It was but a natural deduction, that the broad and deep river they had entered from the ocean, and its tributaries, were stretched out in a long line toward the Pacific coast.*

The progress of colonization in all the northern portion of the continent, after discovery, was slow. What in our age, and especially where our own countrymen are engaged, would be but the work of a year, was then the work of a century. It was before the world had been stimulated by the example of a free government and a free people, unincumbered by royal grants and charters, and their odious and paralizing monopolies. It was before governments had learned the simple truths that some of them are yet slow in appreciating, that the higher destinies of our own race are only to be worked out in the absence of shackles upon the mind and the physical energies of the governed. It was when the good of the few was made subservient to that of the many; and Kings and their favorites were central orbs around which all there was of human energy, enterprize and adventure, was made to revolve as sattelites. It was when foreign wars and conquests, and civil wars, in which the higher interests of mankind were but little involved, were diverting the attention of Europe from the pursuits of peace, civilization, and their extended sphere. There was no prophet to awake the sleeping energies of the Old World to an adequate conception of the field of promise that was opening here; no one to even fore

shadow all that was hidden in the womb of time; and had there been, there would have been unfolded to Kings and Potentates, little for their encouragement; but how much to MAN, in all his noblest aspirations, his looking forward to a BETTER TIME!

When colonization, such as contemplated permanent occupation finally commenced, it was in a measure, simultaneous, upon our northern coasts. Two powerful competitors started in the race

The intrepid La Salle, with a spirit of daring enterprize that was never excelled, had no sooner seen the "avalanche of waters" at Niagara, than he determined to follow them to their source. He had no sooner seen the upper waters of the Mississippi, than he had determined to see the great basin into which they flowed. Leaving behind him detachments of his followers to maintain the posts he established, and carry on lucrative trade, he was himself absorbed in the great objects of his mission, a new route to the Indies and the discovery of gold. The extent of his wanderings is supposed to have been Chihuahua, in New Mexico. He was almost upon the right track with reference to both objects. Others beside him, seem to have been prepossessed with the idea that there was gold in that direction. Shall we conclude that through some unknown medium, some indistinct idea had been promulgated of what in our day is actual discovery and acquisition?

for possession and dominion in America; and a third was awakened and became a competitor. While as yet the Pilgrim Fathers were refugees in Germany, deliberating as to where should be their assylum, appalled by all the dangers of the ocean and an inhospitable clime, and at times half resolving to go back and brave the persecution from which they had fled; while as yet there was but one feeble colony, upon all our southern coast, and the rambling De Soto and the romantic Ponce de Leon had been but disappointed adventurers in the south-west; the adventurous Frenchmen had entered the St. Lawrence and planted a colony upon its banks; had erected rude pallisades at Quebec and Montreal, and were making their way by slow stages in this direction. Halting at Kingston, (Frontenac) they struck off across Canada by river and inland lake navigation-carrying their bark canoes over portagesand reached Lake Huron; then on, amid hostile tribes, until they had explored and made missionary and trading stations upon Lakes Michigan and Superior, the upper waters of the Mississippi, and the Illinois rivers.

In all the French expeditions to the St. Lawrence, previous to that of Champlain, there is little interest save in those of Jaques Cartier. In his second one, in 1535, with three ships, and a large number of accompanying adventurers he entered the St. Lawrence and gave it its name; giving also, as he proceeded up the river, names to other localities which they yet bear. Arrived at the Island of Orleans, he had a friendly interview with the natives. In a previous voyage he had seized and carried to France, two natives, who, returning with him somewhat instructed in the French language, now acted as his interpreters, and gave a favorable account to their people of those they had been with, and the country they had seen. Proceeding on, he anchored for the winter, at "Stadacona," afterwards called Quebec. Here he was met by an Indian chief, Donacona, with a train of five hundred natives who welcomed his arrival. The Indians giving Cartier intimation that a larger village than theirs lay farther up the river. With a picked crew of thirtyfive armed men he ascended the river, had friendly interviews with the natives upon its banks. Arriving at the present site of Montreal, he found an Indian village called Hochelaga, which "stood in the midst of a great field of Indian corn, was of a circular form, containing about fifty large huts, each fifty paces long and from

fourteen to fifteen wide, all built in the shape of tunnels, formed of wood, and covered with birch bark; the dwellings were divided into several rooms, surrounding an open court in the centre, where the fires burned. Three rows of pallisades encircled the town, with only one entrance; above the gate and over the whole length of the outer ring of defence, there was a gallery, approached by flights of steps, and plentifully provided with stones and other missiles to resist attack."* The strangers were entertained with fetes and dances, and in their turn, made presents. The sick and infirm came to Jaques Cartier, who in the simple minds of the natives, possessed some supernatural power over disease, which he disclaimed; but the pious adventurer "read aloud part of the Gospel of St. John, and made the sign of the cross over the sufferers."

