FROM 1713 TO 1755

What with clandestine raids and open wars, it might be thought that the little nation of New France had vent enough for the buoyant energy of its youth. While the population of the English colonies was nearing the million mark, New France had not 60,000 inhabitants by 1759. Yet what had the little nation, whose mainspring was at Quebec, accomplished? Look at the map! Her bushrovers had gone overland to Hudson Bay far north as Nelson. Before 1700 Duluth had forts at Kaministiquia (near modern Fort Williams) on Lake Superior. Radisson, Marquette, Jolliet, and La Salle had blazed a trail to the Mississippi from what is now Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. By 1701 La Motte Cadillac had built what is now Detroit in order to stop the progress of the English traders up the lakes to Michilimackinac; and by 1727 the Company of the Sioux had forts far west as Lake Pepin. With Quebec as the hub of the wheel, draw spokes across the map of North America. Where do they reach? From Quebec to the Gulf of Mexico, to the Missouri, to the Upper Mississippi, to Lake Superior, to Hudson Bay. Who blazed the way through these far pathless wilds? Nameless wanderers dressed in rags and tatters, outcasts of society, forest rovers lured by the Unknown as by a siren, soldiers of fortune, penniless, in debt, heartbroken, slandered, persecuted, driven by the demon of their own genius to earth’s ends, and to ruin!

Spite of clandestine raids and open wars, New France was now setting herself to stretch the lines of her discoveries farther westward.

It will be remembered it was at Three Rivers that the Indians of the Up Country paused on their way down the St. Lawrence. From the days of Radisson in 1660 the passion for discovery had been in the very air of Three Rivers. In this little fort was born in 1686 Pierre Gaultier Varennes de La Verendrye, son of a French officer. From childhood the boy’s ear must have been accustomed to the uncouth babblings of the half-naked Indians, whose canoes came swarming down the river soon as ice broke up in spring. One can guess that in his play the boy many a time simulated Indian voyageur, bushrover, coming home clad in furs, the envy of the villagers. At fourteen young Pierre had decided that he would be a great explorer, but destiny for the time ruled otherwise. At eighteen he was among the bushraiders of New England. Nineteen found him fighting the English in Newfoundland. Then came the honor coveted by all Canadian boys, an appointment to the King’s army in Europe. Young La Verendrye was among the French forces defeated by the great Marlborough; but the Peace of Utrecht sent him back to Canada, aged twenty-seven, to serve in the far northern fur post of Nepigon, eating his heart out with ambition.

It was here the dreams of his childhood emerged like a commanding destiny. Old Indian chief Ochagach drew maps on birch bark of a trail to the Western Sea. La Verendrye took canoe for Quebec, and, with heart beating to the passion of a secret ambition, laid the drawings before Governor Beauharnois. He came just in the nick of time. English traders were pressing westward. New France lent ready ear for schemes of wider empire. The court could grant no money for discoveries, but it gave La Verendrye permission for a voyage and monopoly in furs over the lands he might discover; but the lands must be found before there would be furs, and here began the mundane worries of La Verendrye’s glory.

Montreal merchants outfitted him, but that meant debt; and his little party of fifty grizzled woodrovers set out with their ninety-foot birch canoes from Montreal on June 8, 1731. Three sons were in his party and a nephew, Jemmeraie, from the Sioux country of the west. Every foot westward had been consecrated by heroism to set the pulse of red-blooded men jumping. There was the seigniory of La Chine, named in derision of La Salle’s project to find a path to China. There was the Long Sault, where Dollard had fought the Iroquois. There were the pink granite islands of Georgian Bay, where the Jesuits had led their harried Hurons. There was Michilimackinac, with the brawl of its vice and brandy and lawless traders from the woods, where La Motte Cadillac ruled before going to found Detroit. Seventy-eight days from Montreal, there were the pictured rocks of Lake Superior, purple and silent and deep as ocean, which Radisson had coasted on his way to the Mississippi. Then La Verendrye came to Duluth’s old stamping ground Kaministiquia.

The home-bound boats were just leaving the fur posts for the St. Lawrence. Frosts had already stripped the trees of foliage, and winter would presently lock all avenues of retreat in six months’ ice. La Verendrye’s men began to doubt the wisdom of chasing a will-o’-the-wisp to an unknown Western Sea. The explorer sent half the party forward with his nephew Jemmeraie and his son Jean, while he himself remained at Kaministiquia with the mutineers to forage for provisions. Winter found Jemmeraie’s men on the Minnesota side of Rainy Lake, where they built Fort Pierre and drove a rich trade in furs with the encamped Crees. In summer of 1732 came La Verendrye, his men in gayest apparel marching before the awe-struck Crees with bugle blowing and flags flying. Then white men and Crees advanced in canoes to the Lake of the Woods, coasting from island to island through the shadowy defiles of the sylvan rocks along the Minnesota shore to the northwest angle. Here a second winter witnessed the building of a second post, Fort St. Charles, with four rows of fifteen-foot palisades and thatched-roofed log cabins. The Western Sea seemed far as ever, like the rainbow of the child, ever fleeing as pursued, and La Verendrye’s merchant partners were beginning to curse him for a rainbow chaser. He had been away three years, and there were no profits. Suspicious that he might be defrauding them by private trade or sacrificing their interests to his own ambitions, they failed to send forward provisions for this year. La Verendrye was in debt to his men for three years’ wages, in debt to his partners for three years’ provisions. To fail now he dared not. Go forward he could not, so he hurried down to Montreal, where he prevailed on the merchants to continue supplies by the simple argument that, if they stopped now, there would be total loss.

