to the St. Lawrence and the Lakes
by the water-ways and woodland valleys of the continent. The French,
resenting this intrusion, began to erect a series of forts to mark the
boundaries of their possessions and conserve the inland fur trade.

Already, in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the first scene in the opening
drama had been enacted at Louisburg. This stronghold in Cape Breton,
which guarded the marine highway to New France, had surrendered in 1745
to the forces of England and her colonial levies on the Atlantic. French
pride was hurt at this disaster and the loss of the important naval
station in the gulf. To recover the lost prestige, Count de la
Galissoniere was sent as governor to Canada. This nobleman's extravagant
assumptions of the extent of the territorial possessions of New France,
however, offended the English colonists and roused the jealousy of many
of the Indian tribes. Nor was this feeling allayed when France, by the
Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, recovered Louisburg, and when her boundary
commissioners claimed all the country north of the Bay of Fundy as not
having been ceded to England by the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), the
inevitable result followed; hostilities between the two nations were
precipitated in the valley of the Ohio by the persistent encroachment of
the English.

English successes in other parts of the continent in some measure atoned
for Braddock's defeat. Beausejour fell before an expeditionary force
sent out from Massachusetts, while Dieskau was routed and made a
prisoner near Lake George by Colonel (afterward Sir William) Johnson, in
command of the colonial militia and a band of Mohawk warriors.

The command of the expedition against Beausejour, in the Acadian
isthmus, to which the French still laid claim, had been given to Colonel
Monckton, who, in the spring of 1755, sailed from Boston with forty-one
vessels and two thousand men. Ill-manned by a few hundred refugees and a
small body of soldiers it soon capitulated and was renamed Fort
Cumberland. The Acadian peasants, on the beautiful shores of the Bay of
Fundy, Canadian historians tell us, "were a simple, virtuous, and
prosperous community," though other writers give them less favorable
character, speaking of them as turbulent, aggressive, and meddlesome.
With remarkable industry they had reclaimed from the sea by dikes many
thousand of fertile acres, which produced abundant crops of grain and
orchard fruits; and on the sea meadows at one