A School History of the United States by John Bach McMaster

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%63. The French and the Indians.%--The ways in which French and
English colonists acted towards the Indian are highly characteristic,
and account for much in our history.

From the day when Champlain, in 1609, joined his Huron-Algonquin
neighbors and went with them on the warpath against the Iroquois, the
French held to the policy of making friends with the Indians. No pains
were spared to win them to the cause of France. They were flattered,
petted, treated with ceremonial respect, and became the companions, as
the women often became the wives, of the Frenchmen. Much was expected of
this mingling of races. It was supposed that the Indian would be won
over to civilization and Christianity. But the Frenchmen were won over
to the Indians, and adopted Indian ways of life. They lived in wigwams,
wore Indian dress, decorated their long hair with eagle feathers, and
made their faces hideous with vermilion, ocher, and soot.

%64. Coureurs de Bois.%--There soon grew up in this way a class of
half-civilized vagrants, who ranged the woods in true Indian style, and
gained a living by guiding the canoes of fur traders along the rivers
and lakes of the interior. Stimulated by the profits of the fur trade,
these men pushed their traffic to the most distant tribes, spreading
French guns, French hatchets, beads, cloth, tobacco and brandy, and
French influence over the whole Northwest. Where the trader and the
_coureur de bois_ went, the priest and the soldier followed, and soon
mission houses and forts were established at all the chief passes and
places suited to control the Indian trade.

%65. The English and the Indians.%--How, meantime, did the English
act toward the Indians? In the first place, nothing led them to form
close relationship with the tribes. The fur trade--the source of
Canadian prosperity--and the zeal of priests eager for the conversion of
the heathen, which sent the traders, the _coureurs de bois_, and the
priests from tribe to tribe and from the Atlantic halfway to the
Pacific, did not appeal to the English colonists. Farming and commerce
were the sources of their wealth. Their priests and missionaries were
content to labor with the Indians near at hand.

In the second place, the policy of the French towards the Indians, while
founded on trade, was directed by one central government. The policy of
the English was directed by each colony, and was of as many kinds as
there were colonies. No English frontier exhibited such a mingling of
white men and red as was common wherever the French went. Among the
English there were fur traders, but no _coureurs de bois_. Scorn on the
one side and hatred on the other generally marked the intercourse
between the English and the Indians. One bright exception must indeed be
made. Penn was a broad-minded lover of his kind, a man of most
enlightened views on government and human rights; and in the colony
planted by him there was made a serious effort to treat the Indian as an
equal. But the day came when men not of his faith dealt with the Indians
in true English fashion.

Remembering this difference of treatment, we shall the better understand
how it happened that the French could sprinkle the West with little
posts far from Quebec and surrounded by the fiercest of tribes, while
the English could only with difficulty defend their frontier.[1]

[Footnote 1: A fine account of the Indians, and the French and English
ways of treating them, is given in Parkman's _Conspiracy of Pontiac_,
Vol. I., pp. 16-25, 41-45, 46-56, 64-80.]

%66. Early Indian Wars.%--Again and again this frontier was attacked.
In 1636 the Pequots, who dwelt along the Thames River in Connecticut,
made war on the settlers in the Connecticut River valley towns. Men were
waylaid and scalped, or taken prisoners and burned at the stake.
Determined to put an end to this, ninety men from the Connecticut towns,
with twenty from Massachusetts and some Mohegan Indians, in 1637 marched
against the marauders. They found the Pequots within a circular stockade
near the present town of Stonington, where of 400 warriors all save five
were killed.

%67. King Philip's War.%--During nearly forty years not a tribe in
all New England dared rise against the white men. But in 1675 trouble
began again. The settlers were steadily crowding the Indians off their
lands. No lands were taken without payment, yet the sales were far from
being voluntary. A new generation of Indians, too, had grown up, and,
heedless of the lesson taught their fathers, the Narragansetts,
Nipmucks, and Wampanoags, led by King Philip and Canonchet, rose upon
the English. A dreadful war followed. When it ended, in 1678, the three
tribes were annihilated. Hardly any Indians save the friendly Mohawks
were left in New England. But of ninety English towns, forty had been
the scene of fire and slaughter, and twelve had been destroyed utterly.

%68. The Iroquois.%--Elsewhere on the frontier a happier relation
existed with the Indians. The Iroquois of central New York were the
fiercest and most warlike Indians of the Atlantic coast. But the fight
with Champlain, in 1609, by turning them into implacable enemies of the
French, had rendered them all the more tolerant of the Dutch and the
English, while their complete conquest and subjugation of the Delawares,
or Lenni Lenape, prepared the way for the easy settlement of New Jersey
and Pennsylvania.