Young Jean La Verendrye and Jemmeraie have meanwhile descended Winnipeg River’s white fret of waterfalls to Winnipeg Lake, where they build Fort Maurepas, near modern Alexander, and wait. Fishing failed. The hunt failed. The winter of 1735-1736 proved of such terrible severity that famine stalked through the western woods. La Verendrye’s three forts were reduced to diet of skins, moccasin soup, and dog meat. In desperation Jemmeraie set out with a few voyageurs to meet the returning commander, but privation had undermined his strength. He died on the way and was buried in his hunter’s blanket beside an unknown stream between Lake Winnipeg and the Lake of the Woods. Accompanied by the priest Aulneau, young Jean de La Verendrye decided to rush canoes down from the Lake of the Woods to Michilimackinac for food and powder. A furious pace was to be kept all the way to Lake Superior. The voyageurs had risen early one morning in June, and after paddling some miles through the mist had landed to breakfast when a band of marauding Sioux fell on them with a shout. The priest Aulneau fell pierced in the head by a stone-pointed arrow. Young Jean La Verendrye was literally hacked to pieces. Not a man of the seventeen French escaped, and Massacre Island became a place of ill omen to the French from that day. At last came the belated supplies, and by February of 1737 La Verendrye had moved his main forces west to Lake Winnipeg. This was no Western Sea, though the wind whipped the lake like a tide, which explained the Indian legend of an inland ocean. Though it was no Western Sea, it was a new empire for France. The bourne of the Unknown still fled like the rainbow, and La Verendrye still pursued.

Down to Quebec for more supplies with tales of a vast Beyond Land! Back to Lake Winnipeg by September of 1738 with canoes gliding up the muddy current of Red River for the Unknown Land of the Assiniboines; past Nettley Creek, then known as Massacre Creek or Murderers’ River, from the Sioux having slain the encamped wives and children of the Cree who had gone to Hudson Bay with their furs; between the wooded banks of what are now East and West Selkirk, flat to left, high to right; tracking up the Rapids of St. Andrews, thick oak woods to east, rippling prairie russet in the autumn rolling to the west, La Verendrye and his voyageurs came to the forks of Red River and the Assiniboine, or what is now known as the city of Winnipeg. Where the two rivers met on the flats to the west were the high scaffoldings of an ancient Cree graveyard, bizarre and eerie and ghostlike between the voyageurs and the setting sun. On the high river bank of what is now known as Assiniboine Avenue gleamed the white skin of ten Cree tepees, where two war chiefs waited to meet La Verendrye. Drawing up their canoes near where the bridge now spans between St. Boniface and Winnipeg, the voyageurs came ashore.

It was a fair scene that greeted them, such a scene as any westerner may witness to-day of a warm September night when the sun hangs low like a blood-red shield, and the evening breeze touches the rustling grasses of the prairie beyond the city to the waves of an ocean. It was not the Western Sea, but it was a Sea of Prairie. It was a New World, unbounded by hill or forest, spacious as the very airs of heaven, fenced only by the blue dip of a shimmering horizon. It was a world, though La Verendrye knew it not, five times larger than New France, half as big as all Europe. He had discovered the Canadian Northwest.

One can guess how the tired wanderers at rest beneath the uptilted canoes that night wondered whither their quest would lead them over the fire-dyed horizon where the sun was sinking as over a sea. The Cree chiefs told them of other lands and other peoples to the south, “who trade with a people who dwelt on the great waters beyond the mountains of the setting sun,” the Spaniards.

Leaving men to knock up a trading post near the suburb now known as Fort Rouge, La Verendrye, on September 26, steers his canoes up the shallow Assiniboine far as what is now known as Portage La Prairie, where a trail leads overland to the Saskatchewan and so down to the English traders of Hudson Bay. But this is not the trail to the Western Sea; La Verendrye’s quest is set towards those people “who live on the great waters to the south.”

Fort de La Reine is built at the Portage of the Prairie, and October 18, to beat of drum, with flag flying, La Verendrye marches forth with fifty-two men towards Souris River for the land of the Mandanes on the Missouri. December 3 he is welcomed to the Mandane villages; but here is no Western Sea, only the broad current of the Missouri rolling turbulent and muddy southward towards the Mississippi; but the Mandanes tell of a people to the far west, “who live on the great waters bitter for drinking, who dress in armor and dwell in stone houses.” These must be the Spaniards. La Verendrye’s quest has become a receding phantom. Leaving men to learn the Missouri dialects, La Verendrye marched in the teeth of mid-winter storms back to the Portage of the Prairie on the Assiniboine. Of that march, space forbids to tell. A blizzard raged, driving the fine snows into eyes and skin like hot salt. When the marchers camped at night they had to bury themselves in snow to keep from freezing. Drifts covered all landmarks. The men lost their bearings, doubled back on their own tracks, were frost-bitten, buffeted by the storm, and short of food. Christmas was passed in the camps of wandering Assiniboines, and February 10, 1739, the fifty men staggered, weak and starving, back to the Portage of the Prairie.

The wanderings of La Verendrye and his sons for the next few years led southwestward far as the Rockies in the region of Montana, northwestward far as the Bow River branch of the Saskatchewan. Meanwhile, all La Verendrye’s property had been seized by his creditors. Jealous rivals were clamoring for possession of his fur posts. The King had conferred on him the Order of the Cross of St. Louis, but eighteen years of exposure and worry had broken the explorer’s health. On the eve of setting out again for the west he died suddenly on the 6th of December, 1749, at Montreal.

Look again at the map! The spokes of the wheel running out from Quebec extend to the Gulf of Mexico on the south, to the Rockies on the west, to Hudson Bay on the north. And the population of New France does not yet number 60,000 people. Is it any wonder French Canadians look back on these days as the Golden Age?

And while the bushrovers of Canada are pushing their way through the wilderness westward, there come slashing, tramping, swearing, stamping through the mountainous wilds of West and East Siberia the Cossack soldiers of Peter the Great, led by the Dane, Vitus Bering, bound on discovery to the west coast of America. La Verendrye’s men have crossed only half a continent. Bering’s Russians cross the width of two continents, seven thousand miles, then launch their crazily planked ships over unknown northern seas for America. From 1729 to August of 1742 toil the Russian sea voyagers. Their story is not part of Canada’s history. Suffice to say, December of 1741 finds the Russian crews cast away on two desert islands of Bering Sea west of Alaska, now known as the Commander Islands. Half the crew of seventy-seven perish of starvation and scurvy. Bering himself lies dying in a sandpit, with the earth spread over him for warmth. Outside the sand holes, where the Russians crouch, scream hurricane gales and white billows and myriad sea birds. The ships have been wrecked. The Russians are on an unknown island. Day dawn, December 8, lying half buried in the sand, Bering breathes his last. On rafts made of wreckage the remnant of his crew find way back to Asia, but they have discovered a trail across the sea to a new land. Fur hunters are moving from the east, westward. Fur hunters are moving from the west, eastward. These two tides will meet and clash at a later era.

