trade the
interior of North America was rich. Today its vast agriculture and its
wealth in minerals have brought rewards beyond the dreams of two hundred
years ago. The wealth, however, sought by the leaders of that time came
from furs. In those wastes of river, lake, and forest were the richest
preserves in the world for fur-bearing animals.

This vast wilderness was not an unoccupied land. In those wild regions
dwelt many savage tribes. Some of the natives were by no means without
political capacity. On the contrary, they were long clever enough to pit
English against French to their own advantage as the real sovereigns
in North America. One of them, whose fluent oratory had won for him the
name of Big Mouth, told the Governor of Canada, in 1688, that his people
held their lands from the Great Spirit, that they yielded no lordship to
either the English or the French, that they well understood the weakness
of the French and were quite able to destroy them, but that they wished
to be friends with both French and English who brought to them the
advantages of trade. In sagacity of council and dignity of carriage
some of these Indians so bore themselves that to trained observers they
seemed not unequal to the diplomats of Europe. They were, however,
weak before the superior knowledge of the white men. In all their long
centuries in America they had learned nothing of the use of iron. Their
sharpest tool had been made of chipped obsidian or of hammered copper.
Their most potent weapons had been the stone hatchet or age and the
bow and arrow. It thus happened that, when steel and gunpowder reached
America, the natives soon came to despise their primitive implements.
More and more they craved the supplies from Europe which multiplied in a
hundred ways their strength in the conflict with nature and with man. To
the Indian tribes trade with the French or English soon became a vital
necessity. From the far northwest for a thousand miles to the bleak
shores of Hudson Bay, from the banks of the Mississippi to the banks
of the St. Lawrence and the Hudson, they came each year on laborious
journeys, paddling their canoes and carrying them over portages, to
barter furs for the things which they must have and which the white man
alone could supply.

The Iroquois, the ablest and most resolute of the native tribes, held
the lands bordering on Lake Ontario which commanded the approaches from
both the Hudson and the St. Lawrence by the Gr