early loved a bargain, never
failed to recognize that the goods of his French friends were dear,
and that those of his enemies, the English, were cheap. We find
frequent evidences that for a hundred years the tribesmen of the Upper
Lakes carried on an illicit trade with the hated English, whenever the
usually-wary French were thought to be napping.

It is certain that English forest traders were upon the Ohio in the
year 1700. In 1715,--the year before Governor Spotswood of Virginia,
"with much feasting and parade," made his famous expedition over the
Blue Ridge,--there was a complaint that traders from Carolina had
reached the villages on the Wabash, and were poaching on the French
preserves. French military officers built little log stockades along
that stream, and tried in vain to induce the Indians of the valley to
remove to St. Joseph's River, out of the sphere of English influence.
Everywhere did French traders meet English competitors, who were
not to be frightened by orders to move off the field. New France,
therefore, determined to connect Canada and Louisiana by a chain of
forts throughout the length of the Mississippi basin, which should
not only secure untrammeled communication between these far-separated
colonies, but aid in maintaining French supremacy throughout the
region. Yet in 1725 we still hear of "the English from Carolina"
busily trading with the Miamis under the very shadow of the guns of
Fort Ouiatanon (near Lafayette, Ind.), and the French still vainly
scolding thereat. What was going on upon the Wabash, was true
elsewhere in the Ohio basin, as far south as the Creek towns on the
sources of the Tennessee.

About this time, Pennsylvania and Virginia began to exhibit interest
in their own overlapping claims to lands in the country northwest of
the Ohio. Those colonies were now settled close to the base of the
mountains, and there was heard a popular clamor for pastures new.
French ownership of the over-mountain region was denied, and in 1728
Pennsylvania "viewed with alarm the encroachments of the French." The
issue was now joined; both sides claimed the field, but, as usual, the
contest was at first among the rival forest traders. In the Virginia
and Pennsylvania capitals, the transmontane country was still a misty
region. In 1729, Col. William Byrd, an authority on things Virginian,
was able to write that nothing was then known in that colony of the
sources of the Potomac, Roanoke, and Shenand