xt70gb1xd68n https://exploreuk.uky.edu/dips/xt70gb1xd68n/data/mets.xml Winsor, Justin, 1831-1897. 1895  books b92f352w772009 English Houghton, Mifflin  : Boston, Ma. Contact the Special Collections Research Center for information regarding rights and use of this collection. Mississippi River Valley --History --To 1803. Louisiana --History --Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775. New France --Discovery and exploration. United States --History --Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775. United States --History --French and Indian War, 1755-1763. The Mississippi basin; the struggle in America between England and France 1697-1763, with full cartographical illustrations from contemporary sources. text The Mississippi basin; the struggle in America between England and France 1697-1763, with full cartographical illustrations from contemporary sources. 1895 2009 true xt70gb1xd68n section xt70gb1xd68n 
    
    
    
    
    
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NARRATIVE AND CRITICAL HISTORY OF AMERICA. With Bibliographical and Descriptive Essays on its Historical Sources and Authorities. Profusely illustrated with portraits, maps, facsimiles, etc. Edited by Justin Winsor, Librarian of Harvard University, with the cooperation of a Committee from the Massachusetts Historical Society, and with the aid of other learned Societies. In eight royal 8vo volumes. Each volume, net, $5.50; sheep, net, $6.50; half morocco, net, $7.50. {Sold only by subscription for tke entire set.)

READER'S HANDBOOK OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION.   i6mo, $1.25.

WAS SHAKESPEARE SHAPLEIGH? i6mo, rubricated parchment paper, 75 cents.

C H RISTOP H E R CO LU M B U S, and how he received and imparted the Spirit of Disoovery. With portraits and maps.  8vo, gilt top, $4.00.

CARTIER TO FRONTENAC. A Study of Geographical Discovery in the interior of North America, in its historical relations, 1534-1700. With full cartographical Illustrations from Contemporary Sources. 8vo, gilt top, $4.00.

THE MISSISSIPPI BASIN. The Struggle in America between England and France, 1697-1763. With full cartographical Illustrations from Contemporary Sources. 8vo, gilt top, $4.00.

THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT: The Struggle for the Trans-Allegheny Region, 1763-1797. With full cartographical Illustrations from Contemporary Sources. 8vo, $4.00.

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY, Boston and New York. 
   Cfje jffltestsstppt Basin

THE

STRUGGLE IN AMERICA BETWEEN ENGLAND AND FRANCE

1697   1763

WITH FULL CARTOGRAPHICAL ILLUSTRATIONS FROM CONTEMPORARY SOURCES

BY

JUSTIN WINSOR

BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY   6e iatatj$i&e prc8& Cambtittge 
   Copyright, 1895, By JUSTIN WINSOB,

All rights reserved. 
   To

CLEMENTS EOBEET MAEKHAM, C. B., F. E. S.

President op the Koyal Geographical Society, London.

Dear Me. Markham,   

Such an observer as you are knows how the physiography of a continent influences its history; how it opens avenues of discovery, directs lines of settlement, and gives to the natural rulers of the earth their coign of vantage. I would not say that there are not other compelling influences; but no other control is so steady. If we appreciate such a dominating power in subjecting the earth to man's uses, we cannot be far from discerning the pith of history, particularly of those periods which show the work of pioneers.

The society over which you hold so signal an authority gives itself to the study of geography as elucidating many problems in man's destiny. There is, then, a fitness, I trust, in your accepting this homage from one who is enrolled in that society's foreign membership, and also is your friend and servant,

Harvard University, March, 1895. 
    
   CONTENTS AND ILLUSTRATIONS.

CHAPTER I.

The Mississippi Basin at the End of the Seventeenth Century ...............*.  .  . j  . .

Illustrations : The Natchez Country, after Danville (1732), 7 ; The Upper Mississippi and the Mille Lacs Region, after Humphreys and Abbot (1861), 9 ; The Ohio Basin, after the Same, 19 ; The Green Bay Portage, after Marcel's Reproductions, 23 ; Col-den's Map, showing the Northern Portages, 25 ; The Divide between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Basin, by Humphreys and Abbot, 27 ; The Northern Portages in Joliet's Time, after Marcel's Reproductions, 28, 29 ; The Heads of the Yellowstone and Snake Rivers, after Humphreys and Abbot, 31.

CHAPTER H.

Iberville's Expedition. 1697-1700 ...........