The Treaty of Utrecht had stopped open war, but that did not prevent the bushrovers from raiding the border lands of Maine, of Massachusetts, of New York. The story of one raid is the story of all, and several have already been related. Now comes a half century of petty war that raged on the border lands from Saratoga and Northfield to Maine and New Brunswick. The story of these “little wars,” as the French called them, belongs more to the history of the United States than Canada.

Nor did the Peace of Utrecht stop the double dealing and intrigue by which European rulers sought to use bigoted missionaries and ignorant Indians as pawns in the game of statecraft.

“Sentiments of opposition to the English in Acadia must be secretly fostered,” commanded the King of France in 1715, two years after Acadia had been deeded over to England. “The King is pleased with the efforts of Pere Rasle to induce the Indians not to allow the English to settle on their lands,” runs the royal dispatch of 1721 regarding the border massacres of Maine. “Advise the missionaries in Acadia to do nothing that may serve as a pretext for sending them out of the country, but have them induce the Indians to organize enterprises against the English,” command the royal instructions of 1744. “The Indians,” writes the Canadian Governor, “can be depended on to bring in the scalps of the English as long as we furnish ammunition. This is the opinion of the missionary, M. Le Loutre.” Again, from the Governor of New France: “If the settlers of Acadia hesitate to rise against their English masters, we can employ threats of the Indians and force. It is inconceivable that the English would try to remove these people. Letters from M. Le Loutre report that his Indians have intercepted dispatches of the English officers. M. Le Loutre will keep us informed of everything in Acadia. We have furnished him with secret signals to our ships, which will tell us of every movement on the part of the enemy.”

Of all the hotbeds of intrigue, Acadia, from its position, had become the worst. Here was a population of French farmers, which in half a century had increased to 12,000, held in subjection by an English garrison at Annapolis of less than two hundred soldiers so destitute they had neither shoes nor stockings, coats nor bedding. The French were guaranteed in the Treaty of Utrecht the freedom and privileges of their religion by the English; but in matters temporal as well as spiritual they were absolutely subject to priests, acting as spies for the Quebec plotters.

France, as has been told, retained Cape Breton (Isle Royal) and Prince Edward Island (Isle St. Jean), and the Treaty of Utrecht had hardly been signed before plans were drawn on a magnificent scale for a French fort on Cape Breton to effect a threefold purpose, to command the sea towards Boston, to regain Acadia, to protect the approach to the River St. Lawrence.

The Island of Cape Breton is like a hand with its fingers stuck out in the sea. The very tip of a long promontory commanding one of the southern arms of the sea was chosen for the fort that was to be the strongest in all America. On three sides were the sea, with outlying islands suitable for powerful batteries and a harbor entrance that was both narrow and deep. To the rear was impassable muskeg quaking moss above water-soaked bog. Two weaknesses only had the fort. There were hills to right and left from which an enemy might pour destruction inside the walls, but the royal engineers of France depended on the outlying island batteries preventing any enemy gaining possession of these hills. By 1720 walls thirty-six feet thick had encircled an area of over one hundred acres. Outside the rear wall had been excavated a ditch forty feet deep and eighty wide. Bristling from the six bastions of the walls were more than one hundred and eighty heavy cannon. Besides the two batteries commanding the entrance to the harbor was an outer Royal Battery of forty cannon directly across the water from the fort, on the next finger of the island. Twenty years was the fort in building, costing what in those days was regarded as an enormous sum of money, equal to $10,000,000. Such was Louisburg, impregnable as far as human foresight could judge, the refuge of corsairs that preyed on Boston commerce; the haven of the schemers who intrigued to wean away the Acadians from English rule, the guardian sentinel of all approach to the St. Lawrence.

“It would be well,” wrote the King the very next year after the treaty was signed, “to attract the Acadians to Cape Breton, but act with caution.” And now twenty years had passed. Some Acadians had gone to Cape Breton and others to Prince Edward Island; but statecraft judged the simple Acadian farmer would be more useful where he was, on the spot in Acadia, ready to rebel when open war would give the French of Louisburg a chance to invade.

Late in 1744 Europe breaks into that flame of war known as the Austrian Succession. Before either Quebec or Boston knows of open war, Louisburg has word of it and sends her rangers burning fishing towns and battering at the rotten palisades of Annapolis (Port Royal). Port Royal is commanded by that same Paul Mascarene of former wars, grown old in service. The French bid him save himself by surrender before their fleet comes. Though Mascarene has less than a hundred men, the weather is in his favor. It is September. Winter will drive the invaders home, so he sends back word that he will bide his time till the hostile fleet comes. As for the Abbe Le Loutre, let the treacherous priest beware how he brings his murderous Indians within range of the fort guns! Meanwhile the Acadian habitants are threatened with death if they do not rise to aid the French, but they too bide their time, for if they rebel and fail, that too means death; and “the Neutrals” refuse to stir till the invaders, from lack of provisions, are forced to decamp, and the Abbe Le Loutre, with his black hat drawn down over his eyes, vanishes into forest with his crew of painted warriors.

News of the war and of the ravaging of Acadian fishing towns set Massachusetts in flame. To Boston, above all New England towns, was Louisburg a constant danger. The thing seemed absolute stark madness, the thoughtless daring of foolhardy enthusiasts, but it is ever enthusiasm which accomplishes the impossible; and April 30, 1745, after only seven weeks of preparation, an English fleet of sixty-eight ships some accounts say ninety, including the whalers and transports gathered along the coast towns sails into Gabarus Bay, behind Louisburg, where the waters have barely cleared of ice. William Pepperrell, a merchant, commands the four thousand raw levies of provincial troops, the most of whom have never stepped to martial music before in their lives. Admiral Warren has come up from West India waters with his men-of-war to command the united fleets. Early Monday morning, against a shore wind, the boats are tacking to land, when the alarm bells begin ringing and ringing at Louisburg and a force of one hundred and fifty men dashes downshore for Flat Cove to prevent the landing. Pepperrell out-tricks the enemy by leaving only a few boats to make a feint of landing at the Cove, while he swings his main fleet inshore round a bend in the coast a mile away. Here, with a prodigious rattling of lowered sails and anchor chains, the crews plunge over the rolling waves, pontooning a bridge of small boats ashore. By nightfall the most of the English have landed, and spies report the harbor of Louisburg alive with torches where the French are sinking ships to obstruct the entrance and setting fire to fishing stages that might interfere with cannon aim. The next night, May 1, Vaughan’s New Hampshire boys raw farmers, shambling in their gait, singing as they march swing through the woods along the marsh behind the fort, and take up a position on a hill to the far side of Louisburg, creating an enormous bonfire with the French tar and ships’ tackling stored here. The result of this harmless maneuver was simply astounding. It will be recalled that Louisburg had an outer battery of forty cannon on this side. The French soldiers holding this battery mistook the bonfire for the English attacking forces, and under cover of darkness abandoned the position, battery, guns, powder and all, which the English promptly seized. This was the Royal Battery, which commanded the harbor and could shell into the very heart of the fort.

