ered the Mississippi and La Salle traced it, though Alvar Nuñez had crossed it 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 official, 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