Jaques Cartier returned to his colony at St. Croix, after a friendly parting with his newly acquired acquaintances at Hochelaga. In his absence, the intense cold had come upon his people unprepared, the scurvy had attacked them, twenty-five were dead, and all were more or less affected. The kind natives gave him a remedy that checked the disease.† The expedition prepared to return to France. As if all of the first interviews of our race with the natives were to be signally marked by acts of wrong and outrage, as an earnest of the whole catalogue that was to follow, under pretence that he had seen some manifestations of hostilities, Cartier signalized his departure, and his ingratitude, by seizing the chief, Donacona, the former captives, and two others; and conveying them on board his vessels, took them to France. The act was mitigated, it has been said, by a kind treatment that reconciled them to their fate.

The expedition had found no "gold nor silver" and for that reason disappointed their patron, the King, and the people of France; added to which, were tales of suffering in a rigorous climate. Jaques Cartier, however, made favorable reports of all he had seen and heard; and the Indian chief, Donacona, as soon as he had acquired enough of French to be intelligible, " confirmed all that had been said of the beauty, richness and salubrity of his native country." The chief, however, sickened and died.

The next commission to visit the new dominions of France, was

granted to Jean Francois de la Roche, with Jaques Cartier as his second in command. It was formidable in its organization and equipment; after a series of disasters: the arrival of Cartier, upon his old grounds; a reconciling of the Indians to his outrage; a winter of disease and death among his men; a failure of de la Roche to arrive in season; it returned to France to add to a war in which she had just then engaged, reasons for suspending colonial enterprises. Almost a half century succeeded for French advents to become but a tradition upon the banks of the St. Lawrence.

How like a vision, in all this time, must those advents have seemed with the simple natives! A strange people, with all that could excite their wonder: their huge ships, their loud mouthed cannon, whose sounds had reverberated upon the summits of their mountains, in their vallies, and been re-echoed from the deep recesses of their forests; with their gay banners, and music, and all the imposing attendants of fleets sent out by the proud monarch of a showy and ostentatious nation of Europe; who had addressed them in an unknown tongue, and by signs and symbols awed them to a contemplation of a Great Spirit, other than the terrible Manitou of their simple creed; who had showed them a "book" in which were revelations they had neither "seen in the clouds nor heard in the winds;' whose advent had been a mixed one of conciliation and perfidy: who had given them a taste of "strong water," that had steeped their senses in forgetfulness, or aroused their fiercest passions. All this had come and gone, began and ended, and left behind it a vacuum, of mingled wonder, amazement and curiosity; and of dark forebodings of evil, if there was some kind spirit, caring for their future destiny, to foreshadow to them the sequel of all they had witnessed. Would the pale faced strangers come again? Would their lost ones be restored to reveal to them the mysteries of those wondrous advents; and tell them of all things they had seen in that far off land, the home of the strangers? These were the anxious enquiries, the themes around their council fires, in their wigwams, when they held communion with their pagan deities, or asked the moon and the stars to be the revelators of hidden things. One generation passed away and another succeeded, before the mysterious strangers came,

NOTE-Toward the close of the period between the advents of Cartier and Champlain, small expeditions of French fishermen and traders, generally coasting off New Foundland, occasionally entered the St. Lawrence and traded with the natives.

first to conciliate their favor by offering themselves as allies; then to wrest from them empire and dominion.

The first expedition of Champlain was in 1603 and '4. The accounts of them possess but little interest. In 1608, equipped by his patrons for an expedition, having principally in view the fur trade, he extended his own views to the addition of permanent colonization, and missionary enterprize. Arriving at Quebec, he erected the first European tenements upon the banks of the St. Lawrence. The Indians, with whom Cartier had cultivated an acquaintance, were reduced to a few in number, by removal, famine and disease. Remaining at Quebec through a severe winter, relieving the neccessities of the Indians, his own people suffering under an attack of the scurvy, Champlain in 1609, accompanied by two Frenchmen and a war party of the natives, went up the St. Lawrence, and struck off to the Lake that still bears his name. The war party that accompanied him, were of the Algonquins and Hurons, of Canada, who were then at war with the Iroquois. Their object was invasion of the Iroquois country, and Champlain, from motives of policy had become their ally. Upon the shores of a lake to which he gave the name of St. Sacrament-afterwards called Lake George-the party met a war party of two hundred Iroquois; a battle ensued, the tide of it was as uusual, turning in favor of the warlike and almost every where conquering Iroquois, when Champlain suddenly made his appearance, with his two Frenchmen, and the first fire from their arquabuses, killed two of the Iroquois chiefs, and wounded a third. The Iroquois, dismayed, as well by the report and terrible effect of new weapons of war, as by the appearance of those who bore them, held out but little longer; fled in disorder; were pursued, and many of them killed and taken prisoners. This was the first battle of which history gives us any account, in a region where armies have since often met.And it marks another era, the introduction of fire arms in battle, to the natives, in all the northern portion of this continent. They had now been made acquainted with the two elements that were destined to work out principally their decline and gradual extermination. They had tasted French brandy upon the St. Lawrence, English rum upon the shores of the Chesapeake, and Dutch gin, upon the banks of the Hudson. They had seen the mighty engines, one of which was to conquer them in battle and the other was to conquer them in peace councils, where cessions of their domains were involved.