and De Soto had been buried beneath it. A Frenchman first crossed the Rocky Mountains; the French settled the Mississippi Valley in 1699, and Mobile in 1702. The great Western valleys are still full of French names, and for every one left, two or three have been blotted out. The English maps, down to the year 1763, give the name "New France" not to Canada only, but to the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. New France was vast; New England was a narrow strip along the shore. But there was a yet greater difference in the tenure by which the two nations held their nominal settlements. The French held theirs with the aid of a vast system of paid officials, priests, generals, and governors; the English colonists kept theirs for themselves, aided by a little chartered authority or deputed power. Moreover, the French retained theirs by a chain of forts and a net-work of trading posts; the English held theirs by sober agriculture. In the end the spade and axe proved mightier than the sword. What postponed the triumph was that the French, not the English, had won the hearts of the Indians.

This subject has been considered in a previous chapter, and need be only briefly mentioned here; but it should not be wholly passed by. To the Indian, the Frenchman was a daring swordsman, a gay cavalier, a dashing leader, and the most charming of companions; the Englishman was a plodding and sordid agriculturist. "The stoic of the woods" saw men infinitely his superiors in all knowledge and in the refinements of life, who yet cheerfully accepted his way of living, and took with apparent relish to his whole way of existence. Charlevoix sums it all up admirably: "The savages did not become French: the Frenchmen became savages." To the savage, at least, the alliance was inestimable. What saved the English colonies was the fact that it was not quite universal. It failed to reach the most advanced, the most powerful, and the most central race of savages-the tribes called Iroquois. It

took the French a great many years to outgrow the attitude of hostility to these tribes which began with the attack of Champlain and a few Frenchmen on an Iroquois fort. Baron La Hontan, one of the few Frenchmen who were not also good Catholics, attributes this mainly to the influence of the priests. He says, in the preface to the English translation of his letters (1703): “Notwithstanding the veneration I have for the clergy, I impute to them all the mischief the Iroquese have done to the French colonies in the course of a war that would never have been undertaken if it had not been for the counsels of those pious churchmen." But whatever the cause, the fact was of vital importance, and proved to be, as has been already said, the turning-point of the whole controversy.

These being the general features of the French and Indian warfare, it remains only to consider briefly its successive stages. It took the form of a series of outbreaks, most of which were so far connected with public affairs in Europe that their very names often record the successive rulers under whose nominal authority they were waged. The first, known as "King William's War," and sometimes as "St. Castin's War," began in 1688, ten years after the close of King Philip's War, while France and England were still at peace. In April of the next year came the news that William of Orange had landed in England, and this change in the English dynasty was an important argument in the hands of the French, who insisted on regarding the colonists not as loyal Englishmen, but as rebels against their lawful king, James the Second. In reality the American collision had been in preparation for years. "About the year 1685," wrote the English visitor, Edward Randolph, "the French of Canada encroached upon the lands of the subjects of the crown of England, building forts upon the heads of their great rivers, and extending their bounds, disturbed the inhabitants." On the other hand, it must be remembered that England claimed the present territory of New

Brunswick and Nova Scotia, and the provincial charter of Massachusetts covered those regions. Thus each nationality seemed to the other to be trying to encroach, and each professed to be acting on the defensive. With this purpose the French directly encouraged Indian outbreaks. We now know, from the despatches of Denonville, the French Governor of Canada, that he claimed as his own merit the successes of the Indians; and Champigny wrote that he himself had supplied them with gunpowder, and that the Indians of the Christian villages near Quebec had taken the leading part.

