The Conquest of New France

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fforts 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

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 Céloron, 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

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. Céloron spoke in the name of the

d 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 w

ey 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 Céloron dared the lordship of the King of France and his love for his forest children. Céloron realized that he was on an historic miss

re 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 o

1753 we find him in command of the French forces in the Ohio country. Céloron had been sent to Detroit. If Saint-Pierre had played his part feebly on the Saskatchewan, he was now made for a brief period on

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 b

re 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

times 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

y 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 wer

ada. 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 Wa

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 sta

ardly 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 m

ondon, 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 bene

ound 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. Th

, 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 Indian

h 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 l

nter came on, he broke up his camp and sent his men to their homes. The colonies had no permanent military equipment.

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 th