The Conquest of New France by George M. WrongA Chronicle of the Colonial Wars (page 2)

moreover, Spain claimed the lands bordering on the Gulf of Mexico and declared herself ready to drive out all intruders.

Nature, it is clear, dictated that, if France was to build up her power in the interior of the New World, it was the valley of the St. Lawrence which she should first occupy. Time has shown the riches of the lands drained by the St. Lawrence. On no other river system in the world is there now such a multitude of great cities. The modern traveler who advances by this route to the sources of the river beyond the Great Lakes surveys wonders ever more impressive. Before his view appear in succession Quebec, Montreal, Toronto, Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Duluth, and many other cities and towns, with millions in population and an aggregate of wealth so vast as to stagger the imagination. Step by step had the French advanced from Quebec to the interior. Champlain was on Lake Huron in 1615, and there the Jesuits soon had a flourishing mission to the Huron Indians. They had only to follow the shore of Lake Huron to come to the St. Mary’s River bearing towards the sea the chilly waters of Lake Superior. On this river, a much frequented fishing ground of the natives, they founded the mission of Sainte Marie du Saut. Farther to the south, on the narrow opening connecting Lake Huron and Lake Michigan, grew up the post known as Michilimackinac. It was then inevitable that explorers and missionaries should press on into both Lake Superior and Lake Michigan. By the time that Frontenac came first to Canada in 1672 the French had a post called St. Esprit on the south shore of Lake Superior near its western end and they had also passed westward from Lake Michigan and founded posts on both the Illinois and the Wisconsin Rivers which flow into the Mississippi.

France had placed on record her claim to the whole of the Great West. On a June morning in 1671 there had been a striking scene at Sainte Marie du Saut. The French had summoned a great throng of Indians to the spot. There, with impressive ceremony, Saint-Lusson, an officer from Canada, had set up a cedar post on which was a plate engraved with the royal arms, and proclaimed Louis XIV lord of all the Indian tribes and of all the lands, rivers, and lakes, discovered and to be discovered in the region stretching from the Atlantic to that other mysterious sea beyond the spreading lands of the West. Henceforth at their peril would the natives disobey the French King, or other states encroach upon these his lands. A Jesuit priest followed Saint-Lusson with a description to the savages of their new lord, the King of France. He was master of all the other rulers of the world. At his word the earth trembled. He could set earth and sea on fire by the blaze of his cannon. The priest knew the temper of his savage audience and told of the King’s warriors covered with the blood of his enemies, of the rivers of blood which flowed from their wounds, of the King’s countless prisoners, of his riches and his power, so great that all the world obeyed him. The savages
gave delighted shouts at the strange ceremony, but of its real meaning they knew nothing. What they understood was that the French seemed to be good friends who brought them muskets, hatchets, cloth, and especially the loved but destructive firewater which the savage palate ever craved.

The mystery of the Great Lakes once solved, there still remained that of the Western Sea. The St. Lawrence flowed eastward. Another river must therefore be found flowing westward. The French were eager listeners when the savages talked of a mighty river in the west flowing to the sea. They meant, as we now suppose, the Mississippi. There are vague stories of Frenchmen on the Mississippi at an earlier date; but, however this may be, it is certain that in the summer of 1673 Louis Joliet, the son of a wagon-maker of Quebec, and Jacques Marquette, a Jesuit priest, reached and descended the great river from the mouth of the Wisconsin to a point far past the mouth of the Ohio.

France thus planted herself on the Mississippi, though there her occupation was less complete and thorough than it was on the St. Lawrence. Distance was an obstacle; it was a far cry from Quebec by land, and from France the voyage by sea through the Gulf of Mexico was hardly less difficult. The explorer La Salle tried both routes. In 1681-1682 he set out from Montreal, reached the Mississippi overland, and descended to its mouth. Two years later he sailed from France with four ships bound for the mouth of the river, there to establish a colony; but before achieving his aim he was murdered in a treacherous attack led by his own countrymen.

It was Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d’Iberville, who first made good France’s claim to the Mississippi. He reached the river by sea in 1699 and ascended to a point some eighty miles beyond the present city of New Orleans. Farther east, on Biloxi Bay, he built Fort Maurepas and planted his first colony. Spain disliked this intrusion; but Spain soon to be herself ruled, as France then was, by a Bourbon king–did not prove irreconcilable and slowly France built up a colony in the south. It was in 1718 that Iberville’s brother, Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, founded New Orleans, destined to become in time one of the great cities of North America. Its beginnings were not propitious. The historian Charlevoix describes it as being in 1721 a low-lying, malarious place, infested by snakes and alligators, and consisting of a hundred wretched hovels.

In spite of this dreary outlook, it was still true that France, planted at the mouth of the Mississippi, controlled the greatest waterway in the world. Soon she had scattered settlements stretching northward to the Ohio and the Missouri, the one river reaching eastward almost to the waters of the St. Lawrence system, the other flowing out of the western plains from its source in the Rocky Mountains. The old mystery, however, remained, for the Mississippi flowed into the Gulf of Mexico, into Atlantic waters already well known. The route to the Western Sea was still to be found.

It was easy enough for France to record a sweeping claim to the West, but to make good this claim she needed a chain of posts, which should also be forts, linking the Mississippi with the St. Lawrence and strong enough to impress the Indians whose country she had invaded. At first she had reached the interior by way of the Ottawa River and Lake Huron, and in that northern country her position was secure enough through her posts on the upper lakes. The route farther south by Lake Ontario and Lake Erie was more difficult. The Iroquois menaced Niagara and long refused to let France have a footing there to protect her pathway to Lake Erie and the Ohio Valley. It was not until 1720, a period comparatively late, that the French managed to have a fort at the mouth of the Niagara. On the Detroit River, the next strategic point on the way westward, they were established earlier. Just after Frontenac died in 1698, La Mothe Cadillac urged that there should be built on this river a fort and town which might be made the center of all the trading interests west of Lake Erie. End the folly, he urged, of going still farther afield among the Indians and teaching them the French language and French modes of thought. Leave the Indians to live their own type of life, to hunt and to fish. They need European trade and they have valuable furs to exchange. Encourage them to come to the French at Detroit and see that they go nowhere else by not allowing any other posts in the western country. Cadillac was himself a keen if secret participant in the profits of the fur trade and hoped to be placed in command at Detroit and there to become independent of control from Quebec. Detroit was founded in 1701; and though for a long time it did not thrive, the fact that on the site has grown up one of the great industrial cities of modern times shows that Cadillac had read aright the meaning of the geography of North America.

When France was secure at Niagara and at Detroit, two problems still remained unsolved. One was that of occupying the valley of the Ohio, the waters of which flow westward almost from the south shore of Lake Erie until they empty into the vaster flood of the Mississippi. Here there was a lion in the path, for the English claimed this region as naturally the hinterland of the colonies of Virginia and Pennsylvania. What happened on the Ohio we shall see in a later chapter. The other great problem, to be followed here, was to explore the regions which lay beyond the Mississippi. These spread into a remote unknown, unexplored by the white man, and might ultimately lead to the Western Sea. We might have supposed that France’s farther adventure into the West would have been from the Mississippi up its great tributary the Missouri, which flows eastward from the eternal snows of the Rocky Mountains. Always, however, the uncertain temper of the many Indian tribes in this region made the advance difficult. The tribes inhabiting the west bank of the Mississippi were especially restless and savage. The Sioux, in particular, made life perilous for the French at their posts near the mouth of the Missouri.

It thus happened that the white man first reached the remoter West by way of regions farther north. It became easy enough to coast along the north and the south shore of Lake Superior, easy enough to find rivers which fed the great system of the St. Lawrence or of the Mississippi. These, however, would not solve the mystery. A river flowing westward was still to be sought. Thus, both in pursuit of the fur trade and in quest of the Western Sea, the French advanced westward from Lake Superior. Where now stands the city of Fort William there flows into Lake Superior the little stream called still by its Indian name of Kaministiquia. There the French had long maintained a trading-post from which they made adventurous journeys northward and westward.

The rugged regions still farther north had already been explored, at least in outline. There lay the great inland sea known as Hudson Bay. French and English had long disputed for its mastery. By 1670 the English had found trade to Hudson Bay so promising that they then created the Hudson’s Bay Company, which remains one of the great trading corporations of the world. With the English on Hudson Bay, New France was between English on the north and English on the south and did not like it. On Hudson Bay the English showed the same characteristics which they had shown in New England. They were not stirred by vivid imaginings of what might be found westward beyond the low-lying coast of the great inland sea. They came for trade, planted themselves at the mouths of the chief rivers, unpacked their goods, and waited for the natives to come to barter with them. For many years the natives came, since they must have the knives, hatchets, and firearms of Europe. To share this profitable trade the French, now going overland to the north from Quebec, now sailing into Hudson Bay by the Straits, attacked the English; and on those dreary waters, long before the Great West was known, there had been many a naval battle, many a hand-to-hand fight for forts and their rich prize of furs.

The chief French hero in this struggle was that son of Charles Le Moyne of Montreal, Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville, who ended his days in the task of founding the French colony of Louisiana. He was perhaps the most notable of all the adventurous leaders whom New France produced. He was first on Hudson Bay in the late summer of 1686, in a party of about a hundred men, led by the Chevalier de Troyes, who had marched overland from Quebec through the wilderness. The English on the Bay, with a charter from King Charles II, the friend of the French, and in a time of profound peace under his successor, thought themselves secure. They now had, however, a rude awakening. In the dead of night the Frenchmen fell upon Fort Hayes, captured its dazed garrison, and looted the place. The same fate befell all the other English posts on the Bay. Iberville gained a rich store of furs as his share of the plunder and returned with it to Quebec in 1687, just at the time when La Salle, that other pioneer of France, was struck down in the distant south by a murderer’s hand.

Iberville was, above all else, a sailor. The easiest route to Hudson Bay was by way of the sea. More than once after his first experience he led to the Bay a naval expedition. His exploits are still remembered with pride in French naval annals. In 1697 he sailed the Pelican through the ice-floes of Hudson Straits. He was attacked by three English merchantmen, with one hundred and twenty guns against his forty-four. One of the English ships escaped, one Iberville sank with all on board, one he captured. That autumn the hardy corsair was in France with a great booty from the furs which the English had laboriously gathered.

The triumph of the French on Hudson Bay was short-lived. Their exploits, though brilliant and daring, were more of the nature of raids than attempts to settle and explore. They did no more than the English to ascend the Nelson or other rivers to find what lay beyond; and in 1718, by the Treaty of Utrecht, as we have already seen, they gave up all claim to Hudson Bay and yielded that region to the English.

Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, Sieur de la Verendrye, was a member of the Canadian noblesse, a son of the Governor of Three Rivers on the St. Lawrence. He was born in 1685 and had taken part in the border warfare of the days of Queen Anne. He was a member of the raiding party led against New England by Hertel de Rouville in 1704 and may have been one of those who burst in on the little town of Deerfield, Massachusetts, and either butchered or carried off as prisoners most of the inhabitants. Shortly afterwards we find him a participant in warfare of a less ignoble type. In 1706 he went to France and became an ensign in a regiment of grenadiers. Those were the days when Marlborough was hammering and destroying the armies of Louis XIV. La Verendrye, took part in the last of the series of great battles, the bloody conflict at Malplaquet in 1709. He received a bullet wound through the body, was left for dead on the field, fell into the hands of the enemy, and for fifteen months was a captive. On his release he was too poor to maintain himself as an officer in France and soon returned to Canada, where he served as an officer in a colonial regiment until the peace of 1713. Then the ambitious young man, recently married, with a growing family and slight resources, had to work out a career suited to his genius.

