Frontenac) and at Niagara, to cut off the English from the northwest trade.

The Iroquois country was another field of rivalry. These tribes, dependent on the English at Albany for goods, were jealous of their position as middlemen between New York and the western Indians. In 1680, encouraged by the English, they began a war on the Illinois tribes to break up their traffic with the French. On the other hand, Jesuit missionaries won considerable influence over the Iroquois. The English considered the Jesuits as political agents of the French government, and tried to supplant them with English priests. In 1684 Governor Dongan obtained the acknowledgment by chiefs of the League of the dependence of the Iroquois upon the government of New York, and took them under its protection. Thereafter hostile encounters between the Canadians and Iroquois tended to embroil the English and French governments.

While Anglo-French relations from Hudson Bay to the Mississippi mouth were thus tending towards armed conflict, the spark which brought war was lighted in Europe. William of Orange, whom the Revolution of 1688 brought to the English throne, was already the chief enemy of the French King, Louis XIV, having led in the formation of an alliance to check his projects of expansion towards the Rhine. The pleadings of the exiled Stuarts added to the old enmity embroiled Louis with England in the first of a series of wars which ended only with the overthrow of Napoleon at the battle of Waterloo in 1815.

In 1689, when "King William's War," as it was called in America, began, wide stretches of wilderness separated the settlements in Canada from the English even in New York and New England where the frontiers were nearest. In America, therefore, the war was not fought by armies drawn up in battle array after the European manner, but on the French side consisted chiefly of a series of forays against the English settlements by parties of Indians led by a few whites. These raids fell first upon outlying towns in New Hampshire and Maine. Early in 1690 came an attack on Schenectady, in the Mohawk Valley. It was fortified, as was usual on the frontier, with a palisade of logs set upright, the lower ends planted in the ground. Taken by surprise, it was burned and most of the inhabitants slaughtered or captured.

On the other side, Connecticut and New York troops attacked Montreal, and a naval expedition from Massachusetts captured Port Royal. The war was ended, without permanent results for either participant, by the Peace of Ryswick, in 1697.

Only five years elapsed before hostilities began afresh. "Queen Anne's War," as the War of the Spanish Succession was called in America, like its predecessor, found its chief causes in Europe. It was waged to preserve the balance of power, England, Austria, and Holland joining to prevent the virtual union, as they feared, of France and Spain through the accession of a French prince to the Spanish throne.

In America the fighting was of much the same kind as in King William's War. In the end the Bourbon prince retained the throne of Spain, but at the price of great concessions in the Peace of Utrecht (1713-1714). Besides other changes in the political map of Europe, Gibraltar went to England. It was at this time. that Spain consented to the Asiento contract (see page 78). France yielded Newfoundland, Nova Scotia (conquered by New England militia in 1710), and the Hudson Bay Territory, and recognized the British protectorate over the Iroquois.

Unfortunately the treaty did not define the boundary of Nova Scotia, and although peace prevailed between the two countries for more than thirty years after Utrecht, quarrels and hostile encounters continued along the disputed border.

After Queen Anne's War the rivalry of France and England became world wide and made new conflicts inevitable. Each had its chartered company seeking to control the commerce of the Far East. On the Guinea coast the rival traders competed for the commerce in gold and negroes, with the advantage on the side of the English because of the Asiento contract; while the dim forest glades of America witnessed many a dark encounter the story of which has never been told.

England avoided war because of the close relations between France and Spain. The ties of kinship between the rulers formed the basis of a defensive agreement known as the "family compact" (1733). This was but one of a complicated system of alliances which made it more and more difficult for any two European countries to go to war without involving others. In fact, the next armed conflict between France and England took

place during the general War of the Austrian Succession, 17441748 ("King George's War" in America), which owed its inception to causes quite apart from their own enmities.

