lost heavily. Though the English, led by Sir
Hovenden Walker, made in 1711 an effort to take Quebec which proved
abortive, they seized Nova Scotia; and when the treaty of Utrecht was
made in 1713, France admitted defeat in America by yielding to Britain
her claims to Hudson Bay, Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. But she still
held the shores of the St Lawrence, and she retained, too, the island of
Cape Breton to command its mouth. There she built speedily the fortress
of Louisbourg, and prepared once more to challenge British supremacy in
America. With a sound instinct that looked to future greatness, France
still aimed, more and more, at the control of the interior of the
Continent. The danger from the Iroquois on Lake Ontario had long cut her
off from the most direct access to the West, and from the occupation of
the Ohio valley leading to the Mississippi, but now free from this
savage scourge she could go where she would. In 1701 she founded
Detroit, commanding the route from Lake Erie to Lake Huron. Her
missionaries and leaders were already at Sault Ste Marie commanding the
approach to Lake Superior, and at Michilimackinac commanding that to
Lake Michigan. They had also penetrated to what is now the Canadian
West, and it was a French Canadian, La Verendrye, who, by the route
leading past the point where now stands the city of Winnipeg, pressed
on into the far West until in 1743, first recorded of white men, he came
in sight of the Rocky Mountains. In the south of the continent France
also crowned La Salle's work by founding early in the 18th century New
Orleans at the mouth of the Mississippi. It was a far cry from New
Orleans to Quebec. If France could link them by a chain of settlements
and shut in the English to their narrow strip of Atlantic seaboard there
was good promise that North America would be hers.

The project was far-reaching, but France could do little to make it
effective. Louis XV. allowed her navy to decline and her people showed
little inclination for emigration to the colonies. In 1744, when the war
of the Austrian Succession broke out, the New England colonies planned
and in 1745 effected the capture of Louisbourg, the stronghold of France
in Cape Breton Island, which menaced their commerce. But to their
disgust, when the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle was made in 1748, this
conquest was handed back to France. She continued her work of building a
line of forts on the great lakes--on the river Niagara, on t