His genius was that of an explorer; his task, which fully occupied his alert mind, was that of finding the long dreamed of passage to the Western Sea. The venture certainly offered fascinations. Noyon, a fellow-townsman of La Verendrye at Three Rivers, had brought back from the distant Lake of the Woods, in 1716, a glowing account, told to him by the natives, of walled cities, of ships and cannon, and of white-bearded men who lived farther west. In 1720 the Jesuit Charlevoix, already familiar with Canada, came out from France, went to the Mississippi country, and reported that an attempt to find the path to the Western Sea might be made either by way of the Missouri or farther north through the country of the Sioux west of Lake Superior. Both routes involved going among warlike native tribes engaged in incessant and bloody struggles with each other and not unlikely to turn on the white intruder. Memorial after memorial to the French court for assistance resulted at last in serious effort, but effort handicapped because the court thought that a monopoly of the fur trade was the only inducement required to promote the work of discovery.

La Verendrye was more eager to reach the Western Sea than he was to trade. To outward seeming, however, he became just a fur trader and a successful one. We find him, in 1726, at the trading-post of Nipigon, not far from the lake of that name, near the north shore of Lake Superior. From this point it was not very difficult to reach the shore of one great sea, Hudson Bay, but that was not the Western Sea which fired his imagination. Incessantly he questioned the savages with whom he traded about what lay in the unknown West. His zeal was kindled anew by the talk of an Indian named Ochagach. This man said that he himself had been on a great lake lying west of Lake Superior, that out of it flowed a river westward, that he had paddled down this river until he came to water which, as La Verendrye understood, rose and fell like the tide. Farther, to the actual mouth of the river, the savage had not gone, for fear of enemies, but he had been told that it emptied into a great body of salt water upon the shores of which lived many people. We may be sure that La Verendrye read into the words of the savage the meaning which he himself desired and that in reality the Indian was describing only the waters which flow into Lake Winnipeg.

La Verendrye was all eagerness. Soon we find him back at Quebec stirring by his own enthusiasm the zeal of the Marquis de Beauharnois, the Governor of Canada, and begging for help to pay and equip a hundred men for the great enterprise in the West. The Governor did what he could but was unable to move the French court to give money. The sole help offered was a monopoly of the fur trade in the region to be explored, a doubtful gift, since it angered all the traders excluded from the monopoly. La Verendrye, however, was able, by promising to hand over most of the profits, to persuade merchants in Montreal to equip him with the necessary men and merchandise.

There followed a period of high hopes and of heartbreaking failure. In 1731 La Verendrye set out for the West with three sons, a nephew, a Jesuit priest, the Indian Ochagach as guide–a party numbering in all about fifty. He intended to build trading-posts as he went westward and to make the last post always a base from which to advance still farther. His difficulties read like those of Columbus. His men not only disliked the hard work which was inevitable but were haunted by superstitious fears of malignant fiends in the unknown land who were ready to punish the invaders of their secrets. The route lay across the rough country beyond Lake Superior. There were many long portages over which his men must carry the provisions and heavy stores for trade. At length the party reached Rainy Lake, and out of Rainy Lake the waters flow westward. The country seemed delightful. Fish and game were abundant, and it was not hard to secure a rich store of furs. On the shore of the lake, in a charming meadow surrounded by oak trees, La Verendrye built a trading-post on waters flowing to the west, naming it Fort St. Pierre.

The voyageurs could now travel westward with the current. It is certain that other Frenchmen had preceded them in that region, but this is the first voyage of discovery of which we have any details. Escorted by an imposing array of fifty canoes of Indians, La Verendrye floated down Rainy River to the Lake of the Woods, and here, on a beautiful peninsula jutting out into the lake, he built another post, Fort St. Charles. It must have seemed imposing to the natives. On walls one hundred feet square were four bastions and a watchtower; evidence of the perennial need of alertness and strength in the Indian country. There were a chapel, houses for the commandant and the priest, a powder-magazine, a storehouse, and other buildings. La Verendrye cleared some land and planted wheat, and was thus the pioneer in the mighty wheat production of the West. Fish and game were abundant and the outlook was smiling. By this time the second winter of La Verendrye’s adventurous journeying was near, but even the cold of that hard region could not chill his eagerness. He himself waited at Fort St. Charles but his eldest son, Jean Baptiste, set out to explore still farther.

We may follow with interest the little group of Frenchmen and Indian guides as they file on snowshoes along the surface of the frozen river or over the deep snow of the silent forest on, ever on, to the West. They are the first white men of whom we have certain knowledge to press beyond the Lake of the Woods into that great Northwest so full of meaning for the future. The going was laborious and the distances seemed long, for on their return they reported that they had gone a hundred and fifty leagues, though in truth the distance was only a hundred and fifty miles. Then at last they stood on the shores of a vast body of water, ice-bound and forbidding as it lay in the grip of winter. It opened out illimitably westward. But it was not the Western Sea, for its waters were fresh. The shallow waters of Lake Winnipeg empty not into the Western Sea but into the Atlantic by way of Hudson Bay. Its shores then were deserted and desolate, and even to this day they are but scantily peopled. In that wild land there was no hint of the populous East of which La Verendrye had dreamed.

At the mouth of the Winnipeg River, where it enters Lake Winnipeg, La Verendrye built Fort Maurepas, named after the French minister who was in charge of the colonies and who was influential at court. The name no doubt expresses some clinging hope which La Verendrye still cherished of obtaining help from the King. Already he was hard pressed for resources. Where were the means to come from for this costly work of building forts? >From time to time he sent eastward canoes laden with furs which, after a long and difficult journey, reached Montreal. The traders to whom the furs were consigned sold them and kept the money as their own on account of their outlay. La Verendrye in the far interior could not pay his men and would soon be without goods to trade with the Indians. After having repeatedly begged for help but in vain, he made a rapid journey to Montreal and implored the Governor to aid an enterprise which might change the outlook of the whole world. The Governor was willing but without the consent of France could not give help. By promising the traders, who were now partners in his monopoly, profits of one hundred per cent on their outlay, La Verendrye at last secured what he needed. His canoes were laden with goods, and soon brawny arms were driving once again the graceful craft westward. He had offered a new hostage to fortune by arranging that his fourth son, a lad of eighteen, should follow him in the next year.

La Verendrye pressed on eagerly in advance of the heavy-laden canoes. Grim news met him soon after he reached Fort St. Charles on the Lake of the Woods. His nephew La Jemeraye, a born leader of men, who was at the most advanced station, Fort Maurepas on Lake Winnipeg, had broken down from exposure, anxiety, and overwork, and had been laid in a lonely grave in the wilderness. Nearly all pioneer work is a record of tragedy and its gloom lies heavy on the career of La Verendrye. A little later came another sorrow-laden disaster. La Verendrye sent his eldest son Jean back to Rainy Lake to hurry the canoes from Montreal which were bringing needed food. The party landed on a peninsula at the discharge of Rainy Lake into Rainy River, fell into an ambush of Sioux Indians, and were butchered to a man. This incident reveals the chief cause of the slow progress in discovery in the Great West: the temper of the savages was always uncertain.

There is no sign that La Verendrye wavered in his great hope even when he realized that the Winnipeg River was not the river flowing westward which he sought. We know now that the northern regions of the American continent east of the Rocky Mountains are tilted towards the east and the north and that in all its vast spaces there is no great river which flows to the west. La Verendrye, however, ignorant of this dictate of nature, longed to paddle with the stream towards the west. The Red River flows from the south into Lake Winnipeg at a point near the mouth of the Winnipeg River. Up the Red River went La Verendrye and found a tributary, the Assiniboine, flowing into it from the west. At the point of junction, where has grown up the city of Winnipeg, he built a tiny fort, called Fort Rouge, a name still preserved in a suburb of the modern Winnipeg. The explorers went southward on the Red River, and then went westward on the Assiniboine River only to find the waters persistently flowing against them and no definite news of other waters leading to the Western Sea. On the Assiniboine, near the site of the present town of Portage la Prairie in Manitoba, La Verendrye built Fort La Reine. Its name is evidence still perhaps of hopes for aid through the Queen if not through the King of France.

In 1737 La Verendrye made once more the long journey to Montreal. His fourteen canoes laden with furs were an earnest of the riches of the wonderful West and so pleased his Montreal partners that again they fitted him out with adequate supplies. In the summer of 1738 we find him at Fort La Reine, rich for the moment in goods with which to trade, keen and competent as a trader, and having great influence with the natives. All through the West he found Indians who went to trade with the English on Hudson Bay, and he constantly urged them not to take the long journey but to depend upon the French who came into their own country. It was a policy well fitted to cause searching of heart among the English traders who seemed so secure in their snug quarters on the seashore waiting for the Indians to come to them.

La Verendrye had now a fresh plan for penetrating farther on his alluring quest. He had heard of a river to the south to be reached by a journey overland. It was a new thing for him to abandon canoes and march on foot but this he now did and with winter approaching. On October 16, 1738, when the autumn winds were already chill, there was a striking little parade at Fort La Reine. The drummer beat the garrison to arms. What with soldiers brought from Canada, the voyageurs who had paddled the great canoes, and the Indians who dogged always the steps of the French traders, there was a muster at the fort of some scores of men. La Verendrye reviewed the whole company and from them chose for his expedition twenty soldiers and voyageurs and about twenty Assiniboine Indians. As companions for himself he took Francois and Pierre, two of his three surviving sons, and two traders who were at the fort.

We can picture the little company setting out on the 18th of October on foot, with some semblance of military order, by a well-beaten trail leading across the high land which separates the Red River country from the regions to the southwest. La Verendrye had heard much of a people, the Mandans, dwelling in well-ordered villages on the banks of a great river and cultivating the soil instead of living the wandering life of hunters. Such wonders of Mandan culture had been reported to La Verendrye that he half expected to find them white men with a civilization equal to that of Europe. The river was in reality not an unknown stream, as La Verendrye hoped, but the Missouri, a river already frequented by the French in its lower stretches where its waters join those of the Mississippi.

It was a long march over the prairie. La Verendrye found that he could not hurry his Indian guides. They insisted on delays during days of glorious autumn weather when it would have been wise to press on and avoid the winter cold on the wind-swept prairie. They went out of their way to visit a village of their own Assiniboine tribe; and, when they resumed their journey, this whole village followed them. The prairie Indians had a more developed sense of order and discipline than the tribes of the forest. La Verendrye admired the military regularity of the savages on the march. They divided the company of more than six hundred into three columns: in front, scouts to look out for an enemy and also for herds of buffalo; in the center, well protected, the old and the lame, all those incapable of fighting; and, for a rear-guard, strong fighting men. When buffalo were seen, the most active of the fighters rushed to the front to aid in hemming in the game. Women and dogs carried the baggage, the men condescending to bear only their weapons.

