miles of untrodden wilderness lay between the extremes of this boundless domain, and the French knew that to hold it something more than merely claiming it must be done. They began, therefore, the erection of a chain of forts, or military posts. They built forts at Niagara, Detroit, and other points, to guard the great lakes, and they even encroached on the soil of New York and built a fort at Crown Point. In the Illinois country they founded Vincennes and Kaskaskia, and pushed farther southward, while from the Gulf of Mexico they moved northward, establishing one post after another, until by the middle of the eighteenth century there were more than sixty forts between Montreal and New Orleans. France now claimed all of North America from Mexico and Florida to the Arctic Ocean, except the Hudson Bay region and the narrow English margin on the east between the mountains and the sea; and it must have seemed to human eyes that the future development of the continent must be modeled after the Latin civilization rather than the Anglo-Saxon. But a great struggle was yet to determine the trend of American civilization. Before treating of that, however, we must take note of another preliminary skirmish, known in our history as

KING GEORGE'S WAR (1744-1748)

This war, known by the above name in America, was but the faint glimmer of the dreadful conflagration that swept over Europe at this time under the name of the War of the Austrian Succession. On the death of Charles VI, emperor of Austria, in 1740, the male line of the House of Hapsburg became extinct, and his eldest daughter, Maria Theresa, ascended the Austrian throne. But there were other claimants, and the matter brought on a war of tremendous dimensions, embroiling nearly all the nations of Europe. Again we find France and England on opposite sides, war being declared between them in the spring of 1744. Of this great war we have little to record here, as little of it occurred in America. Aside from the usual Indian massacres, but one great event marks King George's War the capture of Louisburg.

Louisburg, as we have noticed, was built on a point of land on Cape Breton Island; it commanded the chief entrance to the greatest of American rivers, except only the "Father of Waters." It was a powerful fortress; it had cost six million dollars, and was twenty years in building. Its walls of solid masonry, from which frowned

a hundred cannon, were from twenty to thirty feet high, and their circumference was two and a half miles. The fort was the pride of the French heart in America. It was looked upon as an impregnable fortress, that would keep out every intruder and baffle every foe; yet it was reduced and captured by a fleet of little fighting strength, bearing a few thousand soldiers, chiefly New England farmers and fishermen.

The father of the Louisburg expedition was William Shirley, governor of Massachusetts, and William Pepperell of Maine was made its commander. New England furnished the men, while Pennsylvania sent some provisions, and New York a small amount of artillery. The fleet was composed of something over a hundred vessels of various grades, and just before sailing these were joined by four English men-of-war from the West Indies, commanded by Commodore Warren. On the first day of May, 1745, this motley fleet came under the walls of Louisburg. A landing was soon made, and the "men flew to shore like eagles to their quarry." Every effort of the French to drive them back was foiled. The artillery was managed by the master engineer, Richard Gridley of Boston, who was to figure in the same capacity in two far greater wars. The siege continued for six weeks, when a French war vessel of sixty-four guns, laden with military stores, came to the rescue of the fort; but she was captured by the English fleet in open Capture of view of the helpless besieged in the fort. This was the Louisburg, final stroke. The garrison could hold out no longer. 1745. On the 17th of June the fort and batteries were surrendered, and the British flag soon waved over the walls of Louisburg.

The French king was astonished at the fall of his great fortress in America, and determined to recapture it. He sent D'Annville with a fleet for the purpose, but D'Annville died, and his successor committed suicide, and the project came to naught. The next year the king sent another fleet, but it was captured by the English; and then came the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle.

The peace, as arranged at Aix-la-Chapelle, restored to each power what it had possessed before the war save the great sacrifice of life and treasure - and that meant that Louisburg Treaty of Aixmust be restored to the French. A wave of indignation la-Chapelle, swept over the English colonies when they learned that the fruit of their great victory had been quietly handed back, without their knowledge or consent, to the enemy from whom it had

1748.

been taken; and here we find one of the many remote causes that led the colonists in later years to determine that American affairs must be managed in America and not by a corps of diplomats three thousand miles across the sea, who had little interest in the welfare and future of their kindred in the New World.'

