this Iroquois
league was engaged in a long career of conquest. Algonquin tribes all
the way from the Connecticut to the Mississippi were treated as its
vassals and forced to pay tribute in weapons and wampum. This conquering
career extended through the seventeenth century, until it was brought to
an end by the French. When the latter began making settlements in
Canada, they courted the friendship of their Algonquin neighbours, and
thus, without dreaming what deadly seed they were sowing, they were led
to attack the terrible Long House. It was easy enough for Champlain in
1609 to win a victory over savages who had never before seen a white man
or heard the report of a musket; but the victory was a fatal one for the
French, for it made the Iroquois their eternal enemies. The Long House
allied itself first with the Dutch and afterwards with the English, and
thus checked the progress of the French toward the lower Hudson. We too
seldom think how much we owe to those formidable savages.

[Sidenote: The French and the Iroquois.]

The Iroquois pressed the French with so much vigour that in 1689 they
even laid siege to Montreal. But by 1696 the French, assisted by all the
Algonquin tribes within reach, and led by their warlike viceroy, Count
Frontenac, one of the most picturesque figures in American history, at
length succeeded in getting the upperhand and dealing the Long House a
terrible blow, from the effects of which it never recovered. The league
remained formidable, however, until the time of the revolutionary war.
In 1715 its fighting strength was partially repaired by the adoption of
the kindred Iroquois tribe of Tuscaroras, who had just been expelled
from North Carolina by the English settlers, and migrated to New York.
After this accession the league, henceforth known as the Six Nations,
formed a power by no means to be despised, though much less bold and
aggressive than in the previous century.

After administering a check to the Iroquois, the French and Algonquins
kept up for more than sixty years a desultory warfare against the
English colonies. Whenever war broke out between England and France, it
meant war in America as well as in Europe. Indeed, one of the chief
objects of war, on the part of each of these two nations, was to extend
its colonial dominions at the expense of the other. France and England
were at war from 1689 to 1697; from 1702 to 1713; and from 1743 to 1748.
The men in New York or Boston in