Not until cold December had come did the party reach the chief Mandan village. It was in some sense imposing, for the Indian lodges were arranged neatly in streets and squares and the surrounding palisade was strong and well built. Around the fort was a ditch fifteen feet deep and of equal width, which made the village impregnable in Indian warfare. After saluting the village with three volleys of musket fire, La Verendrye marched in with great ceremony, under the French flag, only to discover that the Mandans were not greatly unlike the Assiniboines and other Indians of the West whom he already knew. The men went about naked and the women nearly so. They were skilled in dressing leather. They were also cunning traders, for they duped La Verendrye’s friends, the Assiniboines, and cheated them out of their muskets, ammunition, kettles, and knives. Great eaters were the Mandans. They cultivated abundant crops and stored them in cave cellars. Every day they brought their visitors more than twenty dishes cooked in earthen pottery of their own handicraft. There was incredible feasting, which La Verendrye avoided but which his sons enjoyed. The Mandan language he could not understand and close questioning as to the route to the Western Sea was thus impossible. He learned enough to discredit the vague tales of white men in armor and peopled towns with which his lying guides had regaled him. In the end he decided for the time being to return to Fort La Reine and to leave two of his followers to learn the Mandan language so that in the future they might act as interpreters. When he left the Mandan village on the 13th of December, he was already ill and it is a wonder that he did not perish from the cold on the winter journey across hill and prairie. “In all my life I have never,” he says, “endured such misery from illness and fatigue, as on that journey.” On the 11th of February he was back at Fort La Reine, worn out and broken in health but still undaunted and resolved never to abandon his search.

Abandon it he never did. We find him in Montreal in 1740 involved in what he had always held in horror–a lawsuit brought against him by some impatient creditor. The report had gone abroad that he was amassing great wealth, when, as he said, all that he had accumulated was a debt of forty thousand livres. In the autumn of 1741 he was back at Fort La Reine, where he welcomed his son Pierre from a fruitless journey to the Mandans.

The most famous of all the efforts of the family was now on foot. On April 29, 1742, a new expedition started from Fort La Reine, led by La Verendrye’s two sons, Pierre and Francois. They knew the nature of the task before them, its perils as well as its hopes. They took with them no imposing company as their father had done, but only two men. The party of four, too feeble to fight their way, had to trust to the peaceful disposition of the natives. When they started, the prairie was turning from brown to green and the rivers were still swollen from the spring thaw. In three weeks they reached a Mandan village on the upper Missouri and were well received. It was after midsummer when they set out again and pressed on westward with a trend to the south. The country was bare and desolate. For twenty days they saw no human being. They had Mandan guides who promised to take them to the next tribe, the Handsome Men–Beaux Hommes–as the brothers called them, a tribe much feared by the Mandans. The travelers were now mounted; for the horse, brought first to America by the Spaniards, had run wild on the western plains where the European himself had not yet penetrated, and had become an indispensable aid to certain of the native tribes. Deer and buffalo were in abundance and they had no lack of food.

When they reached the tribe of Beaux Hommes, the Mandan guides fled homeward. Summer passed into bleak autumn with chill winds and long nights. By the end of October they were among the Horse Indians who, they had been told, could guide them to the sea. These, however, now said that only the Bow Indians, farther on, could do this. Winter was near when they were among these Indians, probably a tribe of the Sioux, whom they found excitedly preparing for a raid on their neighbors farther west, the Snakes. They were going, they said, towards the mountains and there the Frenchmen could look out on the great sea. So the story goes on. The brothers advanced ever westward and the land became more rugged, for they were now climbing upward from the prairie country. At last, on January 1, 1743, they saw what both cheered and discouraged them. In the distance were mountains. About them was the prairie, with game in abundance. It was a great host with which the brothers traveled for there were two thousand warriors with their families who made night vocal with songs and yells. On the 12th of January, nearly two weeks later, with an advance party of warriors, the La Verendryes reached the foot of the mountains, “well wooded with timber of every kind and very high.”

Was it the Rocky Mountains which they saw? Had they reached that last mighty barrier of snow-capped peaks, rugged valleys, and torrential streams, beyond which lay the sea? That they had done so was long assumed and many conjectures have been offered as to the point in the Rockies near which they made their last camp. Their further progress was checked by an unexpected crisis. One day they came upon an encampment of the dreaded Snake Indians which had been abandoned in great haste. This, the Bow Indians thought, could only mean that the Snakes had hurriedly left their camp in order to slip in behind the advance guard of the Bows and massacre the women and children left in the rear. Panic seized the Bows and they turned homeward in wild confusion. Their chief could not restrain them. “I was very much disappointed,” writes one of the brothers, “that I could not climb the mountains”–those mountains from which he had been told that he might view the Western Sea.

There was nothing for it but to turn back through snowdrifts over the bleak prairie. The progress was slow for the snow was sometimes two feet deep. On the 1st of March the brothers parted with their Bow friends at their village and then headed for home. By the 20th they were encamped with a friendly tribe on the banks of the Missouri. Here, to assert that Louis XV was lord of all that country, they built on an eminence a pyramid of stones and in it they buried a tablet of lead with an inscription which recorded the name of Louis XV, their King, and of the Marquis de Beauharnois, Governor of Canada, and the date of the visit.

Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. One hundred and seventy years later, on February 16, 1913, a schoolgirl strolling with some companions on a Sunday afternoon near the High School in the town of Pierre, South Dakota, stumbled upon a projecting corner of this tablet, which was in an excellent state of preservation. Thus we know exactly where the brothers La Verendrye were on April 2, 1743, when they bade farewell to their Indian friends and set out on horseback for Fort La Reine.

Spring had turned to summer before the brothers reached their destination. On July 2, 1743, they relieved the anxiety of their waiting father after an absence of fifteen months. Moving slowly as they did, could they have traveled from the distant Rockies from the time in January when they turned back? It seems doubtful; and in spite of the long-cherished belief that the brothers reached the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, it may be that they had not penetrated beyond the barrier which we know as the Black Hills. The chance discovery of a forgotten plate by school children may in truth prove that, as late as in 1750, the Rocky Mountains had not yet been seen by white men and that the first vision of that mighty range was obtained much farther north in Canada.

After 1743 the French seem to have made no further efforts to reach the Western Sea by way of the Missouri. If in reality the brothers had not gone beyond the Black Hills in South Dakota, then their most important work appears to have been done within what is now Canada, as discoverers of the Saskatchewan, the mighty river which carries to far-distant Hudson Bay the waters melted on the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains. It was by this route up the Saskatchewan that fifty years later was solved the tough and haunting problem of going over the mountains to the Pacific Ocean. La Verendrye now ascended the Saskatchewan for some three hundred miles to the forks where it divides into two great branches. He was going deeper into debt but he hoped always for help from the King. It is pathetic to see today, on the map of that part of western Canada which he and his sons explored, a town, a lake, and a county called Dauphin, in honor of the heir to the throne of France. No doubt La Verendrye had the thought that some day he might plead with the Dauphin when he had become King for help in his great task.

Before the year 1749 had ended La Verendrye, who had returned to Montreal, was in his grave. His sons, partners in his work, expected to be charged with the task–to which the King, in 1749, had anew appointed their father–of continuing the work of discovery in the West. Francois, for a time ill, wrote in 1750 from Montreal to La Jonquiere, the Governor at Quebec, that he hoped to take up the plans of his father. The Governor’s reply was that he had appointed another officer, Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, to lead in the search for the Western Sea. Francois hurried to Quebec. The Governor met him with a bland face and seemed friendly. Francois, urged that he and his brothers claimed no preeminence and that they were ready to serve under the orders of Saint-Pierre. The Governor was hesitant; but at last told Francois, frankly that the new leader desired no help either from him or from his brothers. Francois, was dismayed. He and his brothers were in debt. Already he had sent on stores and men to the West and the men were likely to starve if not followed by provisions. His chief property was in the West in the form of goods which would be plundered without his guardianship. To tide over the immediate future he sold the one small piece of land in Montreal which he had inherited from his father and threw this slight sop to his urgent creditors.

Saint-Pierre, strong in his right of monopoly, insisted that the brothers should not even return to the West. Francois, urged that to go was a matter of life and death. In some way he secured leave to set out with one laden canoe. When Saint-Pierre found that Francois had gone, he claimed damages for the intrusion on his monopoly and secured an order to pursue Francois and bring him back. He caught him at Michilimackinac. The meeting between the two men at that place involved explanations. Face to face with an injured man, Saint-Pierre admitted that he had been in the wrong, paid to Francois many compliments, and regretted that he had not joined hands with the brothers.

The mischief done was, however, irreparable. Francois, crippled by opposition, could not carry on his trade with success and in the end he returned to Montreal a ruined man overwhelmed with debt. He wrote to the French court a noble appeal for relief:

“I remain without friends and without patrimony…a simple ensign of the second grade; my elder brother has only the same rank as myself; my younger brother is only a junior cadet. This is the result of all that my father, my brothers and myself have done…. There are in the hands of your Lordship resources of compensation and of consolation. I venture to appeal to you for relief. To find ourselves excluded from the West would mean to be cruelly robbed of our heritage, to realize for ourselves all that is bitter and to see others secure all that is sweet.”

The appeal fell on deaf ears. The brothers sank into obscurity. During Montcalm’s campaigns from 1756 to 1759 Pierre and Francois seem to have been engaged in military service. Francois was killed in the siege of Quebec in 1759. After the final surrender of Canada the Auguste, a ship laden for the most part with refugees returning to France, was wrecked on the St. Lawrence. Among those on board who perished was Pierre de la Verendrye. He died amid the howling of the tempest and the cries of drowning men. Tragedy, unrelenting, had pursued him to the end.

Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, the choice of the Marquis de la Jonquiere to take up the search for the Western Sea in succession to the elder La Verendrye, himself went only as far as Fort La Reine. It was a subordinate, the Chevalier de Niverville, whom he sent farther west to find the great mountains and if possible the sea. The winter of 1750-51 had set in before Niverville was ready. He started apparently from Fort Maurepas, on snowshoes, his party dragging their supplies on toboggans. Before they reached Paskoya on the Saskatchewan (the modern Le Pas) they had nearly perished of hunger and were able to save their lives only by catching a few fish through the ice. Niverville was ill. He sent forward ten men by canoe up the Saskatchewan. They traveled with such rapidity that on May 29, 1751, they had reached the Rockies. They built a good fort, which they named Fort La Jonquiere, and stored it with a considerable quantity of provisions. If, as seems likely, the brothers La Verendrye saw only the Black Hills, these ten unknown men were the discoverers of the Rocky Mountains.

Saint-Pierre braced himself to set out for the distant goal but he was easily discouraged. Niverville, he said, was ill; the Indians were at war among themselves; some of them were plotting what Saint-Pierre calls “treason” to the French and their “perfidy” surpassed anything in his lifelong experience. The hostile influence of the English he thought all-pervasive. Obviously these are excuses. He did not like the task and he turned back. As it was, he tells a dramatic story of how Indians crowded into Fort La Reine in a threatening manner and how he saved the fort and himself only by rushing to the magazine with a lighted torch, knocking open a barrel of powder, and threatening to blow up everything and everybody if the savages did not withdraw at once. He was eager to leave the country. In 1752 he handed over the command to St. Luc de la Come and, in August of that year, having experienced “much wretchedness” on his journeys, he was safely back in Montreal. The founding of Fort La Jonquiere was, no doubt, a great feat. Where the fort stood we do not know. It may have been on the North Saskatchewan, near Edmonton, or on the south branch of the river near Calgary. In any case it was a far-flung outpost of France.

