CHAPTER VIII.

ENGLAND AND FRANCE IN AMERICA

WORKING upward from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the source of this and of the Mississippi, and then down the latter river, Franciscans and Jesuits their pioneers, braving dreadful hardships and dangers in efforts, more courageous than successful, to convert the Indians, the French had come to control that great continental highway and boldly to claim for France the entire heart of North America.

In 1659, Groseilliers and Radisson penetrated beyond Lake Superior, and dwelt for a time among the Sioux, who knew of the Mississippi River. Next year Groseilliers went thither again, accompanied by the Jesuit Menard and his servant, Guérin. In 1661 Menard and Guérin pushed into what is now Wisconsin, and may have seen the Mississippi. These explorations made the French familiar with the copper mines of Lake Superior, and awakened the utmost zeal to see the Great River of which the Indians spoke. La Salle probably discovered the Ohio in 1670, and traced it down to the falls at Louisville. His main eulogist holds that he even reached the Mississippi at that time, some three years earlier than

Joliet, but this is not substantiated. We also reject the belief that he reached the stream by way of the Chicago portage in 1671.

In 1672 Count Frontenac, Governor of New France, despatched Louis Joliet to discover the Great River. He reached the Strait of Mackinaw in December, and there Père Marquette joined him. In May, next year, they paddled their canoes up the Fox River and tugged them across the portage into the Wisconsin, which they descended, entering the Father of Waters June 17, 1673. They floated down to the mouth of the Arkansas and then returned, their journey back being up the Illinois and Desplaines Rivers. Joliet gave his name to the peak on the latter stream which the city of Joliet, Ill., near by, still retains. Joliet arrived at Quebec in August, 1674, having in four months journeyed over twenty-five hundred miles.

It thus became known how close the upper waters of the great rivers, St. Lawrence and Mississippi, were to each other, and that the latter emptied into the Gulf of Mexico instead of the South Sea (Pacific); yet, as the Rocky Mountains had not then been discovered, it was for long believed that some of the western tributaries of the Great River led to that western ocean.

In 1676 Raudin, and three years later, Du Lhut, visited the Ojibwas and Sioux west of Lake Superior. Du Lhut reached the upper waters of the Mississippi at Sandy Lake. He went there again in 1680. In 1682 La Salle crossed the Chicago portage and explored the lower Mississippi

all the way to the Gulf, taking possession of the entire valley in the name of France and naming it Louisiana. Nicholas Perrot travelled by way of the Fox and Wisconsin Rivers to the upper Mississippi in 1685, and again in 1688. It is in his writings that the word "Chicago" first appears in literature.

There were thus between the two great valleys, 1, the Superior route; 2, the Wisconsin and Fox route; 3, the Illinois River route, whether by the Kankakee, La Salle's way, or by the south branch of the Chicago River, Joliet's way; and 4, the route by the Wabash and Ohio. The Wabash, too, could be approached either from Lake Erie or from Lake Michigan, through St. Joseph's River. At high water, canoes often passed from Lake Michigan into the Mississippi without portage.

La Salle had the ambition to get to the South Sea from the Mississippi. Governor De la Barre, who followed Frontenac, opposing him, he repaired to France, where he succeeded in winning Louis XIV. to his plan. At the head of a wellequipped fleet he sailed for the mouth of the Mississippi, reaching land near Matagorda Bay on the first day of the year 1685. Not finding the Mississippi, La Salle's officers mutinied. The expedition broke up into parties, wandering here and there, distressed by Indian attacks and by treachery among themselves. La Salle was shot by his own men. Nearly all his followers perished, but a small party at last discovered the river and ascended it to Fort St. Louis on the Illinois, reach

ing France via Quebec. In this expedition France took possession of Texas, nor did she ever relinquish the claim till, in 1763, the whole of Louisiana west of the Mississippi was ceded to Spain. La Salle's ill-starred attempt led later to the planting of French colonies by D'Iberville at Biloxi Island, in Mobile Bay, soon abandoned, and at Poverty Point, on the Mississippi; and still later to the settlement of New Orleans and vicinity. Growth in these parts was slow, however. So late as 1713 there were not over three hundred whites in the entire Mississippi Valley.

By this time French traders had set foot on every shore of the great lakes and explored nearly every stream tributary thereto. The English, pushing westward more and more, were trying to divide with them the lucrative business of furtrading, and each nation sought to win to itself all the Indians it could. The Mohawks and their confederates of the Five Nations, now equipped and acquainted with fire-arms, spite of alternate overtures and threats from the French, remained firm friends to the English, who more and more invaded those vast and fertile western ranges. grew to be the great question of the age this side. the Atlantic, whether England or France should control the continent. King William's war, declared in 1689, was therefore certain to rage in America as well as in Europe.

It

One sees by a glance at the map what advantage France had in this struggle. It possessed the best fishing grounds and fur-producing districts, and fish and furs were at first the only exports of

value from the north of America. The French, too, held all the water-ways to the heart of the continent. Coming up Lake Champlain they could threaten New York and New England from the rear. The colonies farther south they shut in almost as straitly, French bullets whistling about any Englishman's ears the instant he appeared beyond the mountains.

In other respects England had the advantage. In population English America had become as superior as French America was territorially, having 1,116,000 white inhabitants in 1750, to about 80,000 French. The English colonies were also more convenient to the mother-country, and the better situated for commerce both coastwise and across the ocean. Among the English, temper for mere speculation and adventure decayed very early, giving way to the conviction that successful planting depended wholly upon persistent, energetic toil.

A piece of fortune more important yet was their relatively free religious and political system. Toleration in religion was large. Self-government was nearly complete internally, and indeed externally, till the navigation acts. Canada, on the other hand, was oppressed by a feudal constitution in the state, settlers being denied the fee simple of their lands, and by Jesuits in Church. "New France could not grow," says Parkman, "with a priest on guard at the gate to let in none but such as pleased him. In making Canada a citadel of the state religion, the clerical monitors of the crown robbed their country of a transatlantic empire." Thus the Hu