like tribes of red men who, everywhere except in New York, were
hostile to the English and friendly to the French. Since the beginning
of the seventeenth century French towns and villages had been growing up
along the St. Lawrence, and French explorers had been pushing across
the Great Lakes and down the valley of the Mississippi river, near the
mouth of which the French town of New Orleans had been standing since
1718. It was the French doctrine that discovery and possession of a
river gave a claim to all the territory drained by that river. According
to this doctrine every acre of American soil from which water flowed
into the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi belonged to France. The claims
of the French thus came up to the very crest of the Alleghanies, and
they made no secret of their intention to shut up the English forever
between that chain of mountains and the sea-coast. There were times when
their aims were still more aggressive and dangerous, when they looked
with longing eyes upon the valley of the Hudson, and would fain have
broken through that military centre of the line of English commonwealths
and seized the keys of empire over the continent.

[Sidenote: The Indian tribes.]

From this height of their ambition the French were kept aloof by the
deadly enmity of the most fierce and powerful savages in the New World.
The Indians of those days who came into contact with the white settlers
were divided into many tribes with different names, but they all
belonged to one or another of three great stocks or families. First,
there were the _Mobilians_, far down south; to this stock belonged the
Creeks, Cherokees, and others. Secondly, there were the _Algonquins_,
comprising the Delawares to the south of the Susquehanna; the Miamis,
Shawnees, and others in the western wilderness; the Ottawas in Canada;
and all the tribes still left to the northeast of New England. Thirdly,
there were the _Iroquois_, of whom the most famous were the Five Nations
of what is now central New York. These five great tribes--the Mohawks,
Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas--had for several generations
been united in a confederacy which they likened to a long wigwam with
its eastern door looking out upon the valley of the Hudson and its
western toward the falls of Niagara. It was known far and wide over the
continent as the Long House, and wherever it was known it was dreaded.
When Frenchmen and Englishmen first settled in America,