The English had always been more prosaic than the French. The traders on Hudson Bay worked, indeed, under a monopoly not less rigorous than that which Canada imposed. Without doubt, many an Englishman on the Bay was haunted by the hope and desire to reach the Western Sea. But the servants of the Company knew that to buy and sell at a profit was their chief aim. They had been on the whole content to wait for trade to come to them. By 1740 the Indians, who made the long journey to the Bay by the intricate waters which carried to the sea the flood of the Saskatchewan and Lake Winnipeg, were showing to the English articles supplied by the French at points far inland. It thus became evident that the French were tapping the traffic in furs near its source and cutting off the stream which had long flowed to Hudson Bay.

In June, 1754, Anthony Hendry, a young man in the service of the Company, left York factory on Hudson Bay to find out what the French were doing. We have a slight but carefully written diary of Hendry’s journey. He does not fail to note that in the summer weather life was made almost intolerable by the “musketoos.” Traveling by canoe he reached the Saskatchewan River and tells how, on the 22d of July, he came to “a French house.” It was Fort Paskoya. When Hendry paddled up to the river bank two Frenchmen met him and “in a very genteel manner” invited him into their house. With all courtesy they asked him, he says, if he had any letter from his master and where and on what design he was going inland. His answer was that he had been sent “to view the Country” and that he intended to return to Hudson Bay in the spring. The Frenchmen were sorry that their own master, who was apparently the well-known Canadian leader, St. Luc de la Corne, the successor of Saint-Pierre, had gone to Montreal with furs, and added their regrets that they must detain Hendry until this leader’s return. At this Hendry’s Indians grunted and said that the French dared not do so. Next day Hendry took breakfast and dinner at the fort, gave “two feet of tobacco” (at that time it was sold in long coils) to his hosts, and in return received some moose flesh. The confidence of his Indian guides that the French would not dare to detain him was justified. Next day Hendry paddled on up the river and advanced more than twenty miles, camping at night by “the largest Birch trees I have yet seen.”

Hendry wished to see the country thoroughly and to come into touch with the natives. The best way to do this and to obtain food was to leave the river and go boldly overland. He accordingly left his canoes behind and advanced on foot. The party was starving. On a Sunday in July he walked twenty-six miles and says “neither Bird nor Beast to be seen,–so that we have nothing to eat.” The next day he traveled twenty-four miles on an empty stomach and then, to his delight, found a supply of ripe strawberries, “the size of black currants and the finest I ever eat.” The next day his Indians killed two moose. He then met natives who, when he asked them to go to Hudson Bay to trade, replied that they could obtain all they needed from the French posts. The tact and skill of the French were such that, as Hendry admits, reluctantly enough, the Indians were already strongly attached to them. Day after day Hendry journeyed on over the rolling prairie in the warm summer days. He came to the south branch of the Saskatchewan near the point where now stands the city of Saskatoon and crossed the river on the 21st of August. Then on to the West, eager to take part in the hunting of the buffalo.

Hendry is almost certainly the first Englishman to see this region. In the end he reached the mountains. He makes no mention of having seen or heard anything of Fort La Jonquiere, built three years earlier. He had aims different from those of La Verendrye and other French explorers. Not the Western Sea but openings for trade was he seeking. His great aim was to reach the tribe called later the Blackfeet Indians, who were mighty hunters of the buffalo. Hendry was alive to the impressions of nature. The intense heat of August was followed in September by glorious weather, with the nights cool and the mosquitoes no longer troublesome. The climate was bracing. He complains only, from time to time, of swollen feet, and we need not wonder since his daily march occasionally went beyond twenty-five miles. Sometimes for days he saw no living creature. At other times wild life was prolific: there were moose in great abundance, bears, including the dreaded grizzly–one of which killed an Indian of his company and badly mutilated another–beaver, wild horses, and, above all, the buffalo. “Saw many herds of Buffalo grazing like English cattle,” he says, on the 13th of September, and the next day he goes buffalo hunting. Guns and ammunition were costly. His Indians, who used only bows and arrows, on this day killed seven–“fine sport,” says Hendry. Often the Indians took only the tongue, leaving the carcass for the wolves, who naturally abounded in such advantageous conditions. It is not easy now to imagine the part played by the buffalo in the life of the prairie. As Hendry advanced the herds were so dense as sometimes to retard his progress. Other writers tell of the vast numbers of these creatures. Alexander Henry, the younger, writing on April 1, 1801, says that in a river swollen by spring floods, drowned buffalo floated past his camp in one continuous line for two days and two nights. In prairie fires thousands were blinded and would go tumbling down banks into streams or lie down to die. One morning the bellowing of buffaloes awakened Henry and he looked out to see the prairie black. “The ground was covered at every point of the compass, as far as the eye could reach, and every animal was in motion.”

Daily as Hendry advanced he saw smoke in the distance and his Indians told him that it came from the camp of the Blackfeet. He reached them on Monday the 14th of October. When four miles away he was stopped by mounted scouts who asked whether he came as a friend or as an enemy. He was taken to the camp of two hundred tents pitched in two rows, and was led through the long passage between the tents to the big tent of the chief of whom he had heard much. Not a word was spoken. The chief sat on a white buffalo skin. Pipes were passed round and each person was presented with boiled buffalo flesh. When talk began, Hendry told the chief that his great leader had sent him to invite them to come to trade at Hudson Bay where his people would get powder, shot, guns, cloth, beads, and other things. The chief said it was faraway, and his people knew nothing of paddling. Such strangers to great waters were they that they would not even eat fish. They despised Hendry’s tobacco. What they smoked was dried horse dung. In the end Hendry was dismissed and ordered to make his camp a quarter of a mile away from that of the Blackfeet.

It was close by the present site of Calgary and apparently in full view, on clear days, of the white peaks of the Rocky Mountains that Hendry visited the Blackfeet. He lingered in the far western country through the greater part of the winter. On a portion of his return journey he used a horse. When the spring thaw came, once more he took to the water in canoes. He complains of the idleness of his Indian companions who would remain in their huts all day and never stir to lay up a store of food even when game was abundant. Conjuring, dancing to the hideous pounding of drums, feasting and smoking, were their amusements. On his way back Hendry revisited the French post on the Saskatchewan. The leader, no doubt St. Luc de la Corne, had returned from Montreal and now had with him nine men. “The master,” says Hendry, ” invited me in to sup with him, and was very kind. He is dressed very Genteel.” He showed Hendry his stock of furs; “a brave parcel,” the admiring rival thought. Hendry admits the superiority of the French as traders. They “talk Several Languages to perfection; they have the advantage of us in every shape.” In the West, as in the East, France was recognized as a formidable rival of England for the mastery of North America.

When Hendry was making his peaceful visit to the French fort in 1755, the crisis of the struggle had just been reached. In that year the battle line from Acadia to the Ohio and the Mississippi was already forming, and the fate of France’s eager efforts to hold the West was soon to be decided in the East. If Britain should conquer on the St. Lawrence, she would conquer also on the Saskatchewan and on the Mississippi.

Conquer she did, and thus it happened that it was Britain’s sons who took up the later burdens of the discoverer. In the summer of 1789, just at the time when the great Revolution was beginning in France, Alexander Mackenzie, a Scotch trader from Montreal, starting from Lake Athabasca, north of the farthest point reached by Hendry, was pressing still onward into an unknown region to find a river which might lead to the sea. This river he found; we know it now as the Mackenzie. For two weeks he and his Indians and voyageurs paddled with the current down this mighty stream, and on July 14, 1789, the day of the fall of the Bastille, he saw whales sporting in Arctic waters.

The real goal which Mackenzie sought was that of La Verendrye, a western and not a northern ocean. Three years later, after months of preparation, he attempted the great feat of crossing the Rocky Mountains to the sea. After nine months of rugged travel, across mountain streams and gorges, in peril daily from hostile savages, on July 22, 1793, he reached the shore of the Pacific Ocean, the first white man to go by land over the width of the continent from sea to sea. It was thus a Scotchman who achieved that of which La Verendrye had so long dreamed; and with no aid from the state but with only the resources of a trading company.

Ten years later, when France sold to the United States her last remaining territory of Louisiana, the American Government equipped an expedition under Lewis and Clark to cross the Rocky Mountains by way of the Missouri, the route from which the La Verendrye brothers had been obliged to turn back. The party began the ascent of the Missouri on May 14, 1804, and arrived in the Mandan country in the late autumn. Here they spent the winter of 1804-05. Not until November 15, 1805, had they completed the hard journey across the Rocky Mountains and reached the mouth of the Columbia River on the Pacific Ocean. Little did La Verendrye, in his eager search for the Western Sea, imagine the difficulties to be encountered and the hardships to be endured by those who were destined, in later days, to realize his dream.

CHAPTER VI. The Valley Of The Ohio

Almost at the moment in 1749 when British ships were lying at anchor in Halifax harbor and sending to shore hundreds of boatloads of dazed and expectant settlers for the new colony, there had set out from Montreal, in the interests of France, an expedition with designs so far-reaching that we wonder still at the stupendous issues involved in efforts which seem so petty. The purpose of France was now to make good her claim to the whole vast West. It was a picturesque company which pushed its canoes from the shore at Lachine on the 15th of June, six days before the British squadron reached Halifax. There was a procession of twenty-three great birchbark canoes well filled, for in them were more than two hundred men, at least ten in each canoe, together with the necessary impedimenta for a long journey. There were twenty soldiers in uniform, a hundred and eighty Canadians skilled in paddling and in carrying canoes and freight over the portages, a band of Indians, and fourteen officers with Celoron de Blainville at their head.

The acting Governor of Canada at this time was a dwarf in physique, but a giant in intellect, the brilliant naval officer, the Marquis de la Galissoniere, destined later to inflict upon the English in the Mediterranean the naval defeat which caused the execution of Admiral Byng as a coward. This remarkable man–planning, like his predecessor Frontenac, on a scale suited to world politics–saw that the peace of 1748 settled nothing, that in the balance now was the whole future of North America, and that victory would be to the alert and the strong. He chose Celoron, the most capable of the hardy young Canadian noblesse whom he had at hand, a man accustomed to the life of the forest, and sent with him this large party to assert against the English the right of France to the valley of the Ohio. The English were now to be shut out definitely from advancing westward and to be confined to the strip of territory lying between the Atlantic coast and the Alleghany Mountains, a little more than that strip fifty miles wide talked about in Quebec as the maximum concession of France, but still not very much according to the ideas of the English, and even this not secure if France should ever grow strong enough to crowd them out.

At no time do we find more vivid the contrast in type between the two nations. Before a concrete fact the British take action. When they gave up Louisbourg they built Halifax. Their traders had pressed into the Ohio country, not directed under any grandiose idea of empire, but simply as individuals, to trade and reap for themselves what profit they could. When they were checked and menaced by the French, they saw that something must be done. How they did it we shall see presently. It was the weakness of the English colonies that they could not unite to work out a great plan. If Virginia took steps to advance westward, Pennsylvania was jealous lest lands which she desired should go to a rival colony. France, on the other hand, had complete unity of design. Celoron spoke in the name of the King of France and he spoke in terms uncompromising enough. “The Ohio,” said the King of France through his agent, “belongs to me.” It is a French river. The lands bordering upon it are “my lands.” The English intruders are foreign robbers and not one of them is to be left in the western country: “I wilt not endure the English on my land.” The Indians, dwelling in that region, are “my children.”