During the long peace after 1714 France built the strong fortress of Louisburg on Cape Breton Island, commanding the approaches to the St. Lawrence, guarding her interests in the fisheries, and encouraging the Acadians, now British subjects, to remember their former allegiance. When war broke out in 1744 this stronghold became a shelter for privateers and a base for possible expeditions against the British colonies. Its reduction therefore became a prime object in New England. Governor William Shirley of Massachusetts took the lead in organizing an expedition which with some aid from the British navy succeeded in taking Louisburg in 1745. Shirley would have followed up this success by an attempt at the conquest of Canada, but the British government gave him no encouragement, and the remainder of the war, so far as it concerned America, was a repetition of the old dismal story of Indian raids against the northern frontier.

To offset the success of the British, the French gained a position in the Low Countries so menacing to England that at the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748) she purchased the evacuation of the Netherlands by restoring Louisburg, to the great dissatisfaction of the Americans.

THE FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR

The peace of Aix-la-Chapelle left unsettled the old dispute over the Acadian boundary and did nothing to remove the causes of rivalry in the Mississippi Valley. Even while the peace commissioners were still disputing, the shadow of a new war fell across the upper waters of the Ohio. English land speculators as well as fur traders were now becoming active west of the mountains, seeking control of choice locations in anticipation of the coming of the settlers. In 1749 a group of Virginia gentlemen, in association with several prominent Englishmen, organized The Ohio Land Company, and sought for it a grant of a half million acres on the Ohio river, below the "forks." The next year they sent Christopher Gist to

spy out the

land." These plans were the cause of special alarm to the French. Hence the governor of Canada dispatched a party under Céleron de Blainville (1749) from Lake Erie to the Alleghany River and thence down the Ohio, to assert the French claim. At the Miami River the expedition turned north, crossing to the Maumee and returning to Canada by way of Detroit. They found the Indians friendly to the British, with whom their

trade was large, and saw that vigorous action was needed to hold the country against the English advance. Céleron's expedition was therefore followed by an attack (1752) by Indians under French control upon an Indian town on the Miami River (Pickawilliny) which was a center of British influence, and by the building of forts at Presqu'ile and on French Creek, as the first of a chain intended to bar the English from the Ohio country. The year 1753 found the people of two nations engaged in a race for possession of the same territory, each determined to repel the other's encroachments upon its "undoubted limits." It was under these circumstances that Lieutenant-Governor

Robert Dinwiddie of Virginia decided to send George Washington with a formal message to the French commandant on French Creek demanding the withdrawal of the French as trespassers. Washington, then a young man of twenty-two, was already familiar with life in the wilderness through experience as a surveyor on the Virginia frontier.

The reply to the British demand was a polite refusal. It was followed by the building of Fort Duquesne at the forks of the Ohio, the key to the entire Ohio Valley. Meeting this challenge, the Virginia government sent Washington a second time with a force to drive out the intruders if they would not go peaceably. While still some distance from Fort Duquesne, Washington learned through scouts of the approach of an armed party with hostile intent, as he supposed. He surprised and defeated it, thus shedding the first blood in the new war; but a few days later, pressed by a superior force, he was compelled to surrender. The enemy was left in possession of the disputed country.

These events in the American backwoods involved Europe in another general conflict, the French and Indian War (in Europe called the Seven Years' War). England would gladly have confined the struggle to the western hemisphere; she withheld a declaration of war until France attacked her Mediterranean island of Minorca (1756), which enabled her to represent her enemy as the aggressor and thus to keep Spain neutral during the first years of strife.

In the campaign of 1755 the chief objective of the English was the recovery of the forks of the Ohio. General Edward Braddock was sent from England to command the combined force of regulars and colonial troops collected for this purpose. The two elements of the army did not harmonize. Colonial officers of the highest grade were ranked with British captains and jealousy destroyed the morale of the forces. American tactics, learned in the school of experience, in combat with savage foes in the woods, differed radically from those of the open battle-fields of Europe. The discord, combined with Braddock's tactless disregard of advice and inadaptability to his new surroundings, led to disaster. After a toilsome march across the mountains, as the army neared its destination, it fell into an ambush. From the shelter of the forest the unseen foe fired upon the regulars,