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medal commemorated the successes of Louis XIV. in the New World. Sir William Phipps reached home in November. The treasury was empty. "Considering the present poverty of the country, and, through scarcity of money, the want of an adequate measure of commerce," issues of bills of credit were authorized, in notes from five shillings to five pounds, to "be in value equal to money, and accepted in all public payments."

Repulsed from Canada, the exhausted colonies attempted little more than the defence of their frontiers. Their borders were full of terror and sorrow, of captivity and death; but no designs of conquest were formed. If Schuyler, in 1691, made an irruption into the French settlements on the Sorel, it was only to gain successes in a skirmish, and to effect a safe retreat. A French ship anchoring in Port Royal, the red cross that floated over the town made way for the banner of France; and Acadia was once more a dependence on Canada. In January, 1692, a party of French and Indians, coming in snow-shoes from the east, burst upon the town of York, offering its inhabitants no choice but captivity or death. The fort which was rebuilt at Pemaquid was, at least, an assertion of English supremacy over the neighboring region. In England, the conquest of Canada was resolved on; but the fleet designed for the expedition, after a repulse at Martinique, sailed for Boston, freighted with the yellow fever, which destroyed two thirds of the mariners and soldiers on board. For a season, hostilities in Maine were suspended by a treaty of peace with the Abenakis; but, in less than a year, solely through the influence of the Jesuits, they were again in the field, led by Villieu, the French commander on the Penobscot; and the village at Oyster River, in New Hampshire, was the victim of their fury. Ninety-four persons were killed and carried away. The young wife of Thomas Drew was taken to the tribe at Norridgewock: there, in midwinter, in the open air, during a storm of snow, she gave birth to her first born, doomed by the savages to instant death. In Canada, the

chiefs of the Micmacs presented to Frontenac the scalps of English killed on the Piscataqua.

Once, indeed, in March, 1697, a mother achieved a startling revenge. Seven days after her confinement, the Indian prowlers raised their shouts near the house of Hannah Dustin, of Haverhill: her husband rode home from the field, but too late to provide for her rescue. He must fly, if he would save even one of his seven children, who had hurried before him into the forest. But, from the cowering flock, how could a father make a choice? With gun in his hand, he now repels the assault, now cheers on the innocent group of little ones, as they rustle through the dry leaves and bushes, till all reach a shelter. The Indians burned his home, and dashed his infant against a tree; and, after days of weary marches, Hannah Dustin and her nurse, with a boy from Worcester, find themselves on an island in the Merrimac, just above Concord, in a wigwam occupied by two Indian families. The mother planned escape. "Where would you strike," said the boy, Samuel Leonardson, to his master, "to kill instantly?" and the Indian told him where, and how to scalp. At night, while the household slumbers, the captives, two women and a boy, each with a tomahawk, strike vigorously, and fleetly, and with wise division of labor, and, of the twelve sleepers, ten lie dead; of one squaw the wound was not mortal; one child was spared from design. The love of glory next asserted its power; and the gun and tomahawk of the murderer of her infant, and a bag heaped full with scalps, were choicely kept as the trophies of the heroine. — The streams are the guides which God has set for the stranger in the wilderness: in a bark canoe, the three de scended the Merrimac to the English settlements, astonishing their friends by their escape, and filling the land with wonder at their successful daring.

Such scenes had no influence on the question of boundaries between Canada and New England. In the late summer of 1696, the fort of Pemaquid was taken by D'Iberville and Castin. Thus the frontier of French do

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minion was extended into the heart of Maine; and Acadia was yet, for a season, secured to the countrymen of De Monts and Champlain.

In the west, after the hope of conquering Canada was abandoned, Frontenac had little strife but with the Five Nations, whom he alternately, by missions and treaties, endeavored to win, and, by invasions, to terrify into an alliance. In February, 1692, three hundred French, with Indian confederates, were sent over the snows against the hunting parties of the Senecas in Upper Canada, near the Niagara. In the following year, a larger party invaded the country of the Mohawks, bent on their extermination. The first castle, and the second also, fell easily, for the war-chiefs were absent; at the third, a party of forty, who were dancing a war-dance, gave battle, and victory cost the invaders thirty men. But Schuyler, of Albany, collecting two hundred men, and pursuing the party as it retired, succeeded in liberating many of the captives.