%69. Penn and the Lenni Lenape.%--These Indians were Algonquian, and
lived along the Delaware River and its tributaries. But early in the
seventeenth century they had been reduced to vassalage by the Five
Nations, had been forbidden to carry arms, and had been forced to take
the name of Women.[1]

[Footnote 1: Read Parkman's _Conspiracy of Pontiac_, Vol. I., pp. 30-32,
80-82.]

When the Dutch and Swedes began their settlements on the South River,
and when Penn, in 1683, made a treaty with the Delawares, the settlers
had to deal with peaceful Indians. No horrid wars mark the early history
of Pennsylvania.

%70. The Powhatans in Virginia.%--Much the same may be said of the
Virginia tribes. They were far from friendly, and had they been as
fierce and warlike as the northern tribes, neither the skill of John
Smith, nor the marriage of Pocahontas (the daughter of Powhatan) with
John Rolfe, nor fear of the English muskets, would have saved Jamestown.

[Illustration: Powhatan Indians at work[1]]

[Footnote 1: From a model.]

On the other hand, the destruction of the tribes in New England and the
feud between the French and the Iroquois saved New England. For the time
had now come for the opening of the long struggle between the French and
the English for the ownership of the continent.

SUMMARY

1. The inhabitants of the New World at the time of its discovery, by
mistake called Indians, were barbarians, lived in rude, frail houses,
and used weapons and implements inferior to those of the whites.

2. The Indian tribes of eastern North America are mostly divided into
three great groups: Muskhogean, Iroquoian, and Algonquian.

3. In general, the French made the Indians their friends, while the
English drove them westward and treated them as an inferior race.

[Illustration: THE BRITISH COLONIES AND EUROPEAN POSSESSIONS 1733]

CHAPTER VIII

THE STRUGGLE FOR NEW FRANCE AND LOUISIANA

%71. Louisiana, or the Mississippi Basin.%--The landing of La Salle
on the coast of Texas, and the building of Fort St. Louis of Texas, gave
the French a claim to the coast as far southward as a point halfway
between the fort and the nearest Spanish settlement, in Mexico. At that
point was the Rio Grande, a good natural boundary. On the French maps,
therefore, Louisiana extended from the Rocky Mountains and the Rio
Grande on the west, to the Alleghany Mountains on the east, and from the
Gulf of Mexico on the south, to New France on the north. This confined
the English colonies to a narrow strip between the Alleghany Mountains
and the Atlantic Ocean. As the colonies were growing in population, and
as the charters of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Virginia, and Carolina
gave them great stretches of territory in the Mississippi valley, it was
inevitable that, sooner or later, a bitter contest for possession of the
country should take place between the French and the English in America.

The contest began in 1689, and ended in 1763, and may easily be divided
into two periods: 1. That from 1689 to 1748, when the struggle was for
Acadia and New France. 2. That from 1754 to 1763, when the struggle was
not only for New France, but for Louisiana also.

%72. The Struggle for Acadia and New France; "King William's
War."%--In 1688-89 there was a revolution in England, in the course
of which James II. was driven from his throne, and William and Mary, his
nephew and daughter, were seated on it. James took refuge in France, and
when Louis XIV. attempted to restore him, a great European war
followed, and of course the colonists of the two countries were very
soon fighting each other. As the quarrel did not arise on this side of
the ocean, the English colonists called it "King William's War"; but on
our continent it was really the beginning of a long struggle to
determine whether France or England should rule North America.

The French recognized this at once, and sent over a very able
soldier--Count Frontenac--with orders to conquer New York; but the
colony was saved by the Iroquois, who in the summer of 1689 began a war
of their own against the French, laid siege to Montreal, and roasted
French captives under its walls. Frontenac was compelled to put off his
attack till 1690, when in the dead of winter a band of French and
Indians burned Schenectady, N.Y. Salmon Falls in New Hampshire was next
laid waste (1690), and Fort Loyal, where Portland, Me., is, was taken
and destroyed. A little later Exeter, N.H., was attacked. The boldness
and suddenness of these fearful massacres so alarmed the people exposed
to them that in May, 1690, delegates from Massachusetts, Plymouth,
Connecticut, and New York met at New York city to devise a plan of
attack on the French. Now, at the opening of the war, there were three
French strongholds in America. These were Montreal and Quebec in Canada,
and Port Royal in Acadia. In 1690 a Massachusetts fleet led by Sir
William Phips destroyed Port Royal. It was decided, therefore, to send
another fleet under Phips to take Quebec, while troops from New York and
Connecticut marched against Montreal. Both expeditions were failures,
and for seven years the French and Indians ravaged the frontier. In 1692
York, in Maine, was visited and a third of the inhabitants killed. In
1694 Castine was taken and a hundred persons scalped and tomahawked. At
Durham, in New Hampshire, prisoners were burned alive. Groton, in
Massachusetts, was next visited; but the boldest of all was the
massacre, in 1697, at Haverhill, a town not thirty-five miles from
Boston. In 1696, Frontenac, at the head of a great array of Canadians,
_coureurs de bois_, and Indians, invaded the country of the Onondagas,
and leveled their fortified town to the earth.