Scattered over the vast region about the Great Lakes were a good many French. At the lower end of Lake Ontario stood Fort Frontenac, a menace to the colony of New York, as the dwellers in the British post of Oswego on the opposite shore of the lake well knew. We have already seen that the French held a fort at Niagara guarding the route leading farther west to Lake Erie and to regions beyond Lake Erie, by way of the Ohio or the upper lakes, to the Mississippi. Near the mouth of the Mississippi, New Orleans was now becoming a considerable town with a governor independent of the governor at Quebec. Along the Mississippi at strategic points stretching northward beyond the mouth of the Missouri were a few French settlements, ragged enough and with a shiftless population of fur traders and farmers, but adequate to assert France’s possession of that mighty highway. The weak point in France’s position was in her connection of the Mississippi with the St. Lawrence by way of the Ohio. This was the place of danger, for here English rivalry was strongest, and it was to cure this weakness that Celoron was now sent forth.

Celoron moved toilsomely over the portage which led past the great cataract of Niagara and launched his canoes on Lake Erie. >From its south shore, during seven days of heart-breaking labor, the party dragged the canoes and supplies through dense forest and over steep hills until they reached Chautauqua Lake, the waters of which flow into the Allegheny River and by it to the Ohio. For many weary days they went with the current, stopping at Indian villages, treating with the savages, who were sometimes awed and sometimes menacing. They warned the Indians to have no dealings with the scheming English who would “infallibly prove to be robbers,” and asserted as boldly as Celoron dared the lordship of the King of France and his love for his forest children. Celoron realized that he was on an historic mission. At several points on the Ohio, with great ceremony, he buried leaden plates, as La Verendrye had done a few years earlier in the far West, bearing an inscription declaring that, in the name of the King of France, he took possession of the country. On trees over these memorials of lead he nailed the arms of France, stamped on sheets of tin. Since that day at least three of the plates have been found.

Celoron’s expedition went well enough. He advanced as far west on the Ohio as the mouth of the Great Miami River, then up that river, and by difficult portages back to Lake Erie. It was a remarkable journey; but in the late autumn he was back again in Montreal, not sure that he had achieved much. The natives of the country were, he thought, hostile to France and devoted to the English who had long traded with them. This opinion was in truth erroneous, for, when the time of testing came, the Indians of the West fought on the side of France. Montcalm had many hundreds of them under his banner. The expedition meant the definite and final throwing down of the gauntlet by France. With all due ceremony she had declared that the Ohio country was hers and that there she would allow no English to dwell.

Legardeur de Saint-Pierre could hardly have known, when he left the hard region of the Saskatchewan in 1752, that a year later he would be sent to protect another set of outposts of France in the West. In 1753 we find him in command of the French forces in the Ohio country. Celoron had been sent to Detroit. If Saint-Pierre had played his part feebly on the Saskatchewan, he was now made for a brief period one of the central figures in the opening act of a world drama. It is with a touch of emotion that we see on the stage, as the opponent of this not great Frenchman, the momentous figure of George Washington.

The fight for North America was now rapidly approaching its final phase in the struggle which we know as the Seven Years’ War. During forty years, commissioners of the two nations had been trying to reach some agreement as to boundaries. Each side, however, made impossible demands. France claimed all the lands drained by the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes and by the Mississippi and its tributaries a claim which, if made good, would have carried her into the very heart of the colony of New York and would have given her also the mastery of the Ohio and the regions beyond. Britain claimed all the lands ever occupied by the Iroquois Indians, who had been recognized as British subjects by the Treaty of Utrecht. As those Indians had overrun regions north of the St. Lawrence, the British thus would become masters of a good part of Canada. Neither side was prepared for reasonable compromise. The sword was to be the final arbiter.

Events moved rapidly towards war. In 1753 Duquesne, the new Governor of Canada, sent more than a thousand men to build Fort Le Boeuf, on upper waters flowing to the Ohio and within easy reach of support by way of Lake Erie. In the nest year the French were swarming in the Ohio Valley, stirring up the Indians against the English and confident of success. They jeered at the divisions among the English and believed their own unity so strong that they could master the colonies one by one. The two colonies most affected were Pennsylvania and Virginia, either of them quite ready to see its own citizens advance into the Ohio country and possess the land, but neither of them willing to unite with the other in effective military action to protect the frontier.

It is at this crisis that there appears for the first time in history George Washington of Virginia. In December, 1753, in the dead of winter, he made a long, toilsome journey from Virginia to the north through snow and rain, by difficult forest trails, over two ranges of mountains, across streams sometimes frozen, sometimes dangerous from treacherous thaws. On the way he heard gossip from the Indians about the designs of the French. They boasted that they would come in numbers like the sands of the seashore; that the natives would be no more an obstacle to them than the flies and mosquitoes, which indeed they resembled; and that not the breadth of a finger-nail of land belonged to the Indians. Washington was told by one of the French that “it was their absolute design to take possession of the Ohio and, by–, they would do it!” It was no matter that the French were outnumbered two to one by the English, for the English were dilatory and ineffective.

In the end, Washington arrived at Fort Le Boeuf and presented a letter from Dinwiddie, the Lieutenant-Governor of Virginia, pointing out that the British could not permit an armed force from Canada to invade their territory of the Ohio and requiring that the French should leave the country at once. Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, to whom this firm demand was delivered, “an elderly gentleman,” says Washington, with “much the air of a soldier” gave, of course, a polite answer in the manner of his nation, but he intended, he said, to remain where he was as long as he had instructions so to do. Washington kept his eyes open and made careful observations of the plan of the fort, the number of men, and also of the canoes, of which he noted that there were more than two hundred ready and many others building. The French tried to entice away his Indians and he says, “I cannot say that ever in my life I suffered so much anxiety.” On the journey back he nearly perished when he fell into an ice-cold stream and was obliged to spend the night on a tiny island in frozen clothing. He brought comfort as cold to the waiting Dinwiddie.

The French meanwhile were always a little ahead of the English in their planning. Early in April, 1754, a French force of five or six hundred men from Canada, which had set out while Quebec was still in the icy grip of winter, reached the upper waters of the Ohio. They attacked and destroyed a fort which the English had begun at the forks where now stands Pittsburgh, and, in its place, began a formidable one, called Fort Duquesne after the Governor of Canada. In vain was Washington sent with a few hundred men to take possession of this fort and to assert the claim of the English to the land. He fell in with a French scouting party under young Coulon de Jumonville, killed its leader and nine others, and took more than a score of prisoners–warfare bloody enough in a time of supposed peace. But the French were now on the Ohio in greater numbers than the English. At a spot known as the Great Meadows, where Washington had hastily thrown up defenses, which he called Fort Necessity, he was forced to surrender, but was allowed to lead his force back to Virginia, defeated in the first military adventure of his career. The French took the view that his killing of the young officer Jumonville was assassination, since no state of war existed, and raised a fierce clamor that Washington was a murderer–a strange contrast to his relations with France in the years to come.

What astonishes us in regard to these events is that Britain and France long remained nominally at peace while they were carrying on active hostilities in America and sending from Europe armies to fight. There were various reasons for this hesitation about plunging formally into war. Each side wished to delay until sure of its alliances in Europe. During the war ending in 1748 France had fought with Frederick of Prussia against Austria, and Britain had been Austria’s ally. The war had been chiefly a land war, but France had been beaten on the sea. Now Britain and Prussia were drawing together and, if France fought them, it must be with Austria as an ally. Such an alliance offered France but slight advantage. Austria, an inland power, could not help France against an adversary whose strength was on the sea; she could not aid the designs of France in America or in India, where the capable French leader Dupleix was in a fair way to build up a mighty oriental empire. Nor had France anything to gain in Europe from an Austrian alliance. The shoe was on the other foot. The supreme passion of Maria Theresa who ruled Austria was to recover the province of Silesia which had been seized in 1740 by Prussia and held–held to this day. Austria could do little for France but France could do much for Austria. So Austria worked for this alliance. It is a story of intrigue. Usually in France the King carried on negotiations with foreign countries only through his ministers, who knew the real interests of France. Now the astute Austrian statesman, Kaunitz, went past the ministers of Louis XV to Louis himself. This was the heyday of Madame de Pompadour, the King’s mistress. Maria Theresa condescended to intrigue with this woman whom in her heart she despised. There is still much mystery in the affair. The King was flattered into thinking that personally he was swaying the affairs of Europe and took delight in deceiving his ministers and working behind their backs. While events in America were making war between France and Britain inevitable, France was being tied to an ally who could give her little aid. She must spend herself to fight Austria’s battles on the land, while her real interests required that she should build up her fleet to fight on the sea the great adversary across the English Channel.

The destiny of North America might, indeed; well have been other than it is. A France strong on the sea, able to bring across to America great forces, might have held, at any rate, her place on the St. Lawrence and occupied the valleys of the Ohio and the Mississippi. We can hardly doubt that the English colonies, united by a common deadly peril, could have held against France most of the Atlantic coast. But she might well have divided with them North America; and today the lands north of the Ohio and westward beyond the Ohio to the Pacific Ocean might have been French. The two nations on the brink of war in 1754 were playing for mighty stakes; and victory was to the power which had control of the sea. France had a great army, Britain a great fleet. In this contrast lay wrapped the secret of the future of North America.

As the crisis drew near the vital thought about the future of America was found, not in America, but in Europe. The English colonies were so accustomed to distrust each other that, when Virginia grew excited about French designs on the Ohio, Pennsylvania or North Carolina was as likely as not to say that it was the French who were in the right and a stupid, or excitable, or conceited, colonial governor who was in the wrong. In Paris and London, on the other hand, there were no illusions about affairs in America. In both capitals it was realized that a grim fight was on. During the winter of 1754-55 extensive preparations were being made on both sides. France equipped an army under Baron Dieskau to go to Canada; Britain equipped one under General Braddock to go to Virginia. Each nation asked the other why it was sending troops to America and each gave the assurance of benevolent designs. But in the spring of 1755 a British fleet under Admiral Boscawen put to sea with instructions to capture any French vessels bound for North America. At the same time the two armies were on the way across the Atlantic. Dieskau went to Canada, Braddock to Virginia, each instructed to attack the other side, while in the meantime ambassadors at the two courts gave bland assurances that their only thought was to preserve peace.

The English colonists showed a political blindness that amounted to imbecility. Albany was the central point from which the dangers on all sides might best be surveyed. Here came together in the summer of 1754 delegates from seven of the colonies to consider the common peril. The French were busy in winning, as they did, the support of the many Indian tribes of the West; and the old allies of the English, the Iroquois, were nervous for their own safety. The delegates to Albany, tied and bound by instructions from their Assemblies, had to listen to plain words from the savages. The one Englishman who, in dealing with the Indians, had tact and skill equal to that of Frontenac of old, was an Irishman, Sir William Johnson. To him the Iroquois made indignant protests that the English were as ready as the French to rob them of their lands. If we find a bear in a tree, they said, some one will spring up to claim that the tree belongs to him and keep us from shooting the bear. The French, they added, are at least men who are prepared to fight; you weak and un-prepared English are like women and any day the French may turn
you out. Benjamin Franklin told the delegates that they must unite to meet a common enemy. Unite, however, they would not. No one of them would surrender to a central body any authority through which the power of the King over them might be increased. The Congress–the word is full of omen for the future–failed to bring about the much-needed union.