Illustrations : The Mississippi in La Salle's Time, 34 ; The Gulf Coast defectively mapped (1728), 35 ; Portrait of Iberville, 37 ; Roggeveen's Map of the Gulf Coast (1675), 39 ; The Lower Mississippi Basin, after Humphreys and Abbot (1861), 41; Coxe's Map of Carolana (1722), 44, 45 ; Mitchell's Map (1755) of Colonel Welch's Route (1698), 47 ; Danville's Carte de la Louisiane, 49; Jefferys' Lower Mississippi (1759), 50; Homann's Lower Mississippi with Tonty's Route, 51; Jefferys' Map of Fort L'Huillier and the Trail to the Pawnees, 53 ; La Salle's and Iberville's Explorations, 55 ; Portrait of Bienville, 57 ; Danville's Map of the Gulf Coast (1732), 59.

CHAPTER III.

Throughout the Valley. 1700-1709...........

H.lustrations : Delisle's Map of the Gulf Coast, 75 ; Franque-lin's Map of the Mississippi, 77 ; La Potherie's Carte Generalle de la Nouvelle France (1722), 79 ; The Mille Lacs Region, 81 ; La Hontan's Riviere Longue, 82. 
   vi

CONTENTS AND ILLUSTRATIONS.

CHAPTEK IV.

Croz&t and Trade.  1710-1719.............83

Illustrations : French Soldiers (1710), 84; Red River Basin, after Humphreys and Abbot's Basins of the Mississippi (1861), 89 ; Broutin's Carte des Natchitoches (1722), 91 ; Homann's Map (1720), showing the Routes of St. Denis, 93 ; The Red River Region, after Danville's Louisiana, 95 ; Quivira, etc., by Palairet and Delaroche, 97.

CHAPTER V.

The Mississippi Bubble.  1714-1720 ......... .99

Illustrations : Portrait of John Law, 100 ; Bill of the Banque Royale, 103 ; Country of the Padoucas, etc., 105 ; Law's Map of Louisiana, 107; Arms of the Mississippi Company, 107; Quinquempoix, 109.

CHAPTER VI.

The Barriers of Louisiana.  1710-1720 .........Ill

Illustrations : The Upper Mississippi, from the Gentleman's Magazine (1763), 113 ; The Great Lake of the West, from Popple's Map (1732), 113 ; Danville's Map of the Upper Lakes, 117 ; Map of the Illinois Country, 119; Kaskaskia and its Vicinity, 121; Governor Spotswood's Route to the Valley of Virginia, 129 ; Indian Map of Traders' Paths, 132.

CHAPTER VII.

Charlevoix and his Observations.  1720-1729....... 136

Illustrations : Lafltau's Map of North America, 137 ; De Fer's Map of Santa Fe" and the Far Country, 139 ; The Missouri and the Country of the Padoucas, by Bowen and Gibson, 140 ; Dr. James Smith's Map of Louisiana, 142, 143 ; Danville's Upper Mississippi, 147; Dumont's Plan of New Orleans, 151 ; The Middle Mississippi, by Bowen and Gibson, 153 ; Mitchell's Map of the Cenis' Country, 155.

CHAPTER VIII.

Along the Appalachians.  1720-1727 .......... 160

Illustration : The Indian Trail from the Shenandoah, 169. 
   CONTENTS AND ILLUSTRATIONS.

CHAPTER IX.

The Rivalries of France, England, and Spain.  1730-1740 .  . 171 Illustrations : Keith's Map of Virginia, 181; Fort Rosalie and Vicinity, 189.

CHAPTER X.

The Search for the Sea of the West.   1727-1753 ..... 193

Illustrations : Jefferys' Map of Ve"rendrye's Forts and the River of the West, 195 ; Bowen and Gibson's Sioux Country, (1763), 197 ; Vaugondy's Amerique Septentrionaie (1750), 205 ; Buache's Mer de VOuest (1752), 207 ; Delisle's Carte d'Amerique (1722), 208 ; Buache's Mer de VOuest (1752), 209 ; Le Rouge's River of the West (1746), 215.

CHAPTER XI.

War and Truce.  1741-1748 .............. 218

Illustration : Kitchin's Map of the French Settlements (1747), 226, 227.

CHAPTER XII.

The Portals of the Ohio Valley.   1740-1749 ....... 229

Illustrations : Parts of Fry and Jefferson's Map of Virginia, 231, 233, 237; Lewis Evans's Map of Pensilvania (1749), 240, 241 ; Evans's Middle British Colonies (1758), 244, 245 ; Andrews's New Map of the United States (1783), 247 ; One of Celoron's Plates, 253 ; Map of Ce"loron's March, 256, 257.

CHAPTER XIII.

Louisiana and its Indians.   1743-1757 .......... 259

Illustrations : Map of the Erie Portages, 261; Adair's Map of the Indian Nations, 262, 263 ; Dumont's Chickasaw and Choctaw Country, 265 ; Danville's North America, showing Position of Southern Tribes, 267 ; Le Page du Pratz's Map (1757), 269 ; Timberlake's Cherokee Country, 270 ; Indian Map, by Kitchin, of the Cherokee Country, 272, 273; Covens and Mortier's Cherokee Country (1758), 275.

