one would have been left to the
domination of Great Britain. The demand made by France, if acceded to,
meant the death-blow to English colonization on the American
mainland; and yet it was made not without reason. French explorers,
missionaries, and fur-traders had, with great enterprise and
fortitude, swarmed over the entire region, carrying the flag, the
religion, and the commerce of France into the farthest forest wilds;
while the colonists of their rival, busy in solidly welding their
industrial commonwealths, had as yet scarcely peeped over the
Alleghany barrier.

It was asserted on behalf of Great Britain, that the charters of her
coast colonies carried their bounds far into the West; further, that
as, by the treaty of Utrecht (1713), France had acknowledged the
suzerainty of the British king over the Iroquois confederacy, the
English were entitled to all lands "conquered" by those Indians,
whose war-paths had extended from the Ottawa River on the north to
the Carolinas on the south, and whose forays reached alike to the
Mississippi and to New England. In this view was made, in 1744, the
famous treaty at Lancaster, Pa., whereat the Iroquois, impelled by rum
and presents, pretended to give to the English entire control of the
Ohio Valley, under the claim that the former had in various encounters
conquered the Shawanese of that region and were therefore entitled
to it. It is obvious that a country occasionally raided by marauding
bands of savages, whose homes are far away, cannot properly be
considered theirs by conquest.

Meanwhile, both sides were preparing to occupy and hold the contested
field. New France already had a weak chain of waterside forts
and commercial stations,--the rendezvous of fur-traders, priests,
travelers, and friendly Indians,--extending, with long intervening
stretches of savage-haunted wilderness, through the heart of the
continent, from Lower Canada to her outlying post of New Orleans. It
is not necessary here to enter into the details of the ensuing French
and Indian War, the story of which Parkman has told us so well.
Suffice it briefly to mention a few only of its features, so far as
they affect the Ohio itself.

The Iroquois, although concluding with the English this treaty
of Lancaster, "on which, as a corner-stone, lay the claim of the
colonists to the West," were by this time, as the result of wily
French diplomacy, growing suspicious of their English protectors; at
the same tim