In February, 1755, Braddock arrived in Virginia with his army, and early in May he was on his march across the mountains with regulars, militia, and Indians, to the number of nearly fifteen hundred men, to attack Fort Duquesne and to rid the Ohio Valley of the French. He knew little of forest warfare with its use of Indian scouts, its ambushes, its fighting from the cover of trees. On the 9th of July, on the Monongahela River, near Fort Duquesne, in a struggle in the forest against French and Indians he was defeated and killed. George Washington was in the fight and had to report to Dinwiddie the dismal record of what had happened. The frontier was aflame; and nearly all the Indians of the West, seeing the rising star, went over to the French. The power of France was, for the time, supreme in the heart of the continent. At that moment even far away in the lone land about the Saskatchewan, the English trader, Hendry, had to admit that the French knew better than the English how to attract the support of the savage tribes.

Meanwhile Dieskau had arrived at Quebec. In the colony of New York Sir William Johnson, the rough and cheery Irishman, much loved of the Iroquois, was gathering forces to attack Canada. Early in July, 1755, Johnson had more than three thousand provincial troops at Albany, a motley horde of embattled farmers, most of them with no uniforms, dressed in their own homespun, carrying their own muskets, electing their own officers, and altogether, from the strict soldier’s point of view, a rabble rather than an army. To meet this force and destroy it if he could, Dieskau took to the French fort at Crown Point, on Lake Champlain, and southward from there to Ticonderoga at the head of this lake, some three thousand five hundred men, including his French regulars, some Canadians and Indians. Johnson’s force lay at Fort George, later Fort William Henry, the most southerly point on Lake George. The names, given by Johnson himself, show how the dull Hanoverian kings and their offspring were held in honor by the Irish diplomat who was looking for favors at court. The two armies met on the shores of Lake George early in September and there was an all-day fight. Each side lost some two hundred men. Among those who perished on the French side was Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, who had escaped all the perils of the western wilderness to meet his fate in this border struggle. The honors of the day seem to have been with Johnson, for the French were driven off and Dieskau himself, badly wounded, was taken prisoner. That Johnson had great difficulty in keeping his savages from burning alive and then boiling and eating Dieskau and smoking his flesh in their pipes, in revenge for some of their chiefs killed in the fight, shows what an alliance with Indians meant.

There was small gain to the English from Johnson’s success. He was too cautious to advance towards Canada; and, as winter came on, he broke up his camp and sent his men to their homes. The colonies had no permanent military equipment. Each autumn their forces were dissolved to be reorganized again in the following spring, a lame method of waging war.

For three years longer in the valley of the Ohio, as elsewhere, the star of France remained in the ascendant. It began to decline only when, farther east, on the Atlantic, superior forces sent out from England were able to check the French. During the summer of 1758, while Wolfe and Boscawen were pounding the walls of Louisbourg, seven thousand troops led by General Forbes, Colonel George Washington, and Colonel Henry Bouquet, pushed their way through the wilds beyond the Alleghanies and took possession of the Ohio. The French destroyed Fort Duquesne and fled. On the 25th of November the English occupied the place and named it “Pitts-Bourgh” in honor of their great war minister.

CHAPTER VII. The Expulsion Of The Acadians

We have now to turn back over a number of years to see what has been happening in Acadia, that oldest and most easterly part of New France which in 1710 fell into British hands. Since the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 the Acadians had been nominally British subjects. But the Frenchman, hardly less than the Jew, is difficult of absorption by other racial types. We have already noted the natural aim of France to recover what she had lost and her use of the priests to hold the Acadians to her interests. The Acadians were secure in the free exercise of their religion. They had no secular leaders and few, if any, clergy of their own. They were led chiefly by priests, subjects of France, who, though working in British territory, owned no allegiance to Great Britain, and were directed by the Bishop of Quebec.

For forty years the question of the Acadians remained unsettled. Under the Treaty of 1713 the Acadians might leave the country. If they remained a year they must become British subjects. When, however, in 1715, two years after the conclusion of the treaty, they were required to take the oath of allegiance to the new King, George I, they declared that they could not do so, since they were about to move to Cape Breton. When George II came to the throne in 1727, the oath was again demanded. Still, however, the Acadians were between two fires. Their Indian neighbors, influenced by the French, threatened them with massacre if they took the oath, while the British declared that they would forfeit their farms if they refused. The truth is that the British did not wish to press the alternative. To drive out the Acadians would be to strengthen the neighboring French colony of Cape Breton. To force on them the oath might even cause a rising which would overwhelm the few English in Nova Scotia. So the tradition, never formally accepted by the British, grew up that, while the Acadians owed obedience to George II, they would be neutral in case of war with France. A common name for them used by the British themselves was that of the Neutral French. In time of peace the Acadians could be left to themselves. When, however, war broke out between Britain and France the question of loyalty became acute. Such war there was in 1744. Without doubt, some Acadians then helped the French–but it was, as they protested, only under compulsion and, as far as they could, they seem to have refused to aid either side. The British muttered threats that subjects of their King who would not fight for him had no right to protection under British law. Even then feeling was so high that there was talk of driving the Acadians from their farms and setting them adrift; and these poor people trembled for their own fate when the British victors at Louisbourg in 1745 removed the French population to France. Assurances came from the British government, however, that there was no thought of molesting the Acadians.

With the order “As you were” the dominant thought of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, the highly organized and efficient champions of French policy took every step to ensure that in the next struggle the interests of France should prevail. Peace had no sooner been signed than Versailles was working in Nova Scotia on the old policy. The French priests taught that eternal perdition awaited the Catholic Acadians who should accept the demands of the heretic English. The Indians continued their savage threats. Blood is thicker than water and no doubt the natural sympathies of the Acadians were with the French. But the British were now formidable. For them the founding of Halifax in 1749 had made all the difference. They, too, had a menacing fortress at the door of the Acadians, and their tone grew sterner. As a result the Acadians were told that if, by October 15, 1749, they had not taken an unconditional oath of allegiance to George II, they should forfeit their rights and their property, the treasured farms on which they and their ancestors had toiled. The Acadians were in acute distress. If they yielded to the English, not only would their bodies be destroyed by the savage Micmac Indians, but their immortal souls, they feared, would be in danger.

The Abbe Le Loutre was the parish priest of the Acadian village of Beaubassin on Chignecto Bay and also missionary to the Micmac Indians, whose chief village lay in British territory not many miles from Halifax. British officials of the time denounced him as a determined fanatic who did not stop short of murder. As in most men, there was in Le Loutre a mingling of qualities. He was arrogant, domineering, and intent on his own plans. He hated the English and their heresy, and he preached to his people against them with frantic invective. He incited his Indians to bloodshed. But he also knew pity. The custom of the Indians was to consider prisoners taken by them as their property, and on one occasion Le Loutre himself paid ransom to the Indians for thirty-seven English captives and returned them to Halifax. It is certain that the French government counted upon the influence of French priests to aid its political designs. “My masters, God and the King” was a phrase of the Sulpician father Piquet working at this time on the St. Lawrence. Le Loutre could have echoed the words. He was an ardent politician and France supplied him with both money and arms to induce the Indians to attack the English. The savages haunted the outskirts of Halifax, waylaid and scalped unhappy settlers, and, in due course, were paid from Louisbourg according to the number of scalps which they produced. The deliberate intention was to make new English settlements impossible in Nova Scotia and so to discourage the English that they should abandon Halifax. All this intrigue occurred in 1749 and the years following the treaty of peace. If the English suffered, so did the Acadians. Le Loutre told them that if once they became British subjects they would lose their priests and find their religion suppressed. Acadians who took the oath would, he said, be denied the sacraments of the Church. He would also turn loose on the offenders the murderous savages whom he controlled. If pressed by the English, the Acadians, rather than yield, must abandon their lands and remove into French territory.

At this point arises the question as to what were the limits of this French territory. In yielding Acadia in 1713, France had not defined its boundaries. The English claimed that it included the whole region stretching northeastward to the Gulf of St. Lawrence from the frontier of New England. The French, however, said that Acadia meant only the peninsula of Nova Scotia ending at the isthmus between Baie Verte and the Bay of Chignecto; and for years a Canadian force stood there on guard, daring the British to put a foot on the north side of the little river Missaguash, which the French said was the international boundary.

There was much excitement among the Acadians in 1750, when an English force landed on the isthmus and proceeded to throw up defenses on the south side of the river. This outpost, which in due time became Fort Lawrence, was placed on what even the French admitted to be British territory. Forthwith on a hill two or three miles away, on the other side of the supposed boundary, the French built Fort Beausejour. Le Loutre was on the spot, blustering and menacing. He told his Acadian parishioners of the little village of Beaubassin, near Fort Lawrence and within the British area, that rather than accept English rule they must now abandon their lands and seek the protection of the French at Fort Beausejour. With his own hands he set fire to the village church. The houses of the Acadians were also burned. A whole district was laid waste by fire. Women and children suffered fearful privations–but what did such things matter in view of the high politics of the priest and of France?

During four or five years the hostile forts confronted each other. In time of peace there was war. The French made Beausejour a solid fort, for it still stands, little altered, though it has been abandoned for a century and a half. It was chiefly the Acadians, nominal British subjects, who built these thick walls.

The arrogant Micmacs demanded that the British should hand over to them the best half of Nova Scotia, and they emphasized their demand by treachery and massacre. One day a man, in the uniform of a French officer, followed by a small party, approached Fort Lawrence, waving a white flag. Captain Howe with a small force went out to meet him. As this party advanced, Indians concealed behind a dike fired and killed Howe and eight or ten others. Such ruses were well fitted to cause among the English a resolve to enforce severe measures. The fire burned slowly but in the end it flamed up in a cruel and relentless temper. French policy, too, showed no pity. The Governor of Canada and the colonial minister in France were alike insistent that the English should be given no peace and cared nothing for the sufferings of the unhappy Acadians between the upper and the nether millstone.

At last, in 1755, the English accomplished something decisive. They sent an army to Fort Lawrence, attacked Fort Beausejour, forced its timid commander Vergor to surrender, mastered the whole surrounding country, and obliged Le Loutre himself to fly to Quebec. There he embarked for France. The English captured him on the sea, however, and the relentless and cruel priest spent many years in an English prison. His later years, when he reached France, do him some credit. By that time the Acadians had been driven from their homes. There were nearly a thousand exiles in England. Le Loutre tried to befriend these helpless people and obtained homes for some of them in the parish of Belle-Isle-en- Mer in France.

