disputants;" and he prepared a defence of the Roman church. Thus Calvin and Loyola met in the woods of Maine. But the Protestant minister, unable to compete with the Jesuit for the affections of the Indians, returned to Boston, while "the friar remained, the incendiary of mischief."

Several chiefs had, by stratagem, been seized by 1721. the New England government, and were detained as hostages. For their liberty a stipulated ransom had been paid; and still they were not free. The Abenakis then demanded that their territory should be evacuated, and the imprisoned warriors delivered up, or reprisals would follow. Instead of negotiating, the English seized the young Baron de Saint-Castin, who, being a half-breed, at once held a French commission and was an Indian war-chief; and, after vainly soliciting the savages to surrender Rasles, in January, 1722, Westbrooke led a strong force to Norridgewock to take him by surprise. The warriors were absent in the chase; the Jesuit had sufficient warning to escape, with the old men and the infirm, into the forest; and the invaders gained nothing but his papers. These were important; for the correspondence with Vaudreuil proved a latent hope of establishing the power of France on the Atlantic. There was found, moreover, a vocabulary of the Abenaki language, which the missionary had compiled, and which has been preserved to this day.

1722. Jan.

On returning from the chase, the Indians, after planting their grounds, resolved to destroy the English settlements on the Kennebec. They sent deputies to carry the hatchet and chant the war-song among the Hurons of Quebec and in every village of the Abenakis. The war-chiefs met at Norridgewock, and the work of destruction began by the burning of Brunswick.

The clear judgment of Rasles perceived the issue. The forts of the English could not be taken by the feeble means of the natives: "unless the French should join with the Indians," he reported the land as lost. Many of his red people at his bidding retired to Canada; but, to their earnest solicitations that he would share their flight, the

aged man, foreseeing the impending ruin of Norridgewock, replied: "I count not my life dear unto myself, so I may finish with joy the ministry which I have received."

1722.

The government of Massachusetts, by resolution, declared the eastern Indians to be traitors and rob- July. bers; and, while troops were raised for the war, it stimulated the activity of private parties by offering for each Indian scalp at first a bounty of fifteen pounds, and afterwards of a hundred.

1723.

The expedition to Penobscot was under public auspices. After five days' march through the woods, Mar. 4-9. Westbrooke, with his company, came upon the Indian settlement, that was probably above Bangor, at Old Town. He found a fort, seventy yards long and fifty in breadth, well protected by stockades, fourteen feet high, enclosing twenty-three houses regularly built. On the south side, near at hand, was the chapel, sixty feet long and thirty wide, well and handsomely furnished within and without; and south of this stood the "friar's dwelling-house." The invaders arrived there on the ninth of March, at six in the evening. That night they set fire to the village, and by sunrise next morning every building was in ashes.

1724.

Twice it was attempted in vain to capture Rasles. At last, on the twenty-third of August, 1724, a party from New England reached Norridgewock unperceived, and escaped discovery till they discharged their guns at the cabins.

There were then about fifty warriors in the place. They seized their arms and marched forth tumultuously, not to fight, but to protect the flight of their wives, and children, and old men. Rasles, roused to the danger by their clamors, went forward to save his flock by drawing down upon himself the attention of the assailants; and his hope was not vain. Meantime, the savages fled to the river, which they passed by wading and swimming; while the English pillaged the cabins and the church, and then set them on fire.

After the retreat of the invaders, the savages returned to nurse their wounded and bury their dead. They found

Rasles mangled by many blows, scalped, his skull broken in several places, his mouth and eyes filled with dirt; and they buried him beneath the spot where he used to stand before the altar.

At the death of Sebastian Rasles, the most noted of the Catholic missionaries in New England, he was in his sixtyseventh year, and had been thirty-seven years in the service of the church in America. He was naturally robust, but had wasted by fatigues, age, and fastings. He knew several dialects of the Algonkin, and had been as a missionary among various tribes from the ocean to the Mississippi. In 1721, Father de la Chasse had advised his return to Canada. "God has intrusted to me this flock:" such was his answer; "I shall follow its fortunes, happy to be immolated for its benefit." In New England, he was regarded as the leader of the insurgent Indians; the brethren of his order mourned for him as a martyr, and gloried in his happy immortality as a saint. The French ministry, intent on giving an example of forbearance, restrained its indignation, and trusted that the joint commissioners for regulating boundaries would restore tranquillity.

