and massacre. But the opposing
influence of the English, with whom the Iroquois chiefly traded, proved
too strong.

With the Iroquois hostile, it was too dangerous for the French to travel
inland by way of Lake Ontario. They had, it is true, a shorter and,
indeed, a better route farther north, by way of the Ottawa River and
Lake Nipissing to Lake Huron. In time, however, the Iroquois made even
this route unsafe. Their power was far-reaching and their ambition
limitless. They aimed to be masters of North America. Like all virile
but backward peoples, they believed themselves superior to every other
race. Their orators declared that the fate of the world was to turn on
their policy.

On Frontenac's return to Canada he had a stormy inheritance in
confronting the Iroquois. They had real grievances against France.
Denonville, Frontenac's predecessor, had met their treachery by
treachery of his own. Louis XIV had found that these lusty savages made
excellent galley slaves and had ordered Denonville to secure a supply in
Canada. In consequence the Frenchman seized even friendly Iroquois and
sent them over seas to France. The savages in retaliation exacted a
fearful vengeance in the butchery of French colonists. The bloodiest
story in the annals of Canada is the massacre at Lachine, a village a
few miles above Montreal. On the night of August 4, 1689, fourteen
hundred Iroquois burst in on the village and a wild orgy of massacre
followed. All Canada was in a panic. Some weeks later Frontenac arrived
at Quebec and took command.

To the old soldier, now in his seventieth year, his hard task was not
uncongenial. He had fought the savage Iroquois before and the no less
savage Turk. He belonged to that school of military action which knows
no scruple in its methods, and he was prepared to make war with all the
frightfulness practised by the savages themselves. His resolute,
blustering demeanor was well fitted to impress the red men of the
forest, for an imperious eye will sometimes cow an Indian as well as a
lion, and Frontenac's mien was imperious. In his life in court and camp
he had learned how to command.

The English in New York had professed to be brothers to the Iroquois and
had called them by that name. This title of equality, however, Frontenac
would not yield. Kings speak of "my people"; Frontenac spoke to the
Indians not as his brothers but as his children and as children of the
great King whom he served. He was their father, their protector, the
disposer and controller of mighty reserves of power, who loved and cared
for those putting their trust in him. He could unbend to play with their
children and give presents to their squaws. At times he seemed patient,
gentle, and forgiving. At times, too, he swaggered and boasted in terms
which the event did not always justify.

La Potherie, a cultivated Frenchman in Canada during Frontenac's régime,
describes an amazing scene at Montreal, which seems to show that,
whether Frontenac recognized the title or not, he had qualities which
made him the real brother of the savages. In 1690 Huron and other Indian
allies of the French had come from the far interior to trade and also to
consider the eternal question of checking the Iroquois. At the council,
which began with grave decorum, a Huron orator begged the French to make
no terms with the Iroquois. Frontenac answered in the high tone which he
could so well assume. He would fight them until they should humbly crave
peace; he would make with them no treaty except in concert with his
Indian allies, whom he would never fail in fatherly care. To impress the
council by the reality of his oneness with the Indians, Frontenac now
seized a tomahawk and brandished it in the air shouting at the same time
the Indian war-song. The whole assembly, French and Indians, joined in a
wild orgy of war passion, and the old man of seventy, fresh from the
court of Louis XIV, led in the war-dance, yelled with the Indians their
savage war-whoops, danced round the circle of the council, and showed
himself in spirit a brother of the wildest of them. This was good
diplomacy. The savages swore to make war to the end under his lead. Many
a frontier outrage, many a village attacked in the dead of night and
burned, amidst bloody massacre of its few toil-worn settlers, was to be
the result of that strange mingling of Europe with wild America.

Frontenac's task was to make war on the English and their Iroquois
allies. He had before him the King's instructions as to the means for
effecting this. The King aimed at nothing less than the conquest of the
English colonies in America. In 1664 the English, by a sudden blow in
time of peace, had captured New Netherland, the Dutch colony on the
Hudson, which then became New York. Now, a quarter of a century later,
France thought to strike a similar blow against the English, and Louis
XIV was resolved that the conquest should be thoroughgoing. The Dutch
power had fallen before a meager naval force. The English now would have
to face one much more formidable. Two French ships were to cross the sea
and to lie in wait near New York. Meanwhile from Canada, sixteen hundred
armed men, a thousand of them French regular troops, were to advance by
land into the heart of the colony, seize Albany and all the boats there
available, and descend by the Hudson to New York. The warships, hovering
off the coast, would then enter New York harbor at the same time that
the land forces made their attack. The village, for it was hardly more
than this, contained, as the French believed, only some two hundred
houses and four hundred fighting men and it was thought that a month
would suffice to complete this whole work of conquest. Once victors, the
French were to show no pity. All private property, but that of
Catholics, was to be confiscated. Catholics, whether English or Dutch,
were to be left undisturbed if not too numerous and if they would take
the oath of allegiance to Louis XIV and show some promise of keeping it.
Rich Protestants were to be held for ransom. All the other inhabitants,
except those whom the French might find useful for their own purposes,
were to be driven out of the colony, homeless wanderers, to be
scattered far so that they could not combine to recover what they had
lost. With New York taken, New England would be so weakened that in time
it too would fall. Such was the plan of conquest which came from the
brilliant chambers at Versailles.

New York did not fall. The expedition so carefully planned came to
nothing. Frontenac had never shown much faith in the enterprise. At
Quebec, on his arrival in the autumn of 1689, he was planning something
less ideally perfect, but certain to produce results. The scarred old
courtier intended so to terrorize the English that they should make no
aggressive advance, to encourage the French to believe themselves
superior to their rivals, and, above all, to prove to the Indian tribes
that prudence dictated alliance with the French and not with the
English.

Frontenac wrote a tale of blood. There were three war parties; one set
out from Montreal against New York, and one from Three Rivers and one
from Quebec against the frontier settlements of New Hampshire and Maine.
To describe one is to describe all. A band of one hundred and sixty
Frenchmen, with nearly as many Indians, gathers at Montreal in 
mid-winter. The ground is deep with snow and they troop on snowshoes
across the white wastes. Dragging on sleds the needed supplies, they
march up the Richelieu River and over the frozen surface of Lake
Champlain. As they advance with caution into the colony of New York they
suffer terribly, now from bitter cold, now from thaws which make the
soft trail almost impassable. On a February night their scouts tell them
that they are near Schenectady, on the English frontier. There are young
members of the Canadian noblesse in the party. In the dead of night they
creep up to the paling which surrounds the village. The signal is given
and the village is awakened by the terrible war-whoop. Doors are smashed
by axes and hatchets, and women and children are killed as they lie in
bed, or kneel, shrieking for mercy. Houses are set on fire and living
human beings are thrown into the flames. By midday the assailants have
finished their dread work and are retreating along the forest paths
dragging with them a few miserable captives. In this winter of 1689-90
raiding parties also came back from the borders of New Hampshire and of
Maine with news of similar exploits, and Quebec and Montreal glowed with
the joy of victory.

Far away an answering attack was soon on foot. Sir William Phips of
Massachusetts, the son of a poor settler on the Kennebec River, had made
his first advance in life by taking up the trade of carpenter in Boston.
Only when grown up had he learned to read and write. He married a rich
wife, and ease of circumstances freed his mind for great designs. Some
fifty years before he was thus relieved of material cares, a Spanish
galleon carrying vast wealth had been wrecked in the West Indies. Phips
now planned to raise the ship and get the money. For this enterprise he
obtained support in England and set out on his exacting adventure. On
the voyage his crew mutinied. Armed with cutlasses, they told Phips that
he must turn pirate or perish; but he attacked the leader with his fists
and triumphed by sheer strength of body and will. A second mutiny he
also quelled, and then took his ship to Jamaica where he got rid of its
worthless crew. His enterprise had apparently failed; but the second
Duke of Albemarle and other powerful men believed in him and helped him
to make another trial. This time he succeeded in finding the wreck on
the coast of Hispaniola, and took possession of its cargo of precious
metals and jewels--treasure to the value of three hundred thousand
pounds sterling. Of the spoil Phips himself received sixteen thousand
pounds, a great fortune for a New Englander in those days. He was also
knighted for his services and, in the end, was named by William and Mary
the first royal Governor of Massachusetts.

Massachusetts, whose people had been thoroughly aroused by the French
incursions, resolved to retaliate by striking at the heart of Canada by
sea and to take Quebec. Sir William Phips, though not yet made Governor,
would lead the expedition. The first blow fell in Acadia. Phips sailed
up the Bay of Fundy and on May 11, 1690, landed a force before Port
Royal. The French Governor surrendered on terms. The conquest was
intended to be final, and the people were offered their lives and
property on the condition of taking the oath to be loyal subjects of
William and Mary. This many of them did and were left unmolested. It was
a bloodless victory. But Phips, the Puritan crusader, was something of a
pirate. He plundered private property and was himself accused of taking
not merely the silver forks and spoons of the captive Governor but even
his wigs, shirts, garters, and night caps. The Boston Puritans joyfully
pillaged the church at Port Royal, and overturned the high altar and the
images. The booty was considerable and by the end of May Phips, a
prosperous hero, was back in Boston.

Boston was aflame with zeal to go on and conquer Canada. By the middle
of August Phips had set out on the long sea voyage to Quebec, with
twenty-two hundred men, a great force for a colonial enterprise of that
time, and in all some forty ships. The voyage occupied more than two
months. Apparently the hardy carpenter-sailor, able enough to carry
through a difficult undertaking with a single ship, lacked the
organizing skill to manage a great expedition. He performed, however,
the feat of navigating safely with his fleet the treacherous waters of
the lower St. Lawrence. On the morning of October 16, 1690, watchers at
Quebec saw the fleet, concerning which they had already been warned,
rounding the head of the Island of Orleans and sailing into the broad
basin. Breathless spectators counted the ships. There were thirty-four
in sight, a few large vessels, some mere fishing craft. It was a
spectacle well calculated to excite and alarm the good people of Quebec.
They might, however, take comfort in the knowledge that their great
Frontenac was present to defend them. A few days earlier he had been in
Montreal, but, when there had come the startling news of the approach of
the enemy's ships, he had hurried down the river and had been received
with shouts of joy by the anxious populace.

The situation was one well suited to Frontenac's genius for the
dramatic. When a boat under a flag of truce put out from the English
ships, Frontenac hurried four canoes to meet it. The English envoy was
placed blindfold in one of these canoes and was paddled to the shore.
Here two soldiers took him by the arms and led him over many obstacles
up the steep ascent to the Château St. Louis. He could see nothing but
could hear the beating of drums, the blowing of trumpets, the jeers and
shouting of a great multitude in a town which seemed to be full of
soldiers and to have its streets heavily barricaded. When the bandage
was taken from his eyes he found himself in a great room of the Château.
Before him stood Frontenac, in brilliant uniform, surrounded by the most
glittering array of officers which Quebec could muster. The astonished
envoy presented a letter from Phips. It was a curt demand in the name of
King William of England for the unconditional surrender of all "forts
and castles" in Canada, of Frontenac himself, and all his forces and
supplies. On such conditions Phips would show mercy, as a Christian
should. Frontenac must answer within an hour. When the letter had been
read the envoy took a watch from his pocket and pointed out the time to
Frontenac. It was ten o'clock. The reply must be given by eleven. Loud
mutterings greeted the insulting message. One officer cried out that
Phips was a pirate and that his messenger should be hanged. Frontenac
knew well how to deal with such a situation. He threw the letter in the
envoy's face and turned his back upon him. The unhappy man, who
understood French, heard the Governor give orders that a gibbet should
be erected on which he was to be hanged. When the Bishop and the
Intendant pleaded for mercy, Frontenac seemed to yield. He would not
take, he said, an hour to reply, but would answer at once. He knew no
such person as King William. James, though in exile, was the true King
of England and the good friend of the King of France. There would be
no surrender to a pirate. After this outburst, the envoy asked if he
might have the answer in writing. "No!" thundered Frontenac. "I will
answer only from the mouths of my cannon and with my musketry!"

Phips could not take Quebec. In carrying out his plans, he was slow and
dilatory. Nature aided his foe. The weather was bad, the waters before
Quebec were difficult, and boats grounded unexpectedly in a falling
tide. Phips landed a force on the north side of the basin at Beauport
but was held in check by French and Indian skirmishing parties. He
sailed his ships up close to Quebec and bombarded the stronghold, but
then, as now, ships were impotent against well-served land defenses.
Soon Phips was short of ammunition. A second time he made a landing in
order to attack Quebec from the valley of the St. Charles but French
regulars fought with militia and Indians to drive off his forces. Phips
held a meeting with his officers for prayer. Heaven, however, denied
success to his arms. If he could not take Quebec, it was time to be
gone, for in the late autumn the dangers of the St. Lawrence are great.
He lay before Quebec for just a week and on the 23d of October sailed
away. It was late in November when his battered fleet began to straggle
into Boston. The ways of God had not proved as simple as they had seemed
to the Puritan faith, for the stronghold of Satan had not fallen before
the attacks of the Lord's people. There were searchings of heart,
recriminations, and financial distress in Boston.

For seven years more the war endured. Frontenac's victory over Phips at
Quebec was not victory over the Iroquois or victory over the colony of
New York. In 1691 this colony sent Peter Schuyler with a force against
Canada by way of Lake Champlain. Schuyler penetrated almost to Montreal,
gained some indecisive success, and caused much suffering to the unhappy
Canadian settlers. Frontenac made his last great stroke in July, 1696,
when he led more than two thousand men through the primeval forest to
destroy the villages of the Onondaga and the Oneida tribes of the
Iroquois. On the journey from the south shore of Lake Ontario, the old
man of seventy-five was unable to walk over the rough portages and fifty
Indians shouting songs of joy carried his great canoe on their
shoulders. When the soldiers left the canoes and marched forward to the
fight, they bore Frontenac in an easy chair. He did not destroy his
enemy, for many of the Indians fled, but he burned their chief village
and taught them a new respect for the power of the French. It was the
last great effort of the old warrior. In the next year, 1697, was
concluded the Peace of Ryswick; and in 1698 Frontenac died in his
seventy-ninth year, a hoary champion of France's imperial designs.

The Peace of Ryswick was an indecisive ending of an indecisive war. It
was indeed one of those bad treaties which invite renewed war. The
struggle had achieved little but to deepen the conviction of each side
that it must make itself stronger for the next fight. Each gave back
most of what it had gained. The peace, however, did not leave matters
quite as they had been. The position of William was stronger than
before, for France had treated with him and now recognized him as King
of England. Moreover France, hitherto always victorious, with generals
who had not known defeat, was really defeated when she could not longer
advance.




CHAPTER II.

Quebec And Boston

At the end of the seventeenth century it must have seemed a far cry from
Versailles to Quebec. The ocean was crossed only by small sailing
vessels haunted by both tempest and pestilence, the one likely to
prolong the voyage by many weeks, the other to involve the sacrifice of
scores of lives through scurvy and other maladies. Yet, remote as the
colony seemed, Quebec was the child of Versailles, protected and
nourished by Louis XIV and directed by him in its minutest affairs. The
King spent laborious hours over papers relating to the cherished colony
across the sea. He sent wise counsel to his officials in Canada and with
tactful patience rebuked their faults. He did everything for the
colonists--gave them not merely land, but muskets, farm implements, even
chickens, pigs, and sometimes wives. The defect of his government was
that it tended to be too paternal. The vital needs of a colony
struggling with the problems of barbarism could hardly be read correctly
and provided for at Versailles. Colonies, like men, are strong only when
they learn to take care of themselves.

The English colonies present a vivid contrast. London did not direct and
control Boston. In London the will, indeed, was not wanting, for the
Stuart kings, Charles II and James II, were not less despotic in spirit
than Louis XIV. But while in France there was a vast organism which
moved only as the King willed, in England power was more widely
distributed. It may be claimed with truth that English national
liberties are a growth from the local freedom which has existed from
time immemorial. When British colonists left the motherland to found a
new society, their first instinct was to create institutions which
involved local control. The solemn covenant by which in 1620 the worn
company of the Mayflower, after a long and painful voyage, pledged
themselves to create a self-governing society, was the inevitable
expression of the English political spirit. Do what it would, London
could never control Boston as Versailles controlled Quebec.

The English colonist kept his eyes fixed on his own fortunes. From the
state he expected little; from himself, everything. He had no great
sense of unity with neighboring colonists under the same crown. Only
when he realized some peril to his interests, some menace which would
master him if he did not fight, was he stirred to warlike energy. French
leaders, on the other hand, were thinking of world politics. The voyage
of Verrazano, the Italian sailor who had been sent out by Francis I of
France in 1524, and who had sailed along a great stretch of the Atlantic
coast, was deemed by Frenchmen a sufficient title to the whole of North
America. They flouted England's claim based upon the voyages of the
Cabots nearly thirty years earlier. Spain, indeed, might claim Florida,
but the English had no real right to any footing in the New World. As
late as in 1720, when the fortunes of France were already on the wane in
the New World, Father Bobé, a priest of the Congregation of Missions,
presented to the French court a document which sets forth in
uncompromising terms the rights of France to all the land between the
thirtieth and the fiftieth parallels of latitude. True, he says, others
occupy much of this territory, but France must drive out intruders and
in particular the English. Boston rightly belongs to France and so also
do New York and Philadelphia. The only regions to which England has any
just claim are Acadia, Newfoundland, and Hudson Bay, ceded by France
under the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. This weak cession all true
Frenchmen regret and England must hand the territories back. She owes
France compensation for her long occupation of lands not really hers. If
she makes immediate restitution, the King of France, generous and kind,
will forego some of his rights and allow England to retain a strip some
fifty miles wide extending from Maine to Florida. France has the right
to the whole of the interior. In the mind of the reverend memorialist,
no doubt, there was the conviction that England would soon lose the
meager strip, fifty miles wide, which France might yield.

These dreams of power had a certain substance. It seems to us now that,
from the first, the French were dreaming of the impossible. We know what
has happened, and after the event it is an easy task to measure
political forces. The ambitions of France were not, however, empty
fancies. More than once she has seemed on the point of mastering the
nations of the West. Just before the year 1690 she had a great
opportunity. In England, in 1660, the fall of the system created by
Oliver Cromwell brought back to the English throne the House of Stuart,
for centuries the ally and usually the pupil of France. Stuart kings of
Scotland, allied with France, had fought the Tudor kings of England.
Stuarts in misfortune had been the pensioners of France. Charles II, a
Stuart, alien in religion to the convictions of his people, looked to
Catholic France to give him security on his throne. Before the first
half of the reign of Louis XIV had ended, it was the boast of the French
that the King of England was vassal to their King, that the states of
continental Europe had become mere pawns in the game of their Grand
Monarch, and that France could be master of as much of the world as was
really worth mastering. In 1679 the Canadian Intendant, Duchesneau,
writing from Quebec to complain of the despotic conduct of the Governor,
Frontenac, paid a tribute to "the King our master, of whom the whole
world stands in awe, who has just given law to all Europe."