In the meantime the price of Le Loutre’s intrigues and of the outrages of the French and their Indian allies was now to be paid by the unhappy Acadians. During the spring and summer of 1755, the British decided that the question of allegiance should be settled at once, and that the Acadians must take the oath. There was need of urgency. The army at Fort Lawrence which had captured Fort Beausejour was largely composed of men from New England, and these would wish to return to their homes for the winter. If the Acadians remained and were hostile, the country thus occupied at laborious cost might quickly revert to the French. Already many Acadians had fought on the side of the French and some of them, disguised as Indians, had joined in savage outrage. A French fleet and a French army were reported as likely to arrive before the winter. In fact, France’s naval power with its base at Louisbourg was still stronger than that of Britain with its base at Halifax. When the Acadians were told in plain terms that they must take the oath of allegiance, they firmly declined to do so without certain limitations involving guarantees that they should not be arrayed against France. The Governor at Halifax, Major Charles Lawrence, was a stern, relentless man, without pity, and his mind was made up. Shirley, Governor of Massachusetts, was in touch with Lawrence. The Acadians should be deported if they would not take the oath. This step, however, the government at London never ordered. On the contrary, as late as on August 13, 1755, Lawrence was counseled to act with caution, prudence, and tact in dealing with the “Neutrals,” as the Acadians are called even in this official letter. Meanwhile, without direct warrant from London, Lawrence and his council at Halifax had taken action. His reasoning was that of a direct soldier. The Acadians would not take the full oath of British citizenship. Very well. Quite obviously they could not be trusted. Already they had acted in a traitorous way. Prolonged war with France was imminent. Since Acadians who might be allied with the savages could attack British posts, they must be removed. To replace them, British settlers could in time be brought into the country.

The thing was done in the summer and autumn of 1755. Colonel Robert Monckton, a regular officer, son of an Irish peer, who always showed an ineffable superiority to provincial officers serving under him, was placed in charge of the work. He ordered the male inhabitants of the neighborhood of Beausejour to meet him there on the 10th of August. Only about one-third of them came–some four hundred. He told them that the government at Halifax now declared them rebels. Their lands and all other goods were forfeited; they themselves were to be kept in prison. Not yet, however, was made known to them the decision that they were to be treated as traitors of whom the province must be rid. No attempt was made anywhere to distinguish loyal from disloyal Acadians. Lawrence gave orders to the military officers to clear the country of all Acadians, to get them by any necessary means on board the transports which would carry them away, and to burn their houses and crops so that those not caught might perish or be forced to surrender during the coming winter. At the moment, the harvest had just been reaped or was ripening.

When the stern work was done at Grand Pre, at Pisiquid, now Windsor, at Annapolis, there were harrowing scenes. In command of the work at Grand Pre was Colonel Winslow, an officer from Massachusetts–some of whose relatives twenty-five years later were to be driven, because of their loyalty to the British King, from their own homes in Boston to this very land of Acadia. Winslow issued a summons in French to all the male inhabitants, down to lads of ten, to come to the church at Grand Pre on Friday, the 5th of September, to learn the orders he had to communicate. Those who did not appear were to forfeit their goods. No doubt many Acadians did not understand the summons. Few of them could read and it hardly mattered to them that on one occasion a notice on the church door was posted upside down. Some four hundred anxious peasants appeared. Winslow read to them a proclamation to the effect that their houses and lands were forfeited and that they themselves and their families were to be deported. Five vessels from Boston lay at Grand Pre. In time more ships arrived, but chill October had come before Winslow was finally ready.

By this time the Acadians realized what was to happen. The men were joined by their families. As far as possible the people of the same village were kept together. They were forced to march to the transports, a sorrow-laden company, women carrying babes in their arms, old and decrepit people borne in carts, young and strong men dragging what belongings they could gather. Winslow’s task, as he says, lay heavy on his heart and hands: “It hurts me to hear their weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.” By the 1st of November he had embarked fifteen hundred unhappy people. His last ship-load he sent off on the 13th of December. The suffering from cold must have been terrible.

In all, from Grand Pre and other places, more than six thousand Acadians were deported. They were scattered in the English colonies from Maine to Georgia and in both France and England. Many died; many, helpless in new surroundings, sank into decrepit pauperism. Some reached people of their own blood in the French colony of Louisiana and in Canada. A good many returned from their exile in the colonies to their former home after the Seven Years’ War had ended. Today their descendants form an appreciable part of the population of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island. The cruel act did one thing effectively: it made Nova Scotia safe for the British cause in the attack that was about to be directed against Canada.

CHAPTER VIII. The Victories Of Montcalm

In France’s last, most determined, and most tragic struggle for North America, the noblest aspect is typified in the figure of Montcalm.

The circle of the King and his mistress at Versailles does not tell the whole story of France at this time. No doubt Madame de Pompadour made and unmade ministers, but behind the ministers was the great administrative system of France, with servants alert and efficient, and now chiefly occupied with military plans to defeat the great Frederick of Prussia. At the same time the intellect of France was busy with problems of science and was soon to express itself in the massive volumes of Diderot’s Encyclopaedia. The soldiers of France were preparing to fight on many battlefields. The best of them took little part in the debilitating pleasures of Versailles.

Louis Joseph, Marquis de Montcalm, was a member of the ancient nobility of Languedoc, in the south of France. He was a scholar, a soldier, and a landowner. He could write a Latin inscription, fight a battle, and manage a farm–all with excellence. His was a fruitful race. His wife had borne him ten children, of whom six had survived. He was sincerely religious, a family man, enjoying quiet evenings at home. In his career, as no doubt in that of many other French leaders of the time, we find no lurid lights, no gay scenes at court–nothing but simple and laborious devotion to duty. Though a grand seigneur, Montcalm was poor. His letters show that his mind was always much occupied with family affairs, the need of economy, the careers of his sons, his mill, his plantations. He showed the minute care in management which the French practise better than the English. In 1756 he was forty-four years of age, a soldier who had campaigned in Germany, Bohemia, and Italy, had known victory and defeat, had been a prisoner in the hands of the Austrians, and had made a reputation as a man fit to lead. He lived far from court and went to Paris only rarely. It was this quiet man who, on January 31, 1756, was summoned to Paris to head the military force about to be sent to Canada. Dieskau was a captive in English hands, and Montcalm was to replace Dieskau.

Thus began that connection of Montcalm with Canada which was destined three or four years later to bring to him first victory and then defeat, death, and undying fame. On receiving his appointment he went to Paris, thanked the King in person for the honor done him, and was delighted that his son, a mere boy, was given the rank and pay of a colonel, one of the few abuses of court favor which we find in his career. On March 26, 1756, Montcalm embarked at Brest with his staff. War had not yet been declared, but already Britain had captured some three hundred French merchant ships, had taken prisoner nearly ten thousand French sailors, and was sweeping from the sea the fleets of France.

Owing to the fear of British cruisers, the voyage of Montcalm had its excitements. As usual, however, France was earlier in the field than Britain, who had in April no force ready for America which could intercept Montcalm. The storms were heavy, and on Easter Day, when Mass was celebrated, a sailor firm on his feet had to hold the chalice for the officiating priest. On board there were daily prayers, and always the service ended with cries of “God save the King!” Some of the officers on board were destined to survive to a new era in France when there should be no more a king.

Montcalm had with him a capable staff and a goodly number of young officers, gay, debonair, thinking not of great political designs about America but chiefly of their own future careers in France, and facing death lightheartedly enough. Next to Montcalm in command was the Chevalier de Uvis, a member of a great French family and himself destined to attain the high rank of Marshal of France, and a capable though not a brilliant soldier, whose chief gift was tact and the art of managing men. Third in command was the Chevalier de Bourlamaque, a quiet, reserved man, with no striking social gifts and in consequence not likely at first to make a good impression, though Montcalm, who was at the beginning a little doubtful of his quality, came in the end to rely upon him fully. The most brilliant man in that company was the young Colonel de Bougainville, Montcalm’s chief aide-de-camp. Though only twenty-seven years old he was already famous in the world of science and was destined to be still more famous as a great navigator, to live through the whole period of the French Revolution, and to die only on the eve of the fall of Napoleon. In 1756 he was too young and clever to be always prudent in speech. It is from his quick eye and eager pen that we learn much of the inner story of these last days of New France. Montcalm discusses frankly in his letters these and other officers, with whom he was on the whole well pleased. In his heart he could echo the words of Bougainville as he watched the brilliant spectacle of the embarkation at Brest: “What a nation is ours! Happy is he who leads and is worthy of it.”

It was in this spirit of confidence that Montcalm faced the struggle in America. For him sad days were to come and his sunny, vivacious, southern temperament caused him to suffer keenly. At first, however, all was full of brilliant promise. So eager was he that, when his ships lay becalmed in the St. Lawrence some thirty miles below Quebec, he landed and drove to the city. It is the most beautiful country in the world, he writes, highly cultivated, with many houses, the peasants living more like the lesser gentry of France than like peasants, and speaking excellent French. He found the hospitality in Quebec such that a Parisian would be surprised at the profusion of good things of every kind. The city was, he thought, like the best type of the cities of France. The Canadian climate was health-giving, the sky clear, the summer not unlike that of Languedoc, but the winter trying, since the severe weather caused the inhabitants to remain too much indoors. He described the Canadian ladies as witty, lively, devout, those of Quebec amusing themselves at play, sometimes for high stakes; those of Montreal, with conversation and dancing. He confessed that one of them proved a little too fascinating for his own peace of mind. The intolerable thing was the need to meet and pay court to the Indians whom the Governor, the Marquis de Vaudreuil, regarded as valuable allies. These savages, brutal, changeable, exacting, Montcalm from the first despised. It filled him with disgust to see them swarming in the streets of Montreal, sometimes carrying bows and arrows, their coarse features worse disfigured by war-paint and a gaudy headdress of feathers, their heads shaven, with the exception of one long scalp-lock, their gleaming bodies nearly naked or draped with dirty buffalo or beaver skins. What allies for a refined grand seigneur of France! It was a costly burden to feed them. Sometimes they made howling demands for brandy and for bouillon, by which they meant human blood. Many of them were cannibals. Once Montcalm had to give some of them, at his own cost, a feast of three oxen roasted whole. To his disgust, they gorged themselves and danced round the room shouting their savage war-cries.

The Governor of Canada, Pierre de Rigaud, Marquis de Vaudreuil, belonged to one of the most ancient families of France, related to that of Levis. He had been born in Canada where his father was Governor for the long period of twenty-two years, from 1703 to 1725, and in his outlook and prejudices he was wholly of New France, with a passionate devotion to its people, and a deep resentment at any airs of superiority assumed by those who came from old France. A certain admiration is due to Vaudreuil for his championship of the Canadians and even of the savages of the land of his birth against officers of his own rank and caste who came from France. There was in Canada the eternal cleavage in outlook and manners between the Old World and the New, which is found in equal strength in New England, and which was one of the chief factors in causing the American Revolution. Vaudreuil, born at Quebec in 1698, had climbed the official ladder step by step until, in 1742, he had been made Governor of Louisiana, a post he held for three years. He succeeded the Marquis Duquesne as Governor of Canada in the year before Montcalm arrived. He meant well but he was a vain man, always a leading figure in the small society about him, and obsessed by a fussy self-importance. He was not clever enough to see through flattery. The Intendant Bigot, next to the Governor the most important man in Canada, an able and corrupt rascal, knew how to manage the Governor and to impose his own will upon the weaker man. Vaudreuil and his wife between them had a swarm of needy relatives in Canada, and these and other Canadians who sought favors from the Governor helped to sharpen his antagonism to the officers from France. Vaudreuil believed himself a military genius. It was he and not Montcalm who had the supreme military command, and he regarded as an unnecessary intruder this general officer sent out from France.

