sion of the trade with the Algonquins
of the Northwest, the English had an economic advantage in competing for
this trade in the fact that Albany traders, whose situation enabled them
to import their goods more easily than Montreal traders could, and who
were burdened with fewer governmental restrictions, were able to pay
fifty per cent more for beaver and give better goods. French traders
frequently received their supplies from Albany, a practice against which
the English authorities legislated in 1720; and the _coureurs de bois_
smuggled their furs to the same place.[37] As early as 1666 Talon
proposed that the king of France should purchase New York, "whereby he
would have two entrances to Canada and by which he would give to the
French all the peltries of the north, of which the English share the
profit by the communication which they have with the Iroquois by
Manhattan and Orange."[38] It is a characteristic of the fur trade that
it continually recedes from the original center, and so it happened that
the English traders before long attempted to work their way into the
Illinois country.[39] The wars between the French and English and
Iroquois must be read in the light of this fact. At the outbreak of the
last French and Indian war, however, it was rather Pennsylvania and
Virginia traders who visited the Ohio Valley. It is said that some three
hundred of them came over the mountains yearly, following the
Susquehanna and the Juniata and the headwaters of the Potomac to the
tributaries of the Ohio, and visiting with their pack-horses the Indian
villages along the valley. The center of the English trade was
Pickawillani on the Great Miami. In 1749 Celoron de Bienville, who had
been sent out to vindicate French authority in the valley, reported that
each village along the Ohio and its branches "has one or more English
traders, and each of these has hired men to carry his furs."[40]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 32: New York Colonial Documents, I., 181, 389, Sec.7.]

[Footnote 33: _Ibid._ 182; Collection de manuscrits relatifs a la
Nouvelle-France, I., 254; Radisson, 93.]

[Footnote 34: Parkman, Jesuits in North America; Radisson; Margry,
Decouvertes et Etablissemens, etc., IV., 586-598; Tailhan, Nicholas
Perrot.]

[Footnote 35: Morgan, League of the Iroquois.]

[Footnote 36: N.Y. Col. Docs., IX., 408-9; V., 687, 726; Histoire et
Commerce des Colonies Angloises, 154.]

[Footnote 37: N.Y. Col. Docs., III., 471, 474; IX.,