The next thing for the English was to get their heavy guns ashore through a rolling surf of ice-cold water. For two weeks the men stood by turns to their necks in the surf, steadying the pontoon gangway as the great cannon were trundled ashore; and this was the least of their difficulties. The question was how to get their cannon across the marsh behind the fort to the hill on the far side. The cannon would sink from their own weight in such a bog, and either horses or oxen would flounder to death in a few minutes. Again, the fool-hardy enthusiasm of the raw levies overcame the difficulty. They built large stone boats, raft-shaped, such as are used on farms to haul stones over ground too rough for wagons. Hitching to these, teams of two hundred men stripped to midwaist, they laboriously hauled the cannon across the quaking moss to the hills commanding the rear of the fort, bombs and balls whizzing overhead all the while, fired from the fort bastions. It was cold, damp spring weather. The men who were not soaked to their necks in surf and bog were doing picket duty alongshore, sleeping in their boots. Consequently, in three weeks, half Pepperrell’s force became deadly ill. At this time, within two days, occurred both a cheering success and a disheartening rebuff. A French man-of-war with seventy cannon and six hundred men was seen entering Louisburg. As if in panic fright, one of the small English ships fled. The French ship pursued. In a trice she was surrounded by the English fleet and captured. The flight of the little vessel had been a trick. A few days later four hundred English in whaleboats attempted the mad project of attacking the Island Battery at the harbor entrance. The boats set out about midnight with muffled oars, but a wind rose, setting a tremendous surf lashing the rocks, and yet the invaders might have succeeded but for a piece of rashness. A hundred men had gained the shore when, with the thoughtlessness of schoolboys, they uttered a jubilant yell. Instantly, porthole, platform, gallery, belched death through the darkness. The story is told that a raw New England lad was in the act of climbing the French flagstaff to hang out his own red coat as English flag when a Swiss guard hacked him to pieces. The boats not yet ashore were sunk by the blaze of cannon. A few escaped back in the darkness, but by daylight over one hundred English had been captured. Cannon, mortars, and musketoons were mounted to command the fort inside the walls, and a continuous rain of fire began from the hills. In vain Duchambon, the French commander, waited for reenforcements from Canada. Convent, hospital, barracks, all the houses of the town, were peppered by bombs till there was not a roof intact in the place. The soldiers, of whom there were barely two thousand, were ready to mutiny. The citizens besought Duchambon to surrender. Provisions ran out. Looking down from the tops of the walls, cracking jokes with the English across the ditch, the French soldiers counted more than a thousand scaling ladders ready for hand-to-hand assault, and a host of barrels filled with mud behind which the English sharpshooters crouched. It had just been arranged between Warren and Pepperrell that the former should attack by sea while the latter assaulted by land, when on June 16 the French capitulated. How the New England enthusiasts ran rampant through the abandoned French fort need not be told. How Parson Moody, famous for his long prayers, hewed down images in the Catholic chapel till he was breathless and then came to the officers’ state dinner so exhausted that when asked to pronounce blessing he could only mutter, “Good Lord, we have so much to thank Thee for, time is too short; we must leave it to eternity. Amen”; how the New Englanders, unused to French wines, drank themselves torpid on the stores of the fort cellar; how the French the next year made superhuman effort to regain Louisburg, only to have a magnificent fleet of one hundred and fifty sail wrecked on Sable Island, Duke d’Anville, the commander, dying of heartbreak on his ship anchored near Halifax, his successor killing himself with his own sword, cannot be told here. Louisburg was the prize of the war, and England threw the prize away by giving it back to France in the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748. The English government paid back the colonies for their outlay, but of all the rich French pirate ships loaded with booty, captured at Louisburg by leaving the French flag flying, not a penny’s worth went to the provincial troops. Warren’s seamen received all the loot.

Like all preceding treaties, the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle left unsettled the boundaries between New France and New England. In Acadia, in New York, on the Ohio, collisions were bound to come.

In Acadia the English send their officers to the Isthmus of Chignecto to establish a fort near the bounds of what are now Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. The priestly spy, Louis Joseph Le Loutre, leads his wild Micmac savages through the farm settlement round the English fort, setting fire to houses putting a torch even to the church, and so compelling the habitants of the boundary to come over to the French and take sides. The treaty has restored Louisburg to the French, but the very next year England sends out Edward Cornwallis with two thousand settlers to establish the English fort now known as Halifax. By 1752 there are four thousand people at the new fort, though the Indian raiders miss no occasion to shoot down wayfarers and farmers; and the French Governor at Quebec continues his bribes as much as eight hundred dollars a year to a man to stir up hostility to the English and prevent the Acadian farmers taking the oath of fidelity to England. So much for the peace treaty in Acadia. It was not peace; it was farce.