To men thus obsessed by the greatness of their own ruler it seemed no
impossible task to overthrow a few English colonies in America of whose
King their own was the patron and the paymaster. The world of high
politics has never been conspicuous for its knowledge of human nature. A
strong blow from a strong arm would, it was believed both at Versailles
and Quebec, shatter forever a weak rival and give France the prize of
North America. Officers in Canada talked loftily of the ease with which
France might master all the English colonies. The Canadians, it was
said, were a brave and warlike people, trained to endure hardship, while
the English colonists were undisciplined, ignorant of war, and cowardly.
The link between them and the motherland, said these observers, could be
easily broken, for the colonies were longing to be free. There is no
doubt that France could put into the field armies vastly greater than
those of England. Had the French been able to cross the Channel, march
on London and destroy English power at its root, the story of
civilization in a great part of North America might well have been
different, and we should perhaps find now on the banks of the Hudson
what we find on the banks of the St. Lawrence--villages dominated by
great churches and convents, with inhabitants Catholic to a man,
speaking the language and preserving the traditions of France. The strip
of inviolate sea between Calais and Dover made impossible, however, an
assault on London. Sea power kept secure not only England but English
effort in America and in the end defeated France.

England had defenses other than her great strength on the sea. In spite
of the docility towards France shown by the English King, Charles II,
himself half French in blood and at heart devoted to the triumph of the
Catholic faith, the English people would tolerate no policies likely to
make England subservient to France. This was forbidden by age-long
tradition. The struggle had become one of religion as well as of race. A
fight for a century and a half with the Roman Catholic Church had made
England sternly, fanatically Protestant. In their suspicion of the
system which France accepted, Englishmen had sent a king to the
scaffold, had overthrown the monarchy, and had created a military
republic. This republic, indeed, had fallen, but the distrust of the
aims of the Roman Catholic Church remained intense and burst into
passionate fury the moment an understanding of the aims of France gained
currency.

There are indeed few passages in English history less creditable than
the panic fear of Roman Catholic plots which swept the country in the
days when Frontenac at Quebec was working to destroy English and
Protestant influence in America. In 1678, Titus Oates, a clergyman of
the Church of England who had turned Roman Catholic, declared that,
while in the secrets of his new church, he had found on foot a plot to
restore Roman Catholic dominance in England by means of the murder of
Charles II and of any other crimes necessary for that purpose. Oates
said that he had left the Church and returned to his former faith
because of the terrible character of the conspiracy which he had
discovered. His story was not even plausible; he was known to be a man
of vicious life; moreover, Catholic plotters would hardly murder a king
who was at heart devoted to Catholic policy. England, however, was in a
nervous state of mind; Charles II was known to be intriguing with
France; and a cruel fury surged through the nation. For a share in the
supposed plots a score of people, among them one of the great nobles of
England, the venerable and innocent Earl of Stafford, were condemned to
death and executed. Whatever Charles II himself might have thought, he
was obliged for his own safety to acquiesce in the policy of
persecution.

Catholic France was not less malignant than Protestant England. Though
cruel severity had long been shown to Protestants, they seemed to be
secure under the law of France in certain limited rights and in a
restricted toleration. In 1685, however, Louis XIV revoked the Edict of
Nantes by which Henry IV a century earlier had guaranteed this
toleration. All over France there had already burst out terrible
persecution, and the act of Louis XIV brought a fiery climax. Unhappy
heretics who would not accept Roman Catholic doctrine found life
intolerable. Tens of thousands escaped from France in spite of a law
which, though it exiled the Protestant ministers, forbade other
Protestants to leave the country. Stories of plots were made the excuse
to seize the property of Protestants. Regiments of soldiers, charged
with the task, could boast of many enforced "conversions." Quartered on
Protestant households, they made the life of the inmates a burden until
they abandoned their religion. Among the means used were torture before
a slow fire, the tearing off of the finger nails, the driving of the
whole families naked into the streets and the forbidding of any one to
give them shelter, the violation of women, and the crowding of the
heretics in loathsome prisons. By such means it took a regiment of
soldiers in Rouen only a few days to "convert" to the old faith some six
hundred families. Protestant ministers caught in France were sent to the
galleys for life. The persecutions which followed the revocation of the
Edict of Nantes outdid even Titus Oates.

Charles II died in 1685 and the scene at his deathbed encouraged in
England suspicions of Catholic policy and in France hope that this
policy was near its climax of success. Though indolent and dissolute,
Charles yet possessed striking mental capacity and insight. He knew well
that to preserve his throne he must remain outwardly a Protestant and
must also respect the liberties of the English nation. He cherished,
however, the Roman Catholic faith and the despotic ideals of his Bourbon
mother. On his deathbed he avowed his real belief. With great
precautions for secrecy, he was received into the Roman Catholic Church
and comforted with the consolations which it offers to the dying. While
this secret was suspected by the English people, one further fact was
perfectly clear. Their new King, James II, was a zealous Roman Catholic,
who would use all his influence to bring England back to the Roman
communion. Suspicion of the King's designs soon became certainty and,
after four years of bitter conflict with James, the inevitable happened.
The Roman Catholic Stuart King was driven from his throne and his
daughter Mary and her Protestant husband, William of Orange, became the
sovereigns of England by choice of the English Parliament. Again had the
struggle between Roman Catholic and Protestant brought revolution in
England, and the politics of Europe dominated America. The revolution in
London was followed by revolution in Boston and New York. The authority
of James II was repudiated. His chief agent in New England, Sir Edmund
Andros, was seized and imprisoned, and William and Mary reigned over the
English colonies in America as they reigned over the motherland.

To the loyal Catholics of France the English, who had driven out a
Catholic king and dethroned an ancient line, were guilty of the double
sin of heresy and of treason. To the Jesuit enthusiast in Canada not
only were they infidel devils in human shape upon whose plans must rest
the curse of God; they were also rebels, republican successors of the
accursed Cromwell, who had sent an anointed king to the block. It would
be a holy thing to destroy this lawless power which ruled from London.
The Puritans of Boston were, in turn, not less convinced that theirs was
the cause of God, and that Satan, enthroned in the French dominance at
Quebec, must soon fall. The smaller the pit the fiercer the rats.
Passions raged in the petty colonial capitals more bitterly than even in
London and Paris. This intensity of religious differences embittered the
struggle for the mastery of the new continent.

The English colonies had twenty white men to one in Canada. Yet Canada
was long able to wage war on something like equal terms. She had the
supreme advantage of a single control. There was no trouble at Quebec
about getting a reluctant legislature to vote money for war purposes. No
semblance of an elected legislature existed and the money for war came
not from the Canadians, but from the capacious, if now usually depleted,
coffers of the French court at Versailles. In the English colonies the
legislatures preferred, of all political struggles, one about money with
the Governor, the representative of the King. At least one of the
English colonies, Pennsylvania, believing that evil is best conquered by
non-resistance, was resolutely against war for any reason, good or bad.
Other colonies often raised the more sordid objection that they were too
poor to help in war. The colonial legislatures, indeed, with their
eternal demand for the privileges and rights which the British House of
Commons had won in the long centuries of its history, constitute the
most striking of all the contrasts with Canada. In them were always the
sparks of an independent temper. The English diarist, Evelyn, wrote, in
1671, that New England was in "a peevish and touchy humour." Colonists
who go out to found a new state will always demand rights like those
which they have enjoyed at home. It was unthinkable that men of Boston,
who, themselves, or whose party in England, had fought against a
despotic king, had sent him to the block and driven his son from the
throne, would be content with anything short of controlling the taxes
which they paid, making the laws which they obeyed, and carrying on
their affairs in their own way. When obliged to accept a governor from
England, they were resolved as far as possible to remain his paymaster.
In a majority of the colonies they insisted that the salary of the
Governor should be voted each year by their representatives, in order
that they might be able always to use against him the cogent logic of
financial need. On questions of this kind Quebec had nothing to say. To
the King in France and to him alone went all demands for pay and honors.
If, in such things, the people of Canada had no remote voice, they were
still as well off as Frenchmen in France. New England was a copy of Old
England and New France a copy of Old France. There was, as yet, no
"peevish and touchy humour" at either Quebec or Versailles in respect to
political rights.

Canada, in spite of its scanty population, was better equipped for war
than was any of the English colonies. The French were largely explorers
and hunters, familiar with hardship and danger and led by men with a
love of adventure. The English, on the other hand, were chiefly traders
and farmers who disliked and dreaded the horrors of war. There was not
to be found in all the English colonies a family of the type of the
Canadian family of Le Moyne. Charles Le Moyne, of Montreal, a member of
the Canadian noblesse, had ten sons, every one of whom showed the spirit
and capacity of the adventurous soldier. They all served in the time of
Frontenac. The most famous of them, Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville, shines
in varied rôles. He was a frontier leader who made his name a terror in
the English settlements; a sailor who seized and ravaged the English
settlements in Newfoundland, who led a French squadron to the remote and
chill waters of Hudson Bay, and captured there the English strongholds
of the fur trade; and a leader in the more peaceful task of founding, at
the mouth of the Mississippi, the colony of Louisiana. Canada had the
advantage over the English colonies in bold pioneers of this type.

Canada was never doubtful of the English peril or divided in the desire
to destroy it. Nearly always, a soldier or a naval officer ruled in the
Château St. Louis, at Quebec, with eyes alert to see and arms ready to
avert military danger. England sometimes sent to her colonies in America
governors who were disreputable and inefficient, needy hangers-on, too
well-known at home to make it wise there to give them office, but
thought good enough for the colonies. It would not have been easy to
find a governor less fitted to maintain the dignity and culture of high
office than Sir William Phips, Governor of Massachusetts in the time of
Frontenac. Phips, however, though a rough brawler, was reasonably
efficient, but Lord Cornbury, who became Earl of Clarendon, owed his
appointment as Governor of New Jersey and New York in 1701, only to his
necessities and to the desire of his powerful connections to provide for
him. Queen Anne was his cousin. He was a profligate, feeble in mind but
arrogant in spirit, with no burden of honesty and a great burden of
debt, and he made no change in his scandalous mode of life when he
represented his sovereign at New York. There were other governors only
slightly better. Canada had none as bad. Her viceroys as a rule kept up
the dignity of their office and respected the decencies of life. In
English colonies, governors eked out their incomes by charging heavy
fees for official acts and any one who refused to pay such fees was not
likely to secure attention to his business. In Canada the population was
too scanty and the opportunity too limited to furnish happy
hunting-grounds of this kind. The governors, however, badly paid as they
were, must live, and, in the case of a man like Frontenac, repair
fortunes shattered at court. To do so they were likely to have some
concealed interest in the fur trade. This was forbidden by the court but
was almost a universal practice. Some of the governors carried trading
to great lengths and aroused the bitter hostility of rival trading
interests. The fur trade was easily controlled as a government monopoly
and it was unfair that a needy governor should share its profits. But,
after all, such a quarrel was only between rival monopolists. Better a
trading governor than one who plundered the people or who by drunken
profligacy discredited his office.

While all Canada was devoted to the Roman Catholic Church, the diversity
of religious beliefs in the English colonies was a marked feature of
social life. In Virginia, by law of the colony, the Church of England
was the established Church. In Massachusetts, founded by stern Puritans,
the public services of the Church of England were long prohibited. In
Pennsylvania there was dominant the sect derisively called "Quakers,"
who would have no ecclesiastical organization and believed that religion
was purely a matter for the individual soul. Boston jeered at the
superstitions of Quebec, such as the belief of the missionaries that a
drop of water, with the murmured words of baptism, transformed a dying
Indian child from an outcast savage into an angel of light. Quebec
might, however, deride Boston with equal justice. Sir William Phips
believed that malignant and invisible devils had made a special invasion
of Massachusetts, dragging people from their houses, pushing them into
fire and water, and carrying them through the air for miles over trees
and hills. These devils, it was thought, took visible form, of which the
favorite was that of a black cat. Witches were thought to be able to
pass through keyholes and to exercise charms which would destroy their
victims. While Phips and Frontenac were struggling for the mastery of
Canada, a fever of excitement ran through New England about these perils
of witchcraft. When, in 1692, Phips became Governor of Massachusetts, he
named a special court to try accused persons. The court considered
hundreds of cases and condemned and hanged nineteen persons for wholly
imaginary crimes. Whatever the faults of the rule of the priests at
Quebec, they never equaled this in brutality or surpassed it in blind
superstition. In New England we find bitter religious persecution. In
Canada there was none: the door was completely closed to Protestants and
the family within were all of one mind. There was no one to persecute.

The old contrast between French and English ideals still endures. At
Quebec there was an early zeal for education. In 1638, the year in which
Harvard College was organized, a college and a school for training the
French youth and the natives were founded at Quebec. In the next year
the Ursuline nuns established at Quebec the convent which through all
the intervening years has continued its important work of educating
girls. In zeal for education Quebec was therefore not behind Boston. But
the spirit was different. Quebec believed that safety lay in control by
the Church, and this control it still maintains. Massachusetts came in
time to believe that safety lay in freeing education from any spiritual
authority. Today Laval University at Quebec and Harvard University at
Cambridge represent the outcome of these differing modes of thought.
Other forces were working to produce essentially different types. The
printing-press Quebec did not know; and, down to the final overthrow of
the French power in 1763, no newspaper or book was issued in Canada.
Massachusetts, on the other hand, had a printing-press as early as in
1638 and soon books were being printed in the colony. Of course, in the
spirit of the time, there was a strict censorship. But, by 1722, this
had come to an end, and after that the newspaper, unknown in Canada, was
busy and free in its task of helping to mold the thought of the English
colonies in America.




CHAPTER III.

France Loses Acadia

The Peace of Ryswick in 1697 had settled nothing finally. France was
still strong enough to aim at the mastery of Europe and America. England
was torn by internal faction and would not prepare to face her menacing
enemy. Always the English have disliked a great standing army. Now,
despite the entreaties of a king who knew the real danger, they reduced
the army to the pitiable number of seven thousand men. Louis XIV grew
ever more confident. In 1700 he was able to put his own grandson on the
throne of Spain and to dominate Europe from the Straits of Gibraltar to
the Netherlands. Another event showing his resolve soon startled the
world. In 1701 died James II, the dethroned King of England, and Louis
went out of his way to insult the English people. William III was King
by the will of Parliament. Louis had recognized him as such. Yet, on the
death of James, Louis declared that James's son was now the true King of
England. This impudent defiance meant, and Louis intended that it should
mean, renewed war. England had invited it by making her forces weak.
William III died in 1702 and the war went on under his successor, Queen
Anne.

Thus it happened that once more war-parties began to prowl on the
Canadian frontier, and women and children in remote clearings in the
forest shivered at the prospect of the savage scourge. The English
colonies suffered terribly. Everywhere France was aggressive. The
warlike Iroquois were now so alarmed by the French menace that, to
secure protection, they ceded their territory to Queen Anne and became
British subjects, a humiliating step indeed for a people who had once
thought themselves the most important in all the world. By 1703 the
butchery on the frontier was in full operation. The Jesuit historian
Charlevoix, with complacent exaggeration, says that in that year alone
three hundred men were killed on the New England frontier by the Abenaki
Indians incited by the French. The numbers slain were in fact fewer and
the slain were not always men but sometimes old women and young babies.
The policy of France was to make the war so ruthless that a gulf of
hatred should keep their Indian allies from ever making friends and
resuming trade with the English, whose hatchets, blankets, and other
supplies were, as the French well knew, better and cheaper than their
own. The French hoped to seize Boston, to destroy its industries and
sink its ships, then to advance beyond Boston and deal out to other
places the same fate. The rivalry of New England was to be ended by
making that region a desert.

The first fury of the war raged on the frontier of Maine, which was an
outpost of Massachusetts. On an August day in 1703 the people of the
rugged little settlement of Wells were at their usual tasks when they
heard gunshots and war-whoops. Indians had crept up to attack the place.
They set the village on fire and killed or carried off some twoscore
prisoners, chiefly women and children. The village of Deerfield, on the
northwestern frontier of Massachusetts, consisted of a wooden
meeting-house and a number of rough cabins which lodged the two or three
hundred inhabitants. On a February night in 1704 savages led by a young
member of the Canadian noblesse, Hertel de Rouville, approached the
village silently on snowshoes, waited on the outskirts during the dead
of night, and then just before dawn burst in upon the sleeping people.
The work was done quickly. Within an hour after dawn the place had been
plundered and set on fire, forty or fifty dead bodies of men and women
and children lay in the village, and a hundred and eleven miserable
prisoners were following their captors on snowshoes through the forest,
each prisoner well knowing that to fall by the way meant to have his
head split by a tomahawk and the scalp torn off. When on the first night
one of them slipped away, Rouville told the others that, should a
further escape occur, he would burn alive all those remaining in his
hands. The minister of the church at Deerfield, the Reverend John
Williams, was a captive, together with his wife and five children. The
wife, falling by the way, was killed by a stroke of a tomahawk and the
body was left lying on the snow. The children were taken from their
father and scattered among different bands. After a tramp of two hundred
miles through the wilderness to the outlying Canadian settlements, the
minister in the end reached Quebec. Every effort was made, even by his
Indian guard, to make him accept the Roman Catholic faith, but the stern
Puritan was obdurate. His daughter, Eunice, on the other hand, caught
young, became a Catholic so devoted that later she would not return to
New England lest the contact with Protestants should injure her faith.
She married a Caughnawaga Indian and became to all outward appearance a
squaw. Williams himself lived to resume his career in New England and to
write the story of the raid at Deerfield.

It may be that there were men in New England and New York capable of
similar barbarities. It is true that the savage allies of the English,
when at their worst, knew no restraint. There is nothing in the French
raids on a scale as great as that of the murderous raid by the Iroquois
on the French village of Lachine. But the Puritans of New England, while
they were ready to hew down savages, did not like and rarely took part
in the massacre of Europeans.

As the outrages went on year after year the temper of New England
towards the savages grew more ruthless. The General Court, the
Legislature of Massachusetts, offered forty pounds for every Indian
scalp brought in. Indians, like wolves, were vermin to be destroyed. The
anger of New England was further kindled by what was happening on the
sea. Privateers from Port Royal, in Acadia, attacked New England
commerce and New England fishermen and made unsafe the approaches to
Boston. This was to touch a commercial community on its most tender
spot; and a deep resolve was formed that Canada should be conquered and
the menace ended once for all.