[Illustration: MAP OF PART OF ACADIA]

%73. The Struggle for Acadia and New France; "Queen Anne's War."%--In
1697 the war ended with the treaty of Ryswick, and "King William's War"
came to a close in America with nothing gained and much lost on each
side. The peace, however, did not last long, for in 1701 England and
France were again fighting. As William died in 1702, and was succeeded
by his sister-in-law Anne, the struggle which followed in America was
called "Queen Anne's War." Again Port Royal was captured (1710); again
an expedition went against Quebec and failed (1711); and again, year
after year, the French and Indians swept along the frontier of New
England, burning towns and slaughtering and torturing the inhabitants.
At last the treaty of Utrecht, in 1713, ended the strife, and the first
signs of English conquest in America were visible, for the French gave
up Acadia and acknowledged the claims of the English to Newfoundland and
the country around Hudson Bay. The name Acadia was changed by the
conquerors to Nova Scotia. Port Royal, never again to be parted with,
they called Annapolis, in honor of the Queen.[1]

[Footnote 1: Read Parkman's _A Half-century of Conflict_, Vol. I., pp.
1-149.]

%74. The French take Possession of the Mississippi Valley; the Chain of
Forts.%--The peace made at Utrecht was unbroken for thirty years. But
this long period was, on the part of the French in America, at least, a
time of careful preparation for the coming struggle for possession of
the valleys of the Mississippi, the Ohio, and the Lakes. In the
Mississippi valley most elaborate preparations for defense were already
under way. No sooner did the treaty of Ryswick end the first French war
than a young naval officer named Iberville applied to the King for leave
to take out an expedition and found a colony at the mouth of the
Mississippi, just as La Salle had attempted to do. Permission was
readily given, and in 1698 Iberville sailed with two ships from France,
and in February, 1699, entered Mobile Bay. Leaving his fleet at anchor,
he set off with a party in small boats in search of the great river. He
coasted along the shore, entered the Mississippi through one of its
three mouths, and went up the river till he came to an Indian village,
where the chief gave him a letter which Tonty, thirteen years before,
when in search of La Salle, had written and left in the crotch of
a tree.

Iberville now knew that he was on the Mississippi; but having seen no
spot along its low banks suitable for the site of a city, he went back
and led his colony to Biloxi Bay, and there settled it. Thus when the
eighteenth century opened there were in all Louisiana but two French
settlements--that founded on the Illinois River by La Salle, and that
begun by Iberville at Biloxi. But the occupation of Louisiana was now
the established policy of France, and hardly a year went by without one
or more forts appearing somewhere in the valley. Before 1725 came,
Mobile Bay was occupied, New Orleans was founded, and Forts Rosalie,
Toulouse, Tombeckbee, Natchitoches, Assumption, and Chartres were
erected. Along the Lakes, Detroit had been founded, Niagara was built in
1726, and in 1731 a band of Frenchmen, entering New York, put up
Crown Point.[1]

[Footnote 1: Parkman's _A Half-century of Conflict_, Vol. I., pp.
288-314. For the French posts see map on pp. 74, 75.]

The meaning of this chain of forts stretching from New Orleans and
Mobile to Lake Champlain and Montreal, was that the French were
determined to shut the English out of the valley of the Mississippi, and
to keep them away from the shores of the Great Lakes. But they were also
determined at the first chance to reconquer Annapolis and Nova Scotia,
which they had lost by the treaty of Utrecht in 1713. As a very
important step towards the accomplishment of this purpose, the French
selected a harbor on the southeast coast of Cape Breton Island, and
there built Louisburg, a fortress so strong that the French officers
boasted that it could be defended by a garrison of women.

