labored twelve years in the face of jealousy at home, treachery in his own ranks, bankruptcy, shipwreck, and massacre, enduring physical hardship and forest travel which exhausted even his Indian guides, before he actually guided his canoes out of Illinois into the broad stream of the Mississippi (February 6, 1682). On the ninth of April he planted the lilies of France on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, naming the huge valley of the Mississippi "Louisiana" in honor of King Louis XIV. For a brief moment fortune smiled on La Salle. He was enthusiastically received at the court and furnished with ships, supplies, and colonists for his grand project of establishing a settlement on the Gulf of Mexico. But the misfortune that dogged his footsteps soon overtook him. His fleet missed the mouth of the Mississippi (1685) and his colony was landed far to the westward on the barren shores of Texas. The intrepid leader himself was assassinated by a traitor of his own band while seeking his way back to the Great Lakes (1687). It was reserved for Le Moyne d'Iberville to establish the first permanent French settlement on the Gulf at Biloxi (Mississippi) in 1699. New Orleans was founded in 1718.

92. French Ideas of Colonization. In spite of the patronage of the king; in spite of the imperial plans of the greatest of the governors of Canada, Count Frontenac (1672-1682, 1689-1698); in spite of the line of forts and trading posts that extended in a huge arc of twenty-five hundred miles from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the mouth of the Mississippi; in spite of the devotion of the Ursuline nuns and the martyrdom of the Jesuit missionaries, the French empire in America contained only eighteen hundred inhabitants at the close of the seventeenth century, while the English colonists in the narrow strip along the Atlantic seaboard had increased to twelve times that number. The reason for this discrepancy lay chiefly in the repressive character of the French colonial policy. None but Frenchmen and Roman Catholics were allowed in the colony. The land was all in the hands of great proprietors, who rented strips for cultivation along the river banks in exchange for labor on their big estates or payment in produce. There was no representative

assembly or local government, and during the century and a half of French rule not a single newspaper was published in Canada. Justice was dispensed by the feudal lords or the royal magistrates without trial by jury. Absolutism in government was accompanied by a "paternal" system of social control which treated the inhabitants of the province like irresponsible children and kept them in perpetual leading strings. They were directed by the government not only what taxes to pay, with what ports to trade, what laws to obey, what worship to perform, but also what tools to use, what seeds to plant, and at what age to marry. This absolute and paternal rule, while it promoted military efficiency, did not attract a numerous population of middle-class citizens who were free to better their fortunes by their own industry and to shape their political destinies in their own representative assemblies.

93. The Fur Trade. The economic life of New France was based on the fur trade. Every year the Indians came down through the regions about the Great Lakes to Montreal in hundreds of canoes to barter the skins of the beaver, the otter, and the moose for guns, powder, knives, cloth, trinkets, and brandy. The traffic in brandy caused bitter strife in the province between the bishops and the civil authorities. The Church forbade the debauching of the savages, but the Intendant, who was in charge of the business affairs of Canada, encouraged it because the drunken Indians would part with furs of priceless value for a few gewgaws and more liquor. The fur trade was a strict government monopoly, but the law was defied by bold woodrangers (coureurs de bois), who penetrated the wilderness for private gain. Sometimes these outlaws would sacrifice their native tongue, their religion, even their very civilization itself, to join the Indian tribes, marrying squaws, eating boiled dog and mush, daubing their naked bodies with greasy war paint, and leading the hideous dance or the murderous raid. The fur trade was profitable (so long as the market in Europe was not glutted), but the absorption of the whole colony's energy in it was an economic misfortune. It tended to draw away the better young men from the farms and to discourage diversified in

dustries by which talent is nourished and prosperity is widely distributed through a country.

94. The Clash between the French and the English. For about three quarters of a century after the founding of Jamestown and Quebec there was little friction between the English and the French. They were not in each other's way. The English had no interest in the cold valley of the St. Lawrence, and the strip of land between the Atlantic coast of the Alleghenies offered ample room for their slow expansion. About the time of La Salle's great exploit, however, the English began to awake to the "inconvenience," as Governor Dongan of New York phrased it, "of having the French running all along from our lakes by the back of Virginia and Carolina to the bay of Mexico." And when the long series of wars (the "second Hundred Years' War") between England and France broke out with the accession of William of Orange to the English throne in 1689 [77], they were fought in America as King William's War (16901697), Queen Anne's War (1702-1713), and King George's War (1744-1748). These wars, consisting chiefly of Indian raids,' resulted in only one important gain for the English in America. By the Treaty of Utrecht, in 1713, the French surrendered their claim to Acadia (Nova Scotia), Newfoundland, and the Hudson Bay region to England and recognized the English protectorate over the Iroquois Indians. By the same treaty Spain gave England the exclusive right to transport negro slaves from Africa to America and allowed one English ship a year to engage in trade with Spanish America. This treaty marked the ascendancy of England in sea power the power which was destined to win the colonial supremacy of the world.

95. The Rivalry for the Ohio Valley. By the middle of the eighteenth century the English had become fully aware of the

1 In King George's War (1745) the colonial troops, supported by the British fleet, captured the imposing fortress of Louisburg on Cape Breton Island, guarding the mouth of the St. Lawrence. Colonel William Pepperrell of Maine was in command of the expedition, and his army consisted almost wholly of troops voted by the New England legislatures. The restoration of the fortress to France by the peace of 1748 created bitter feelings in the breasts of the New England yeomen, who thought that the mother country underrated their sacrifice and courage.

menace of the French west of the Alleghenies. The ink was hardly dry on the treaty which ended King George's War (1748) before both nations were moving to secure control of the Ohio valley, the natural highway to the West. In 1749 a French expedition under Céleron de Blainville went down the Ohio, nailing signs to the trees and burying lead plates along the river banks, proclaiming the land to be the domain of Louis XV; and Christopher Gist, the agent of the Ohio Company (founded by Virginia planters and English capitalists), followed Blainville's track (1750), prospecting for sites for new settlements, and determined "to go quite down to the Mississippi rather than take mean and broken lands." The Indians along the river banks listened in turn to the blandishments of the French and the threats of the English, drank their brandy and rum, and accepted their gifts with stolid impartiality, little dreaming that they were participating in the opening of a tremendous contest between the two leading states of the world, not only for the control of the Ohio valley, but for the domination of North America, of India, and of the sea routes of the world.

96. George Washington opens the Great French War. The opening act of the contest for the Ohio valley is of special interest as introducing George Washington on the stage of American history. When the French began to construct a chain of forts to connect Lake Erie with the Ohio River (map, p. 101), Governor Dinwiddie of Virginia sent Washington, a major in the militia, thoroughly familiar with the hardships of forest travel, to warn the French off of territory "so notoriously known to be the property of the crown of Great Britain." Washington faithfully delivered his message to the French commanders at Venango and Fort Le Boeuf in the wilds of northwestern Pennsylvania and was sent again the next year (1754) to anticipate the French in seizing the important position where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers join to form the Ohio. He clashed with a detachment of French and Indians at Great Meadows, and there the first shot was fired in the great war which was to disturb three continents. The French had secured the "forks of the Ohio" with Fort Duquesne, but