It was only an occasional spirit in Massachusetts who made comprehensive
political plans. One of these was Samuel Vetch, a man somewhat different
from the usual type of New England leader, for he was not of English but
of Scottish origin, of the Covenanter strain. Vetch, himself an
adventurous trader, had taken a leading part in the ill-fated Scottish
attempt to found on the Isthmus of Panama a colony, which, in easy touch
with both the Pacific and the Atlantic, should carry on a gigantic
commerce between the East and the West. The colony failed, chiefly,
perhaps, because Spain would not have this intrusion into territory
which she claimed. Tropical disease and the disunion and incompetence of
the colonists themselves were Spain's allies in the destruction. After
this, Vetch had found his way to Boston, where he soon became prominent.
In 1707 Scotland and England were united under one Parliament, and the
active mind of Vetch was occupied with something greater than a Scottish
colony at Panama. Queen Anne, Vetch was resolved, should be "Sole
Empress of the vast North American Continent." Massachusetts was ready
for just such a cry. The General Court took up eagerly the plan of
Vetch. The scheme required help from England and the other colonies. To
England Vetch went in 1708. Marlborough had just won the great victory
of Oudenarde. It was good, the English ministry thought, to hit France
wherever she raised her head. In the spring of 1709 Vetch returned to
Boston with promises of powerful help at once for an attack on Canada,
and with the further promise that, the victory won, he himself should be
the first British Governor of Canada. New York was to help with nine
hundred men. Other remoter colonies were to aid on a smaller scale.
These contingents were to attack Canada by way of Lake Champlain. Twelve
hundred men from New England were to join the regulars from England and
go against Quebec by way of the sea and master Canada once for all.

The plan was similar to the one which Amherst and Wolfe carried to
success exactly fifty years later, and with a Wolfe in command it might
now have succeeded. The troops from England were to be at Boston before
the end of May, 1709. The colonial forces gathered. New Jersey and
Pennsylvania refused, indeed, to send any soldiers; but New York and the
other colonies concerned did their full share. By the early summer
Colonel Francis Nicholson, with some fifteen hundred men, lay fully
equipped in camp on Wood Creek near Lake Champlain, ready to descend on
Montreal as soon as news came of the arrival of the British fleet at
Boston for the attack on Quebec. On the shores of Boston harbor lay
another colonial army, large for the time--the levies from New England
which were to sail to Quebec. Officers had come out from England to
drill these hardy men, and as soldiers they were giving a good account
of themselves. They watched, fasted, and prayed, and watched again for
the fleet from England. Summer came and then autumn and still the fleet
did not arrive. Far away, in the crowded camp on Wood Creek, pestilence
broke out and as time wore on this army slowly melted away either by
death or withdrawal. At last, on October 11, 1709, word came from the
British ministry, dated the 27th of July, two months after the promised
fleet was to arrive at Boston, that it had been sent instead to
Portugal.

In spite of this disappointment the resolution endured to conquer
Canada. New York joined New England in sending deputations to London to
ask again for help. Four Mohawk chiefs went with Peter Schuyler from New
York and were the wonder of the day in London. It is something to have a
plan talked about. Malplaquet, the last of Marlborough's great
victories, had been won in the autumn of 1709 and the thought of a new
enterprise was popular. Nicholson, who had been sent from Boston, urged
that the first step should be to take Port Royal. What the colonies
required for this expedition was the aid of four frigates and five
hundred soldiers who should reach Boston by March.

The help arrived, though not in March but in July, 1710. Boston was
filled with enthusiasm for the enterprise. The legislature made military
service compulsory, quartered soldiers in private houses without consent
of the owners, impressed sailors, and altogether was quite arbitrary and
high-handed. The people, however, would bear almost anything if only
they could crush Port Royal, the den of privateers who seized many New
England vessels. On the 18th of September, to the great joy of Boston,
the frigates and the transports sailed away, with Nicholson in command
of the troops and Vetch as adjutant-general.

What we know today as Digby Basin on the east side of the Bay of Fundy,
is a great harbor, landlocked but for a narrow entrance about a mile
wide. Through this "gut," as it is called, the tide rushes in a
torrential and dangerous stream, but soon loses its violence in the
spacious and quiet harbor. Here the French had made their first enduring
colony in America. On the shores of the beautiful basin the
fleurs-de-lis had been raised over a French fort as early as 1605. A
lovely valley opens from the head of the basin to the interior. It is
now known as the Annapolis Valley, a fertile region dotted by the
homesteads of a happy and contented people. These people, however, are
not French in race nor do they live under a French Government. When on
the 24th of September, 1710, the fleet from Boston entered the basin,
and in doing so lost a ship and more than a score of men through the
destructive current, the decisive moment had come for all that region.
Fate had decreed that the land should not remain French but should
become English.

Port Royal was at that time a typical French community of the New World.
The village consisted of some poor houses made of logs or planks, a
wooden church, and, lying apart, a fort defended by earthworks. The
Governor, Subercase, was a brave French officer. He ruled the little
community with a despotism tempered only by indignant protests to the
King from those whom he ruled when his views and theirs did not
coincide. The peasants in the village counted for nothing. Connected
with the small garrison there were ladies and gentlemen who had no light
opinion of their own importance and were so peppery that Subercase
wished he had a madhouse in which to confine some of them. He thought
well of the country. It produced, he said, everything that France
produced except olives. The fertile land promised abundance of grain and
there was an inexhaustible supply of timber. There were many excellent
harbors. Had he a million livres, he would, he said, invest it gladly in
the country and be certain of a good return. His enthusiasm had
produced, however, no answering enthusiasm at Versailles, for there the
interests of Port Royal were miserably neglected. Yet it was a thorn in
the flesh of the English. In 1708 privateers from Port Royal had
destroyed no less than thirty-five English vessels, chiefly from Boston,
and had carried to the fort four hundred and seventy prisoners. Even in
winter months French ships would flit out of Port Royal and bring in
richly laden prizes. Can we wonder at Boston's deep resolve that now at
last the pest should end!

It was an imposing force which sailed into the basin. The four frigates
and thirty transports carried an army far greater than Subercase had
thought possible. The English landed some fourteen hundred men.
Subercase had less than three hundred. Within a few days, when the
English began to throw shells into the town, he asked for terms. On the
16th of October the little garrison, neglected by France and left ragged
and half-starved, marched out with drums beating and colors flying. The
English, drawn up before the gate, showed the usual honors to a brave
foe. The French flag was hauled down and in its place floated that of
Britain. Port Royal was renamed Annapolis and Vetch was made its
Governor. Three times before had the English come to Port Royal as
conquerors and then gone away, but now they were to remain. Ever since
that October day, when autumn was coloring the abundant foliage of the
lovely harbor, the British flag has waved over Annapolis. Because the
flag waved there it was destined to wave over all Acadia, or Nova
Scotia, and with Acadia in time went Canada.

A partial victory, however, such as the taking of Port Royal, was not
enough for the aroused spirit of the English. They and their allies had
beaten Louis XIV on the battlefields of Europe and had so worn out
France that clouds and darkness were about the last days of the Grand
Monarch now nearing his end. In America his agents were still drawing up
papers outlining grandiose designs for mastering the continent and for
proving that England's empire was near its fall, but Europe knew that
France in the long war had been beaten. The right way to smite France in
America was to rely upon England's naval power, to master the great
highway of the St. Lawrence, to isolate Canada, and to strangle one by
one the French settlements, beginning with Quebec.

There was malignant intrigue at the court of Queen Anne. One favorite,
the Duchess of Marlborough, had just been disgraced, and another, Mrs.
Masham, had been taken on by the weak and stupid Queen. The conquest of
Canada, if it could be achieved without the aid of Marlborough, would
help in his much desired overthrow. Petty motives were unhappily at the
root of the great scheme. Who better to lead such an expedition than the
brother of the new favorite whose success might discredit the husband of
the old one? Accordingly General "Jack" Hill, brother of Mrs. Masham,
was appointed to the chief military command and an admiral hitherto
little known but of good habits and quick wit, Sir Hovenden Walker, was
to lead the fleet.

The expedition against Quebec was on a scale adequate for the time.
Britain dispatched seven regiments of regulars, numbering in all five
thousand five hundred men, and there were besides in the fleet some
thousands of sailors and marines. Never before had the English sent to
North America a force so great. On June 24, 1711, Admiral Walker arrived
at Boston with his great array. Boston was impressed, but Boston was
also a little hurt, for the British leaders were very lofty and superior
in their tone towards colonials and gave orders as if Boston were a
provincial city of England which must learn respect and obedience to His
Majesty's officers "vested with the Queen's Royal Power and Authority."

More than seventy ships, led by nine men-of-war, sailed from Boston for
the attack on Canada. On board were nearly twelve thousand men. Compared
with this imposing fleet, that of Phips, twenty-one years earlier, seems
feeble. Phips had set out too late. This fleet was in good time, for it
sailed on the 30th of July. Vetch, always competent, was in command of
the colonial military forces, but never had any chance to show his
mettle, for during the voyage the seamen were in control. The Admiral
had left England with secret instructions. He had not been informed of
the task before him and for it he was hardly prepared. There were no
competent pilots to correct his ignorance. Now that he knew where he was
going he was anxious about the dangers of the northern waters. The St.
Lawrence River, he believed, froze solidly to the bottom in winter and
he feared that the ice would crush the sides of his ships. As he had
provisions for only eight or nine weeks, his men might starve. His mind
was filled, as he himself says, with melancholy and dismal horror at the
prospect of seamen and soldiers, worn to skeletons by hunger, drawing
lots to decide who should die first amidst the "adamantine frosts" and
"mountains of snow" of bleak and barren Canada.

The Gulf and River St. Lawrence spell death to an incompetent sailor.
The fogs, the numerous shoals and islands, make skillful seamanship
necessary. It is a long journey from Boston to Quebec by water. For
three weeks, however, all went well. On the 22d of August, Walker was
out of sight of land in the Gulf where it is about seventy miles wide
above the Island of Anticosti. A strong east wind with thick fog is
dreaded in those waters even now, and on the evening of that day a storm
of this kind blew up. In the fog Walker lost his bearings. When in fact
he was near the north shore he thought he was not far from the south
shore. At half-past ten at night Paddon, the captain of the Edgar,
Walker's flag-ship, came to tell him that land was in sight. Walker
assumed that it was the south shore and gave a fatal order for the fleet
to turn and head northward, a change which turned them straight towards
cliffs and breakers. He then went to bed. Soon one of the military
officers rushed to his cabin and begged him to come on deck as the ships
were among breakers. Walker, who was an irascible man, resented the
intrusion and remained in bed. A second time the officer appeared and
said the fleet would be lost if the Admiral did not act. Why it was left
for a military rather than a naval officer to rouse the Admiral in such
a crisis we do not know. Perhaps the sailors were afraid of the great
man. Walker appeared on deck in dressing gown and slippers. The fog had
lifted, and in the moonlight there could be seen breaking surf to
leeward. A French pilot, captured in the Gulf, had taken pains to give
what he could of alarming information. He now declared that the ships
were off the north shore. Walker turned his own ship sharply and
succeeded in beating out into deep water and safety. For the fleet the
night was terrible. Some ships dropped anchor which held, for happily
the storm abated. Fog guns and lights as signals of distress availed
little to the ships in difficulty. Eight British transports laden with
troops and two ships carrying supplies were dashed to pieces on the
rocks. The shrieks of drowning men could be heard in the darkness. The
scene was the rocky Isle aux Œufs and adjacent reefs off the north
shore. About seven hundred soldiers, including twenty-nine officers, and
in addition perhaps two hundred sailors, were lost on that awful night.

The disaster was not overwhelming and Walker might have gone on and
captured Quebec. He had not lost a single war-ship and he had still some
eleven thousand men. General Hill might have stiffened the back of the
forlorn Admiral, but Hill himself was no better. Vetch spoke for going
on. He knew the St. Lawrence waters for he had been at Quebec and had
actually charted a part of the river and was more familiar with it, he
believed, than were the Canadians themselves. What pilots there were
declared, however, that to go on was impossible and the helpless
captains of the ships were of opinion that, with the warning of such a
disaster, they could not disregard this counsel. Though the character of
the English is such that usually a reverse serves to stiffen their
backs, in this case it was not so. A council of war yielded to the panic
of the hour and the great fleet turned homeward. Soon it was gathered in
what is now Sydney harbor in Cape Breton. From here the New England
ships went home and Walker sailed for England. At Spithead the Edgar,
the flag-ship, blew up and all on board perished. Walker was on shore at
the time. So far was he from being disgraced that he was given a new
command. Later, when the Whigs came in, he was dismissed from the
service, less, it seems, in blame for the disaster than for his Tory
opinions. It is not an unusual irony of life that Vetch, the one wholly
efficient leader in the expedition, ended his days in a debtor's prison.

Quebec had shivered before a menace, the greatest in its history.
Through the long months of the summer of 1711 there had been prayer and
fasting to avert the danger. Apparently trading ships had deserted the
lower St. Lawrence in alarm, for no word had arrived at Quebec of the
approach of Walker's fleet. Nor had the great disaster been witnessed by
any onlookers. The island where it occurred was then and still remains
desert. Up to the middle of October, nearly two months after the
disaster, the watchers at Quebec feared that they might see any day a
British fleet rounding the head of the Island of Orleans. On the 19th of
October the first news of the disaster arrived and then it was easy for
Quebec to believe that God had struck the English wretches with a
terrible vengeance. Three thousand men, it was said, had reached land
and then perished miserably. Many bodies had been found naked and in
attitudes of despair. Other thousands had perished in the water.
Vessel-loads of spoil had been gathered, rich plate, beautiful swords,
magnificent clothing, gold, silver, jewels. The truth seems to be that
some weeks after the disaster the evidences of the wrecks were
discovered. Even to this day ships are battered to pieces in those
rock-strewn waters and no one survives to tell the story. Some fishermen
landing on the island had found human bodies, dead horses and other
animals, and the hulls of seven ships. They had gathered some
wreckage--and that was the whole story. Quebec sang Te Deum. From
attacks by sea there had now been two escapes which showed God's love
for Canada. In the little church of Notre Dame des Victoires,
consecrated at that time to the memory of the deliverance from Phips and
Walker, daily prayers are still poured out for the well-being of Canada.
God had been a present help on land as well as on the sea. Nicholson,
with more than two thousand men, had been waiting at his camp near Lake
Champlain to descend on Montreal as soon as Walker reached Quebec. When
he received the news of the disaster he broke up his force and retired.
For the moment Canada was safe from the threatened invasion.

In spite of this apparent deliverance, the long war, now near its end,
brought a destructive blow to French power in America. Though France
still possessed vigor and resources which her enemies were apt to
underrate, the war had gone against her in Europe. Her finest armies had
been destroyed by Marlborough, her taxation was crushing, her credit was
ruined, her people were suffering for lack of food. The allies had begun
to think that there was no humiliation which they might not put upon
France. Louis XIV, they said, must give up Alsace, which, with Lorraine,
he had taken some years earlier, and he must help to drive his own
grandson from the Spanish throne. This exorbitant demand stirred the
pride not only of Louis but of the French nation, and the allies found
that they could not trample France under their feet. The Treaty of
Utrecht, concluded in 1713, shows that each side was too strong as yet
to be crushed. In dismissing Marlborough, Great Britain had lost one of
her chief assets. His name had become a terror to France. To this day,
both in France and in French Canada, is sung the popular ditty "Monsieur
Malbrouck est mort," a song of delight at a report that Marlborough was
dead. When in place of Marlborough leaders of the type of General Hill
were appointed to high command, France could not be finally beaten. The
Treaty of Utrecht was the outcome of war-weariness. It marks, however, a
double check to Louis XIV. He could not master Europe and he could not
master America. France now ceded to Britain her claim to Acadia,
Newfoundland, and Hudson Bay. She regarded this, however, as only a
temporary set-back and was soon planning and plotting great designs far
surpassing the narrower vision of the English colonies.

It was with a wry face, however, that France yielded Acadia. To retain
it she offered to give up all rights in the Newfoundland fisheries, the
nursery of her marine. Britain would not yield Acadia, dreading chiefly
perhaps the wrath of New England which had conquered Port Royal.
Britain, however, compromised on the question of boundaries in a way so
dangerous that the long war settled finally no great issues in America.
She took Acadia "according to its ancient limits,"--but no one knew
these limits. They were to be defined by a joint commission of the two
nations which, after forty years, reached no agreement. The Island of
Cape Breton and the adjoining Ile St. Jean, now Prince Edward Island,
remained to France. Though Britain secured sovereignty over
Newfoundland, France retained extensive rights in the Newfoundland
fisheries. The treaty left unsettled the boundary between Canada and the
English colonies. While it yielded Hudson Bay to Britain, it settled
nothing as to frontiers in the wilderness which stretched beyond the
Great Lakes into the Far West and which had vast wealth in furs.




CHAPTER IV.

Louisbourg And Boston

For thirty years England and France now remained at peace, and England
had many reasons for desiring peace to continue. Anne, the last of the
Stuart rulers, died in 1714. The new King, George I, Elector of Hanover,
was a German and a German unchangeable, for he was already fifty-four,
with little knowledge of England and none of the English, and with an
undying love for the dear despotic ways easily followed in a small
German principality. He and his successor George II were thinking
eternally of German rather than of English problems, and with German
interests chiefly regarded it was well that England should make a friend
of France. It was well, too, that under a new dynasty, with its title
disputed, England should not encourage France to continue the friendly
policy of Louis XIV towards James, the deposed Stuart Pretender. England
had just made a new, determined, and arrogant enemy by forcing upon
Spain the deep humiliation of ceding Gibraltar, which had been taken in
1704 by Admiral Rooke with allied forces. The proudest monarchy in
Europe was compelled to see a spot of its own sacred territory held
permanently by a rival nation. Gibraltar Spain was determined to
recover. Its loss drove her into the arms of the enemies of England and
remains to this day a grievance which on occasion Spanish politicians
know well how to make useful.

Great Britain was now under the direction of a leader whose policy was
peace. A nation is happy when a born statesman with a truly liberal mind
and a genuine love of his country comes to the front in its affairs.
Such a man was Sir Robert Walpole. He was a Whig squire, a plain country
gentleman, with enough of culture to love good pictures and the ancient
classics, but delighting chiefly in sports and agriculture, hard
drinking and politics. When only twenty-seven he was already a leader
among the Whigs; at thirty-two he was Secretary for War; and before he
was forty he had become Prime Minister, a post which he really created
and was the first Englishman to hold. Friendship with France marked a
new phase of British policy. Walpole's baffled enemies said that he was
bribed by France. His shrewd insight kept France lukewarm in its support
of the Stuart rising in 1715, which he punished with great severity. But
it was as a master of finance that he was strongest. While continental
nations were wasting men and money Walpole gloried in saving English
lives and English gold. He found new and fruitful modes of taxation, but
when urged to tax the colonies he preferred, as he said, to leave that
to a bolder man. It is a pity that any one was ever found bold enough to
do it.