The overthrow of the missions completed the ruin of French influence. The English themselves had grown skilful in the Indian warfare; and no war-parties of the red men ever displayed more address or heroism than the brave John Lovewell and his companions. His volunteer associates twice returned laden with scalps. On a third expedition, falling into an ambush of a larger party of Saco Indians, he lost his life in Fryeburg, near a sheet of water which has taken his name; and the stream that feeds it is still known to the peaceful husbandman as the Battle Brook.

1725. April.

Nov.

At last, the eastern Indians, despairing of success, instigated, but not supported, by the French, unable to contend openly with their opponents, and excelled even in their own methods of warfare, concluded a peace, 1726. which was ratified by the chiefs as far as the St. John, and was long and faithfully maintained. InAuence by commerce took the place of influence by religion,

Aug. 6.

and English trading-houses supplanted French missions. Peace on the eastern frontier revived the maritime enterprise of Maine, and its settlements began to obtain a fixed prosperity.

The wilderness that divided the contending claimants postponed hostilities. By the treaty of Utrecht, the subjects and friends of both nations might resort to each other for the reciprocal benefit of their trade; and an active commerce subsisted between Albany and Montreal by means of the Christian Iroquois. The French, in 1719, gained leave to build a trading-house in the land of the Onondagas. In 1720, Jeancœur took possession of Niagara; and, in 1722, the governor of New York was instructed "to extend with caution the English settlements as far as possible, since there was no great probability of obtaining a determination of the general boundary." Burnet bestowed assiduous care on the condition of the frontiers, invoked colonial concert, appealed to the ministry, and, in 1726, persuaded the New York legislature, at its own cost, to lay the foundation of Oswego. This was the first in the series of measures which carried the bounds of the English colonies towards Michigan. In 1727, this trading-post was converted into a fortress, in defiance of the discontent of the Iroquois and the constant protest of France. It was the avenue through which the west was reached by English traders; and formed a station of the Miamis, and even of the Hurons, from Detroit on their way to Albany.

The limit of jurisdiction between England and France was not easy of adjustment. Canada, by its original charter, comprised the whole basin of the St. Lawrence; and that part of Vermont and New York which is watered by streams flowing to the St. Lawrence had ever been regarded by France as Canadian territory. The boat of Champlain had entered the lake that makes his name a familiar word in the same summer in which Hudson ascended the North River. Holland had never dispossessed the French; and the conquest and surrender of New Netherland could transfer no more than the possessions of Holland. There was, therefore, no act of France relinquishing its claim till the

treaty of Utrecht. The ambiguous language of that treaty did, indeed, refer to "the Five Nations subject to England;" but French diplomacy would not interpret an allusion to savage hordes as a surrender of Canadian territory. The right of France, then, to that part of New York and Vermont which belongs to the basin of the St. Lawrence, sprung from discovery, occupation, the uniform language of its grants and state papers.

As the claims of discovery and earliest occupation were clearly with the French, the English revived and exaggerated the rights of the Five Nations. In the strife with France, during the government of De la Barre, some of their chiefs had fastened the arms of the Duke of York to their castles; and this act was taken as a confession of irrevocable allegiance to England. The treaty of Ryswick made the condition at the commencement of hostilities the basis of occupation at the time of peace. Now at the opening of the war Fort Frontenac had been razed, and the country around it and Montreal itself were actually in possession of the Mohawks; so that all Upper Canada was declared to have become, by the treaty of Ryswick, a part of the domain of the Five Nations, and therefore subject to England.

1701.

Again, at the opening of the war of the Spanish succession, the chiefs of the Mohawks and Oneidas had appeared in Albany; and the English commissioners, who could produce no treaty, yet made a minute in their books of entry that the Mohawks and the Oneidas had placed their hunting-grounds under the protection of the English. Immediately, their hunting-grounds were interpreted to extend to Lake Nipising; and, on old English maps, the region is included within the dominions of England, by virtue of an act of cession from the Iroquois.

But, as a treaty of which no record existed could hardly be cited by English lawyers as a surrender of lands, it was the object of Governor Burnet to obtain a confirmation of this grant. Accordingly, in the treaty concluded at Sept. 14. Albany, in September, 1726, the cession of the Iroquois country west of Lake Erie, and north of Erie

1726.