In New York state matters were worse. The Iroquois had been acknowledged allies of the English, and before 1730 the English fort at Oswego had been built at the southeast corner of Lake Ontario to catch the fur trade of the northern tribes coming down the lakes to New France, and to hold the Iroquois’ friendship. Also, as French traders pass up the lake to Fort Frontenac (Kingston) and Niagara with their national flag flying from the prow of canoe and flatboat, chance bullets from the English fort ricochet across the advancing prows, and soldiers on the galleries inside Fort Oswego take bets on whether they can hit the French flag. Prompt as a gamester, New France checkmates this move. Peter Schuyler has been settling English farmers round Lake Champlain. At Crown Point, long known as Scalp Point, where the lake narrows and portage runs across to Lake George and the Mohawk land, the French in 1731 erect a strong fort. As for the English traders at Fort Oswego catching the tribes from the north, New France counterchecks that by sending Portneuf in April of 1749, only a year after the peace, to the Toronto portage where the Indians come from the Upper Lakes by way of Lake Simcoe. What is now known as Toronto is named Rouille, after a French minister; and as if this were not checkmate enough to the English advancing westward, the Sulpician priest from Montreal, Abbe Picquet, zealously builds a fort straight north of Oswego, on the south side of the St. Lawrence, to keep the Iroquois loyal to France. Picquet calls his fort “Presentation.” His enemies call it “Picquet’s Folly.” It is known to-day as Ogdensburg. Look at the map. France’s frontier line is guarded by forts that stand like sentinels at the gateways of all waters leading to the interior, Ogdensburg, Kingston, Toronto, Niagara, Detroit, Michilimackinac, and La Verendrye’s string of forts far west as the Rockies. New York’s frontier line is guarded by one fort only, Oswego. Here too, as in Acadia, the peace is a farce.

But it was in the valley of the Ohio where the greatest struggle over boundaries took place. One year after the peace, Celoron de Bienville is sent in July, 1749, to take possession of the Ohio for France. France claims right to this region by virtue of La Salle’s explorations sixty years previously, and of all those French bushrangers who have roved the wilds from the Great Lakes to Louisiana. Small token did France take of La Salle’s exploits while he lived, but great store do her statesmen set by his voyages now that he has been sixty years dead. “But pause!” commands the English Governor of Virginia. “Since time immemorial have our traders wandered over the Great Smoky Mountains, over the Cumberlands, over the Alleghenies, down the Tennessee and the Kanawha and the Monongahela and the Ohio to the Mississippi.” As a matter of fact, one Major General Wood had in 1670 and 1674 sent his men overland, if not so far as the Mississippi, then certainly as far as the Ohio and the valley of the Mississippi. But Wood was a private adventurer. For years his exploit had been forgotten. No record of it remained but an account written by his men, Batts and Hallam. The French declared the record was a myth, and it has, in fact, been so regarded by the most of historians. Yet, curiously enough, ranging through some old family papers of the Hudson’s Bay Company in the Public Records, London, I found with Wood’s own signature his record of the trip across the mountains to the Indians of the Ohio and the Mississippi. It is probable that the English cared quite as much for claims founded on La Salle’s voyage as the French cared for claims founded on the horseback trip of Major General Wood’s men. The fact remained: here were the English traders from Virginia pressing northward by way of the Ohio; here were the French adventurers pressing south by way of the Ohio. As in Acadia and New York, peace or no peace, a clash was inevitable.

Duquesne has come out governor of Canada, and by 1753 has dispatched a thousand men into the Ohio valley, who blaze a trail through the wilderness and string a line of forts from Presqu’ Isle (Erie) on Lake Erie southward to Fort Duquesne at the junction of the Allegheny and Monongahela, where Pittsburg stands to-day.

One December night at Fort Le Boeuf, on the trail to the Ohio, the French commandant was surprised to see a slim youth of twenty years ride out of the rain-drenched, leafless woods, followed by four or five whites and Indians with a string of belled pack-horses. The young gentleman introduces himself with great formality, though he must use an interpreter, for he does not speak French. He is Major George Washington, sent by Governor Dinwiddie of Virginia to know why the French have been seizing the fur posts of English traders in this region. The French commander, Saint Pierre, receives the young Virginian courteously, plies master and men with such lavish hospitality that Washington has much trouble to keep his drunk Indians from deserting, and dismisses his visitor with the smooth but bootless response that as France and England are at peace he cannot answer Governor Dinwiddie’s message till he has heard from the Governor of Canada, Marquis Duquesne. Not much satisfaction for emissaries who had forded ice-rafted rivers and had tramped the drifted forests for three hundred miles.

By January of 1754 Washington is back in Virginia. By May he is on the trail again, blazing a path through the wilderness down the Monongahela towards the French fort; for what purpose one may guess, though these were times of piping peace. Come an old Indian chief and an English bushwhacker one morning with word that fifty French raiders are on the trail ten miles away; for what purpose one may guess, spite of peace. Instantly Washington sends half a hundred Virginia frontiersmen out scouting. They find no trace of raiders, but the old chief picks up the trail of the ambushed French. Here they had broken branches going through the woods; there a moccasin track punctures the spongy mold; here leaves have been scattered to hide camp ashes. At midnight, with the rain slashing through the forest black as pitch, Washington sets out with forty men, following his Indian guide. Through the dark they feel rather than follow the trail, and it is a slow but an easy trick to those acquainted with wildwood travel. Leave the path by as much as a foot length and the foliage lashes you back, or the windfall trips you up, or the punky path becomes punctured beneath moccasin tread. By day dawn, misty and gray in the May woods, the English are at the Indian camp and march forward escorted by the redskins, single file, silent as ghosts, alert as tigers. Raindrip swashes on the buckskin coats. Muskets are loaded and carefully cased from the wet. The old chief stops suddenly . . . and points! There lie the French in a rock ravine sheltered by the woods like a cave. The next instant the French had leaped up with a whoop. Washington shouted “Fire!” When the smoke of the musket crash cleared, ten French lay dead, among them their officer, Jumonville; and twenty-two others surrendered. No need to dispute whether Washington was justified in firing on thirty bush rovers in time of peace! The bushrovers had already seized English forts and were even now scouring the country for English traders. For a week their scouts had followed Washington as spies.

Expecting instant retaliation from Fort Duquesne, Washington retreated swiftly to his camping place at Great Meadows and cast up a log barricade known as Fort Necessity. A few days later comes a company of regular troops. By July 1 he has some four hundred men, but at Fort Duquesne are fourteen hundred French. The French wait only for orders from Quebec, then march nine hundred bushrovers against Washington. July 3, towards midday, they burst from the woods whooping and yelling. Washington chose to meet them on the open ground, but the French were pouring a cross fire over the meadow; and to compel them to attack in the open, Washington drew his men behind the barricade. By nightfall the Virginians were out of powder. Twelve had been killed and forty-three were wounded. Before midnight the French beat a parley. All they desired was that the English evacuate the fort. To fight longer would have risked the extermination of Washington’s troops. Terms of honorable surrender were granted, and the next day the day which Washington was to make immortal, July 4 the English retreated from Fort Necessity. Such was the peace in the Ohio valley.