%75. The Struggle for New France; "King George's War."%--Such was the
situation in America when (in March, 1744) France declared war on
England and began what in Europe was called the "War of the Austrian
Succession"; but in our country it was known as "King George's War,"
because George II. was then King of England. The French, with their
usual promptness, rushed down and burned the little English post of
Canso, in Nova Scotia, carried off the garrison, and attacked Annapolis,
where they were driven off. That Nova Scotia could be saved, seemed
hopeless. Nevertheless, Governor Shirley of Massachusetts determined to
make the attempt, and that the King might know the exact situation he
sent to London, with a dispatch, an officer named Captain Ryal, who had
been taken prisoner at Canso and afterwards released on parole.[2]

[Footnote 2: The reception of that officer well illustrates the gross
ignorance of America and American affairs which then existed in England.
When the Duke of Newcastle, who was prime minister, read the dispatch,
he exclaimed: "Oh, yes--yes--to be sure. Annapolis must be
defended--troops must be sent to Annapolis. Pray where is Annapolis?
Cape Breton an island! Wonderful! Show it me on the map. So it is, sure
enough. My dear sir [to Captain Ryal], you always bring us good news. I
must go and tell the King that Cape Breton is an island."]

Although Shirley applied to the King for help with which to defend Nova
Scotia, he knew full well that the burden of defense would fall on the
colonies. And with that determination and persistence which always
brings success he labored hard to persuade New Hampshire, Connecticut,
and Rhode Island to join with Massachusetts in an effort to capture
Louisburg. It would be delightful to tell how he overcame all
difficulties; how the young men rallied on the call for troops; how at
the end of March, 1745, 4000 of them in a hundred transports and
accompanied by fourteen armed ships set sail, followed by the prayers of
all New England, and after a siege of six weeks took the fortress on the
17th of June, 1745. But the story is too long.[1] It is enough to know
that the victory was hailed with delight on both sides of the Atlantic,
but that when peace came, in 1748, the British government was still so
blind to the struggle for North America which had been going on for
fifty years, that Louisburg was restored to the French.

[Footnote 1: Read Samuel Adams Drake's _Taking of Louisburg_; Parkman's
_A Half-century of Conflict_, Vol. II., pp. 78-161.]

%76. The French on the Allegheny River; the Buried Plates.%--With
Louisburg back in their possession and no territory lost, the French
went on more vigorously than ever with their preparations to shut the
British out of the Mississippi valley; and as but one highway to the
valley, the Ohio River, was still unguarded, the governor of Canada, in
1749, dispatched Celoron de Bienville with a band of men in twenty-three
birch-bark canoes to take formal possession of the valley. Paddling up
the St. Lawrence and Lake Ontario, they carried their canoes across to
Lake Erie, and, skirting the southeastern shore, they landed and crossed
to Chautauqua Lake, down which and its outlet they floated to the
Allegheny River. Once on the Allegheny, the ceremony of taking
possession began. The men were drawn up, and Louis XV. was proclaimed
king of all the region drained by the Ohio. The arms of France stamped
on a sheet of tin were nailed to a tree, at the foot of which a lead
plate was buried in the ground. On the plate was an inscription claiming
the Ohio, and all the streams that run into it, in the name of the King
of France.

[Illustration: [1]Half of one of the lead plates]

[Footnote 1: Now owned by the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester,
Mass.]

* * * * *

TRANSLATION OF THE ENTIRE INSCRIPTION

In the year 1749, during the reign of Louis XV., King of France, we,
Celeron, commander of a detachment sent by the Marquis de la
Gallissoniere, commander in chief of New France, to restore tranquillity
in some savage villages of these districts, have buried this plate at
the confluence of the Ohio and ... this ... near the river Ohio, alias
Beautiful River, as a monument of our having retaken possession of the
said river Ohio and of those that fall into the same, and of all the
lands on both sides as far as the sources of the said rivers, as well as
of those of which preceding kings have enjoyed possession, partly by the
force of arms, partly by treaties, especially by those of Ryswick,
Utrecht, and Aix-la-Chapelle.

* * * * *

A second plate was buried below the mouth of French Creek; a third near
the mouth of Wheeling Creek; and a fourth at the mouth of the Muskingum,
where half a century later it was found protruding from the river bank
by a party of boys while bathing. Yet another was unearthed at the mouth
of the Great Kanawha by a freshet, and was likewise found by a boy while
playing at the water's edge. The last plate was hidden where the Great
Miami joins the Ohio; and this done, Celoron crossed Ohio to Lake Erie
and went back to Montreal.[1]

[Footnote 1: Read T. J. Chapman's _The French in the Allegheny Valley_,
pp. 9-23, 187-197; Parkman's _Montcalm and Wolfe_, Vol. I., pp. 36-62;
Winsor's _The Mississippi Basin_, pp. 252-255.]

