But, more than this, Governor Dongan of New York had divined the ideas of La Salle, and had begun to counterwork them. He proposed that the English should enter the West, exclude the French, and limit them to the St. Lawrence. It was a war of ideas. It was at this time that New York obtained from the Iroquois the first of those concessions which afterward played so important a part in English policy, and became the basis of the New York claim to the Western country. The two mother countries were at peace; but Denonville and Dongan conducted a long correspondence growing out of the rival claims, often angry, sometimes bitter. The French governor sometimes despaired of his cause, although he triumphed in the end. The Iroquois were never friendly to the French, and often hostile; and they now strove to alienate the Northwestern tribes from them. But Denonville had some great advantages over his rival. He was absolute in Canada, and was thoroughly supported by his king, while Dongan was wholly unsupported. The English king was a creature of Louis XIV.'s, and the colonies other than New York, although Dongan was upholding their common cause, were wholly indifferent to the issue. Still he might have won but for one force that he was powerless to overcome: he had no weapon that he could oppose to the French coureurs des bois. These redoubtable bush-rangers, always proud of their French blood and language, and always impatient of French authority; devoted to the King, but caring nothing for his law; leading a life picturesque and reckless; with the bravery and generosity of the traditional outlaw; familiar with every stream and at home in every forest; delighting in illicit trade; often under the ban of the governor; ready to confess themselves or quick to shed blood; rapidly succumbing to the hardships and dangers of their irregular life, but still more rapidly recruited from the settlements-the coureurs des bois now rendered to New France one of their greatest services. They had become so numerous that every family in Canada was said to have a member in the bush. They had great in

fluence with the Indians; they hated the English; and they were often envied by their countrymen who followed more orderly lives. They had their own leaders, some of whom could bring together five or six hundred men. Du Lhut was the most celebrated of these, and in this first crisis of Northwestern history he played a conspicuous part. He built a fort on the northern side of Lake Superior, to control the road from the Upper Lakes to Hudson Bay. He also pointed out to Denonville the importance of closing the gate-way of Detroit. The governor gave him a commission to close it, which Du Lhut hastened to execute. In 1686 he built Fort St. Joseph, at the head of the Strait, near where Fort Gratiot afterward stood. St. Joseph was abandoned and destroyed soon after, but not until a fort had been built on the site of Detroit. This action had not been taken a moment too soon, for immediately we hear of men from New York on their way to Mackinaw. In 1686 and 1687 strong parties of English and Dutch traders, escorted by Iroquois warriors, made this attempt; the first of these had actually passed St. Joseph before it was discovered and captured, the second was stopped on Lake Erie. Nor did the English then give over the attempt to penetrate the upper country; we hear afterward of New York traders at various places, and notably in the neighborhood of Fort Miamis, on the St. Joseph, in 1694. But building and garrisoning forts were only a part of the services rendered in this trying time by the coureurs des bois. They placated the Indians, and patrolled the forests and lakes for stray Englishmen. So competent an authority as Judge Campbell expresses the opinion that but for them the Michigan region would have fallen into English hands before the close of the seventeenth century.' But before the Strait of Detroit was occupied by the French, plantings had already been made farther to the west.

From the time of La Salle's visit in 1679, we can trace a

1 Political History of Michigan, 40.

continuous French occupation of Illinois. After La Salle had navigated the great river to the Gulf, he had a double-headed scheme. First, he would plant a colony on the Illinois to hold the country against the Six Nations, who extended their forays to the Mississippi, to protect the Western Indians, and to gather furs. A second colony, planted at the mouth of the Mississippi, would command Lower Louisiana and receive and ship to France the furs gathered on the upper waters. He would bind together the two colonies by a chain of fortified posts, which should also be continued through the Lake country to the settlements on the St. Lawrence. He now changed the scene of his northern operations. He planted his citadel of St. Louis on the summit of "Starved Rock," proposing to make that the centre of his colony. This undertaking well under way, he started for France to carry out the second part of his programme. Further we shall not follow this indomitable explorer, except to say that in 1687, while seeking, by an overland journey to Canada, to save from destruction his Southern colony, that, either by mistake or treachery, had been landed in Texas rather than at the mouth. of the Mississippi, he was slain by an assassin of his own party, just one hundred years before Anglo-American institutions were established in the territory that he had called his own. La Salle was the father of Illinois. At first his colony was exceedingly feeble, but it was never discontinued. "Joutel found a garrison at Fort St. Louis . . . in 1687, and in 1689 La Hontan bears testimony that it still continued. In 1696 a public document proves its existence; and when Tonty, in 1700, again descended the Mississippi, he was attended by twenty Canadians, residents on the Illinois." Even while the wars named after King William and Queen Anne were going on, the French settlements were growing in numbers and increasing in size; those wars over, they made still more rapid progress. Missions grew into settlements and parishes.

