persons-scarcely a tenth part of the English population on its frontiers; about a twentieth part of English North America.

West of Montreal, the principal French posts, and those but inconsiderable ones, were at Frontenac, at Mackinaw, and on the Illinois. At Niagara, there was a wavering purpose of maintaining a post, but no permanent occupation. So weak were the garrisons, that English traders, with an escort of Indians, had ventured even to Mackinaw, and, by means of the Senecas, obtained a large share of the commerce of the lakes. French

diplomacy had attempted to pervade the west, and 1687. concert an alliance with all the tribes from Lake Ontario to the Mississippi. The traders were summoned even from the plains of the Sioux; and Tonti and the Illinois were, by way of the Ohio and the Alleghany, to precipitate themselves on the Senecas, while the French should come from Montreal, and the Ottawas and other Algonquins, under Durantaye, the vigilant commander at Mackinaw, should descend from Michigan. But the power of the Illinois was broken; the Hurons and Ottawas were almost ready to become the allies of the Senecas. The savages still held the keys of the great west; no intercourse existed, but by means of the forestrangers, who penetrated the barren heaths round Hudson's Bay, the morasses of the north-west, the homes of the Sioux and Miamis, the recesses of every forest, where there was an Indian with skins to sell. " God alone could have saved Canada this year," wrote Denonville, in 1688. But for the missions at the west, Illinois would have been abandoned, the fort at Mackinaw lost, and a general rising of the natives would have completed the ruin of New France.

1688.

Personal enterprise took the direction of the fur1689. trade: Port Nelson, in Hudson's Bay, and Fort Albany, were originally possessed by the French. The attention of the court of France was directed to the fisheries; and Acadia had been represented by De Meules as the most important settlement of France. To protect it, the Jesuits Vincent and James Bigot collected a village of Abenakis on the Penobscot; and a flourishing town now marks the spot where the baron de St. Castin, a veteran officer of the regiment of Carignan, established a trading fort. Would France, it was said, strengthen its

post on the Penobscot, occupy the islands that command the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and send supplies to Newfoundland, she would be sole mistress of the fisheries for cod. Hence the strife with Massachusetts, in which the popu lar mind was so deeply interested, that, to this day, the figure of a cod-fish is suspended in the hall of its representatives.

Thus France, bounding its territory next New England by the Kennebec, claimed the whole eastern coast, Nova Scotia, Cape Breton, Newfoundland, Labrador, and Hudson's Bay; and, to assert and defend this boundless region, Acadia and its dependencies counted but nine hundred French inhabitants. The missionaries, swaying the mind of the Abenakis, were the sole source of hope.

On the declaration of war by France against England, Count Frontenac, once more governor of Canada, was charged to recover Hudson's Bay; to protect Acadia; and, by a descent from Canada, to assist a fleet from France in making conquest of New York. Of that province, De Callieres was, in advance, appointed governor; the English Catholics were to be permitted to remain,other inhabitants, to be sent into Pennsylvania or New England. But, on reaching the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Frontenac learned the capture of Montreal.

On the twenty-fifth of August, the Iroquois, fifteen hundred in number, reached the Isle of Montreal, at La Chine, at break of day, and, finding all asleep, set fire to the houses, and engaged in one general massacre. In less than an hour, two hundred people met death under forms too horrible for description. Approaching the town of Montreal, they made an equal number of prisoners, and, after a severe skirmish, became masters of the fort, and of the whole island, of which they retained unmolested possession till the middle of October. In the moment of consternation, Denonville had ordered Fort Frontenac, on Lake Ontario, to be evacuated and razed. From Three Rivers to Mackinaw, there remained not one French town, and hardly even a post.

In Hudson's Bay, a band of brothers De Sainte Helene and D'Iberville-sustained the honour of French arms. They were Canadians, sons of Charles Lemoine, an early emigrant from Normandy, whose numerous offspring gave also to American history the name of Bienville. Passing across the ridge that divides the rivers of

Hudson's Bay from those of the St. Lawrence, amidst marvellous adventures, by hardy resolution and daring presence of mind, they had, in 1686, conquered the English posts from Fort Rupert to Albany River, leaving the English no trading-house in the bay, except that of which, in 1685, they had dispossessed the French at Port Nelson. That post remained to the English; but the sons of Lemoine intercepted the forces which were sent to proclaim William of Orange monarch over jagged cliffs, and deep ravines never warmed by a sunbeam,-over the glaciers and mountains, the rivers and trading-houses in Hudson's Bay. Exulting in their success, they returned to Quebec.