Unluckily several of the provinces had just been brought together under the governorship of a man greatly disliked and distrusted, Sir Edmund Andros. In August this official, then newly placed in power, visited the Five Nations at Albany to secure their friendliness. During his absence there were rumors of Indian outbreaks at the East, and though he took steps to suppress them, yet nobody trusted him. The friendly Indians declared that "the Governor was a rogue, and had hired the Indians to kill the English," and that the Mohawks were to seize Boston in the spring. This rumor helped the revolt of the people against Andros; and after his overthrow the garrisons at the eastward were broken up, and the savage assaults recommenced. Cocheco, now Dover, New Hampshire, was destroyed; Pemaquid, a fort with seven or eight cannon, was regularly besieged by a hundred Christian Indians under their priest, Père Thury, who urged on the attack, but would not let the English be scalped or tortured. From the beginning the movements of the French and Indians were not impulsive outbreaks, as heretofore, but were directed by a trained soldier of fifty years' experience, the Count de Frontenac. There were no soldiers of experience among the colonists, and they fought like peasants against a regular army. Yet when, after a terrible Indian massacre at Schenectady, a Congress of delegates was held at New York, in May, 1690, they daringly

planned an attack on the two strongholds, Quebec and Montreal. Winthrop of Connecticut was to take Montreal by a land expedition, and Sir William Phips, of Massachusetts-a rough sailor who had captured Port Royal-was sent by water with more than two thousand men against Quebec, an almost impregnable fortress manned by nearly three thousand. Both enterprises failed, and the Baron La Hontan wrote of Phipsin the English edition of his letters - that he could not have served the French better had he stood still with his hands in his pockets. The colonies were impoverished by these hopeless efforts, and the Puritans attributed their failure to "the frown of God." The Indians made fresh attacks at Pentucket (Haverhill) and elsewhere; but the Peace of Ryswick (September 20, 1697) stopped the war for a time, and provided that the American boundaries of France and England should remain the same.

A few more years brought new hostilities (May 4, 1702), when England declared war against France and Spain. This was called in Europe "The War of the Spanish Succession," but in America simply "Queen Anne's War." The Five Nations were now strictly neutral, so that New York was spared, and the force of the war fell on the New England settlements. The Eastern Indians promised equal neutrality, and one of their chiefs said, "The sun is not more distant from the earth than our thoughts from war." But they joined in the war just the same, and the Deerfield (Massachusetts) massacre, with the captivity of Rev. John Williams, roused the terror of all the colonists. Traces of that attack, in the form of tomahawk strokes upon doors, are still to be seen in Deerfield. The Governor of Massachusetts was distrusted; he tried in vain to take the small fort of Port Royal in Nova Scotia "the hornets' nest," as it was called; but it was finally taken in 1710, and its name was changed to Annapolis Royal, afterwards Annapolis, in honor of the Queen.

The year after, a great expedition was sent from England

by St. John, afterwards Lord Bolingbroke, to effect the conquest of Canada. Fifteen ships of war, with five regiments of Marlborough's veterans, reached Boston in June, 1711. Provincial troops went from New York and New Jersey, as well as New England, and there were eight hundred Iroquois warriors. St. John wrote, "I believe you may depend upon our being, at this time, the masters of all North America." On the contrary, they did not become masters of an inch of ground; the expedition utterly failed, mainly through the incompetency of the commander, Admiral Sir Hovenden Walker; eight ships were wrecked, eight hundred and eighty-four men were drowned, and fleet and land-forces retreated. In April, 1713, the war nominally closed with the Peace of Utrecht, which gave to England Hudson Bay, Newfoundland, and Acadia-the last so poorly defined as to lead to much trouble at a later day.

But in Maine the Indian disturbances still went on. New forts were built by the colonists, and there were new attacks by the Abenaki tribe. Among these the most conspicuous figure was for a quarter of a century the Jesuit priest Père Rasle, who had collected a village of "praying Indians" at Norridgewock, and had trained a band of forty young men to assist, wearing cassock and surplice, in the services of the

Les Sauvages, Je commence

a mellre

en ordre en forme de dictionance Les mots que j'appiens.

FAC-SIMILE FROM MS. OF FATHER RASLE'S ABENAKI GLOSSARY.

Translation: "Having been for a year among the savages, I begin to arrange in order in the manner of a dictionary the words that I learn."