Though the peace is still continued, England dispatches in 1755 two regiments of the line under Major General Braddock to protect Virginia, along with a fleet of twelve men-of-war under Admiral Boscawen. France keeps up the farce by sending out Baron Dieskau with three thousand soldiers and Admiral La Motte with eighteen ships. Coasting off Newfoundland, the English encounter three of the French ships that have gone astray in the fog. “Is it peace or war?” shout the French across decks. “Peace,” answers a voice from the English deck; and instantaneously a hurricane cannonade rakes the decks of the French, killing eighty. Two of the French ships surrendered. The other escaped through the fog. Such was the peace!

Braddock himself, accompanied by Washington, marches with twenty-two hundred men over the Alleghenies along the old trail of the Monongahela against Fort Duquesne. Of Braddock, the least said the better. A gambler, full of arrogant contempt towards all people and things that were not British, hail-fellow-well-met to his boon companions, heartless towards all outside the pale of his own pride, a blustering bully yet dogged, and withal a gentleman after the standard of the age, he was neither better nor worse than the times in which he lived. Of Braddock’s men, fifteen hundred were British regulars, the rest Virginian bushfighters; and the redcoat troops held such contempt towards the buckskin frontiersmen that friction arose from the first about the relative rank of regulars and provincials. From the time they set out, the troops had been retarded by countless delays. There was trouble buying up supplies of beef cattle among the frontiersmen. Scouts scoured the country for horses and wagons to haul the great guns and heavy artillery. Braddock’s high mightiness would take no advice from colonials about single-file march on a bush trail and swift raids to elude ambushed foes. Everything proceeded slowly, ponderously, with the system and routine of an English guardroom. Scouts to the fore and on both flanks, three hundred bushwhackers went ahead widening the bridle path to a twelve-foot road for the wagons; and along this road moved the troops, five and six abreast, the red coats agleam through the forest foliage, drums rolling, flags flying, steps keeping time as if on parade, Braddock and his officers mounted on spirited horses, the heavy artillery and supply wagons lagging far behind in a winding line.

What happened has been told times without number in story and history. It was what the despised colonials feared and any bushranger could have predicted. July 9, in stifling heat, the marchers had come to a loop in the Monongahela River. Braddock thought to avoid the loop by fording twice. He was now within eight miles of Fort Duquesne the modern Pittsburg. Though Indian raiders had scalped some wanderers from the trail and insolent messages had been occasionally found scrawled in French on birch trees, not a Frenchman had been seen on the march. The advance guard had crossed the second ford about midday when the road makers at a little opening beyond the river saw a white man clothed in buckskin, but wearing an officer’s badge, dash out of the woods to the fore, wave his hat, . . . and disappear. A moment later the well-known war whoop of the French bushrovers tore the air to tatters; and bullets rained from ambushed foes in a sheet of fire. In vain the English drums rolled . . . and rolled . . . and soldiers shouted, “The King! God save the King!” One officer tried to rally his men to rush the woods, but they were shot down by a torrent of bullets from an unseen foe. The Virginian bushfighters alone knew how to meet such an emergency. Jumping from tree to tree for shelter like Indians dancing sideways to avoid the enemy’s aim, they had broken from rank to fight in bushman fashion when Braddock came galloping furiously from the rear and ordered them back in line. What use was military rank with an invisible foe? As well shoot air as an unseen Indian! Again the Virginians broke rank, and the regulars, huddled together like cattle in the shambles, fired blindly and succeeded only in hitting their own provincial troops. Braddock stormed and swore and rode like a fury incarnate, roaring orders which no one could hear, much less obey. Five horses were shot under him and the dauntless commander had mounted a fresh one when the big guns came plunging forward; but the artillery on which Braddock had pinned his faith only plowed pits in the forest mold. Of eighty officers, sixty had fallen and a like proportion of men. Braddock ordered a retreat. The march became a panic, the panic frenzied terror, the men who had stood so stolidly under withering fire now dashing in headlong flight from the second to the first ford and back over the trail, breathless as if pursued by demons! Artillery, cattle, supplies, dispatch boxes, all were abandoned. Washington’s clothes had been riddled by bullets, but he had escaped injury. Braddock reeled from his horse mortally wounded, to be carried back on a litter to that scene of Washington’s surrender the year before. Four days later the English general died there. Of the English troops, more than a thousand lay dead, blistering in the July sun, maimed and scalped by the Indians. Braddock was buried in his soldier’s coat beside the trail, all signs of the grave effaced to prevent vandalism.

Of all the losses the most serious were the dispatch boxes; for they contained the English plans of campaign from Acadia to Niagara, and were carried back to Fort Duquesne, where they put the French on guard. The jubilant joy at the French fort need not be described. When he heard of the English advance, Contrecoeur, the commander, had been cooped up with less than one thousand men, half of whom were Indians. Had Braddock once reached Fort Duquesne, he could have starved it into surrender without firing a gun, or shelled it into kindling wood with his heavy artillery. Beaujeu, an officer under Contrecoeur, had volunteered to go out and meet the English. “My son, my son, will you walk into the arms of death?” demanded the Indian chiefs. “My fathers, will you allow me to go alone?” answered Beaujeu; and out he sallied with six hundred picked men. It was Beaujeu whom Braddock’s men had seen dash out and wave his hat. The brave Frenchman fell, shot at the first volley from the English, and his Indian friends avenged his death by roasting thirty English prisoners alive.