Nor did the Five Nations continue their control over western commerce. After many vacillations, the prudence of the memorable La Motte Cadillac, who had been appointed governor at Mackinaw, confirmed the friendship of the neighboring tribes; but the Indians of the west would not rally under the banner of Onondio; and, in 1696, the French of Canada, aided only by their immediate allies, made their last invasion of Western New York. Frontenac, then seventy-four years of age, himself conducted the army: from Fort Frontenac they passed over to Oswego, and occupied both sides of that river; at night, they reached the falls three leagues above its mouth, and, by the light of bark torches, they dragged the canoes and boats above the portage. As they advanced, they found the savage defiance, in two bundles of reeds, suspended on a tree a sign that fourteen hundred and thirty-four warriors (such was the number of reeds) defied them. As they approached the great village of the Onondagas, that nation set fire to it, and, by night, the invaders beheld the glare of the burning wigwams.

Early in August, the army encamped near the Salt Springs, while a party was sent to ravage the country of the Oneidas, with orders to cut up their corn, burn their villages, put to death all who should offer resistance, and take six chiefs as hostages. Meantime, an aged Onondaga captive, who had refused to fly, was abandoned to the fury of the allies of the French; and never did the marvellous fortitude of an Indian brave display more fully its character of passive grandeur. All the tortures that more than four hundred savages could inflict on the decrepit old man, extorted from him not one word of weakness: he scoffed always at his tormentors as the slaves of those whom he despised. On receiving mortal wounds, his last words were, "You should have taken more time to learn how to meet death manfully! I die contented; for I have no cause for selfreproach." Such scenes were enacted at Salina.

After these successes against the Onondagas and Oneidas, it was proposed to go against the Cayugas; but Frontenac refused, as if uncertain of the result: "It was time for him to repose;" and the army returned to Montreal. He had humbled, but not subdued, the Five Nations, and left them to suffer from a famine, yet to recover their lands and their spirit, — having pushed hostilities so far that no negotiations for peace could easily succeed.

The last year of the war was one of especial alarm, as rumor divulged the purpose of the French king to send out a powerful fleet to devastate the coast of New England, and to conquer New York. But nothing came of it; and the peace of Ryswick occasioned, at least, a suspension of hostilities, though not till the English exchequer had been recruited by means of a great change in financial policy. In 1694, England accepted from individuals a loan of one and a half million pounds sterling, paying for it eight per cent. per annum, and constituting the subscribers to the loan an incorporated bank of circulation. This was the origin of the Bank of England.

1697.]

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CHAPTER XLIII.

COLONIZATION OF MICHIGAN, ILLINOIS, MISSISSIPPI, LOUISIANA, ALABAMA.

THE peace of Ryswick, ratified in September, 1697, was itself a victory of the spirit of reform; for Louis XIV., with James II. at his court, recognized the revolutionary sovereign of England; and the encroachments of France on the German empire were restrained. In America, France retained all Hudson's Bay, and all the places of which she was in possession at the beginning of the war; in other words, with the exception of the eastern moiety of Newfoundland, France retained the whole coast and adjacent islands, from Maine to beyond Labrador and Hudson's Bay, besides Canada and the valley of the Mississippi. But the boundary lines were reserved as subjects for wrangling among commissioners.

On the east, England claimed to the St. Croix, and France to the Kennebec; and, had peace continued, the St. George would have been adopted as a compromise.

The boundary between New France and New York was still more difficult to be adjusted. The Iroquois were proud of their independence; France asserted its right to dominion over their lands; England claimed to be in possession. Religious sympathies inclined the nations to the French, but commercial advantages brought them always into connection with the English.

the

After many collisions and acts of hostility between the Iroquois and the allies of the French, especially the Ottáwas; after many ineffectual attempts, on the part of Lord Bellamont, to constitute himself the arbiter of peace, and thus to obtain an acknowledged ascendency, four upper nations, in the summer of 1700, sent envoys to Montreal "to weep for the French who had died in the war." After rapid negotiations, peace was ratified between the Iroquois, on the one side, and France and