Walpole's policy endured for a quarter of a century. He abandoned it
only after a bitter struggle in which he was attacked as sacrificing the
national honor for the sake of peace. Spain was an easy mark for those
who wished to arouse the warlike spirit. She still persecuted and burned
heretics, a great cause of offense in Protestant Britain, and she was
rigorous in excluding foreigners from trading with her colonies. To be
the one exception in this policy of exclusion was the privilege enjoyed
by Britain. When the fortunes of Spain were low in 1713, she had been
forced not merely to cede Gibraltar but also to give to the British the
monopoly of supplying the Spanish colonies with negro slaves and the
right to send one ship a year to trade at Porto Bello in South America.
It seems a sufficiently ignoble bargain for a great nation to exact: the
monopoly of carrying and selling cargoes of black men and the right to
send a single ship yearly to a Spanish colony. We can hardly imagine
grave diplomats of our day haggling over such terms. But the eighteenth
century was not the twentieth. From the treaty the British expected
amazing results. The South Sea Company was formed to carry on a vast
trade with South America. One ship a year could, of course, carry
little, but the ships laden with negroes could smuggle into the colonies
merchandise and the one trading ship could be and was reloaded
fraudulently from lighters so that its cargo was multiplied manyfold.
Out of the belief in huge profits from this trade with its exaggerated
visions of profit grew in 1720 the famous South Sea Bubble which
inaugurated a period of frantic speculation in England. Worthless shares
in companies formed for trade in the South Seas sold at a thousand per
cent of their face value. It is a form of madness to which human greed
is ever liable. Walpole's financial insight condemned from the first the
wild outburst, and his common sense during the crisis helped to stem the
tide of disaster. The South Sea Bubble burst partly because Spain stood
sternly on her own rights and punished British smugglers. During many
years the tension between the two nations grew. No doubt Spanish
officials were harsh. Tales were repeated in England of their
brutalities to British sailors who fell into their hands. In 1739 the
story of a certain Captain Jenkins that his ear had been cut off by
Spanish captors and thrown in his face with an insulting message to his
government brought matters to a climax. Events in other parts of Europe
soon made the war general. When, in 1740, the young King of Prussia,
Frederick II, came to the throne, his first act was to march an army
into Silesia. To this province he had, he said, in the male line, a
better claim than that of the woman, Maria Theresa, who had just
inherited the Austrian crown. Frederick conquered Silesia and held it.
In 1744 he was allied with Spain and France, while Britain allied
herself with Austria, and thus Britain and France were again at war.

In America both sides had long seen that the war was inevitable. Never
had French opinion been more arrogant in asserting France's right to
North America than after the Treaty of Utrecht. At the dinner-table of
the Governor in Quebec there was incessant talk of Britain's incapacity,
of the sheer luck by which she had blundered into the occupation of
great areas, while in truth she was weak through lack of union and
organization. A natural antipathy, it was said, existed between her
colonies and herself; she was a monarchy while they were really
independent republics. France, on the other hand, had grown stronger
since the last war. In 1713 she had retained the island of Cape Breton
and now she had made it a new menace to British power. Boston, which had
breathed more freely after the fall of Port Royal in 1710, soon had
renewed cause for alarm in regard to its shipping. On the southern coast
of Cape Breton, there was a spacious harbor with a narrow entrance
easily fortified, and here France began to build the fortress of
Louisbourg. It was planned on the most approved military principles of
the time. Through its strength, the boastful talk went, France should
master North America. The King sent out cannon, undertook to build a
hospital, to furnish chaplains for the service of the Church, to help
education, and so on. Above all, he sent to Louisbourg soldiers.

Reports of these wonderful things reached the English colonies and
caused fears and misgivings. New England believed that Louisbourg
reflected the pomp and wealth of Versailles. The fortress was, in truth,
slow in building and never more than a rather desolate outpost of
France. It contained in all about four thousand people. During the
thirty years of the long truce it became so strong that it was without a
rival on the Atlantic coast. The excellent harbor was a haven for the
fishermen of adjacent waters and a base for French privateers, who were
a terror to all the near trade routes of the Atlantic. On the military
side Louisbourg seemed a success. But the French failed in their effort
to colonize the island of Cape Breton on which the fortress stood. Today
this island has great iron and other industries. There are coal-mines
ear Louisbourg; and its harbor, long deserted after the fall of the
power of France, has now an extensive commerce. The island was indeed
fabulously rich in coals and minerals. To use these things, however, was
to be the task of a new age of industry. The colonist of the eighteenth
century--a merchant, a farmer, or a fur trader--thought that Cape Breton
was bleak and infertile and refused to settle there. Louisbourg remained
a compact fortress with a good harbor, free from ice during most of the
year, but too much haunted by fog. It looked out on a much-traveled sea.
But it remained set in the wilderness.

Even if Louisbourg made up for the loss of Port Royal, this did not,
however, console France for the cession of Acadia. The fixed idea of
those who shaped the policy of Canada was to recover Acadia and
meanwhile to keep its French settlers loyal to France. The Acadians were
not a promising people with whom to work. In Acadia, or Nova Scotia, as
the English called it, these backward people had slowly gathered during
a hundred years and had remained remote and neglected. They had cleared
farms, built primitive houses, planted orchards, and reared cattle. In
1713 their number did not exceed two or three thousand, but already they
were showing the amazing fertility of the French race in America. They
were prosperous but ignorant. Almost none of them could read. After the
cession of their land to Britain in 1713 they had been guaranteed by
treaty the free exercise of their religion and they were Catholics to a
man. It seems as if history need hardly mention a people so feeble and
obscure. Circumstances, however, made the rôle of the Acadians
important. Their position was unique. The Treaty of Utrecht gave them
the right to leave Acadia within a year, taking with them their personal
effects. To this Queen Anne added the just privilege of selling their
lands and houses. Neither the Acadians themselves, however, nor their
new British masters were desirous that they should leave. The Acadians
were content in their old homes; and the British did not wish them to
help in building up the neighboring French stronghold on Cape Breton. It
thus happened that the French officials could induce few of the Acadians
to migrate and the English troubled them little. Having been resolute in
acquiring Nova Scotia, Britain proceeded straightway to neglect it. She
brought in few settlers. She kept there less than two hundred soldiers
and even to these she paid so little attention that sometimes they had
no uniforms. The Acadians prospered, multiplied, and quarreled as to the
boundaries of their lands. They rendered no military service, paid no
taxes, and had the country to themselves as completely as if there had
been no British conquest. They rarely saw a British official. If they
asked the British Governor at Annapolis to settle for them some vexed
question of rights or ownership he did so and they did not even pay a
fee.

This is not, however, the whole story. England's neglect of the colony
was France's opportunity. Perhaps the French court did not follow
closely what was going on in Acadia. The successive French Governors of
Canada at Quebec were, however, alert; and their policy was to incite
the Abenaki Indians on the New England frontier to harass the English
settlements, and to keep the Acadians an active factor in the support of
French plans. The nature of French intrigue is best seen in the career
of Sebastien Rale. He was a highly educated Jesuit priest. It was long a
tradition among the Jesuits to send some of their best men as
missionaries among the Indians. Rale spent nearly the whole of his life
with the Abenakis at the mission station of Norridgewock on the Kennebec
River. He knew the language and the customs of the Indians, attended
their councils, and dominated them by his influence. He was a model
missionary, earnest and scholarly. But the Jesuit of that age was prone
to be half spiritual zealot, half political intriguer. There is no doubt
that the Indians had a genuine fear that the English, with danger from
France apparently removed by the Treaty of Utrecht, would press claims
to lands about the Kennebec River in what is now the State of Maine, and
that they would ignore the claims of the Indians and drive them out. The
Governor at Quebec helped to arouse the savages against the arrogant
intruders. English border ruffians stirred the Indians by their drunken
outrages and gave them real cause for anger. The savages knew only one
way of expressing political unrest. They began murdering women and
children in raids on lonely log cabins on the frontier. The inevitable
result was that in 1721 Massachusetts began a war on them which dragged
on for years. Rale, inspired from Quebec, was believed to control the
Indians and, indeed, boasted that he did so. At last the English struck
at the heart of the trouble. In 1724 some two hundred determined men
made a silent advance through the forest to the mission village of
Norridgewock where Rale lived, and Rale died fighting the assailants. In
Europe a French Jesuit such as he would have worked among diplomats and
at the luxurious courts of kings. In America he worked among savages
under the hard conditions of frontier life. The methods and the aims in
both cases were the same--by subtle and secret influence so to mold the
actions of men that France should be exalted in power. In their high
politics the French sometimes overreached themselves. To seize points of
vantage, to intrigue for influence, are not in themselves creative. They
must be supported by such practical efforts as will assure an economic
reserve adequate in the hour of testing. France failed partly because
she did not know how to lay sound industrial foundations which should
give substance to the brilliant planning of her leaders.

To French influence of this kind the English opposed forces that were
the outcome of their national character and institutions. They were
keener traders than the French and had cheaper and better goods, with
the exception perhaps of French gunpowder and of French brandy, which
the Indians preferred to English rum. Though the English were less alert
and less brilliant than the French, the work that they did was more
enduring. Their settlements encroached ever more and more upon the
forest. They found and tilled the good lands, traded and saved and
gradually built up populous communities. The British colonies had twenty
times the population of Canada. The tide of their power crept in slowly
but it moved with the relentless force that has subsequently made nearly
the whole of North America English in speech and modes of thought.

When, in 1744, open war between the two nations came at last in Europe,
each prepared to spring at the other in America--and France sprang
first. In Nova Scotia, on the narrow strait which separates the mainland
from the island of Cape Breton, the British had a weak little fishing
settlement called Canseau. Suddenly in May, 1744, when the British at
Canseau had heard nothing of war, two armed vessels from Louisbourg with
six or seven hundred soldiers and sailors appeared before the poor
little place and demanded its surrender. To this the eighty British
defenders agreed on the condition that they should be sent to Boston
which, as yet, had not heard of the war. Meanwhile they were taken to
Louisbourg where they kept their eyes open. But the French continued in
their offensive. The one vital place held by the British in Nova Scotia
was Annapolis, at that time so neglected that the sandy ramparts had
crumbled into the ditch supposed to protect them, and cows from the
neighboring fields walked up the slope and looked down into the fort. It
was Duvivier, the captor of Canseau, who attacked Annapolis. He had
hoped much for help from the Indians and the Acadians, but, though both
seemed eager, both failed him in action. Paul Mascarene, who defended
Annapolis, was of Huguenot blood, which stimulated him to fight the
better against the Catholic French. Boston sent him help, for that
little capital was deeply moved, and so Annapolis did not fall, though
it was harassed during the whole summer of 1744; and New England, in a
fever at the new perils of war, prepared a mighty stroke against the
French.

This expedition was to undertake nothing less than the capture of
Louisbourg itself. The colonial troops had been so often reminded of
their inferiority to regular troops as fighting forces that, with
provincial docility, they had almost come to accept the estimate. It was
well enough for them to fight irregular French and Indian bands, but to
attack a fortress defended by a French garrison was something that only
a few bold spirits among them could imagine. Such a spirit, however, was
William Vaughan, a Maine trader, deeply involved in the fishing industry
and confronted with ruin from hostile Louisbourg. Shirley, the Governor
of Massachusetts, a man of eager ambition, took up the proposal and
worked out an elaborate plan. The prisoners who had been captured at
Canseau by the French and interned at Louisbourg now arrived at Boston
and told of bad conditions in the fortress. In January, 1745, Shirley
called a session of the General Court, the little parliament of
Massachusetts, and, having taken the unusual step of pledging the
members to secrecy, he unfolded his plan. But it proved too bold for the
prudent legislators, and they voted it down. Meanwhile New England trade
was suffering from ships which used Louisbourg as a base. At length
public opinion was aroused and, when Shirley again called the General
Court, a bare majority endorsed his plan. Soon thereafter New England
was aflame. Appeals for help were sent to England and, it is said, even
to Jamaica. Shirley counted on aid from a British squadron, under
Commodore Peter Warren, in American waters, but at first Warren had no
instructions to help such a plan. This disappointment did not keep New
England from going on alone. In the end Warren received instructions to
give the necessary substantial aid, and he established a strict blockade
which played a vital part in the siege of the French fortress.

In this hour of deadly peril Louisbourg was in not quite happy case.
Some of the French officers, who would otherwise have starved on their
low pay, were taking part in illicit trade and were neglecting their
duties. Just after Christmas in 1744, there had been a mutiny over a
petty question of butter and bacon. Here, as in all French colonies,
there were cliques, with the suspicions and bitterness which they
involve. The Governor Duchambon, though brave enough, was a man of poor
judgment in a position that required both tact and talent. The English
did not make the mistake of delaying their preparations. They were
indeed so prompt that they arrived at Canseau early in April and had to
wait for the ice to break up in Gabarus Bay, near Louisbourg, where they
intended to land. Here, on April 30, the great fleet appeared. A watcher
in Louisbourg counted ninety-six ships standing off shore. With little
opposition from the French the amazing army landed at Freshwater Cove.

Then began an astonishing siege. The commander of the New England
forces, William Pepperrell, was a Maine trader, who dealt in a little of
everything, fish, groceries, lumber, ships, land. Though innocent of
military science, he was firm and tactful. A British officer with strict
military ideas could not, perhaps, have led that strange army with
success. Pepperrell knew that he had good fighting material; he knew,
too, how to handle it. In his army of some four thousand men there was
probably not one officer with a regular training. Few of his force had
proper equipment, but nearly all his men were handy on a ship as well as
on land. In Louisbourg were about two thousand defenders, of whom only
five or six hundred were French regulars. These professional soldiers
watched with contempt not untouched with apprehension the breaches of
military precedent in the operations of the besiegers. Men harnessed
like horses dragged guns through morasses into position, exposed
themselves recklessly, and showed the skill, initiative, and resolution
which we have now come to consider the dominant qualities of the Yankee.
In time Warren arrived with a British squadron and then the French were
puzzled anew. They could not understand the relations between the fleet
and the army, which seemed to them to belong to different nations. The
New Englanders appeared to be under a Governor who was something like an
independent monarch. He had drawn up elaborate plans for his army,
comical in their apparent disregard of the realities of war, naming the
hour when the force should land "unobserved" before Louisbourg,
instructing Pepperrell to surprise that place while every one was
asleep, and so on. Kindly Providence was expected even to give
continuous good weather. "The English appear to have enlisted Heaven in
their interests," said a despairing resident of the town; "so long as
the expedition lasted they had the most beautiful weather in the world."
There were no storms; the winds were favorable; fog, so common on that
coast, did not creep in; and the sky was clear.

Among the French the opinion prevailed that the English colonists were
ferocious pirates plotting eternally to destroy the power of France.
Their liberty, however, it was well understood, had made them strong;
and now they quickly became formidable soldiers. Their shooting, bad at
first, was, in the end, superb. Sometimes in their excess of zeal they
overcharged their cannon so that the guns burst. But they managed to hit
practically every house in Louisbourg, and since most of the houses were
of wood there was constant danger of fire. Some of the French fought
well. Even children of ten and twelve helped to carry ammunition.

The Governor Duchambon tried to keep up the spirits of the garrison by
absurd exaggeration of British losses. He was relying much on help from
France, but only a single ship reached port. On May 19, 1745, the
besieged saw approaching Louisbourg a great French ship of war, the
Vigilant, long looked for, carrying 64 guns and 560 men. A northwest
wind was blowing which would have brought her quickly into the harbor.
The British fleet was two and a half leagues away to leeward. The great
ship, thinking herself secure, did not even stop to communicate with
Louisbourg but wantonly gave chase to a small British privateer which
she encountered near the shore. By skillful maneuvering the smaller ship
led the French frigate out to sea again, and then the British squadron
came up. From five o'clock to ten in the evening anxious men in
Louisbourg watched the fight and saw at last the Vigilant surrender
after losing eighty men. This disaster broke the spirit of the
defenders, who were already short of ammunition. When they knew that the
British were preparing for a combined assault by land and sea, they made
terms and surrendered on the 17th of June, after the siege had lasted
for seven weeks. The garrison marched out with the honors of war, to be
transported to France, together with such of the civilian population as
wished to go.

The British squadron then sailed into the harbor. Pepperrell's strange
army, ragged and war-worn after the long siege, entered the town by the
south gate. They had fought as crusaders, for to many of them Catholic
Louisbourg was a stronghold of Satan. Whitfield, the great English
evangelist, then in New England, had given them a motto--Nil desperandum
Christo duce. There is a story that one of the English chaplains, old
Parson Moody, a man of about seventy, had brought with him from Boston
an axe and was soon found using it to hew down the altar and images in
the church at Louisbourg. If the story is true, it does something to
explain the belief of the French in the savagery of their opponents who
would so treat things which their enemies held to be most sacred. The
French had met this fanaticism with a savagery equally intense and
directed not against things but against the flesh of men. An inhabitant
of Louisbourg during the siege describes the dauntless bravery of the
Indian allies of the French during the siege: "Full of hatred for the
English whose ferocity they abhor, they destroy all upon whom they can
lay hands." He does not have even a word of censure for the savages who
tortured and killed in cold blood a party of some twenty English who had
been induced to surrender on promise of life. The French declared that
not they but the savages were responsible for such barbarities, and the
English retorted that the French must control their allies. Feeling on
such things was naturally bitter on both sides and did much to decide
that the war between the two nations should be to the death.

The fall of Louisbourg brought great exultation to the English colonies.
It was a unique event, the first prolonged and successful siege that had
as yet taken place north of Mexico. An odd chance of war had decreed
that untrained soldiers should win a success so prodigious. New England,
it is true, had incurred a heavy expenditure, and her men, having done
so much, naturally imagined that they had done everything, and talked as
if the siege was wholly their triumph. They were, of course, greatly
aided by the fleet under Warren, and the achievement was a joint triumph
of army and navy. New England alone, however, had the credit of
conceiving and of arousing others to carry out a brilliant exploit.

Victory inspires to further victory. The British, exultant after
Louisbourg, were resolved to make an end of French power in America.
"Delenda est Canada!" cried Governor Shirley to the General Court of
Massachusetts, and the response of the members was the voting of men and
money on a scale that involved the bankruptcy of the Commonwealth. Other
colonies, too, were eager for a cause which had won a success so
dazzling, and some eight thousand men were promised for an attack on
Canada, proud and valiant Massachusetts contributing nearly one-half of
the total number. The old plan was to be followed. New York was to lead
in an attack by way of Lake Champlain. New England was to collect its
forces at Louisbourg. Here a British fleet should come, carrying eight
battalions of British regulars, and, with Warren in command, the whole
armada should proceed to Quebec. Nothing came of this elaborate scheme.
Neither the promised troops nor the fleet arrived from England. British
ministers broke faith with the colonists in the adventure with quite too
light a heart.

