became the wives, of the Frenchmen. Much was expected of
this mingling of races. It was supposed that the Indian would be won
over to civilization and Christianity. But the Frenchmen were won over
to the Indians, and adopted Indian ways of life. They lived in wigwams,
wore Indian dress, decorated their long hair with eagle feathers, and
made their faces hideous with vermilion, ocher, and soot.

%64. Coureurs de Bois.%--There soon grew up in this way a class of
half-civilized vagrants, who ranged the woods in true Indian style, and
gained a living by guiding the canoes of fur traders along the rivers
and lakes of the interior. Stimulated by the profits of the fur trade,
these men pushed their traffic to the most distant tribes, spreading
French guns, French hatchets, beads, cloth, tobacco and brandy, and
French influence over the whole Northwest. Where the trader and the
_coureur de bois_ went, the priest and the soldier followed, and soon
mission houses and forts were established at all the chief passes and
places suited to control the Indian trade.

%65. The English and the Indians.%--How, meantime, did the English
act toward the Indians? In the first place, nothing led them to form
close relationship with the tribes. The fur trade--the source of
Canadian prosperity--and the zeal of priests eager for the conversion of
the heathen, which sent the traders, the _coureurs de bois_, and the
priests from tribe to tribe and from the Atlantic halfway to the
Pacific, did not appeal to the English colonists. Farming and commerce
were the sources of their wealth. Their priests and missionaries were
content to labor with the Indians near at hand.

In the second place, the policy of the French towards the Indians, while
founded on trade, was directed by one central government. The policy of
the English was directed by each colony, and was of as many kinds as
there were colonies. No English frontier exhibited such a mingling of
white men and red as was common wherever the French went. Among the
English there were fur traders, but no _coureurs de bois_. Scorn on the
one side and hatred on the other generally marked the intercourse
between the English and the Indians. One bright exception must indeed be
made. Penn was a broad-minded lover of his kind, a man of most
enlightened views on government and human rights; and in the colony
planted by him there was made a serious effort to treat the Indian as an
equal. But the day came when