The Isthmus of Chignecto, or the boundary between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, was the scene of the border-land fights in Acadia. To narrate half the forays, raids, and ambuscades would require a volume. Fights as gallant as Dollard’s at the Sault waged from Beausejour, the French fort north of the boundary, to Grand Pre and Annapolis, where the English were stationed. After the founding of Halifax the Abbe Le Loutre, whose false, foolish counsels had so often endangered the habitant farmer, moved from his mission in the center of Acadia up to Beausejour on the New Brunswick side. Here he could be seen with his Indians toiling like a demon over the trenches, when Monckton, the English general, came on June 1, 1855, with the British fleet, to land his forces at Fort Lawrence, the English post on the south side. Colonel Lawrence was now English governor of Acadia, and he had decided with Monckton that once and for all the French of Acadia must be subjugated. The French of Beausejour had in all less than fifteen hundred men, half of whom were simple Acadian farmers forced into unwilling service by the priest’s threats of Indian raid in this world and damnation in the next. Day dawn of June 4 the bugles blew to arms and the English forces, some four thousand, had marched to the south shore of the Missaguash River, when the French on the north side uttered a whoop and emitted a clatter of shots. Black-hatted, sinister, tireless, the priest could be seen urging his Indians on. The English brought up three field cannon and under protection of their scattering fire laid a pontoon bridge. Crossing the river, they marched within a mile of the fort. That night the sky was alight with flame; for Vergor, the French commander, and Abbe Le Loutre set fire to all houses outside the fort walls. In a few days the English cannon had been placed in a circle round the fort, and set such strange music humming in the ears of the besieged that the Acadian farmers deserted and the priest nervously thought of flight. Louisburg could send no aid, and still the bombs kept bursting through the roofs of the fort houses. One morning a bomb crashed through the roof of the breakfast room, killing six officers on the spot; and the French at once hung out the white flag; but when the English troops marched in on June 16, at seven in the evening, Le Loutre had fled overland through the forests of New Brunswick for Quebec.

There scant welcome awaited the renegade priest. The French governors had been willing to use him as their tool at a price ($800 a year), but when the tool failed of its purpose they cast him aside. Le Loutre sailed for France, but his ship was captured by an English cruiser and he was imprisoned for eight years on the island of Jersey.

Meanwhile, how was fate dealing with the Acadian farmers? Ever since the Treaty of Utrecht they had been afraid to take the oath of unqualified loyalty to England, lest New France, or rather Abbe Le Loutre, let loose the hounds of Indian massacre on their peaceful settlements. Besides, had not the priest assured them year in and year out that France would recover Acadia and put to the sword those habitants who had forsworn France? And they had been equally afraid to side with the French, for in case of failure the burden of punishment would fall on them alone. For almost half a century they had been known as Neutrals. Of their population of 12,000, 3000 had been lured away to Prince Edward Island and Cape Breton. When Cornwallis had founded Halifax he had intended to wait only till the English were firmly established, when he would demand an oath of unqualified allegiance from the Acadians. They, on their part, were willing to take the oath with one proviso, that they should never be required to take up arms against the French; or they would have been willing to leave Acadia, as the Treaty of Utrecht had provided, in case they did not take the oath of allegiance. But in the early days of English possession the English governors were not willing they should leave. If the Acadians had migrated, it would simply have strengthened the French in Cape Breton and Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick. Obstructions had been created that prevented the supply of transports to move the Acadians. The years had drifted on, and a new generation had grown up, knowing nothing of treaty rights, but only that the French were threatening them on one side if they did not rise against England, and the English on the other side if they did not take oath of unqualified allegiance. Cornwallis had long since left Halifax, and Lawrence, the English governor, while loyal to a fault, was, like Braddock, that type of English understrapper who has wrought such irreparable injury to English prestige purely from lack of sympathetic insight with colonial conditions. For years before he had become governor, Lawrence’s days had been embittered by the intrigues of the French with the Acadian farmers. He had been in Halifax when the Abbe Le Loutre’s Indian brigands had raided and slain as many as thirty workmen at a time near the English fort. He had been at the Isthmus of Chignecto that fatal morning when some Indians dressed in the suits of French officers waved a white flag and lured Captain Howe of the English fort across stream, where they shot him under flag of truce in cold blood.

These are not excuses for what Lawrence did. Nothing can excuse the infamy of his policy toward the Acadians. There are few blacker crimes in the history of the world; but these facts explain how a man of Lawrence’s standing could assume the responsibility he did. In addition, Lawrence was a bigoted Protestant. He not only hated the Acadians because they were French; he hated them as “a colony of rattlesnakes” because they were Catholics; and being an Englishman, he despised them because they were colonials. France and England were now on the verge of the great struggle for supremacy in America. Eighteen French frigates had come to Louisburg and three thousand French regulars to Quebec. If Lawrence did not yet know that Braddock had been defeated on July 9 at Duquesne, as his friends declare in his defense, it is a strange thing; for by August the bloody slaughter of the Monongahela was known everywhere else in America from Quebec to New Spain. With Lawrence and Monckton and Murray and Boscawen and the other English generals sent to conduct the campaign in Acadia, the question was what to do with the French habitants. Let two facts be distinctly stated here and with great emphasis: first, the colonial officers, like Winslow from Massachusetts, knew absolutely nothing of the English officers’ plans; they were not admitted to the conferences of the English officers and were simply expected to obey orders; second, the English government knew absolutely nothing of the English officers’ course till it was too late for remedy. In fact, later dispatches of that year inquire sharply what Lawrence meant by an obscure threat to drive the Acadians out of the country.

Did a darker and more sinister motive underlie the policy of Lawrence and his friends? Poems, novels, histories have waged war of words over this. Only the facts can be stated. Land to the extent of twenty thousand acres each, which had belonged to the Acadians, was ultimately deeded to Lawrence and his friends. Charges of corruption against Lawrence himself were lodged with the British government both by mail and by personal delegates from Halifax. Unfortunately Lawrence died in Halifax in 1760 before the investigation could take place; and whether true or false, the odium of the charges rests upon his fame.

