supplies was conquered could this line of inland forts be made weak, for Quebec supplied Frontenac and Frontenac supplied Niagara; from Niagara guns, ammunition and Short-sighted troops went to Illinois by the Maumee and to policies of war the Pittsburgh region by the Allegheny. As a military line of posts it was of marvelous length; but it was never one bit stronger than its capital-fortress, Quebec.

The Middle

Colonies face

the French in the West

This was plain enough later on. At the time, however, the various colonies were driven desperate by the stinging attacks made upon their borders and could not see the thing in the large. The northern colonies first met the French and Indian onslaught and felt that everything should be done to help them withstand it. Virginia in 1716 first began to be interested in the West which she then jealously heard the French were seizing. In that year Governor Spottswood of the Old Dominion made an official journey toward the Blue Mountain wall at the heads of the Potomac and James. Pennsylvania also took the hint, and her German, Irish, and Scotch-Irish soon challenged the right of the French to the furs of the West. These Indian traders were crossing the Alleghenies by 1725. Governor Spottswood's idea of Virginia's expansion westward bore fruit for, in 1748, a company of Virginia gentlemen-including George Washington's two half-brothers secured from England's king a definite grant of half a million acres in the Ohio Valley; this company was known as the "Ohio Company."

France rein

forces her

The news of this grant soon reached Quebec and showed the French that something more than La Salle's brave claim and a line of posts on the Great Lakes and Illinois were necessary if they were to hold the West. The Governor of Canada sent Céloron to bury leaden plates in the rivers behind New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, to claim that region for France and, in swift order, detachments of troops were sent to erect forts from Lake Erie down the Allegheny toward the site of Pittsburgh.

western claim

Neither France nor England had really made good her claims to the Mississippi Basin, which were based on the explorations

The Scotch-
Irish strength-
en the Anglo-
Saxon claim

of western settlements

of La Salle and Cabot. France had far the most to her credit in this line, however. Yet the English of the seaboard, in their less spectacular way, had moved into a position in these years (1732-1750) of great latent power. With the rise of the price of land in Pennsylvania, and because of their fondness for slate and shale soils, the Scotch-Irish went over into the Susquehanna region of Pennsylvania, as we have seen, and had advanced beyond it to the Alleghany Mountain wall. Pennsylvania's great belts of good limestone soil turn southward (map p. 107), cross Maryland and the Potomac River, anc reach down long fingers on the line of the ShenanThe extension doah River toward Tennessee. In 1732 the vanguard of the great army of westward migration struck out on this line to the southwest, marked by the Virginia towns Winchester, Staunton, and Radford. At the same time a thin line of settlements was creeping up the Potomac to the Cumberland, Md., region where lay a famous, distinct break in the Allegheny Mountain barrier. So rapid and lusty was this migration that, in the time of Braddock's defeat, twenty-three years later, English settlements on the Shenandoah line of advance were located farther west than Fort Duquesne, although much to the south of it. The English had not gone so far west as had the French-whose bold captains by this time had explored to far Calgary in the Saskatchewan country-but they had built more solidly as far as they had gone. And when it came to the hour of testing, solid building was to prove an asset of vastly greater value than much aimless running about and heroic exploration. The French, so to speak, had looked at everything, but had solidly secured nothing. The English colonists, the tortoises in the continental race, had crept slowly west, but they had come "to have and to hold." From their outposts redskins might drive these pioneers to-day-but tomorrow they were, as likely as not, back again. Thus, doggedly and loyally, the borderers of central Pennsylvania and the Valley of Virginia gave the British crown a better claim to the

The solidarity of the English advance

West than the pompous but vague one handed down from John Cabot.