Now that Montcalm was come, Vaudreuil showed a malignant alertness, born of jealousy, to snub and check him. Outward courtesies were, of course, maintained. Vaudreuil could be bland and Montcalm restrained, in spite of his southern temperament, but their dispatches show the bitterness in their relations. The court of France encouraged not merely the leaders but even officers in subordinate posts to communicate to it their views. A voluble correspondence about affairs in Canada has been preserved. Vaudreuil himself must have tried the patience of the French ministers for he wrote at prodigious length, exalting his own achievements to the point of being ludicrous. At the same time he belittled everything done by Montcalm, complained that he was ruining the French cause in America, hinted that he was in league with corrupt elements in Canada, and in the end even went so far as to request his recall in order that the more pliant Levis might be put in his place. The letters of Montcalm are more reserved. Unlike Vaudreuil, he never stooped to falsehood. He knew that he was under the orders of the Governor and he accepted the situation. When operations were on hand, Vaudreuil would give Montcalm instructions so ambiguous that if he failed he would be sure to get the discredit, while, if he succeeded, to Vaudreuil would belong the glory.

War is, at best, a cruel business. In Europe its predatory barbarity was passing away and there the lives of prisoners and of women and children were now being respected. Montcalm had been reared under this more civilized code, and he and his officers were shocked by what Vaudreuil regarded as normal and proper warfare. In 1756 the French had a horde of about two thousand savages, who had flocked to Montreal from points as far distant as the great plains of the West. They numbered more than thirty separate tribes or nations, as in their pride they called themselves, and each nation had to be humored and treated as an equal, for they were not in the service of France but were her allies. They expected to be consulted before plans of campaign were completed. The defeat of Braddock in 1755 had made them turn to the prosperous cause of France. Vaudreuil gave them what they hardly required–encouragement to wage war in their own way. The more brutal and ruthless the war on the English, he said, the more quickly would their enemies desire the kind of peace that France must have. The result was that the western frontiers of the English colonies became a hell of ruthless massacre. The savages attacked English settlements whenever they found them undefended. A pioneer might go forth in the morning to his labor and return in the evening to find his house in ashes and his wife and children lying dead with the scalps torn from their heads as trophies of savage prowess.

For years, until the English gained the upper hand over the French, this awful massacre went on. Hundreds of women and children perished. Vaudreuil reported with pride to the French court the number of scalps taken, and in his annals such incidents were written down as victories, He warned Montcalm that he must not be too strict with the savages or some day they would take themselves off and possibly go over to the English and leave the French without indispensable allies. He complained of the lofty tone of the French regular officers towards both Indians and Canadians, and assured the French court that it was only his own tact which prevented an open breach.

Canada lay exposed to attack by three routes by Lake Ontario, by Lake Champlain, and by the St. Lawrence and the sea. It was vital to control the route to the West by Lake Ontario, vital to keep the English from invading Canada by way of Lake Champlain, vital to guard the St. Lawrence and keep open communications with France. Montcalm first directed his attention to Lake Ontario. Oswego, lying on the south shore, was a fort much prized by the English as a base from which they could attack the French Fort Frontenac on the north side of the lake and cut off Canada from the West. If the English could do this, they would redeem the failure of Braddock and possibly turn the Indians from a French to an English alliance.

The French, in turn, were resolved to capture and destroy Oswego. In the summer of 1756, they were busy drawing up papers and instructions for the attack. Montcalm wrote to his wife that he had never before worked so hard. He kept every one busy, his aide-de-camp, his staff, and his secretaries. No detail was too minute for his observation. He regulated the changes of clothes which the officers might carry with them. He inspected hospitals, stores, and food, and he even ordered an alteration in the method of making bread. He reorganized the Canadian battalions and in every quarter stirred up new activity. He was strict about granting leave of absence. Sometimes his working day endured for twenty hours–to bed at midnight and up again at four o’clock in the morning. He went with Levis to Lake Champlain to see with his own eyes what was going on there. Then he turned back to Montreal. The discipline among the Canadian troops was poor and he stiffened it, thereby naturally causing great offense to those who liked slack ways and hated to take trouble about sanitation and equipment. He held interminable conferences with his Indian allies. They were astonished to find that the great soldier of whom they had heard so much was so small in stature, but they noted the fire in his eye. He despised their methods of warfare and notes with a touch of irony that, while every other barbarity continues, the burning of prisoners at the stake has rather gone out of fashion, though the savages recently burned an English woman and her son merely to keep in practice.

Montcalm made his plans secretly and struck suddenly. In the middle of August, 1756, he surprised and captured Oswego and took more than sixteen hundred prisoners. Of these, in spite of all that he could do, his Indians murdered some. The blow was deadly. The English lost vast stores; and now the French controlled the whole region of the Great Lakes. The Indians were on the side of the rising power more heartily than ever, and the unhappy frontier of the English colonies was so harried that murderous savages ventured almost to the outskirts of Philadelphia. Montcalm caused a Te Deum to be sung on the scene of his victory at Oswego. In August he was back in Montreal where again was sung another joyous Te Deum. He wrote letters in high praise of some of his officers, especially of Bourlamaque, Malartic, and La Pause, the last “un homme divin.” Some of the Canadian officers, praised by Vaudreuil, he had tried and found wanting. “Don’t forget,” he wrote to Levis, “that Mercier is a feeble ignoramus, Saint Luc a prattling boaster, Montigny excellent but a drunkard. The others are not worth speaking of, including my first lieutenant-general Rigaud.” This Rigaud was the brother of Vaudreuil. When the Governor wrote to the minister, he, for his part, said that the success of the expedition was wholly due to his own vigilance and firmness, aided chiefly by this brother, “mon frere,” and Le Mercier, both of whom Montcalm describes as inept. Vaudreuil adds that only his own tact kept the Indian allies from going home because Montcalm would not let them have the plunder which they desired.

Montcalm struck his next blow at the English on Lake Champlain. In July, 1757, he had eight thousand men at Ticonderoga, at the northern end of Lake George. Two thousand of these were savages drawn from more than forty different tribes–a lawless horde whom the French could not control. A Jesuit priest saw a party of them squatting round a fire in the French camp roasting meat on the end of sticks and found that the meat was the flesh of an Englishman. English prisoners, sick with horror, were forced to watch this feast. The priest’s protest was dismissed with anger: the savages would follow their own customs; let the French follow theirs. The truth is that the French had been only too successful in drawing the savages to them as allies. They formed now one- quarter of the whole French army. They were of little use as fighters and probably, in the long run, the French would have been better off without them. If, however, Montcalm had caused them to go, Vaudreuil would have made frantic protests, so that Montcalm accepted the necessity of such allies.

Each success, however, brought some new horrors at the hands of the Indians. Montcalm captured Fort William Henry, at the southern end of Lake George, in August, a year after the taking of Oswego. Fort William Henry was the most advanced English post in the direction of Canada. The place had been left weak, for the Earl of Loudoun, Commander-in-Chief of the British forces in America, was using his resources for an expedition against Louisbourg, which wholly failed. Colonel Monro, the brave officer in command at Fort William Henry, made a strong defense, but was forced to surrender. The terms were that he should march out with his soldiers and the civilians of the place, and should be escorted in safety to Fort Edward, about eighteen miles to the south. This time the savages surpassed themselves in treachery and savagery. They had formally approved of the terms of surrender, but they attacked the long line of defeated English as they set out on the march, butchered some of their wounded, and seized hundreds of others as prisoners. Montcalm did what he could and even risked his life to check the savages. But some fifty English lay dead and the whole savage horde decamped for Montreal carrying with them two hundred prisoners.

Montcalm burned Fort William Henry and withdrew to Ticonderoga at the north end of the lake. Why, asked Vaudreuil, had he not advanced further south into English territory, taken Fort Edward–weak, because the English were in a panic–menaced Albany itself, and advanced even to New York? Montcalm’s answer was that Fort Edward was still strong, that he had no transport except the backs of his men to take cannon eighteen miles by land in order to batter its walls, and that his Indians had left him. Moreover, he had been instructed to hasten his operations and allow his Canadians to go home to gather the ripening harvest so that Canada might not starve during the coming winter. Vaudreuil pressed at the French court his charges against Montcalm and without doubt produced some effect. French tact was never exhibited with more grace than in the letters which Montcalm received from his superiors in France, urging upon him with suave courtesy the need of considering the sensitive pride of the colonial forces and of guiding with a light rein the barbaric might of the Indian allies. It is hard to imagine an English Secretary of State administering a rebuke so gently and yet so unmistakably. Montcalm well understood what was meant. He knew that some intrigue had been working at court but he did not suspect that the Governor himself, all blandness and compliments to his face, was writing to Paris voluminous attacks on his character and conduct.

In the next summer (1758) Montcalm won another great success. He lay with his forces at Ticonderoga. The English were determined to press into the heart of Canada by way of Lake Champlain. All through the winter, after the fall of Fort William Henry, they had been making preparations on a great scale at Albany. By this time Amherst and Wolfe were on the scene in America, and they spent this summer in an attack on Louisbourg which resulted in the fall of the fortress. On the old fighting ground of Lake Champlain and Lake George, the English were this year making military efforts such as the Canadian frontier had never before seen. William Pitt, who now directed the war from London, had demanded that the colonies should raise twenty thousand men, a number well fitted to dismay the timid legislators of New York and Pennsylvania. At Albany fifteen thousand men came marching in by detachments–a few of them regulars, but most of them colonial militia who, as soon as winter came on, would scatter to their homes. The leader was General Abercromby–a leader, needless to say, with good connections in England, but with no other qualification for high command.

On July 5, 1758, there was a sight on Lake George likely to cause a flutter of anxiety in the heart of Montcalm at Ticonderoga. In a line of boats, six miles long, the great English host came down the lake and, early on the morning of the sixth, landed before the fort which Montcalm was to defend. The soul of the army had been a brilliant young officer, Lord Howe, who shared the hardships of the men, washed his own linen at the brook, and was the real leader trusted by the inept Abercromby. It was a tragic disaster for the British that at the outset of the fight Howe was killed in a chance skirmish. Montcalm’s chief defense of Ticonderoga consisted in a felled forest. He had cut down hundreds of trees and, on high ground in front of the fort, made a formidable abbatis across which the English must advance. Abercromby had four men to one of Montcalm. Artillery would have knocked a passage through the trunks of the trees which formed the abbatis. Abercromby, however, did not wait to bring up artillery. He was confident that his huge force could beat down opposition by a rapid attack, and he made the attack with all courage and persistence. But the troops could not work through the thicket of fallen trunks and, as night came on, they had to withdraw baffled. Next day Lake George saw another strange spectacle–a British army of thirteen thousand men, the finest ever seen hitherto in America, retreating in a panic, with no enemy in pursuit. Nearly two thousand English had fallen, while Montcalm’s loss was less than four hundred. He planted a great cross on the scene of the fight with an inscription in Latin that it was God who had wrought the victory. All Canada had a brief period of rejoicing before the gloom of final defeat settled down upon the country.

CHAPTER IX. Montcalm At Quebec

The rejoicing in Canada was brief. Before the end of the year the British were victorious at both the eastern and western ends of the long battle-line. Louisbourg had fallen in July; Fort Duquesne, in November. Fort Frontenac–giving command of Lake Ontario and, with it, the West–had surrendered to Bradstreet in August just after Montcalm’s victory at Ticonderoga. The Ohio was