Stories went abroad of disorder and dissension in Louisbourg under the
English and of the weakness of the place. Disease broke out. Hundreds of
New England soldiers died and their bones now lie in graves, unmarked
and forgotten, on the seashore by the deserted fortress; at almost any
time still their bones, washed down by the waves, may be picked up on
the beach. There were sullen mutterings of discontent at Louisbourg.
Soldiers grumbled over grievances which were sometimes fantastic. Rumor
had been persistent in creating a legend that vast wealth, the
accumulated plunder brought in by French privateers, was stored in the
town. From this source a rich reward in booty was expected by the
soldiers. In fact, when Louisbourg was taken, all looting was forbidden
and the soldiers were put on guard over houses which they had hoped to
rob. For the soldiers there were no prizes. Louisbourg was poor. The
sailors, on the other hand, were fortunate. As a decoy Warren kept the
French flag flying over the harbor, and French ships sailed in, one of
them with a vast treasure of gold and silver coin and ingots from Peru
valued at £600,000. One other prize was valued at £200,000 and a third
at £140,000. Warren's own share of prize money amounted to £60,000,
while Pepperrell, the unrewarded leader of the sister service, piled up
a personal debt of £10,000. Quarrels occurred between soldiers and
sailors, and in these the New Englanders soon proved by no means the
cowards which complacent superiority in England considered them; rather,
as an enlightened Briton said, "If they had pickaxe and spade they would
dig a way to Hell itself and storm that stronghold."

Behind all difficulties was the question whether, having taken
Louisbourg, the British could continue to hold it. France answered with
a resolute "No." To retake it she fitted out a great fleet. Nearly half
her navy gathered under the Duc d'Anville and put to sea on June 20,
1746. If in the previous summer God had helped the English with good
weather, by a similar proof His face now appeared turned a second time
against the French. In the great array there were more than sixty ships,
which were to gather at Chebucto, now Halifax, harbor, and to be joined
there by four great ships of war from the West Indies. Everything went
wrong. On the voyage across the Atlantic there was a prolonged calm,
followed by a heavy squall. Several ships were struck by lightning. A
magazine on the Mars blew up, killing ten and wounding twenty-one men.
Pestilence broke out. As a crowning misfortune, the fleet was scattered
by a terrific storm. After great delay d'Anville's ship reached
Chebucto, then a wild and lonely spot. The expected fleet from the West
Indies had indeed come, but had gone, since the ships from France, long
overdue, had not arrived. D'Anville died suddenly--some said of
apoplexy, others of poison self-administered. More ships arrived full of
sick men and short of provisions. D'Estournel, who succeeded d'Anville
in chief command, in despair at the outlook killed himself with his own
sword after the experience of only a day or two in his post. La
Jonquière, a competent officer, afterwards Governor of Canada, then led
the expedition. The pestilence still raged, and from two to three
thousand men died. One day a Boston sloop boldly entered Chebucto harbor
to find out what was going on. It is a wonder that the British did not
descend upon the stricken French and destroy them. In October, La
Jonquière, having pulled his force together, planned to win the small
success of taking Annapolis, but again storms scattered his ships. At
the end of October he finally decided to return to France. But there
were more heavy storms; and one French crew was so near starvation that
only a chance meeting with a Portuguese ship kept them from killing and
eating five English prisoners. Only a battered remnant of the fleet
eventually reached home ports.

The disaster did not crush France. In May of the next spring, 1747, a
new fleet under La Jonquière set out to retake Louisbourg. Near the
coast of Europe, however, Admirals Anson and Warren met and completely
destroyed it, taking prisoner La Jonquière himself. This disaster
effected what was really the most important result of the war: it made
the British fleet definitely superior to the French. During the struggle
England had produced a new Drake, who attacked Spain in the spirit of
the sea-dogs of Elizabeth. Anson had gone in 1740 into the Pacific,
where he seized and plundered Spanish ships as Drake had done nearly two
centuries earlier; and in 1744, when he had been given up for lost, he
completed the great exploit of sailing round the world and bringing home
rich booty. Such feats went far to give Britain that command of the sea
on which her colonial Empire was to depend.

The issue of the war hung more on events that occurred in Europe than in
America, and France had made gains as well as suffered losses. It was on
the sea that she had sustained her chief defeats. In India she had
gained by taking the English factory at Madras; and in the Low Countries
she was still aggressive. Indeed, during the war England had been more
hostile to Spain than to France. She had not taken very seriously her
support of the colonies in their attack on Louisbourg and she had failed
them utterly in their designs on Canada. It is true that in Europe
England had grave problems to solve. Austria, with which she was allied,
desired her to fight until Frederick of Prussia should give up the
province of Silesia seized by him in 1740. In this quarrel England had
no vital interest. France had occupied the Austrian Netherlands and had
refused to hand back to Austria this territory unless she received Cape
Breton in return. Britain might have kept Cape Breton if she would have
allowed France to keep Belgium. This, in loyalty to Austria, she would
not do. Accordingly peace was made at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748 on the
agreement that each side should restore to the other its conquests, not
merely in Europe but also in America and Asia. Thus it happened that the
British flag went up again at Madras while it came down at Louisbourg.

Boston was of course angry at the terms of the treaty. What sacrifices
had Massachusetts not made! The least of them was the great burden of
debt which she had piled up. Her sons had borne what Pepperrell called
"almost incredible hardships." They had landed cannon on a lee shore
when the great waves pounded to pieces their boats and when men wading
breast high were crushed by the weight of iron. Harnessed two and three
hundred to a gun, they had dragged the pieces one after the other over
rocks and through bog and slime, and had then served them in the open
under the fire of the enemy. New Englanders had died like "rotten sheep"
in Louisbourg. The graves of nearly a thousand of them lay on the bleak
point outside the wall. What they had gained by this sacrifice must now
be abandoned. A spirit of discontent with the mother country went abroad
and, after this sacrifice of colonial interests, never wholly died out.
It is not without interest to note in passing that Gridley, the engineer
who drew the plan of the defenses of Louisbourg, thirty years later drew
those of Bunker Hill to protect men of the English race who fought
against England.

Every one knew that the peace of 1748 was only a truce and Britain began
promptly new defenses. Into the spacious harbor of Chebucto, which three
years earlier had been the scene of the sorrows of d'Anville's fleet,
there sailed in June, 1749, a considerable British squadron bent on a
momentous errand. It carried some thousands of settlers, Edward
Cornwallis, a governor clothed with adequate authority, and a force
sufficient for the defense of the new foundation. Cornwallis was
delighted with the prospect. "All the officers agree the harbour is the
finest they have ever seen"--this, of Halifax harbor with the great
Bedford Basin, opening beyond it, spacious enough to contain the fleets
of the world. "The Country is one continuous Wood, no clear spot to be
seen or heard of. D'Anville's fleet ... cleared no ground; they encamped
their men on the beach." The garrison was withdrawn from Louisbourg and
soon arrived at Halifax, with a vast quantity of stores. A town was
marked out; lots were drawn for sites; and every one knew where he might
build his house. There were prodigious digging, chopping, hammering. "I
shall be able to get them all Houses before winter," wrote Cornwallis
cheerily. Firm military discipline, indeed, did wonders. Before winter
came, a town had been created, and with the town a fortress which from
that time has remained the chief naval and military stronghold of Great
Britain in North America. At Louisbourg some two hundred miles farther
east on the coast, France could reëstablish her military strength, but
now Louisbourg had a rival and each was resolved to yield nothing to the
other. The founding of Halifax was in truth the symbol of the renewal of
the struggle for a continent.




CHAPTER V.

The Great West

In days before the railway had made possible a bulky commerce by
overland routes, rivers furnished the chief means of access to inland
regions. The fame of the Ganges, the Euphrates, the Nile, and the Danube
shows the part which great rivers have played in history. Of North
America's four greatest river systems, the two in the far north have
become known in times so recent that their place in history is not yet
determined. One of them, the Mackenzie, a mighty stream some two
thousand miles long, flows into the Arctic Ocean through what remains
chiefly a wilderness. The waters of the other, the Saskatchewan,
discharge into Hudson Bay more than a thousand miles from their source,
flowing through rich prairie land which is still but scantily peopled.
On the Saskatchewan, as on the remaining two systems, the St. Lawrence
and the Mississippi, the French were the pioneers. Though today the
regions drained by these four rivers are dominated by the rival race,
the story which we now follow is one of romantic enterprise in which the
honors are with France.

More perhaps by accident than by design had the French been the first to
settle on the St. Lawrence. Fishing vessels had hovered round the
entrance to the Gulf of St. Lawrence for years before, in 1535, the
French sailor, Jacques Cartier, advanced up the river as far as the foot
of the torrential rapids where now stands the city of Montreal. Cartier
was seeking a route to the Far East. He half believed that this
impressive waterway drained the plains of China and that around the next
bend he might find the busy life of an oriental city. The time came when
it was known that a great sea lay between America and Asia and the
mystery of the pathway to this sea long fascinated the pioneers of the
St. Lawrence. Canada was a colony, a trading-post, a mission, the
favorite field of Jesuit activity, but it was also the land which
offered by way of the St. Lawrence a route leading illimitably westward
to the Far East.

One other route rivaled the St. Lawrence in promise, and that was the
Mississippi. The two rivers are essentially different in their
approaches and in type. The mouth of the St. Lawrence opens directly
towards Europe and of all American rivers lies nearest to the seafaring
peoples of Europe. Since it flows chiefly in a rocky bed, its course
changes little; its waters are clear, and they become icy cold as they
approach the sea and mingle with the tide which flows into the great
Gulf of St. Lawrence from the Arctic regions. The Mississippi, on the
other hand, is a turbid, warm stream, flowing through soft lands. Its
shifting channel is divided at its mouth by deltas created from the vast
quantity of soil which the river carries in its current. On the
low-lying, forest-clad, northern shore of the Gulf of Mexico it was not
easy to find the mouth of the Mississippi by approaching it from the
sea. The voyage there from France was long and difficult; and, moreover,
Spain claimed the lands bordering on the Gulf of Mexico and declared
herself ready to drive out all intruders.

Nature, it is clear, dictated that, if France was to build up her power
in the interior of the New World, it was the valley of the St. Lawrence
which she should first occupy. Time has shown the riches of the lands
drained by the St. Lawrence. On no other river system in the world is
there now such a multitude of great cities. The modern traveler who
advances by this route to the sources of the river beyond the Great
Lakes surveys wonders ever more impressive. Before his view appear in
succession Quebec, Montreal, Toronto, Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit,
Chicago, Duluth, and many other cities and towns, with millions in
population and an aggregate of wealth so vast as to stagger the
imagination. Step by step had the French advanced from Quebec to the
interior. Champlain was on Lake Huron in 1615, and there the Jesuits
soon had a flourishing mission to the Huron Indians. They had only to
follow the shore of Lake Huron to come to the St. Mary's River bearing
towards the sea the chilly waters of Lake Superior. On this river, a
much frequented fishing ground of the natives, they founded the mission
of Sainte Marie du Saut. Farther to the south, on the narrow opening
connecting Lake Huron and Lake Michigan, grew up the post known as
Michilimackinac. It was then inevitable that explorers and missionaries
should press on into both Lake Superior and Lake Michigan. By the time
that Frontenac came first to Canada in 1672 the French had a post called
St. Esprit on the south shore of Lake Superior near its western end and
they had also passed westward from Lake Michigan and founded posts on
both the Illinois and the Wisconsin Rivers which flow into the
Mississippi.

France had placed on record her claim to the whole of the Great West. On
a June morning in 1671 there had been a striking scene at Sainte Marie
du Saut. The French had summoned a great throng of Indians to the spot.
There, with impressive ceremony, Saint-Lusson, an officer from Canada,
had set up a cedar post on which was a plate engraved with the royal
arms, and proclaimed Louis XIV lord of all the Indian tribes and of all
the lands, rivers, and lakes, discovered and to be discovered in the
region stretching from the Atlantic to that other mysterious sea beyond
the spreading lands of the West. Henceforth at their peril would the
natives disobey the French King, or other states encroach upon these his
lands. A Jesuit priest followed Saint-Lusson with a description to the
savages of their new lord, the King of France. He was master of all the
other rulers of the world. At his word the earth trembled. He could set
earth and sea on fire by the blaze of his cannon. The priest knew the
temper of his savage audience and told of the King's warriors covered
with the blood of his enemies, of the rivers of blood which flowed from
their wounds, of the King's countless prisoners, of his riches and his
power, so great that all the world obeyed him. The savages gave
delighted shouts at the strange ceremony, but of its real meaning they
knew nothing. What they understood was that the French seemed to be good
friends who brought them muskets, hatchets, cloth, and especially the
loved but destructive firewater which the savage palate ever craved.

The mystery of the Great Lakes once solved, there still remained that of
the Western Sea. The St. Lawrence flowed eastward. Another river must
therefore be found flowing westward. The French were eager listeners
when the savages talked of a mighty river in the west flowing to the
sea. They meant, as we now suppose, the Mississippi. There are vague
stories of Frenchmen on the Mississippi at an earlier date; but, however
this may be, it is certain that in the summer of 1673 Louis Joliet, the
son of a wagon-maker of Quebec, and Jacques Marquette, a Jesuit priest,
reached and descended the great river from the mouth of the Wisconsin to
a point far past the mouth of the Ohio.

France thus planted herself on the Mississippi, though there her
occupation was less complete and thorough than it was on the St.
Lawrence. Distance was an obstacle; it was a far cry from Quebec by
land, and from France the voyage by sea through the Gulf of Mexico was
hardly less difficult. The explorer La Salle tried both routes. In
1681-1682 he set out from Montreal, reached the Mississippi overland,
and descended to its mouth. Two years later he sailed from France with
four ships bound for the mouth of the river, there to establish a
colony; but before achieving his aim he was murdered in a treacherous
attack led by his own countrymen.

It was Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d'Iberville, who first made good France's
claim to the Mississippi. He reached the river by sea in 1699 and
ascended to a point some eighty miles beyond the present city of New
Orleans. Farther east, on Biloxi Bay, he built Fort Maurepas and planted
his first colony. Spain disliked this intrusion; but Spain--soon to be
herself ruled, as France then was, by a Bourbon king--did not prove
irreconcilable and slowly France built up a colony in the south. It was
in 1718 that Iberville's brother, Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de
Bienville, founded New Orleans, destined to become in time one of the
great cities of North America. Its beginnings were not propitious. The
historian Charlevoix describes it as being in 1721 a low-lying,
malarious place, infested by snakes and alligators, and consisting of a
hundred wretched hovels.

In spite of this dreary outlook, it was still true that France, planted
at the mouth of the Mississippi, controlled the greatest waterway in the
world. Soon she had scattered settlements stretching northward to the
Ohio and the Missouri, the one river reaching eastward almost to the
waters of the St. Lawrence system, the other flowing out of the western
plains from its source in the Rocky Mountains. The old mystery, however,
remained, for the Mississippi flowed into the Gulf of Mexico, into
Atlantic waters already well known. The route to the Western Sea was
still to be found.

It was easy enough for France to record a sweeping claim to the West,
but to make good this claim she needed a chain of posts, which should
also be forts, linking the Mississippi with the St. Lawrence and strong
enough to impress the Indians whose country she had invaded. At first
she had reached the interior by way of the Ottawa River and Lake Huron,
and in that northern country her position was secure enough through her
posts on the upper lakes. The route farther south by Lake Ontario and
Lake Erie was more difficult. The Iroquois menaced Niagara and long
refused to let France have a footing there to protect her pathway to
Lake Erie and the Ohio Valley. It was not until 1720, a period
comparatively late, that the French managed to have a fort at the mouth
of the Niagara. On the Detroit River, the next strategic point on the
way westward, they were established earlier. Just after Frontenac died
in 1698, La Mothe Cadillac urged that there should be built on this
river a fort and town which might be made the center of all the trading
interests west of Lake Erie. End the folly, he urged, of going still
farther afield among the Indians and teaching them the French language
and French modes of thought. Leave the Indians to live their own type of
life, to hunt and to fish. They need European trade and they have
valuable furs to exchange. Encourage them to come to the French at
Detroit and see that they go nowhere else by not allowing any other
posts in the western country. Cadillac was himself a keen if secret
participant in the profits of the fur trade and hoped to be placed in
command at Detroit and there to become independent of control from
Quebec. Detroit was founded in 1701; and though for a long time it did
not thrive, the fact that on the site has grown up one of the great
industrial cities of modern times shows that Cadillac had read aright
the meaning of the geography of North America.

When France was secure at Niagara and at Detroit, two problems still
remained unsolved. One was that of occupying the valley of the Ohio, the
waters of which flow westward almost from the south shore of Lake Erie
until they empty into the vaster flood of the Mississippi. Here there
was a lion in the path, for the English claimed this region as naturally
the hinterland of the colonies of Virginia and Pennsylvania. What
happened on the Ohio we shall see in a later chapter. The other great
problem, to be followed here, was to explore the regions which lay
beyond the Mississippi. These spread into a remote unknown, unexplored
by the white man, and might ultimately lead to the Western Sea. We might
have supposed that France's farther adventure into the West would have
been from the Mississippi up its great tributary the Missouri, which
flows eastward from the eternal snows of the Rocky Mountains. Always,
however, the uncertain temper of the many Indian tribes in this region
made the advance difficult. The tribes inhabiting the west bank of the
Mississippi were especially restless and savage. The Sioux, in
particular, made life perilous for the French at their posts near the
mouth of the Missouri.

It thus happened that the white man first reached the remoter West by
way of regions farther north. It became easy enough to coast along the
north and the south shore of Lake Superior, easy enough to find rivers
which fed the great system of the St. Lawrence or of the Mississippi.
These, however, would not solve the mystery. A river flowing westward
was still to be sought. Thus, both in pursuit of the fur trade and in
quest of the Western Sea, the French advanced westward from Lake
Superior. Where now stands the city of Fort William there flows into
Lake Superior the little stream called still by its Indian name of
Kaministiquia. There the French had long maintained a trading-post from
which they made adventurous journeys northward and westward.

The rugged regions still farther north had already been explored, at
least in outline. There lay the great inland sea known as Hudson Bay.
French and English had long disputed for its mastery. By 1670 the
English had found trade to Hudson Bay so promising that they then
created the Hudson's Bay Company, which remains one of the great trading
corporations of the world. With the English on Hudson Bay, New France
was between English on the north and English on the south and did not
like it. On Hudson Bay the English showed the same characteristics which
they had shown in New England. They were not stirred by vivid imaginings
of what might be found westward beyond the low-lying coast of the great
inland sea. They came for trade, planted themselves at the mouths of the
chief rivers, unpacked their goods, and waited for the natives to come
to barter with them. For many years the natives came, since they must
have the knives, hatchets, and firearms of Europe. To share this
profitable trade the French, now going overland to the north from
Quebec, now sailing into Hudson Bay by the Straits, attacked the
English; and on those dreary waters, long before the Great West was
known, there had been many a naval battle, many a hand-to-hand fight for
forts and their rich prize of furs.

The chief French hero in this struggle was that son of Charles Le Moyne
of Montreal, Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville, who ended his days in the task
of founding the French colony of Louisiana. He was perhaps the most
notable of all the adventurous leaders whom New France produced. He was
first on Hudson Bay in the late summer of 1686, in a party of about a
hundred men, led by the Chevalier de Troyes, who had marched overland
from Quebec through the wilderness. The English on the Bay, with a
charter from King Charles II, the friend of the French, and in a time of
profound peace under his successor, thought themselves secure. They now
had, however, a rude awakening. In the dead of night the Frenchmen fell
upon Fort Hayes, captured its dazed garrison, and looted the place. The
same fate befell all the other English posts on the Bay. Iberville
gained a rich store of furs as his share of the plunder and returned
with it to Quebec in 1687, just at the time when La Salle, that other
pioneer of France, was struck down in the distant south by a murderer's
hand.