The Seven Years' War was declared between England and France in 1756. The cause of the war was France's insatiable desire for continental expansion in Europe and her wish to surpass her ancient foe, the House of Hapsburg. With France were

LIMESTONE PATHWAYS. (Marking the route of migration from Pennsylvania to the limestone zones of Tennessee and Kentucky.)

allied Russia, Sweden, Saxony, and Austria, while England lamely aided the brilliant King Frederick the Great of Prussia, whose overthrow was France's chief ambition. Frederick was, however, more than a match for his enemies, countless as they seemed to be. Meantime, England "at last produced a man," as Frederick the Great exclaimed when he perceived the genius of William Pitt who now came into power in England. France had struck at Prussia; it was a strange turn of fate that Prussia's

supposedly weak ally, England, should suddenly produce a man who should make himself the true founder of the British Empire by bending his energies to plant England's

The Seven
Years' War

flag in India on the one hand, and, on the other, to crush French power on our own continent. All this was Pitt's ambition and the story of its fulfillment is one of the famous chapters of both English and American history.

READING LIST

W. B. Munro, Crusaders of New France, Chaps. 5-10; R. G. Thwaites, France in America, Chaps. 5-8; J. Fiske, New France and New England, Chaps. 4 and 7; E. Channing, History, II, Chap. 5; F. Parkman, A Half Century of Conflict; G. M. Wrong, The Conquest of New France (Chronicles of America, X), Chaps. 1-5; J. Winsor, Cartier to Frontenac; J. Finley, The French in the Heart of America, Chaps. 1-12; Fox, Map Studies, No. 10.

QUERY AND DISCUSSION

Why were the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi river basins two of the "world's greatest prizes"? Along the southern shore of Lake Erie (on a French map of 1749) was written: "This shore is almost unknown." How can you explain this ignorance when most of the Great Lakes were well explored by that date? Why was such ignorance favorable to English expansion? Explain the strategic importance of the site of Pittsburgh to both French and English. What is meant by the "solid building" of the English? What was the effect on English colonists of being ignored by the Mother Country when she made treaties with France at the close of the early colonial wars? Have nations ignored their colonies when making treaties in more recent days?

Section 14. The Conquest of New France

France's league with the Alleghenies

When the hour now struck for England and France to settle who should control the destiny of this continent, the latter was handicapped in numbers but was favored (map p. 102) by her interior location. New France contained only 80,000 souls, while the English colonies counted over a million and a quarter. But, so long as the English forgot or failed to attack Quebec by sea, and tried to fling armies across the vi upon Oswego, Niagara, or the Ohio, there was hope

every case the question of victory was a question of transportation; the real foe was the wilderness-not the enemy at the trail's end. Upon those leagues of forest, mountain, and swamp France placed supreme reliance.

Washington's tour to the

The Ohio Company to which Washington's half-brothers belonged opened the forest prelude to the struggle by sending (1749) the North Carolina explorer, Christopher Gist, to seek out and locate their claim to western land. When the Virginia Governor heard that the French were fortifying the route from Lake Erie toward the Allegheny River he chose the young surveyor, George Washington, to carry thither a message ordering a withdrawal. The message was spurned by Legardeur de St. Pierre at Fort La Boeuf. This soldier had led the expedition which had planted the flag of France on the Saskatchewan two thousand miles farther west! What could a Virginia lad, just out of his teens, tell him about French claims? But that lad returned west the next year (1754) with three hundred men to challenge the French, who by now had driven away the Ohio Company's warehouse build

Ohio

ers from the site of Pittsburgh and themselves Washington had erected there Fort Duquesne, at the strategic at Fort capitulates junction of the Allegheny and Monongahela Necessity rivers. The young Virginia major of militia was forced by the French to surrender at Fort Necessity, amid the mountains, but was allowed to withdraw with the honors of war. In 1755 England planned a real campaign in America, one phase of which was to send General Edward Braddock to strike up the Potomac and across the Alleghenies

Braddock's

at Fort Duquesne. It was a poorly conceived campaign plan but its results, misjudged at the time,

were important. France laughed in her sleeve at the notion of an English army crossing the Alleghenies. She did not know Braddock. Considering the fact that few of the colonies respected the royal orders sent by King George to raise troops, money, and provisions, and to build roads for Braddock, his campaign ought to have made him famous. Deceived and humiliated by his