1

1 Monette: History of the Mississippi Valley, i., 153, 154.

Old Kaskaskia was begun in what La Salle called the “terrestrial paradise" before the close of the seventeenth century.

The Wabash Valley was occupied about 1700, the first settlers entering it by the portage leading from the Kankakee. Later the voyageurs found a shorter route to the fertile valley. Ascending the Maumee, then called "The Miami of the Lake,” whose heads are interlaced with those of the Wabash, and crossing the short portage leading to that stream, they could descend to the Ohio. As the Frenchmen found their way to the confluence of the two streams by the Wabash, and as they knew little of the Ohio, then called "the River of the Iroquois," they took the Wabash for the main stream. Post Vincents, the Vincennes of our maps, was planted in 1735, and became the principal of a long but thin line of settlements.

The nearest road from Canada to the Mississippi lies through the State of Ohio, the most remote through the State of Wisconsin; the Ohio portages were the last to be travelled by the French, that of the Fox and the Wisconsin was the first. The Iroquois long excluded the French from Ohio, and the remoteness of Wisconsin, aided perhaps by the rigor of the climate, tended to a similar result. Still, the Jesuits planted several missions in the latter State. That of St. Francis Xavier, planted by Claude Allouez, the founder of Saint-Esprit, at Green Bay, in 1669, was the most important, and became, in course of time, the nucleus of a small French settlement. Mention may also be made of Prairie du Chien and of the post on Lake Pepin.

The French located their principal missions and posts with admirable judgment. There is not one of them in which we cannot see the wisdom of the priest, of the soldier, and the trader combined. The triple alliance worked for an immediate end, but the sites that they chose are as important today as they were when they chose them. The fact is, Nature had decided all these questions ages before the soil of the New World had been pressed by the white man's foot. Marquette.

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called the Straits of Mackinaw "the key, and, as it were, the gate for all the tribes from the South as the Saut is for those of the North, there being in this section of the country only these two passages by water, for a great number of nations have to go by one or other of these channels in order to reach the French settlements. This presents a peculiarly favorable opportunity both for instructing those who pass here and also for obtaining easy access and conveyance to their places of abode." The straits were called the "home of the fishes." Elsewhere, although they exist in large numbers,” says Marquette, "it is not properly their home, which is in the neighborhood of Michilimackinac. It is this attraction which has heretofore drawn to a point so advantageous the greater part of the savages in this country, driven away by fear of the Iroquois." La Salle's colony of St. Louis was planted in one of the gardens of the world, in the midst of a numerous Indian population, on the great line of travel between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River. Kaskaskia and the neighboring settlements held the centre of the long line extending from Canada to Louisiana. The Wabash colony commanded that valley and the Lower Ohio. Detroit was a position so important that, securely held by the French, it practically banished from the English mind for fifty years the thought of acquiring the Northwest. The Indians and the beavers have long since disappeared from the region lying between the lakes and the Mississippi; that region has twice changed hands since those early days; the whole country has been transformed by the hand of man; but the Saut Canal, the Mackinaw shipping, and the cities of Chicago, St. Louis, and Detroit show us how geography conditions history, as well as that the savage and the civilized man have much in common. Then how unerringly were the French guided to the carrying places between the Northern and the Southern waters, viz., Green Bay, Fox River, and

1 Cooley: Michigan, in Commonwealth Series, 11.