CHAPTER IV

RIVALS AND NEW COLONIES (1604-1689)

38. French Settlements in America (1604-1660). While the English colonies were growing up, three other European nations - France, Holland, and Sweden - planted settlements near by. The French strongly desired the profitable fur trade of the St. Lawrence, and also wished to Christianize the heathen Indians. Their missionaries went out among the wild tribes and endured hardship, poverty, and death; some of them were made martyrs by the Indians whom they came to save. The

their first permanent settlement was Port Royal on the Bay of Fundy (1604). They named the

adjacent country Acadia.

Location of the "Five Nations" of Iroquois, enlarged by the adoption of the Tuscaroras in 1715 to the "Six Nations." They counted about 2500 warriors

A more vigorous colony was planted by Samuel de Champlain at Quebec in 1608, and there has been a town of Quebec ever since, on that spot. Champlain was a captain in the French navy, and one of the boldest of explorers. He sought the friendship of the Indians who controlled the routes from the Great Lakes. When a party of their warriors asked him to help them against the fierce and hostile Iroquois, commonly

called the Five Nations," living to the southward, he and two other Frenchmen agreed to go along with them. They paddled nearly the whole length of a sheet of water since known as Lake Champlain, till they met a party of four hundred of the Iroquois. With their harquebuses (a sort of awkward gun), the Frenchmen drove the enemy off in great confusion. This victory drew upon the French the rage of the Iroquois, who for nearly a hundred years raided the French settlements, killing and burning. They made it unsafe to travel upon Lake Ontario or Lake Erie, and therefore Champlain and his successors followed up the Ottawa River and crossed over the

center of the colony of New France. Thence missionaries and fur traders set out for the interior, and planted missions and trading posts on the Great Lakes as far west as Lake Michigan and Lake Superior.

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39. Exploration of the Mississippi by the French (16601684). From the Indians the French heard tales of a great river to the westward which they thought might be the Col-· orado. An adventurous young man named La Salle conceived the idea of finding that river. He ventured upon Lake Erie, which till then had hardly been visited by white men, and explored the country south of the lake. While he went back to the St. Lawrence to get together men and means to reach the great river, a missionary, Father Marquette, and a trader named Joliet together went up the Fox River, crossed to the Wisconsin River, and so down to the Mississippi River, which they followed for a long distance (1673) in the hope of reaching the sea.

La Salle was backed by the king of France, who gave him authority to discover and explore new lands for the king. With him went a missionary, Father Hennepin, who followed the river up to the Falls of St. Anthony, now the site of Minneapolis. After many hardships and delays, La Salle and his company went from Lake Michigan up the Chicago River, crossed a short portage, and paddled their canoes down the Illinois River to its mouth, and then on down the Mississippi until they reached the salt water of the delta (1682). Thus the region that we now call the West was opened to Europeans.

La Salle reported that along the banks lay" the most beautiful country in the world," and he talks of "cotton, cochineal, nuts, entire forests of mulberry trees, salt, slate, coal, vines, apple trees." According to the usual practice of claiming territory in America, the king of France considered himself entitled by La Salle's discoveries to the immense area drained by all the streams that flow into the Mississippi River and its branches.

La Salle named the region Louisiana for his royal master, who was so pleased that he fitted out a fleet with which the explorer expected to reach the mouth of the Mississippi River by sea (1684). La Salle missed the stream, landed at Matagorda Bay in what is now Texas, and after months of misery for the whole party, was killed by one of his own men.

No

Frenchman planted permanent colonies anywhere in Louisiana till fifteen years later; but the French, who were the first to explore the Mississippi, laid claim to the whole of its magnificent basin

40. The Dutch and the Swedes in America (1609-1660). — The early French and English colonies were far apart and separated by wide stretches of woods and mountains. A third group of European colonists took up land between the two groups of English colonies the southern and the New England. These were the Dutch, whose home country of the Netherlands" was usually called Holland by the English. These prosperous, seafaring people had been ruled by the king of Spain, but they revolted and set up a federal government of their own in 1579; and they continued to fight the Spaniards at intervals for nearly seventy years. They were rich traders and manufacturers, and were so strong at sea that they attacked and captured a good part of the Portuguese possessions in southern Asia. That is how modern Holland comes to own Java, Sumatra, and other Asiatic islands.

Replica of Henry Hudson's Half Moon. This ship was sent to the United States by Holland in 1909

At the same time they turned their attention westward and in 1609 sent out Henry Hudson, an Englishman, to search

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for a new water route to India. In his ship, the Half Moon, he came into the bay now called New York harbor, and sailed up the stream afterwards called Hudson River for its discoverer. Five years later (1614) a little post was founded on the rocky island of Manhattan, and was called New Amsterdam (map, page 49). This was the beginning of the city of New York. In 1621 the Dutch chartered a West India Company, which began to plant trading posts on the Connect

A school for children of the burgher class in New Amsterdam

icut, Hudson, and Delaware rivers; and they called the whole region "New Netherland." New Amsterdam was well placed, for the Hudson led up into the country of the Iroquois, whose friendship the traders cultivated. The Dutch built a post at Fort Orange (now Albany), and others in the Mohawk Valley. Along with the traders came Dutch farmers, and the West India Company granted tracts of land to large owners called "patroons," who leased farms to immigrants.

The Dutch were not so fortunate on the Connecticut, where English settlers came and crowded them out (§ 34). On the Delaware River also their claim was disputed by Sweden, which in 1638 sent out a colony and built a little post called Fort Christina (now Wilmington, Delaware). The Swedes