A governor of New York, moreover,
even were he as keen and far-seeing as Frontenac himself, would often
have been helpless. When the Five Nations were attacked by the French,
he had no troops to defend them, nor could he, like a Canadian governor,
call out the forces of his province by a word, to meet the exigency. The
small revenues of New York were not at his disposal. Without the votes
of the frugal representatives of an impoverished people, his hands were
tied. Hence the Five Nations, often left unaided when they most needed
help, looked upon their Dutch and English neighbors as slothful and
unwarlike.

Yet their friendship was of the greatest importance to the province, in
peace as well as in war, and was indispensable in the conflict that New
York was waging single-handed for the control of the western fur-trade.
The Five Nations, as we have seen,[279] acted as middlemen between the
New York merchants and the tribes of the far interior, and through them
English goods and English influence penetrated all the lake country, and
reached even to the Mississippi.

These vast western regions, now swarming with laborious millions, were
then scantily peopled by savage hordes, whose increase was stopped by
incessant mutual slaughter. This wild population had various centres or
rallying-points, usually about the French forts, which protected them
from enemies and supplied their wants. Thus the Pottawattamies, Ottawas,
and Hurons were gathered about Detroit, and the Illinois about Fort St.
Louis, on the river Illinois, where Henri de Tonty and his old comrade,
La Forest, with fifteen or twenty Frenchmen, held a nominal monopoly of
the neighboring fur-trade. Another focus of Indian population was near
the Green Bay of Lake Michigan, and on Fox River, which enters it. Here
were grouped the Sacs, Winnebagoes, and Menominies, with the Outagamies,
or Foxes, a formidable tribe, the source of endless trouble to the
French.

The constant aim of the Canadian authorities was to keep these western
savages at peace among themselves, while preventing their establishing
relations of trade with the Five Nations, and carrying their furs to
them in exchange for English goods. The position was delicate, for while
a close understanding between the western tribes and the Five Nations
would be injurious to French interests, a quarrel would be still more
so, since the French would then be forced to side with their western
allies, and so be dra