typical Indian hunter and fighter. Such men as Boone and Kenton and Wetzel belong to the country west of the mountains.

By a sort of tacit agreement, the three powers adopted priority of discovery as the rule for dividing and appropriating North America. Spain was at first disposed to claim the whole continent under the papal bull of 1493; but the maritime enterprise, military and naval power, and diplomatic force of England and France compelled her to admit them to a share of the spoil. The Spanish navigators and explorers from Columbus to De Soto gave the Gulf region to Spain ; Cartier gave the St. Lawrence to France, and Cabot the Atlantic Plain to England.

The adjustment of territorial claims and rights was a long and difficult process; and it was only as the principle of use and settlement, and even the sword, was brought in to help out discovery that points of dispute were ever settled. The recognition by Spain of discovery as the ground of title left unanswered the question where the boundary line should be drawn between Florida and the Carolinas and Georgia, and the question was never put at rest until she yielded the whole peninsula in 1763. France at first claimed the Atlantic coast south of Nova Scotia under the voyage of Verrazano; but the failure of the Huguenot colonies in Carolina and Florida, and the resolution of England in insisting upon the Cabot title, led France to yield that shore, and to content her ambition with the north. John Cabot discovered the northeastern coast years before the first French navigator crossed the ocean; but as England did not follow up discovery with settlement, and as the French made greater discoveries in that quarter, a vast region that might have been England's fell to France. Henry IV. of France, in the patent that he gave to De Monts, carried the southern boundary of Acadia to the latitude of Philadelphia; and the English kings lapped their charters over upon the French, as we shall soon see. Again, under the rule

of priority Spain was entitled to the Mississippi Valley; but, like England on the northeast coast, she did not follow discovery with occupation, and so the valley fell to France, who entered it from the north. This brought France and England into collision along the western side of the Alleghanies, as well as in the northeast and north. In general, the disputes as to the rightful ownership of a given region of territory grew out of one or both of two circumstances: a disagreement as to who the first discoverer was, or a disagreement as to how far the rights resulting from his discovery extended. Every one of the powers admitted that the others had territorial rights, but their quarrels never ended until France retired from the continent.

The remark should be added that it is impossible to represent correctly these facts on maps. The names "Acadia," "Virginia," and "Florida " stand for very different things at different times; and at no particular time, for a full century following Jamestown, were their boundary lines defined. The lines of delimitation, drawn on the most carefully constructed maps, answer but a vague general purpose. The French included Plymouth and New Amsterdam in Acadia, and Spanish maps of the seventeenth century sometimes carry Florida beyond Quebec. But more absurd than this, some sixteenthcentury geographers, and notably the Dutch, "out of spite to the Spaniards," include the whole of both North and South America in New France. 1

1

1 Parkman: Pioneers of France in the New World, 183, 184, note.

III..

THE FRENCH DISCOVER THE NORTHWEST.

WHAT ready access to the heart of North America the Saint Lawrence gave the French, was pointed out in the first and second chapters. We are now to see what use they made of their opportunity.

The advantages of the position harmonized admirably with the French character, particularly as developed under the new conditions, and with the great ideas that underlay New France. These northern colonists shrunk from a life of material development like that of their southern neighbors; they had some agriculture, but they were not such tillers of the soil as the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay, the Dutch of Hudson River, the Quakers of the Delaware, and still less the Virginia or Carolina planters; they cared for no trade but that in furs and peltries; they were indifferent to civil and religious freedom, and had no share in that passion for political and religious progress that characterized the British colonists; and, so far from desiring a State without a king and a Church without a bishop, they could not even conceive of State and Church without them. They never developed a self-reliant colonial character, but were more than content to go on as they began the children of patronage and power. But they desired to enlarge the borders of France and increase her glory; they loved the fur trade; and they longed to plant the emblems of the true faith beside all the unknown rivers and hidden lakes of the wilderness. Not only did the bolder minds burn to penetrate the secrets of the continent, but the majority, now hunters or farmers, and now soldiers or voy

ageurs, loved the free and picturesque life of the forests and waters that made the history of Canada one long adventure. Dominion, evangelization of the Indians, and the fur trade were the three ideas on which the colony rested. The soldier, the priest, and the trader are the three types of character that are never out of our sight. In one marked feature the French plan of colonization differed from that of the English. The English found no place whatever, not even the smallest, for the Indians: the French made them the very centre and heart of their whole scheme. Sympathetic, social, pliable to new conditions, the French revealed a genius for getting on with the savages that is rather confirmed than disproved by their sore experience with the Iroquois. With such ideas as these, under leaders who combined adventure, religious zeal, and far-reaching policy, they gained the rear and northern flank of the English settlements, and, almost before the latter, absorbed with their farms and shops, fishing and trade, churches and politics, were aware of what was going on, wellnigh confined them to the narrow slope between the mountains and the sea. There is no reason to think that Champlain saw the final end; but he marked out the general plan, and was himself the first to put it in practice.

In 1611 Champlain made the rude beginnings of the city of Montreal. Here he and the French traders met the wild warriors and hunters as they descended the St. Lawrence and the Ottawa: he to win influence over the Indians and to gain knowledge of their country, they to buy the Indian catch of beaver-skins. In 1613, following two pioneers whom he had sent to winter with the Indians, he ascended the Ottawa, and thus began the first survey of the route by which the Canadian Pacific Railway passes from the valley of the St. Lawrence to the region of the Upper Lakes. Trusting the false tale of one of the two pioneers, he expected to reach a great northern sea that would bear him on to the regions of the East, which Columbus had sought in the western waters. Disappointed in this endeavor, he still reached the Isle des Allumettes, the

Indian half-way house to Lake Huron, before returning to Quebec. In this vast primeval forest, six years after Smith landed on the shore of the James, but seven years before the foot of Miles Standish touched Plymouth Rock, Champlain won the respect of the Indian tribes and displayed the emblems of his religion.

In the month of May, 1615, four Récollet friars, a branch of the great Franciscan order, landed at Quebec. They came by the procurement of Champlain to carry forward the work. of Indian conversions. Having celebrated the first mass ever heard in Canada, they distributed to each a province of the wilderness empire of Satan. To Le Caron the Hurons were assigned; and soon the priest was on his way to their distant villages. As well the heroic temper of the man as his religious outlook is shown by a single sentence from one of his letters to a friend: "I must needs tell you what abundant consolation I found under all my troubles; for when one sees so many infidels needing nothing but a drop of water to make them children of God, he feels an inexpressible ardor to labor for their conversion, and sacrifice to it his repose and his life." Soon the soldier followed the priest. Ascending the Ottawa and the Mattawan, crossing the portage to Lake Nipissing, and then descending French River and Georgian Bay, Champlain found his way to the "Mer Douce" of the French maps, the Lake Huron of ours. Striking inland from Thunder Bay, he found Le Caron already established in the country of the Hurons.

The savages were all expectation; for the white chief whose prowess on the battle-field they had already learned, had promised to lead them against the Iroquois. The attack upon the Senecas in Central New York proved a failure, and Champlain returned with the Hurons to their villages, where he spent the winter. In the spring he returned to his colony, where he had been given up for dead; and the first French

1 Parkman: Pioneers of France, 363, 364.