1 But the English looked at the matter from a different standpoint. Chalmers complains bitterly (Vol. II, p. 253) that England in this war had lost her reputation and had expended £30,000,000 on which she must pay interest - all for the colonists, who had lost nothing, and who ungratefully continued to defraud the mother country by smuggling. He neglects to state that most of this expenditure took place in Europe and had no connection with American affairs.

CHAPTER IX

THE FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR

THE Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle of 1748, like its predecessors at Ryswick and Utrecht, failed to settle the vital question between the rival claimants of North America. A commission of two Englishmen and two Frenchmen sat in Paris for many months after this treaty was signed, endeavoring to adjust the French-English boundaries in America; but they labored in vain.

The first subject in dispute was the bounds of Acadia. The Treaty of Utrecht ceded it to England without defining its bounds, and thus planted the seeds of future quarrels. The French now contended that Acadia comprised only the peninsula of Nova Scotia, while the English claimed that the bounds formerly given to it by the French must now be adhered to. By these bounds the vast territory comprising northern Maine, New Brunswick, and a great portion of the St. Lawrence Valley were included in Acadia. While this question was pending, a more important and immediate one came up for solution, namely, the ownership of the Ohio Valley.

This valley of the "Beautiful River" was a princely domain. It extended southward from Lake Erie and westward from

Valley.

the base of the Alleghany Mountains, comprising an end- The Ohio less succession of hills and valleys, watered by innumerable crystal streams, and stretching on and on until it merged at length into the greater valley of the Mississippi. The French claimed this vast region as a part of the great basin of the Mississippi discovered by Marquette and La Salle, and now secured by a cordon of forts from Canada to the sunny climate of the Gulf of Mexico. The English claimed it on two grounds, both of which were as shadowy as the claims of the French: first, the early charters of Virginia and of other colonies (based on the Cabot discoveries) which covered the unknown regions westward to the equally unknown "South Sea"; and second, the claims of the Iroquois. The Iroquois had been acknowledged British subjects by the Treaty of Utrecht, and their lands were therefore British territory, and their conquests were considered

British conquests. Roving bands of these Indians had, at various times, traversed this western country, and had here and there driven off the natives or gained some trivial victory; and the English now claimed many thousands of square miles in consequence of these "conquests." They "laid claim to every mountain, forest, or prairie where an Iroquois had taken a scalp."1

The claims of both nations were extravagant in the extreme. If the French had had their way, the English would have been confined to the narrow space between the crest of the Alleghanies and the Atlantic. If the English boundaries had been accepted, the French would have been hemmed within a small portion of Canada, north of the river St. Lawrence.

Both nations were now moving to occupy the Ohio Valley. The governor of Canada sent Céloron de Bienville, who, with a company of Canadians and Indians, floated down the Allegheny and Ohio rivers, and took formal possession in the name of his king. At the mouth of a river flowing into the Ohio, he would choose a large tree and nail to it a tin plate bearing the arms of France, while at its root he would bury a leaden plate inscribed with the statement that the country belonged to France. This was done at many places along the Ohio.2

Bienville, 1749.

During this same year, 1749, the English made a far more rational and tangible move toward securing the coveted territory. The Ohio Company was formed; it was composed of a few wealthy Virginians, to whom King George II granted five hundred thousand acres of land free of rent for ten years, between the Monongahela and Kanawha rivers, on condition that they plant one hundred families and maintain a fort in their new possessions. A little later the French made an important move. They built a fort at Presque Isle, where Erie now stands, Fort Le Bouf, twenty miles from this, and Venango, on the site of the city of Franklin, Pennsylvania. This action alarmed Governor Dinwiddie of Virginia, as Virginia claimed the whole of the Allegheny Valley by right of her charter of 1609. The governor, therefore, determined to make a formal protest against the occupation of this territory by

1 Parkman, "Montcalm and Wolfe," Vol. I, p. 125.

2 The plate buried at the mouth of the Muskingum was found half a century later by some boys while bathing. Part of it was melted into bullets, and the remainder is now in the cabinet of the American Antiquarian Society. The plate buried at the mouth of the Kanawha was unearthed by floods, and was found by a boy in 1846, ninety-seven years after it had been buried. Ibid., p. 48.