CHAPTER XIV.

Undeclared War.   1750-1754............. 277

Lllustrations : Boundary  of  Carolina  and Virginia, 278; Mitchell's Frontier Settlements (1775), 281 ; Colonel Cresap's 
   viii CONTENTS AND ILLUSTRATIONS.

Map of the Sources of the Potomac, 283 ; Mitchell's Map of the Route of Christopher Gist, 291; Danville's Ohio Valley, 295 ; Hutchins's Rapids of the Ohio, 296 ; Howell's Map of the French Creek Route, 297 ; Sketch of the French Creek Route, 298, 299 ; Le Rouge's Map of the Route from Duquesne, 301; Evans's Middle British Colonies, corrected by Pownall, 304, 305 ; Part of Fry and Jefferson's Map of Virginia, 313.

CHAPTER XV.

The Rival Claimants for North America.   1497-1755.   .   .  . 316 Illustrations : Map from the Memoires des Commissaires du Roi (1757), 319, 320, 321 ; Part of Bowen and Gibson's North America (1763), 328, 329 ; Mitchell's Map of the Wabash River (1755), 333.

CHAPTER XVI.

The Anxieties and Plans of 1754 ........... 338

Illustration : Charles Thomson's Map, 345.

CHAPTER XVH.

The Alleghany Portals. 1755 ............. 352

Illustration : Jefferys' Map of Braddock's March, 358, 359.

CHAPTER XVIII.

Two Dismal Years, 1756,1757 ............. 372

Illustrations : Pouchot's Map of the Frontiers, 375 ; Emanuel Bowen's Map of the Country of the Southern Indians, 383.

CHAPTER XIX.

The Ohio and St. Lawrence won.  1758-1759 ....... 385

Illustrations : Plan of Fort Duquesne, 391; Fort Massac and Vicinity, 392 ; The Lower Ohio, 393.

CHAPTER XX.

The Transition from War to War. 1760-1762 ...... 403

CHAPTER XXI.

The Treaty of Peace. 1762-1763 ............ 415

Illustrations : Jefferys' Map of the Proposed Neutral Territory, 416 ; Jefferys' Map of the Canadian Northwest, 421 ; Part of 
   01

CONTENTS AND ILLUSTRATIONS. ix

the Map. of the Compagnie Francpise, 423; Vander Aa's Canada, 425 ; Map of North America, from the Gentleman's Magazine (December, 1755), 427 ; Jefferys' Map of Lake Winnipeg and the River of the West, 429.

CHAPTER XXII.

The Effect upon the Indians.  1763-1765 ........ 432

Illustrations : Map of Bouquet's Campaign in Smith's Historical Account, 435 ; Hutehins's Survey-of Bouquet's Route, 436, 437 ; Scull's Map of the Monongahela Valley, 439 ; Portrait of Henry Bouquet, 443. "

CHAPTER XXHI.

Occupation Completed.  1764,1765 ........... 447

Illustrations : Jefferys' Map of the Coast of the Gulf of Mexico (1768), 448, 449; Ross's Course of the Mississippi (1775), 450 ; Callot's Town and Fort of Natchez, 451; Callot's View of the Fort at Natchez, 453 ; Callot's Map of Kaskaskia and Fort Chartres, 458, 459 ; Thomas Hutehins's Villages in the Illinois Country, 460 ; Ross's Vicinity of Fort Chartres and Kaskaskia, 461; A French House among the Illinois (Callot), 463.

Index

465 
    
     

EXPLORATIONS IN THE MISSISSIPPI BASIN.

CHAPTER I.

the mississippi basin at the end of the seventeenth

century.

The seventeenth century closed with France prepared to profit by the results and influences of more than a hundred and sixty years of exploration in the interior of North America.

On the eastern seaboard of the continent the claims of France arising from the voyage of Verrazano had availed lit-tie, though Louis XIV. had strenuously asserted them. ^herfror The Spaniards of those days guarded their capricious rights from Florida northward. The English, taking advantage of the close attention bestowed by France upon intestine affairs during her civil wars, had begun a settlement on the North Carolina coast. This was almost coincident with the defeat of the Great Armada, that first serious setback to Spanish pride. The century which followed saw the English well established along the Atlantic shores of North America. In 1688, the revolution which put William of Orange on the English throne opened the way for a long conflict with France, nowhere more warily pursued than in the New World. By the close of the seventeenth century, England was prepared to defend her territorial claims from Spanish Florida on the south, with limits in dispute, to Acadia on the north, where there was a like uncertainty of boundary. The English claim thus covered an extent of coast, with an indefinite extension inland, of so varied a climate that the average temperature ranged from 42   to 75   Fahrenheit.