Iberville was, above all else, a sailor. The easiest route to Hudson Bay
was by way of the sea. More than once after his first experience he led
to the Bay a naval expedition. His exploits are still remembered with
pride in French naval annals. In 1697 he sailed the Pelican through the
ice-floes of Hudson Straits. He was attacked by three English
merchantmen, with one hundred and twenty guns against his forty-four.
One of the English ships escaped, one Iberville sank with all on board,
one he captured. That autumn the hardy corsair was in France with a
great booty from the furs which the English had laboriously gathered.

The triumph of the French on Hudson Bay was short-lived. Their exploits,
though brilliant and daring, were more of the nature of raids than
attempts to settle and explore. They did no more than the English to
ascend the Nelson or other rivers to find what lay beyond; and in 1713,
by the Treaty of Utrecht, as we have already seen, they gave up all
claim to Hudson Bay and yielded that region to the English.

Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, Sieur de la Vérendrye, was a member of the
Canadian noblesse, a son of the Governor of Three Rivers on the St.
Lawrence. He was born in 1685 and had taken part in the border warfare
of the days of Queen Anne. He was a member of the raiding party led
against New England by Hertel de Rouville in 1704 and may have been one
of those who burst in on the little town of Deerfield, Massachusetts,
and either butchered or carried off as prisoners most of the
inhabitants. Shortly afterwards we find him a participant in warfare of
a less ignoble type. In 1706 he went to France and became an ensign in a
regiment of grenadiers. Those were the days when Marlborough was
hammering and destroying the armies of Louis XIV. La Vérendrye took part
in the last of the series of great battles, the bloody conflict at
Malplaquet in 1709. He received a bullet wound through the body, was
left for dead on the field, fell into the hands of the enemy, and for
fifteen months was a captive. On his release he was too poor to maintain
himself as an officer in France and soon returned to Canada, where he
served as an officer in a colonial regiment until the peace of 1713.
Then the ambitious young man, recently married, with a growing family
and slight resources, had to work out a career suited to his genius.

His genius was that of an explorer; his task, which fully occupied his
alert mind, was that of finding the long dreamed of passage to the
Western Sea. The venture certainly offered fascinations. Noyon, a
fellow-townsman of La Vérendrye at Three Rivers, had brought back from
the distant Lake of the Woods, in 1716, a glowing account, told to him
by the natives, of walled cities, of ships and cannon, and of
white-bearded men who lived farther west. In 1720 the Jesuit Charlevoix,
already familiar with Canada, came out from France, went to the
Mississippi country, and reported that an attempt to find the path to
the Western Sea might be made either by way of the Missouri or farther
north through the country of the Sioux west of Lake Superior. Both
routes involved going among warlike native tribes engaged in incessant
and bloody struggles with each other and not unlikely to turn on the
white intruder. Memorial after memorial to the French court for
assistance resulted at last in serious effort, but effort handicapped
because the court thought that a monopoly of the fur trade was the only
inducement required to promote the work of discovery.

La Vérendrye was more eager to reach the Western Sea than he was to
trade. To outward seeming, however, he became just a fur trader and a
successful one. We find him, in 1726, at the trading-post of Nipigon,
not far from the lake of that name, near the north shore of Lake
Superior. From this point it was not very difficult to reach the shore
of one great sea, Hudson Bay, but that was not the Western Sea which
fired his imagination. Incessantly he questioned the savages with whom
he traded about what lay in the unknown West. His zeal was kindled anew
by the talk of an Indian named Ochagach. This man said that he himself
had been on a great lake lying west of Lake Superior, that out of it
flowed a river westward, that he had paddled down this river until he
came to water which, as La Vérendrye understood, rose and fell like the
tide. Farther, to the actual mouth of the river, the savage had not
gone, for fear of enemies, but he had been told that it emptied into a
great body of salt water upon the shores of which lived many people. We
may be sure that La Vérendrye read into the words of the savage the
meaning which he himself desired and that in reality the Indian was
describing only the waters which flow into Lake Winnipeg.

La Vérendrye was all eagerness. Soon we find him back at Quebec stirring
by his own enthusiasm the zeal of the Marquis de Beauharnois, the
Governor of Canada, and begging for help to pay and equip a hundred men
for the great enterprise in the West. The Governor did what he could but
was unable to move the French court to give money. The sole help offered
was a monopoly of the fur trade in the region to be explored, a doubtful
gift, since it angered all the traders excluded from the monopoly. La
Vérendrye, however, was able, by promising to hand over most of the
profits, to persuade merchants in Montreal to equip him with the
necessary men and merchandise.

There followed a period of high hopes and of heart-breaking failure. In
1731 La Vérendrye set out for the West with three sons, a nephew, a
Jesuit priest, the Indian Ochagach as guide--a party numbering in all
about fifty. He intended to build trading-posts as he went westward and
to make the last post always a base from which to advance still farther.
His difficulties read like those of Columbus. His men not only disliked
the hard work which was inevitable but were haunted by superstitious
fears of malignant fiends in the unknown land who were ready to punish
the invaders of their secrets. The route lay across the rough country
beyond Lake Superior. There were many long portages over which his men
must carry the provisions and heavy stores for trade. At length the
party reached Rainy Lake, and out of Rainy Lake the waters flow
westward. The country seemed delightful. Fish and game were abundant,
and it was not hard to secure a rich store of furs. On the shore of the
lake, in a charming meadow surrounded by oak trees, La Vérendrye built a
trading-post on waters flowing to the west, naming it Fort St. Pierre.

The voyageurs could now travel westward with the current. It is certain
that other Frenchmen had preceded them in that region, but this is the
first voyage of discovery of which we have any details. Escorted by an
imposing array of fifty canoes of Indians, La Vérendrye floated down
Rainy River to the Lake of the Woods, and here, on a beautiful peninsula
jutting out into the lake, he built another post, Fort St. Charles. It
must have seemed imposing to the natives. On walls one hundred feet
square were four bastions and a watchtower; evidence of the perennial
need of alertness and strength in the Indian country. There were a
chapel, houses for the commandant and the priest, a powder-magazine, a
storehouse, and other buildings. La Vérendrye cleared some land and
planted wheat, and was thus the pioneer in the mighty wheat production
of the West. Fish and game were abundant and the outlook was smiling. By
this time the second winter of La Vérendrye's adventurous journeying was
near, but even the cold of that hard region could not chill his
eagerness. He himself waited at Fort St. Charles but his eldest son,
Jean Baptiste, set out to explore still farther.

We may follow with interest the little group of Frenchmen and Indian
guides as they file on snowshoes along the surface of the frozen river
or over the deep snow of the silent forest on, ever on, to the West.
They are the first white men of whom we have certain knowledge to press
beyond the Lake of the Woods into that great Northwest so full of
meaning for the future. The going was laborious and the distances seemed
long, for on their return they reported that they had gone a hundred and
fifty leagues, though in truth the distance was only a hundred and fifty
miles. Then at last they stood on the shores of a vast body of water,
ice-bound and forbidding as it lay in the grip of winter. It opened out
illimitably westward. But it was not the Western Sea, for its waters
were fresh. The shallow waters of Lake Winnipeg empty not into the
Western Sea but into the Atlantic by way of Hudson Bay. Its shores then
were deserted and desolate, and even to this day they are but scantily
peopled. In that wild land there was no hint of the populous East of
which La Vérendrye had dreamed.

At the mouth of the Winnipeg River, where it enters Lake Winnipeg, La
Vérendrye built Fort Maurepas, named after the French minister who was
in charge of the colonies and who was influential at court. The name no
doubt expresses some clinging hope which La Vérendrye still cherished of
obtaining help from the King. Already he was hard pressed for resources.
Where were the means to come from for this costly work of building
forts? From time to time he sent eastward canoes laden with furs which,
after a long and difficult journey, reached Montreal. The traders to
whom the furs were consigned sold them and kept the money as their own
on account of their outlay. La Vérendrye in the far interior could not
pay his men and would soon be without goods to trade with the Indians.
After having repeatedly begged for help but in vain, he made a rapid
journey to Montreal and implored the Governor to aid an enterprise which
might change the outlook of the whole world. The Governor was willing
but without the consent of France could not give help. By promising the
traders, who were now partners in his monopoly, profits of one hundred
per cent on their outlay, La Vérendrye at last secured what he needed.
His canoes were laden with goods, and soon brawny arms were driving once
again the graceful craft westward. He had offered a new hostage to
fortune by arranging that his fourth son, a lad of eighteen, should
follow him in the next year.

La Vérendrye pressed on eagerly in advance of the heavy-laden canoes.
Grim news met him soon after he reached Fort St. Charles on the Lake of
the Woods. His nephew La Jemeraye, a born leader of men, who was at the
most advanced station, Fort Maurepas on Lake Winnipeg, had broken down
from exposure, anxiety, and overwork, and had been laid in a lonely
grave in the wilderness. Nearly all pioneer work is a record of tragedy
and its gloom lies heavy on the career of La Vérendrye. A little later
came another sorrow-laden disaster. La Vérendrye sent his eldest son
Jean back to Rainy Lake to hurry the canoes from Montreal which were
bringing needed food. The party landed on a peninsula at the discharge
of Rainy Lake into Rainy River, fell into an ambush of Sioux Indians,
and were butchered to a man. This incident reveals the chief cause of
the slow progress in discovery in the Great West: the temper of the
savages was always uncertain.

There is no sign that La Vérendrye wavered in his great hope even when
he realized that the Winnipeg River was not the river flowing westward
which he sought. We know now that the northern regions of the American
continent east of the Rocky Mountains are tilted towards the east and
the north and that in all its vast spaces there is no great river which
flows to the west. La Vérendrye, however, ignorant of this dictate of
nature, longed to paddle with the stream towards the west. The Red River
flows from the south into Lake Winnipeg at a point near the mouth of the
Winnipeg River. Up the Red River went La Vérendrye and found a
tributary, the Assiniboine, flowing into it from the west. At the point
of junction, where has grown up the city of Winnipeg, he built a tiny
fort, called Fort Rouge, a name still preserved in a suburb of the
modern Winnipeg. The explorers went southward on the Red River, and then
went westward on the Assiniboine River only to find the waters
persistently flowing against them and no definite news of other waters
leading to the Western Sea. On the Assiniboine, near the site of the
present town of Portage la Prairie in Manitoba, La Vérendrye built Fort
La Reine. Its name is evidence still perhaps of hopes for aid through
the Queen if not through the King of France.

In 1737 La Vérendrye made once more the long journey to Montreal. His
fourteen canoes laden with furs were an earnest of the riches of the
wonderful West and so pleased his Montreal partners that again they
fitted him out with adequate supplies. In the summer of 1738 we find him
at Fort La Reine, rich for the moment in goods with which to trade, keen
and competent as a trader, and having great influence with the natives.
All through the West he found Indians who went to trade with the English
on Hudson Bay, and he constantly urged them not to take the long journey
but to depend upon the French who came into their own country. It was a
policy well fitted to cause searching of heart among the English traders
who seemed so secure in their snug quarters on the seashore waiting for
the Indians to come to them.

La Vérendrye had now a fresh plan for penetrating farther on his
alluring quest. He had heard of a river to the south to be reached by a
journey overland. It was a new thing for him to abandon canoes and march
on foot but this he now did and with winter approaching. On October 16,
1738, when the autumn winds were already chill, there was a striking
little parade at Fort La Reine. The drummer beat the garrison to arms.
What with soldiers brought from Canada, the voyageurs who had paddled
the great canoes, and the Indians who dogged always the steps of the
French traders, there was a muster at the fort of some scores of men. La
Vérendrye reviewed the whole company and from them chose for his
expedition twenty soldiers and voyageurs and about twenty Assiniboine
Indians. As companions for himself he took François and Pierre, two of
his three surviving sons, and two traders who were at the fort.

We can picture the little company setting out on the 18th of October on
foot, with some semblance of military order, by a well-beaten trail
leading across the high land which separates the Red River country from
the regions to the southwest. La Vérendrye had heard much of a people,
the Mandans, dwelling in well-ordered villages on the banks of a great
river and cultivating the soil instead of living the wandering life of
hunters. Such wonders of Mandan culture had been reported to La
Vérendrye that he half expected to find them white men with a
civilization equal to that of Europe. The river was in reality not an
unknown stream, as La Vérendrye hoped, but the Missouri, a river already
frequented by the French in its lower stretches where its waters join
those of the Mississippi.

It was a long march over the prairie. La Vérendrye found that he could
not hurry his Indian guides. They insisted on delays during days of
glorious autumn weather when it would have been wise to press on and
avoid the winter cold on the wind-swept prairie. They went out of their
way to visit a village of their own Assiniboine tribe; and, when they
resumed their journey, this whole village followed them. The prairie
Indians had a more developed sense of order and discipline than the
tribes of the forest. La Vérendrye admired the military regularity of
the savages on the march. They divided the company of more than six
hundred into three columns: in front, scouts to look out for an enemy
and also for herds of buffalo; in the center, well protected, the old
and the lame, all those incapable of fighting; and, for a rear-guard,
strong fighting men. When buffalo were seen, the most active of the
fighters rushed to the front to aid in hemming in the game. Women and
dogs carried the baggage, the men condescending to bear only their
weapons.

Not until cold December had come did the party reach the chief Mandan
village. It was in some sense imposing, for the Indian lodges were
arranged neatly in streets and squares and the surrounding palisade was
strong and well built. Around the fort was a ditch fifteen feet deep and
of equal width, which made the village impregnable in Indian warfare.
After saluting the village with three volleys of musket fire, La
Vérendrye marched in with great ceremony, under the French flag, only to
discover that the Mandans were not greatly unlike the Assiniboines and
other Indians of the West whom he already knew. The men went about naked
and the women nearly so. They were skilled in dressing leather. They
were also cunning traders, for they duped La Vérendrye's friends, the
Assiniboines, and cheated them out of their muskets, ammunition,
kettles, and knives. Great eaters were the Mandans. They cultivated
abundant crops and stored them in cave cellars. Every day they brought
their visitors more than twenty dishes cooked in earthen pottery of
their own handicraft. There was incredible feasting, which La Vérendrye
avoided but which his sons enjoyed. The Mandan language he could not
understand and close questioning as to the route to the Western Sea was
thus impossible. He learned enough to discredit the vague tales of white
men in armor and peopled towns with which his lying guides had regaled
him. In the end he decided for the time being to return to Fort La Reine
and to leave two of his followers to learn the Mandan language so that
in the future they might act as interpreters. When he left the Mandan
village on the 13th of December, he was already ill and it is a wonder
that he did not perish from the cold on the winter journey across hill
and prairie. "In all my life I have never," he says, "endured such
misery from illness and fatigue, as on that journey." On the 11th of
February he was back at Fort La Reine, worn out and broken in health but
still undaunted and resolved never to abandon his search.

Abandon it he never did. We find him in Montreal in 1740 involved in
what he had always held in horror--a lawsuit brought against him by some
impatient creditor. The report had gone abroad that he was amassing
great wealth, when, as he said, all that he had accumulated was a debt
of forty thousand livres. In the autumn of 1741 he was back at Fort La
Reine, where he welcomed his son Pierre from a fruitless journey to the
Mandans.

The most famous of all the efforts of the family was now on foot. On
April 29, 1742, a new expedition started from Fort La Reine, led by La
Vérendrye's two sons, Pierre and François. They knew the nature of the
task before them, its perils as well as its hopes. They took with them
no imposing company as their father had done, but only two men. The
party of four, too feeble to fight their way, had to trust to the
peaceful disposition of the natives. When they started, the prairie was
turning from brown to green and the rivers were still swollen from the
spring thaw. In three weeks they reached a Mandan village on the upper
Missouri and were well received. It was after midsummer when they set
out again and pressed on westward with a trend to the south. The country
was bare and desolate. For twenty days they saw no human being. They had
Mandan guides who promised to take them to the next tribe, the Handsome
Men--Beaux Hommes--as the brothers called them, a tribe much feared by
the Mandans. The travelers were now mounted; for the horse, brought
first to America by the Spaniards, had run wild on the western plains
where the European himself had not yet penetrated, and had become an
indispensable aid to certain of the native tribes. Deer and buffalo were
in abundance and they had no lack of food.

When they reached the tribe of Beaux Hommes, the Mandan guides fled
homeward. Summer passed into bleak autumn with chill winds and long
nights. By the end of October they were among the Horse Indians who,
they had been told, could guide them to the sea. These, however, now
said that only the Bow Indians, farther on, could do this. Winter was
near when they were among these Indians, probably a tribe of the Sioux,
whom they found excitedly preparing for a raid on their neighbors
farther west, the Snakes. They were going, they said, towards the
mountains and there the Frenchmen could look out on the great sea. So
the story goes on. The brothers advanced ever westward and the land
became more rugged, for they were now climbing upward from the prairie
country. At last, on January 1, 1743, they saw what both cheered and
discouraged them. In the distance were mountains. About them was the
prairie, with game in abundance. It was a great host with which the
brothers traveled for there were two thousand warriors with their
families who made night vocal with songs and yells. On the 12th of
January, nearly two weeks later, with an advance party of warriors, the
La Vérendryes reached the foot of the mountains, "well wooded with
timber of every kind and very high."

Was it the Rocky Mountains which they saw? Had they reached that last
mighty barrier of snow-capped peaks, rugged valleys, and torrential
streams, beyond which lay the sea? That they had done so was long
assumed and many conjectures have been offered as to the point in the
Rockies near which they made their last camp. Their further progress was
checked by an unexpected crisis. One day they came upon an encampment of
the dreaded Snake Indians which had been abandoned in great haste. This,
the Bow Indians thought, could only mean that the Snakes had hurriedly
left their camp in order to slip in behind the advance guard of the Bows
and massacre the women and children left in the rear. Panic seized the
Bows and they turned homeward in wild confusion. Their chief could not
restrain them. "I was very much disappointed," writes one of the
brothers, "that I could not climb the mountains"--those mountains from
which he had been told that he might view the Western Sea.

There was nothing for it but to turn back through snowdrifts over the
bleak prairie. The progress was slow for the snow was sometimes two feet
deep. On the 1st of March the brothers parted with their Bow friends at
their village and then headed for home. By the 20th they were encamped
with a friendly tribe on the banks of the Missouri. Here, to assert that
Louis XV was lord of all that country, they built on an eminence a
pyramid of stones and in it they buried a tablet of lead with an
inscription which recorded the name of Louis XV, their King, and of the
Marquis de Beauharnois, Governor of Canada, and the date of the visit.

Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. One hundred and seventy years
later, on February 16, 1913, a schoolgirl strolling with some companions
on a Sunday afternoon near the High School in the town of Pierre, South
Dakota, stumbled upon a projecting corner of this tablet, which was in
an excellent state of preservation. Thus we know exactly where the
brothers La Vérendrye were on April 2, 1743, when they bade farewell to
their Indian friends and set out on horseback for Fort La Reine.

Spring had turned to summer before the brothers reached their
destination. On July 2, 1743, they relieved the anxiety of their waiting
father after an absence of fifteen months. Moving slowly as they did,
could they have traveled from the distant Rockies from the time in
January when they turned back? It seems doubtful; and in spite of the
long-cherished belief that the brothers reached the foothills of the
Rocky Mountains, it may be that they had not penetrated beyond the
barrier which we know as the Black Hills. The chance discovery of a
forgotten plate by school children may in truth prove that, as late as
in 1750, the Rocky Mountains had not yet been seen by white men and that
the first vision of that mighty range was obtained much farther north in
Canada.

After 1743 the French seem to have made no further efforts to reach the
Western Sea by way of the Missouri. If in reality the brothers had not
gone beyond the Black Hills in South Dakota, then their most important
work appears to have been done within what is now Canada, as discoverers
of the Saskatchewan, the mighty river which carries to far-distant
Hudson Bay the waters melted on the eastern slopes of the Rocky
Mountains. It was by this route up the Saskatchewan that fifty years
later was solved the tough and haunting problem of going over the
mountains to the Pacific Ocean. La Vérendrye now ascended the
Saskatchewan for some three hundred miles to the forks where it divides
into two great branches. He was going deeper into debt but he hoped
always for help from the King. It is pathetic to see today, on the map
of that part of western Canada which he and his sons explored, a town, a
lake, and a county called Dauphin, in honor of the heir to the throne of
France. No doubt La Vérendrye had the thought that some day he might
plead with the Dauphin when he had become King for help in his great
task.

Before the year 1749 had ended La Vérendrye, who had returned to
Montreal, was in his grave. His sons, partners in his work, expected to
be charged with the task--to which the King, in 1749, had anew appointed
their father--of continuing the work of discovery in the West. François,
for a time ill, wrote in 1750 from Montreal to La Jonquière, the
Governor at Quebec, that he hoped to take up the plans of his father.
The Governor's reply was that he had appointed another officer,
Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, to lead in the search for the Western Sea.
François hurried to Quebec. The Governor met him with a bland face and
seemed friendly. François urged that he and his brothers claimed no
preëminence and that they were ready to serve under the orders of
Saint-Pierre. The Governor was hesitant; but at last told François
frankly that the new leader desired no help either from him or from his
brothers. François was dismayed. He and his brothers were in debt.
Already he had sent on stores and men to the West and the men were
likely to starve if not followed by provisions. His chief property was
in the West in the form of goods which would be plundered without his
guardianship. To tide over the immediate future he sold the one small
piece of land in Montreal which he had inherited from his father and
threw this slight sop to his urgent creditors.

Saint-Pierre, strong in his right of monopoly, insisted that the
brothers should not even return to the West. François urged that to go
was a matter of life and death. In some way he secured leave to set out
with one laden canoe. When Saint-Pierre found that François had gone, he
claimed damages for the intrusion on his monopoly and secured an order
to pursue François and bring him back. He caught him at Michilimackinac.
The meeting between the two men at that place involved explanations.
Face to face with an injured man, Saint-Pierre admitted that he had been
in the wrong, paid to François many compliments, and regretted that he
had not joined hands with the brothers.

The mischief done was, however, irreparable. François, crippled by
opposition, could not carry on his trade with success and in the end he
returned to Montreal a ruined man overwhelmed with debt. He wrote to the
French court a noble appeal for relief:

I remain without friends and without patrimony ... a simple ensign of
the second grade; my elder brother has only the same rank as myself; my
younger brother is only a junior cadet. This is the result of all that
my father, my brothers and myself have done.... There are in the hands
of your Lordship resources of compensation and of consolation. I venture
to appeal to you for relief. To find ourselves excluded from the West
would mean to be cruelly robbed of our heritage, to realize for
ourselves all that is bitter and to see others secure all that is sweet.

The appeal fell on deaf ears. The brothers sank into obscurity. During
Montcalm's campaigns from 1756 to 1759 Pierre and François seem to have
been engaged in military service. François was killed in the siege of
Quebec in 1759. After the final surrender of Canada the Auguste, a ship
laden for the most part with refugees returning to France, was wrecked
on the St. Lawrence. Among those on board who perished was Pierre de la
Vérendrye. He died amid the howling of the tempest and the cries of
drowning men. Tragedy, unrelenting, had pursued him to the end.

Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, the choice of the Marquis de la Jonquière to
take up the search for the Western Sea in succession to the elder La
Vérendrye, himself went only as far as Fort La Reine. It was a
subordinate, the Chevalier de Niverville, whom he sent farther west to
find the great mountains and if possible the sea. The winter of 1750-51
had set in before Niverville was ready. He started apparently from Fort
Maurepas, on snowshoes, his party dragging their supplies on toboggans.
Before they reached Paskoya on the Saskatchewan (the modern Le Pas) they
had nearly perished of hunger and were able to save their lives only by
catching a few fish through the ice. Niverville was ill. He sent forward
ten men by canoe up the Saskatchewan. They traveled with such rapidity
that on May 29, 1751, they had reached the Rockies. They built a good
fort, which they named Fort La Jonquière, and stored it with a
considerable quantity of provisions. If, as seems likely, the brothers
La Vérendrye saw only the Black Hills, these ten unknown men were the
discoverers of the Rocky Mountains.

Saint-Pierre braced himself to set out for the distant goal but he was
easily discouraged. Niverville, he said, was ill; the Indians were at
war among themselves; some of them were plotting what Saint-Pierre calls
"treason" to the French and their "perfidy" surpassed anything in his
lifelong experience. The hostile influence of the English he thought
all-pervasive. Obviously these are excuses. He did not like the task and
he turned back. As it was, he tells a dramatic story of how Indians
crowded into Fort La Reine in a threatening manner and how he saved the
fort and himself only by rushing to the magazine with a lighted torch,
knocking open a barrel of powder, and threatening to blow up everything
and everybody if the savages did not withdraw at once. He was eager to
leave the country. In 1752 he handed over the command to St. Luc de la
Corne and, in August of that year, having experienced "much
wretchedness" on his journeys, he was safely back in Montreal. The
founding of Fort La Jonquière was, no doubt, a great feat. Where the
fort stood we do not know. It may have been on the North Saskatchewan,
near Edmonton, or on the south branch of the river near Calgary. In any
case it was a far-flung outpost of France.

The English had always been more prosaic than the French. The traders on
Hudson Bay worked, indeed, under a monopoly not less rigorous than that
which Canada imposed. Without doubt, many an Englishman on the Bay was
haunted by the hope and desire to reach the Western Sea. But the
servants of the Company knew that to buy and sell at a profit was their
chief aim. They had been on the whole content to wait for trade to come
to them. By 1740 the Indians, who made the long journey to the Bay by
the intricate waters which carried to the sea the flood of the
Saskatchewan and Lake Winnipeg, were showing to the English articles
supplied by the French at points far inland. It thus became evident that
the French were tapping the traffic in furs near its source and cutting
off the stream which had long flowed to Hudson Bay.

In June, 1754, Anthony Hendry, a young man in the service of the
Company, left York factory on Hudson Bay to find out what the French
were doing. We have a slight but carefully written diary of Hendry's
journey. He does not fail to note that in the summer weather life was
made almost intolerable by the "musketoos." Traveling by canoe he
reached the Saskatchewan River and tells how, on the 22d of July, he
came to "a French house." It was Fort Paskoya. When Hendry paddled up to
the river bank two Frenchmen met him and "in a very genteel manner"
invited him into their house. With all courtesy they asked him, he says,
if he had any letter from his master and where and on what design he was
going inland. His answer was that he had been sent "to view the Country"
and that he intended to return to Hudson Bay in the spring. The
Frenchmen were sorry that their own master, who was apparently the
well-known Canadian leader, St. Luc de la Corne, the successor of
Saint-Pierre, had gone to Montreal with furs, and added their regrets
that they must detain Hendry until this leader's return. At this
Hendry's Indians grunted and said that the French dared not do so. Next
day Hendry took breakfast and dinner at the fort, gave "two feet of
tobacco" (at that time it was sold in long coils) to his hosts, and in
return received some moose flesh. The confidence of his Indian guides
that the French would not dare to detain him was justified. Next day
Hendry paddled on up the river and advanced more than twenty miles,
camping at night by "the largest Birch trees I have yet seen."

Hendry wished to see the country thoroughly and to come into touch with
the natives. The best way to do this and to obtain food was to leave the
river and go boldly overland. He accordingly left his canoes behind and
advanced on foot. The party was starving. On a Sunday in July he walked
twenty-six miles and says "neither Bird nor Beast to be seen,--so that
we have nothing to eat." The next day he traveled twenty-four miles on
an empty stomach and then, to his delight, found a supply of ripe
strawberries, "the size of black currants and the finest I ever eat."
The next day his Indians killed two moose. He then met natives who, when
he asked them to go to Hudson Bay to trade, replied that they could
obtain all they needed from the French posts. The tact and skill of the
French were such that, as Hendry admits, reluctantly enough, the Indians
were already strongly attached to them. Day after day Hendry journeyed
on over the rolling prairie in the warm summer days. He came to the
south branch of the Saskatchewan near the point where now stands the
city of Saskatoon and crossed the river on the 21st of August. Then on
to the West, eager to take part in the hunting of the buffalo.

Hendry is almost certainly the first Englishman to see this region. In
the end he reached the mountains. He makes no mention of having seen or
heard anything of Fort La Jonquière, built three years earlier. He had
aims different from those of La Vérendrye and other French explorers.
Not the Western Sea but openings for trade was he seeking. His great aim
was to reach the tribe called later the Blackfeet Indians, who were
mighty hunters of the buffalo. Hendry was alive to the impressions of
nature. The intense heat of August was followed in September by glorious
weather, with the nights cool and the mosquitoes no longer troublesome.
The climate was bracing. He complains only, from time to time, of
swollen feet, and we need not wonder since his daily march occasionally
went beyond twenty-five miles. Sometimes for days he saw no living
creature. At other times wild life was prolific: there were moose in
great abundance, bears, including the dreaded grizzly--one of which
killed an Indian of his company and badly mutilated another--beaver,
wild horses, and, above all, the buffalo. "Saw many herds of Buffalo
grazing like English cattle," he says, on the 13th of September, and the
next day he goes buffalo hunting. Guns and ammunition were costly. His
Indians, who used only bows and arrows, on this day killed seven--"fine
sport," says Hendry. Often the Indians took only the tongue, leaving the
carcass for the wolves, who naturally abounded in such advantageous
conditions. It is not easy now to imagine the part played by the buffalo
in the life of the prairie. As Hendry advanced the herds were so dense
as sometimes to retard his progress. Other writers tell of the vast
numbers of these creatures. Alexander Henry, the younger, writing on
April 1, 1801, says that in a river swollen by spring floods, drowned
buffalo floated past his camp in one continuous line for two days and
two nights. In prairie fires thousands were blinded and would go
tumbling down banks into streams or lie down to die. One morning the
bellowing of buffaloes awakened Henry and he looked out to see the
prairie black. "The ground was covered at every point of the compass, as
far as the eye could reach, and every animal was in motion."

Daily as Hendry advanced he saw smoke in the distance and his Indians
told him that it came from the camp of the Blackfeet. He reached them on
Monday the 14th of October. When four miles away he was stopped by
mounted scouts who asked whether he came as a friend or as an enemy. He
was taken to the camp of two hundred tents pitched in two rows, and was
led through the long passage between the tents to the big tent of the
chief of whom he had heard much. Not a word was spoken. The chief sat on
a white buffalo skin. Pipes were passed round and each person was
presented with boiled buffalo flesh. When talk began, Hendry told the
chief that his great leader had sent him to invite them to come to trade
at Hudson Bay where his people would get powder, shot, guns, cloth,
beads, and other things. The chief said it was far away, and his people
knew nothing of paddling. Such strangers to great waters were they that
they would not even eat fish. They despised Hendry's tobacco. What they
smoked was dried horse dung. In the end Hendry was dismissed and ordered
to make his camp a quarter of a mile away from that of the Blackfeet.

It was close by the present site of Calgary and apparently in full view,
on clear days, of the white peaks of the Rocky Mountains that Hendry
visited the Blackfeet. He lingered in the far western country through
the greater part of the winter. On a portion of his return journey he
used a horse. When the spring thaw came, once more he took to the water
in canoes. He complains of the idleness of his Indian companions who
would remain in their huts all day and never stir to lay up a store of
food even when game was abundant. Conjuring, dancing to the hideous
pounding of drums, feasting and smoking, were their amusements. On his
way back Hendry revisited the French post on the Saskatchewan. The
leader, no doubt St. Luc de la Corne, had returned from Montreal and now
had with him nine men. "The master," says Hendry, "invited me in to sup
with him, and was very kind. He is dressed very Genteel." He showed
Hendry his stock of furs; "a brave parcel," the admiring rival thought.
Hendry admits the superiority of the French as traders. They "talk
Several Languages to perfection; they have the advantage of us in every
shape." In the West, as in the East, France was recognized as a
formidable rival of England for the mastery of North America.

When Hendry was making his peaceful visit to the French fort in 1755,
the crisis of the struggle had just been reached. In that year the
battle line from Acadia to the Ohio and the Mississippi was already
forming, and the fate of France's eager efforts to hold the West was
soon to be decided in the East. If Britain should conquer on the St.
Lawrence, she would conquer also on the Saskatchewan and on the
Mississippi.

Conquer she did, and thus it happened that it was Britain's sons who
took up the later burdens of the discoverer. In the summer of 1789, just
at the time when the great Revolution was beginning in France, Alexander
Mackenzie, a Scotch trader from Montreal, starting from Lake Athabasca,
north of the farthest point reached by Hendry, was pressing still onward
into an unknown region to find a river which might lead to the sea. This
river he found; we know it now as the Mackenzie. For two weeks he and
his Indians and voyageurs paddled with the current down this mighty
stream, and on July 14, 1789, the day of the fall of the Bastille, he
saw whales sporting in Arctic waters.

The real goal which Mackenzie sought was that of La Vérendrye, a western
and not a northern ocean. Three years later, after months of
preparation, he attempted the great feat of crossing the Rocky Mountains
to the sea. After nine months of rugged travel, across mountain streams
and gorges, in peril daily from hostile savages, on July 22, 1793, he
reached the shore of the Pacific Ocean, the first white man to go by
land over the width of the continent from sea to sea. It was thus a
Scotchman who achieved that of which La Vérendrye had so long dreamed;
and with no aid from the state but with only the resources of a trading
company.

Ten years later, when France sold to the United States her last
remaining territory of Louisiana, the American Government equipped an
expedition under Lewis and Clark to cross the Rocky Mountains by way of
the Missouri, the route from which the La Vérendrye brothers had been
obliged to turn back. The party began the ascent of the Missouri on May
14, 1804, and arrived in the Mandan country in the late autumn. Here
they spent the winter of 1804-05. Not until November 15, 1805, had they
completed the hard journey across the Rocky Mountains and reached the
mouth of the Columbia River on the Pacific Ocean. Little did La
Vérendrye, in his eager search for the Western Sea, imagine the
difficulties to be encountered and the hardships to be endured by those
who were destined, in later days, to realize his dream.




CHAPTER VI.

The Valley Of The Ohio

Almost at the moment in 1749 when British ships were lying at anchor in
Halifax harbor and sending to shore hundreds of boatloads of dazed and
expectant settlers for the new colony, there had set out from Montreal,
in the interests of France, an expedition with designs so far-reaching
that we wonder still at the stupendous issues involved in efforts which
seem so petty. The purpose of France was now to make good her claim to
the whole vast West. It was a picturesque company which pushed its
canoes from the shore at Lachine on the 15th of June, six days before
the British squadron reached Halifax. There was a procession of
twenty-three great birchbark canoes well filled, for in them were more
than two hundred men, at least ten in each canoe, together with the
necessary impedimenta for a long journey. There were twenty soldiers in
uniform, a hundred and eighty Canadians skilled in paddling and in
carrying canoes and freight over the portages, a band of Indians, and
fourteen officers with Céloron de Blainville at their head.

The acting Governor of Canada at this time was a dwarf in physique, but
a giant in intellect, the brilliant naval officer, the Marquis de la
Galissonière, destined later to inflict upon the English in the
Mediterranean the naval defeat which caused the execution of Admiral
Byng as a coward. This remarkable man--planning, like his predecessor
Frontenac, on a scale suited to world politics--saw that the peace of
1748 settled nothing, that in the balance now was the whole future of
North America, and that victory would be to the alert and the strong. He
chose Céloron, the most capable of the hardy young Canadian noblesse
whom he had at hand, a man accustomed to the life of the forest, and
sent with him this large party to assert against the English the right
of France to the valley of the Ohio. The English were now to be shut out
definitely from advancing westward and to be confined to the strip of
territory lying between the Atlantic coast and the Alleghany Mountains,
a little more than that strip fifty miles wide talked about in Quebec as
the maximum concession of France, but still not very much according to
the ideas of the English, and even this not secure if France should ever
grow strong enough to crowd them out.

At no time do we find more vivid the contrast in type between the two
nations. Before a concrete fact the British take action. When they gave
up Louisbourg they built Halifax. Their traders had pressed into the
Ohio country, not directed under any grandiose idea of empire, but
simply as individuals, to trade and reap for themselves what profit they
could. When they were checked and menaced by the French, they saw that
something must be done. How they did it we shall see presently. It was
the weakness of the English colonies that they could not unite to work
out a great plan. If Virginia took steps to advance westward,
Pennsylvania was jealous lest lands which she desired should go to a
rival colony. France, on the other hand, had complete unity of design.
Céloron spoke in the name of the King of France and he spoke in terms
uncompromising enough. "The Ohio," said the King of France through his
agent, "belongs to me." It is a French river. The lands bordering upon
it are "my lands." The English intruders are foreign robbers and not one
of them is to be left in the western country: "I will not endure the
English on my land." The Indians, dwelling in that region, are "my
children."

Scattered over the vast region about the Great Lakes were a good many
French. At the lower end of Lake Ontario stood Fort Frontenac, a menace
to the colony of New York, as the dwellers in the British post of Oswego
on the opposite shore of the lake well knew. We have already seen that
the French held a fort at Niagara guarding the route leading farther
west to Lake Erie and to regions beyond Lake Erie, by way of the Ohio or
the upper lakes, to the Mississippi. Near the mouth of the Mississippi,
New Orleans was now becoming a considerable town with a governor
independent of the governor at Quebec. Along the Mississippi at
strategic points stretching northward beyond the mouth of the Missouri
were a few French settlements, ragged enough and with a shiftless
population of fur traders and farmers, but adequate to assert France's
possession of that mighty highway. The weak point in France's position
was in her connection of the Mississippi with the St. Lawrence by way of
the Ohio. This was the place of danger, for here English rivalry was
strongest, and it was to cure this weakness that Céloron was now sent
forth.

