ranger or French
partisan leader. Indians lounged about the fort, the stores, and the
houses, begging, or gazing stolidly at the troops as they drilled, at
the creaking carts from the outlying farms as they plied through the
streets, at the driving to and fro from pasture of the horses and milch
cows, or at the arrival of a vessel from Niagara or a brigade of
fur-laden bateaux from the upper lakes.

The Indians.

In their paint and their cheap, dirty finery, these savages did not look
very important; yet it was because of them that the British kept up
their posts in these far-off forests, beside these great lonely waters;
it was for their sakes that they tried to stem the inrush of the
settlers of their own blood and tongue; for it was their presence alone
which served to keep the wilderness as a game preserve for the fur
merchants; it was their prowess in war which prevented French village
and British garrison from being lapped up like drops of water before the
fiery rush of the American advance. The British themselves, though
fighting with and for them, loved them but little; like all
frontiersmen, they soon grew to look down on their mean and trivial
lives,--lives which nevertheless strongly attracted white men of evil
and shiftless, but adventurous, natures, and to which white children,
torn from their homes and brought up in the wigwams, became passionately
attached. Yet back of the lazy and drunken squalor lay an element of the
terrible, all the more terrible because it could not be reckoned with.
Dangerous and treacherous allies, upon whom no real dependence could
ever placed, the Indians were nevertheless the most redoubtable of all
foes when the war was waged in their own gloomy woodlands.

The British Officers

At such a post those standing high in authority were partly civil
officials, partly army officers. Of the former, some represented the
provincial government, and others acted for the fur companies. They had
much to do, both in governing the French townsfolk and countryfolk, in
keeping the Indians friendly, and in furthering the peculiar commerce on
which the settlements subsisted. But the important people were the army
officers. These were imperious, able, resolute men, well drilled, and
with a high military standard of honor. They upheld with jealous pride
the reputation of an army which in that century proved again and again
that on stricken fields no soldiery of continental Europe could