What he did with the Acadians is too well known to require telling. In secret conclave the infamous edict was pronounced. Quickly messengers were sent with secret dispatches to the officers of land forces and ships at Annapolis, at Mines, at Chignecto, to repair to the towns of the Acadians, where, upon opening their dispatches, they would find their orders, which were to be kept a secret among the officers. The colonial officers, on reading the orders, were simply astounded. “It is the most grievous affair that ever I was in, in my life,” declared Winslow. The edict was that every man, woman, and child of the Acadians should be forcibly deported, in Lawrence’s words, “in such a way as to prevent the reunion of the colonists.” The men of the Acadian settlements were summoned to the churches to hear the will of the King of England. Once inside, doors were locked, English soldiers placed on guard with leveled bayonet, and the edict read by an officer standing on the pulpit stairs or on a table. The Acadians were snared like rats in a trap. Outside were their families, hostages for the peaceable conduct of the men. Inside were the brothers and husbands, hostages for the good conduct of the families outside. Only in a few places was there any rioting, and this was probably caused by the brutality of the officers. Murray and Monckton and Lawrence refer to their prisoners as “Popish recusants,” “poor wretches,” “rascals who have been bad subjects.” While the Acadians were to be deported so they could never reunite as a colony, it was intended to keep the families together and allow them to take on board what money and household goods they possessed; but there were interminable delays for transports and supplies. From September to December the deportation dragged on, and when the Acadians, patient as sheep at the shambles, became restless, some of the ships were sent off with the men, while the families were still on land. In places the men were allowed ashore to harvest their crops and care for their stock; but harvest and stock fell to the victors as burning hayricks and barns nightly lighted to flame the wooded background and placid seas of the fair Acadian land. Before winter set in, the Acadians had been scattered from New England to Louisiana. A few people in the Chignecto region had escaped to the woods of New Brunswick, and one shipload overpowered its officers and fled to St. John River; but in all, six thousand six hundred people were deported.

It is the blackest crime that ever took place under the British flag, and the expulsion was only the beginning of the sufferers’ woes. Some people found their way to Quebec, but Quebec was destitute and in the throes of war. The wanderers came to actual starvation. The others wandered homeless in Boston, in New York, in Philadelphia, in Louisiana. After the peace of 1763 some eight hundred gathered together in Boston and began the long march overland through the forests of Maine and New Brunswick, to return to Acadia. Singing hymns, dragging their baggage on sleighs, pausing to hunt by the way, these sad pilgrims toiled more than one thousand miles through forest and swamp, and at the end of two years found themselves back in Acadia. But they were like ghosts of the dead revisiting scenes of childhood! Their lands were occupied by new owners. Of their herds naught remained but the bleaching bone heaps where the lowing cattle had huddled in winter storms. New faces filled their old houses. Strange children rambled beneath the little dormer windows of the Acadian cottages, and the voices of the boys at play in the apple orchards shouted in an alien tongue. The very names of the places had vanished. Beausejour was now Cumberland. Beaubassin had become Amherst. Cobequid was now Truro. Grand Pre was now known as Horton. The heart-broken people hurried on like ghosts to the unoccupied lands of St. Mary’s Bay, St. Mary’s Bay, where long ago Priest Aubry had been lost. Here they settled, to hew out for themselves a second home in the wilderness.

Dieskau had intended to attack the English at Oswego, but the plans for Johnson on Lake Champlain brought the commander of the French rushing up the Richelieu River with three thousand soldiers, part regulars, part Canadians. Crown Point called Fort Frederick by the French was reached in August. No English are here, but scouts bring word that Johnson has built a fort on the south end of Lake George, and, leaving only five hundred men to garrison it, is moving up the lake with his main troops.

Fired by the French victories over Braddock, Dieskau planned to capture the English fort and ambush Johnson on the march. Look at the map! The south end of Lake Champlain lies parallel with the north end of Lake George. The French can advance on the English one of two ways, portage over to Lake George and canoe up the lake to Johnson’s fort, or ascend the marsh to the south of Lake Champlain, then cross through the woods to Johnson’s fort. Dieskau chose the latter trail. Leaving half his men to guard the baggage, Dieskau bade fifteen hundred picked men follow him on swiftest march with provisions in haversack for only eight days. September 8, 10 A.M., the marchers advance through the woods on Johnson’s fort, when suddenly they learn that their scout has lied, Johnson himself is still at the fort. Instead of five hundred are four thousand English. Advancing along the trail V-shape, regulars in the middle, Canadians and Indians on each side, the French come on a company of five hundred English wagoners. In the wild melee of shouts the English retreat in a rabble. “Pursue! March! Fire! Force the place!” yells Dieskau, dashing forward sword in hand, thinking to follow so closely on the heels of the rabble that he can enter the English fort before the enemy know; but his Indians have forsaken him, and Johnson’s scouts have forewarned the approach of the French. Instead of ambushing the English, Dieskau finds his own army ambushed. He had sneered at the un-uniformed plowboys of the English. “The more there are, the more we shall kill,” he had boasted; but now he discovers that the rude bushwhackers, “who fought like boys in the morning, at noon fought like men, and by afternoon fought like devils.” Their sharpshooters kept up a crash of fire to the fore, and fifteen hundred doubled on the rear of his army, “folding us up,” he reported, “like a pack of cards.” Dieskau fell, shot in the leg and in the knee, and a bullet struck the cartridge box of the servant who was washing out the wounds.

“Lay my telescope and coat by me, and go!” ordered Dieskau. “This is as good a deathbed as anyplace. Go!” he thundered, seeing his second officer hesitate. “Don’t you see you are needed? Go and sound a retreat.”

A third shot penetrated the wounded commander’s bladder. Lying alone, propped against a tree, he heard the drums rolling a retreat, when one of the enemy jumped from the woods with pointed pistol.

“Scoundrel!” roared the dauntless Dieskau; “dare to shoot a man weltering in his blood.” The fellow proved to be a Frenchman who had long ago deserted to the English, and he muttered out some excuse about shooting the devil before the devil shot him; but when he found out who Dieskau was, he had him carried carefully to Johnson’s tent, where every courtesy was bestowed upon the wounded commander. Johnson himself lay wounded.

All that night Iroquois kept breaking past the guard into the tent.

“What do they want?” asked Dieskau feebly.

“To skin you and eat you,” returned Johnson laconically. Whose was the victory? The losses had been about even, two hundred and fifty on each side. Johnson had failed to advance to Crown Point, but Dieskau had failed to dislodge Johnson. If Dieskau had not been captured, it is a question if either side would have considered the fight a victory. As it was, New France was plunged in grief; joy bells rang in New England. Johnson was given a baronetcy and 5000 pounds for his victory. He had named the lake south of Lake Champlain after the English King, Lake George.

So closed the first act in the tragic struggle for supremacy in America.