%77. The French build Forts on the Allegheny.%--This formal taking
possession of the valleys of the Allegheny and the Ohio was all well
enough in its way; but the French knew that if they really intended to
keep out the British they must depend on forts and troops, and not on
lead plates. To convince the French King of this, required time; so that
it was not till 1752 that orders were given to fortify the route taken
by Celoron in 1749. The party charged with this duty repaired to the
little peninsula where is now the city of Erie, and there built a log
fort which they called Presque Isle. Having done this, they cut a road
twenty miles long, to the site of Waterford, Pa., and built Fort Le
Boeuf, and later one at Venango, the present site of the town
of Franklin.

%78. Washington's First Public Service.%--The arrival of the French
in western Pennsylvania alarmed and excited no one so much as Governor
Robert Dinwiddie of Virginia. He had two good reasons for his
excitement. In the first place, Virginia, because of the interpretation
she placed on her charter of 1609, claimed to own the Allegheny valley
(see p. 33). In the second place, the governor and a number of Virginia
planters were deeply interested in a great land company called the Ohio
Company, to which the King of England had given 500,000 acres lying
along the Ohio River between the Monongahela and the Kanawha rivers, a
region which the French claimed, and toward which they were moving.

As soon, therefore, as Dinwiddie heard that the French were really
building forts in the upper Allegheny valley, he determined to make a
formal demand for their withdrawal, and chose as his messenger George
Washington, then a young man of twenty-one, and adjutant general of the
Virginia militia.

Washington's instructions bade him go to Logstown, on the Ohio, find out
all he could as to the whereabouts of the French, and then proceed to
the commanding officer, deliver the letter of Dinwiddie, and demand an
answer. He was especially charged to ascertain how many French forts had
been erected, how many soldiers there were in each, how far apart the
posts were, and if they were to be supported from Quebec.[1]

[Footnote 1: Read T.J. Chapman's _The, French in the Allegheny Valley_,
pp. 23-47; Parkman's _Montcalm and Wolfe_, Vol. I., pp. 128-161; Lodge's
_George Washington_, pp. 62-69.]

With that promptness which distinguished him during his whole life,
Washington set out on his perilous journey the very day he received his
instructions, and made his way first to Logstown, and then to Fort Le
Boeuf, where he delivered Governor Dinwiddie's letter to the French
commandant. The reply of Saint-Pierre--for that was the name of the
French commandant--was that he would send the letter of Dinwiddie to the
governor of Canada, the Marquis Duquesne (doo-kan'), and that, in the
meantime, he would hold the fort.

[Illustration: The French and the English Forts]

%79. Fort Duquesne.%--When Dinwiddie read the answer of Saint-Pierre,
he saw clearly that the time had come to act. The French were in force
on the upper Allegheny. Unless something was done to drive them out,
they would soon be at the forks of the Ohio, and once they were there,
the splendid tract of the Ohio Company would be lost forever. Without a
moment's delay he decided to take possession of the forks of the Ohio,
and raised two companies of militia of 100 men each. A trader named
William Trent was in command of one of the companies, and that no time
should be lost, he, with forty men, hurried forward, and, February 17,
1754, drove the first stake of a stockade that was to surround a fort on
the site of the city of Pittsburg. While the English were still at work
on their fort, April 17, 1754, a body of French and Indians came down
from Le Boeuf, and bade them leave the valley. Trent was away, and the
working party was in command of an ensign named Ward, who, as resistance
was useless, surrendered, and was allowed to march off with his men. The
French then finished the fort Trent had begun, and called it Fort
Duquesne, after the governor of Canada.

%80. "Join or Die."%--Meantime the legislature of Virginia voted
L10,000 for the defense of the Ohio valley, and promised a land bounty
to every man who would volunteer to fight the French and Indians. Joshua
Frye was made colonel, and Washington lieutenant colonel of the troops
thus to be raised. As some time must elapse before the ranks could be
filled, Washington took seventy-five men and (in March, 1754) set off to
help Trent; but he had not gone far on his way when Ensign Ward met him
(where Cumberland, Md., now is) and told him all about the surrender.
Accounts of the affair were at once sent to the governors of Maryland,
Pennsylvania, and Virginia.

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