Céloron moved toilsomely over the portage which led past the great
cataract of Niagara and launched his canoes on Lake Erie. From its south
shore, during seven days of heart-breaking labor, the party dragged the
canoes and supplies through dense forest and over steep hills until they
reached Chautauqua Lake, the waters of which flow into the Allegheny
River and by it to the Ohio. For many weary days they went with the
current, stopping at Indian villages, treating with the savages, who
were sometimes awed and sometimes menacing. They warned the Indians to
have no dealings with the scheming English who would "infallibly prove
to be robbers," and asserted as boldly as Céloron dared the lordship of
the King of France and his love for his forest children. Céloron
realized that he was on an historic mission. At several points on the
Ohio, with great ceremony, he buried leaden plates, as La Vérendrye had
done a few years earlier in the far West, bearing an inscription
declaring that, in the name of the King of France, he took possession of
the country. On trees over these memorials of lead he nailed the arms of
France, stamped on sheets of tin. Since that day at least three of the
plates have been found.

Céloron's expedition went well enough. He advanced as far west on the
Ohio as the mouth of the Great Miami River, then up that river, and by
difficult portages back to Lake Erie. It was a remarkable journey; but
in the late autumn he was back again in Montreal, not sure that he had
achieved much. The natives of the country were, he thought, hostile to
France and devoted to the English who had long traded with them. This
opinion was in truth erroneous, for, when the time of testing came, the
Indians of the West fought on the side of France. Montcalm had many
hundreds of them under his banner. The expedition meant the definite and
final throwing down of the gauntlet by France. With all due ceremony she
had declared that the Ohio country was hers and that there she would
allow no English to dwell.

Legardeur de Saint-Pierre could hardly have known, when he left the hard
region of the Saskatchewan in 1752, that a year later he would be sent
to protect another set of outposts of France in the West. In 1753 we
find him in command of the French forces in the Ohio country. Céloron
had been sent to Detroit. If Saint-Pierre had played his part feebly on
the Saskatchewan, he was now made for a brief period one of the central
figures in the opening act of a world drama. It is with a touch of
emotion that we see on the stage, as the opponent of this not great
Frenchman, the momentous figure of George Washington.

The fight for North America was now rapidly approaching its final phase
in the struggle which we know as the Seven Years' War. During forty
years, commissioners of the two nations had been trying to reach some
agreement as to boundaries. Each side, however, made impossible demands.
France claimed all the lands drained by the St. Lawrence and the Great
Lakes and by the Mississippi and its tributaries--a claim which, if made
good, would have carried her into the very heart of the colony of New
York and would have given her also the mastery of the Ohio and the
regions beyond. Britain claimed all the lands ever occupied by the
Iroquois Indians, who had been recognized as British subjects by the
Treaty of Utrecht. As those Indians had overrun regions north of the St.
Lawrence, the British thus would become masters of a good part of
Canada. Neither side was prepared for reasonable compromise. The sword
was to be the final arbiter.

Events moved rapidly towards war. In 1753 Duquesne, the new Governor of
Canada, sent more than a thousand men to build Fort Le Bœuf, on upper
waters flowing to the Ohio and within easy reach of support by way of
Lake Erie. In the next year the French were swarming in the Ohio Valley,
stirring up the Indians against the English and confident of success.
They jeered at the divisions among the English and believed their own
unity so strong that they could master the colonies one by one. The two
colonies most affected were Pennsylvania and Virginia, either of them
quite ready to see its own citizens advance into the Ohio country and
possess the land, but neither of them willing to unite with the other in
effective military action to protect the frontier.

It is at this crisis that there appears for the first time in history
George Washington of Virginia. In December, 1753, in the dead of winter,
he made a long, toilsome journey from Virginia to the north through snow
and rain, by difficult forest trails, over two ranges of mountains,
across streams sometimes frozen, sometimes dangerous from treacherous
thaws. On the way he heard gossip from the Indians about the designs of
the French. They boasted that they would come in numbers like the sands
of the seashore; that the natives would be no more an obstacle to them
than the flies and mosquitoes, which indeed they resembled; and that not
the breadth of a finger-nail of land belonged to the Indians. Washington
was told by one of the French that "it was their absolute design to take
possession of the Ohio and, by------, they would do it!" It was no
matter that the French were outnumbered two to one by the English, for
the English were dilatory and ineffective.

In the end, Washington arrived at Fort Le Bœuf and presented a letter
from Dinwiddie, the Lieutenant-Governor of Virginia, pointing out that
the British could not permit an armed force from Canada to invade their
territory of the Ohio and requiring that the French should leave the
country at once. Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, to whom this firm demand was
delivered, "an elderly gentleman," says Washington, with "much the air
of a soldier" gave, of course, a polite answer in the manner of his
nation, but he intended, he said, to remain where he was as long as he
had instructions so to do. Washington kept his eyes open and made
careful observations of the plan of the fort, the number of men, and
also of the canoes, of which he noted that there were more than two
hundred ready and many others building. The French tried to entice away
his Indians and he says, "I cannot say that ever in my life I suffered
so much anxiety." On the journey back he nearly perished when he fell
into an ice-cold stream and was obliged to spend the night on a tiny
island in frozen clothing. He brought comfort as cold to the waiting
Dinwiddie.

The French meanwhile were always a little ahead of the English in their
planning. Early in April, 1754, a French force of five or six hundred
men from Canada, which had set out while Quebec was still in the icy
grip of winter, reached the upper waters of the Ohio. They attacked and
destroyed a fort which the English had begun at the forks where now
stands Pittsburgh, and, in its place, began a formidable one, called
Fort Duquesne after the Governor of Canada. In vain was Washington sent
with a few hundred men to take possession of this fort and to assert the
claim of the English to the land. He fell in with a French scouting
party under young Coulon de Jumonville, killed its leader and nine
others, and took more than a score of prisoners--warfare bloody enough
in a time of supposed peace. But the French were now on the Ohio in
greater numbers than the English. At a spot known as the Great Meadows,
where Washington had hastily thrown up defenses, which he called Fort
Necessity, he was forced to surrender, but was allowed to lead his force
back to Virginia, defeated in the first military adventure of his
career. The French took the view that his killing of the young officer
Jumonville was assassination, since no state of war existed, and raised
a fierce clamor that Washington was a murderer--a strange contrast to
his relations with France in the years to come.

What astonishes us in regard to these events is that Britain and France
long remained nominally at peace while they were carrying on active
hostilities in America and sending from Europe armies to fight. There
were various reasons for this hesitation about plunging formally into
war. Each side wished to delay until sure of its alliances in Europe.
During the war ending in 1748 France had fought with Frederick of
Prussia against Austria, and Britain had been Austria's ally. The war
had been chiefly a land war, but France had been beaten on the sea. Now
Britain and Prussia were drawing together and, if France fought them, it
must be with Austria as an ally. Such an alliance offered France but
slight advantage. Austria, an inland power, could not help France
against an adversary whose strength was on the sea; she could not aid
the designs of France in America or in India, where the capable French
leader Dupleix was in a fair way to build up a mighty oriental empire.
Nor had France anything to gain in Europe from an Austrian alliance. The
shoe was on the other foot. The supreme passion of Maria Theresa who
ruled Austria was to recover the province of Silesia which had been
seized in 1740 by Prussia and held--held to this day. Austria could do
little for France but France could do much for Austria. So Austria
worked for this alliance. It is a story of intrigue. Usually in France
the King carried on negotiations with foreign countries only through his
ministers, who knew the real interests of France. Now the astute
Austrian statesman, Kaunitz, went past the ministers of Louis XV to
Louis himself. This was the heyday of Madame de Pompadour, the King's
mistress. Maria Theresa condescended to intrigue with this woman whom in
her heart she despised. There is still much mystery in the affair. The
King was flattered into thinking that personally he was swaying the
affairs of Europe and took delight in deceiving his ministers and
working behind their backs. While events in America were making war
between France and Britain inevitable, France was being tied to an ally
who could give her little aid. She must spend herself to fight Austria's
battles on the land, while her real interests required that she should
build up her fleet to fight on the sea the great adversary across the
English Channel.

The destiny of North America might, indeed, well have been other than it
is. A France strong on the sea, able to bring across to America great
forces, might have held, at any rate, her place on the St. Lawrence and
occupied the valleys of the Ohio and the Mississippi. We can hardly
doubt that the English colonies, united by a common deadly peril, could
have held against France most of the Atlantic coast. But she might well
have divided with them North America; and today the lands north of the
Ohio and westward beyond the Ohio to the Pacific Ocean might have been
French. The two nations on the brink of war in 1754 were playing for
mighty stakes; and victory was to the power which had control of the
sea. France had a great army, Britain a great fleet. In this contrast
lay wrapped the secret of the future of North America.

As the crisis drew near the vital thought about the future of America
was found, not in America, but in Europe. The English colonies were so
accustomed to distrust each other that, when Virginia grew excited about
French designs on the Ohio, Pennsylvania or North Carolina was as likely
as not to say that it was the French who were in the right and a stupid,
or excitable, or conceited, colonial governor who was in the wrong. In
Paris and London, on the other hand, there were no illusions about
affairs in America. In both capitals it was realized that a grim fight
was on. During the winter of 1754-55 extensive preparations were being
made on both sides. France equipped an army under Baron Dieskau to go to
Canada; Britain equipped one under General Braddock to go to Virginia.
Each nation asked the other why it was sending troops to America and
each gave the assurance of benevolent designs. But in the spring of 1755
a British fleet under Admiral Boscawen put to sea with instructions to
capture any French vessels bound for North America. At the same time the
two armies were on the way across the Atlantic. Dieskau went to Canada,
Braddock to Virginia, each instructed to attack the other side, while in
the meantime ambassadors at the two courts gave bland assurances that
their only thought was to preserve peace.

The English colonists showed a political blindness that amounted to
imbecility. Albany was the central point from which the dangers on all
sides might best be surveyed. Here came together in the summer of 1754
delegates from seven of the colonies to consider the common peril. The
French were busy in winning, as they did, the support of the many Indian
tribes of the West; and the old allies of the English, the Iroquois,
were nervous for their own safety. The delegates to Albany, tied and
bound by instructions from their Assemblies, had to listen to plain
words from the savages. The one Englishman who, in dealing with the
Indians, had tact and skill equal to that of Frontenac of old, was an
Irishman, Sir William Johnson. To him the Iroquois made indignant
protests that the English were as ready as the French to rob them of
their lands. If we find a bear in a tree, they said, some one will
spring up to claim that the tree belongs to him and keep us from
shooting the bear. The French, they added, are at least men who are
prepared to fight; you weak and unprepared English are like women and
any day the French may turn you out. Benjamin Franklin told the
delegates that they must unite to meet a common enemy. Unite, however,
they would not. No one of them would surrender to a central body any
authority through which the power of the King over them might be
increased. The Congress--the word is full of omen for the future--failed
to bring about the much-needed union.

In February, 1755, Braddock arrived in Virginia with his army, and early
in May he was on his march across the mountains with regulars, militia,
and Indians, to the number of nearly fifteen hundred men, to attack Fort
Duquesne and to rid the Ohio Valley of the French. He knew little of
forest warfare with its use of Indian scouts, its ambushes, its fighting
from the cover of trees. On the 9th of July, on the Monongahela River,
near Fort Duquesne, in a struggle in the forest against French and
Indians he was defeated and killed. George Washington was in the fight
and had to report to Dinwiddie the dismal record of what had happened.
The frontier was aflame; and nearly all the Indians of the West, seeing
the rising star, went over to the French. The power of France was, for
the time, supreme in the heart of the continent. At that moment even far
away in the lone land about the Saskatchewan, the English trader,
Hendry, had to admit that the French knew better than the English how to
attract the support of the savage tribes.

Meanwhile Dieskau had arrived at Quebec. In the colony of New York Sir
William Johnson, the rough and cheery Irishman, much loved of the
Iroquois, was gathering forces to attack Canada. Early in July, 1755,
Johnson had more than three thousand provincial troops at Albany, a
motley horde of embattled farmers, most of them with no uniforms,
dressed in their own homespun, carrying their own muskets, electing
their own officers, and altogether, from the strict soldier's point of
view, a rabble rather than an army. To meet this force and destroy it if
he could, Dieskau took to the French fort at Crown Point, on Lake
Champlain, and southward from there to Ticonderoga at the head of this
lake, some three thousand five hundred men, including his French
regulars, some Canadians and Indians. Johnson's force lay at Fort
George, later Fort William Henry, the most southerly point on Lake
George. The names, given by Johnson himself, show how the dull
Hanoverian kings and their offspring were held in honor by the Irish
diplomat who was looking for favors at court. The two armies met on the
shores of Lake George early in September and there was an all-day fight.
Each side lost some two hundred men. Among those who perished on the
French side was Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, who had escaped all the
perils of the western wilderness to meet his fate in this border
struggle. The honors of the day seem to have been with Johnson, for the
French were driven off and Dieskau himself, badly wounded, was taken
prisoner. That Johnson had great difficulty in keeping his savages from
burning alive and then boiling and eating Dieskau and smoking his flesh
in their pipes, in revenge for some of their chiefs killed in the fight,
shows what an alliance with Indians meant.

There was small gain to the English from Johnson's success. He was too
cautious to advance towards Canada; and, as winter came on, he broke up
his camp and sent his men to their homes. The colonies had no permanent
military equipment. Each autumn their forces were dissolved to be
reorganized again in the following spring, a lame method of waging war.

For three years longer in the valley of the Ohio, as elsewhere, the star
of France remained in the ascendant. It began to decline only when,
farther east, on the Atlantic, superior forces sent out from England
were able to check the French. During the summer of 1758, while Wolfe
and Boscawen were pounding the walls of Louisbourg, seven thousand
troops led by General Forbes, Colonel George Washington, and Colonel
Henry Bouquet, pushed their way through the wilds beyond the Alleghanies
and took possession of the Ohio. The French destroyed Fort Duquesne and
fled. On the 25th of November the English occupied the place and named
it "Pitts-Bourgh" in honor of their great war minister.




CHAPTER VII.

The Expulsion Of The Acadians

We have now to turn back over a number of years to see what has been
happening in Acadia, that oldest and most easterly part of New France
which in 1710 fell into British hands. Since the Treaty of Utrecht in
1713 the Acadians had been nominally British subjects. But the
Frenchman, hardly less than the Jew, is difficult of absorption by other
racial types. We have already noted the natural aim of France to recover
what she had lost and her use of the priests to hold the Acadians to her
interests. The Acadians were secure in the free exercise of their
religion. They had no secular leaders and few, if any, clergy of their
own. They were led chiefly by priests, subjects of France, who, though
working in British territory, owned no allegiance to Great Britain, and
were directed by the Bishop of Quebec.

For forty years the question of the Acadians remained unsettled. Under
the Treaty of 1713 the Acadians might leave the country. If they
remained a year they must become British subjects. When, however, in
1715, two years after the conclusion of the treaty, they were required
to take the oath of allegiance to the new King, George I, they declared
that they could not do so, since they were about to move to Cape Breton.
When George II came to the throne in 1727, the oath was again demanded.
Still, however, the Acadians were between two fires. Their Indian
neighbors, influenced by the French, threatened them with massacre if
they took the oath, while the British declared that they would forfeit
their farms if they refused. The truth is that the British did not wish
to press the alternative. To drive out the Acadians would be to
strengthen the neighboring French colony of Cape Breton. To force on
them the oath might even cause a rising which would overwhelm the few
English in Nova Scotia. So the tradition, never formally accepted by the
British, grew up that, while the Acadians owed obedience to George II,
they would be neutral in case of war with France. A common name for them
used by the British themselves was that of the Neutral French. In time
of peace the Acadians could be left to themselves. When, however, war
broke out between Britain and France the question of loyalty became
acute. Such war there was in 1744. Without doubt, some Acadians then
helped the French--but it was, as they protested, only under compulsion
and, as far as they could, they seem to have refused to aid either side.
The British muttered threats that subjects of their King who would not
fight for him had no right to protection under British law. Even then
feeling was so high that there was talk of driving the Acadians from
their farms and setting them adrift; and these poor people trembled for
their own fate when the British victors at Louisbourg in 1745 removed
the French population to France. Assurances came from the British
government, however, that there was no thought of molesting the
Acadians.

With the order "As you were" the dominant thought of the Treaty of
Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, the highly organized and efficient champions of
French policy took every step to ensure that in the next struggle the
interests of France should prevail. Peace had no sooner been signed than
Versailles was working in Nova Scotia on the old policy. The French
priests taught that eternal perdition awaited the Catholic Acadians who
should accept the demands of the heretic English. The Indians continued
their savage threats. Blood is thicker than water and no doubt the
natural sympathies of the Acadians were with the French. But the British
were now formidable. For them the founding of Halifax in 1749 had made
all the difference. They, too, had a menacing fortress at the door of
the Acadians, and their tone grew sterner. As a result the Acadians were
told that if, by October 15, 1749, they had not taken an unconditional
oath of allegiance to George II, they should forfeit their rights and
their property, the treasured farms on which they and their ancestors
had toiled. The Acadians were in acute distress. If they yielded to the
English, not only would their bodies be destroyed by the savage Micmac
Indians, but their immortal souls, they feared, would be in danger.

The Abbé Le Loutre was the parish priest of the Acadian village of
Beaubassin on Chignecto Bay and also missionary to the Micmac Indians,
whose chief village lay in British territory not many miles from
Halifax. British officials of the time denounced him as a determined
fanatic who did not stop short of murder. As in most men, there was in
Le Loutre a mingling of qualities. He was arrogant, domineering, and
intent on his own plans. He hated the English and their heresy, and he
preached to his people against them with frantic invective. He incited
his Indians to bloodshed. But he also knew pity. The custom of the
Indians was to consider prisoners taken by them as their property, and
on one occasion Le Loutre himself paid ransom to the Indians for
thirty-seven English captives and returned them to Halifax. It is
certain that the French government counted upon the influence of French
priests to aid its political designs. "My masters, God and the King" was
a phrase of the Sulpician father Piquet working at this time on the St.
Lawrence. Le Loutre could have echoed the words. He was an ardent
politician and France supplied him with both money and arms to induce
the Indians to attack the English. The savages haunted the outskirts of
Halifax, waylaid and scalped unhappy settlers, and, in due course, were
paid from Louisbourg according to the number of scalps which they
produced. The deliberate intention was to make new English settlements
impossible in Nova Scotia and so to discourage the English that they
should abandon Halifax. All this intrigue occurred in 1749 and the years
following the treaty of peace. If the English suffered, so did the
Acadians. Le Loutre told them that if once they became British subjects
they would lose their priests and find their religion suppressed.
Acadians who took the oath would, he said, be denied the sacraments of
the Church. He would also turn loose on the offenders the mur

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