In the east, blood was first shed at Cocheco, where, thirteen years before, an unsuspecting party of three hundred and fifty Indians had been taken prisoners, and shipped for Boston, to be sold into foreign slavery. The memory of the treachery was indelible; and the Indian emissaries of Castin easily excited the tribe of Penacook to revenge. On the evening of the twenty-seventh of June, two squaws repaired to the house of Richard Waldron, and the octogenarian magistrate bade them lodge on the floor. At night, they rise, unbar the gates, and summon their companions, who at once enter every apartment. "What now? what now ?" shouted the brave old man ; and, seizing his sword, he defended himself till he fell, stunned by a blow from a hatchet. They then placed him in a chair on a table in his own hall :-"Judge Indians again!"-thus they mocked him : and, making cruel sport of their debts to him as a trader, they drew gashes across his breast, and each one cried, "Thus I cross out my account!" At last, the mutilated man reeled from faintness, and died in the midst of tortures. The Indians, burning his house, and others that stood near it, having killed three-and-twenty, returned to the wilderness with twentynine captives.

August comes. The women and children, at the Penobscot village of Canibas, have confessed their sins to the Jesuit Thury, that so they may uplift purer hands, while their fathers and brothers proceed against the heretics;—in the little chapel, the missionary and his neophytes have established a perpetual rosary during the expedition, and even the hours of repast do not interrupt

the edifying exercise. A hundred warriors, purified also by confession, in a fleet of bark canoes, steal out of the Penobscot, and paddle towards Pemaquid. Thomas Gyles and his sons are at work, in the sunny noontide, making hay. A volley whistles by them ;-a short encounter ends in their defeat. 66 'I ask no favour," says the wounded father, "but leave to pray with my children." Pale with the loss of blood, he commends his children to God, then bids them farewell for this world, yet in the hope of seeing them in a better. The Indians, restless at delay, use the hatchet, and, for burial, heap boughs over his body. After a defence of two days, the stockade at Pemaquid capitulates; and the warriors return to Penobscot to exult over their prisoners. Other inroads were made by the Penobscot and St. John Indians, so that the settlements east of Falmouth were deserted.

66 we

In September, commissioners from New England held a conference with the Mohawks at Albany, soliciting an alliance. We have burned Montreal," said they; are allies of the English; we will keep the chain unbroken." But they refused to invade the Abenakis.

Had Frontenac never left New France, Montreal would probably have been safe. He now used every effort to win the Five Nations to neutrality or to friendship. To recover esteem in their eyes; to secure to Durantaye, the commander at Mackinaw, the means of treating with the Hurons and the Ottawas; it was resolved by Frontenac to make a triple descent into the English provinces.

From Montreal, a party of one hundred and ten, 1690. composed of French, and of the Christian Iroquois,having De Mantet and Sainte Helene as leaders, and D'Iberville, the hero of Hudson's Bay, as a volunteer,for two-and-twenty days, waded through snows and morasses, through forests and across rivers, to Schenectady. The village had given itself calmly to slumber: through open and unguarded gates the invaders entered silently, and having, just before midnight, reached its heart, the war-whoop was raised (dreadful sound to the mothers of that place and their children!), and the dwellings set on fire. Of the inhabitants, some, half-clad, fled through the snows to Albany; sixty were massacred, of whom seventeen were children, and ten were Africans. For such ends had the hardships of a winter's expedition, frost,

famine, and frequent deaths, been encountered. Such was

war.

The party from Three Rivers, led by Hertel, and consisting of but fifty-two persons, of whom three were his sons, and two his nephews, surprised the settlement at Salmon Falls, on the Piscataqua, and, after a bloody engagement, burned houses, barus, and cattle in the stalls, and took fifty-four prisoners, chiefly women and children. The prisoners were laden by the victors with spoils from their own homes. Robert Rogers, rejecting his burden, was bound by the Indians to a tree, and dry leaves kindled about him, yet in such heaps as would burn but slowly. Mary Ferguson, a girl of fifteen, burst into tears, from fatigue, and was scalped forthwith. Mehetabel Goodwin would linger apart in the snow to lull her infant to sleep, lest its cries should provoke the savages. Angry at the delay, her master struck the child against a tree, and hung it among the branches. The infant of Mary Plaisted was thrown into the river, that, eased of her burden, she might walk faster.

Returning from this expedition, Hertel met the war party, under Portneuf, from Quebec, and, with them and a reinforcement from Castin, made a successful attack on the fort and settlement in Casco Bay.

Meantime, danger taught the colonies the necessity of union, and, on the first day of May, 1690, New York beheld the momentous example of an American "congress." The idea originated with the government of Massachusetts, established by the people in the period that intervened between the overthrow of Andros and the arrival of the second charter; and the place of meeting was New York, where, likewise, the government had sprung directly from the action of the people. Thus, without exciting suspicion, were the forms of independence and union prepared. The invitations were given by letters from the general court of Massachusetts, and extended to all the colonies as far, at least, as Maryland. Massachusetts, the parent of so many states, is certainly the parent of the American Union. At that congress, it was resolved to attempt the conquest of Canada by marching an army, by way of Lake Champlain, against Montreal, while Massachusetts should, with a fleet, attack Quebec. Thus did Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York, having, at that time, each a government constituted by itself, in the spirit of independence, not