, and
lived along the Delaware River and its tributaries. But early in the
seventeenth century they had been reduced to vassalage by the Five
Nations, had been forbidden to carry arms, and had been forced to take
the name of Women.[1]

[Footnote 1: Read Parkman's _Conspiracy of Pontiac_, Vol. I., pp. 30-32,
80-82.]

When the Dutch and Swedes began their settlements on the South River,
and when Penn, in 1683, made a treaty with the Delawares, the settlers
had to deal with peaceful Indians. No horrid wars mark the early history
of Pennsylvania.

%70. The Powhatans in Virginia.%--Much the same may be said of the
Virginia tribes. They were far from friendly, and had they been as
fierce and warlike as the northern tribes, neither the skill of John
Smith, nor the marriage of Pocahontas (the daughter of Powhatan) with
John Rolfe, nor fear of the English muskets, would have saved Jamestown.

[Illustration: Powhatan Indians at work[1]]

[Footnote 1: From a model.]

On the other hand, the destruction of the tribes in New England and the
feud between the French and the Iroquois saved New England. For the time
had now come for the opening of the long struggle between the French and
the English for the ownership of the continent.

SUMMARY

1. The inhabitants of the New World at the time of its discovery, by
mistake called Indians, were barbarians, lived in rude, frail houses,
and used weapons and implements inferior to those of the whites.

2. The Indian tribes of eastern North America are mostly divided into
three great groups: Muskhogean, Iroquoian, and Algonquian.

3. In general, the French made the Indians their friends, while the
English drove them westward and treated them as an inferior race.

[Illustration: THE BRITISH COLONIES AND EUROPEAN POSSESSIONS 1733]

CHAPTER VIII

THE STRUGGLE FOR NEW FRANCE AND LOUISIANA

%71. Louisiana, or the Mississippi Basin.%--The landing of La Salle
on the coast of Texas, and the building of Fort St. Louis of Texas, gave
the French a claim to the coast as far southward as a point halfway
between the fort and the nearest Spanish settlement, in Mexico. At that
point was the Rio Grande, a good natural boundary. On the French maps,
therefore, Louisiana extended from the Rocky Mountains and the Rio
Grande on the west, to the Alleghany Mountains on the east, and from the
Gulf of Mexico on the south, to New France on the north. This confined
the English colonies to a narr