In the struggle for the possession of the region about the 
   2

THE MISSISSIPPI BASIN.

Gulf of St. Lawrence, though France had contested it with The st England and with Portugal, she had practically ob-audTriud- tained the mastery, and now held without dispute son's Bay. jj^j. grand northern portal of the continent, so essential in pressing her claim upon the great interior.

Farther north, about Hudson's Bay, her rivalry with England was brisk,     for it was necessary there to protect the flank of her main enterprise on the St. Lawrence,     and at the close, of the seventeenth century it was at its height. It was a claim for and against, on both sides, stoutly advocated and as stoutly defended. Between the rivals it was not only a question of trade for peltries, vital for France in her system of colonization, but it was to decide with whom rested the coveted chance of finding in those high latitudes the long-sought passage to the western ocean. Already in the closing years of the seventeenth century, the leader whom France had most trusted in this northern conflict was gaining skill and hardihood for a career which was soon to be transferred to the mouth of the Mississippi. In 1641, Charles Le Moyne, leaving Dieppe, had come to

Quebec .to cast his lot for awhile with the Jesuits, and Here he raised up a family of distinguished sons, and

the oldest and youngest bore the appellations respectively of Iberville and Bienville. The elder was a man of nearly thirty when he appeared in command of an expedition sent from Quebec to attack the remaining English forts on Hudson's Bay. He failed in his purpose, and learning on his way back that the Yankee Phips was in the St. Lawrence (1690), he bore away his ships to France with what plunder he had secured. In the years immediately following, fortune varied in the north,     now the French, now the English, got the ascendency. In the winter of 1694   95, Iberville gained what had been lost, and a like fortune followed him in a measure in 1697.

Stories told by the Indians, and some papers captured by him in Fort Nelson, had inspired him with the hope of finding his way through these northern waters to the great western sea, but in this he failed, leaving the problem to be intermittently attacked with little cessation even to the present day.

Peace of            . .... ,

Ryswiok.    Ihe peace of Byswick, negotiated in ignorance of the French conquests hereabouts, restored in 1697 to the 
   ENGLISH CHARTERS.

3

English all they had lost about Hudson's Bay, and Iberville was left to final adventures in a new field.

The death of Frontenac had deprived Canada of a conspicuous leader, and active spirits, subject to the influence of that rugged soldier, turned to other allurements. So Iberville appears on the Mississippi.

The charters which the English king had given, while parceling out the Atlantic seaboard of the present United States, carried the bounds of the several grants west- sea-to-sea

- , . , -. - charters.

ward to the great ocean supposed to lie somewhere beyond the Alleghanies. Though Drake and others had followed the Pacific northward to Upper California, the determination of longitude was still so uncertain that different estimates prevailed as to the width of the continent. When the charter of Virginia was confirmed in 1609, there was just dying out a conception which had prevailed among geographers, but which the intuitions of Mercator had done much to dispel, that a great western sea approached the, Atlantic somewhere midway along its seaboard.   This theory had come down from the    ,, . .

J The Sea of

voyage of Verrazano. To prove it, various explora- verrazauo. tions had been made inland from the ramifying waters of the Chesapeake and the Hudson. It was with this determination in view that Francis I. of France had commissioned Cartier to pierce the continent from the great gulf back of Newfoundland ; and Cartier's success, followed by the later developments made by Cham plain, Nicollet, Grosseilliers, and Joliet, had proved on the contrary the extent of the two great interior valleys of North America, and that they stretched over the latitudes and longitudes supposed to have been the bed of the Verrazano Sea. These explorations had also shown how slight a ridge separated the basins of these continental valleys. St. Lus-son and Duluth had gone through the formalities of

t? , The interior

taking possession for France of these enormous water- valleys and sheds near their upper springs, and La Salle had planted the arms of France at the mouth of the Mississippi for a similar purpose. Thus, by 1665, the French had jiroved the vast westward extent of the St. Lawrence water-system, and had made extremely probable the existence of the Mississippi. The ultimate discovery of this latter basin could not be avoided 
   4 THE MISSISSIPPI BASIN.

when the English, in 1663, insisted in the charter of Carolina on territorial rights which reached to the New Albion of Drake. This region of the Pacific coast was no longer generally thought to lie just beyond the Alleghanies, as British disregard of foreign intelligence, exemplified in the Farrer map of 1651, had recently asserted.

The principles which underlie the rights of discovery were Rights of sure t0 bring these rival claims of sovereignty over ducovery.   ne same territory to a sharp encounter, as soon as the French had proved that their lines of exploration crossed these charter bounds of the English. This impending conflict was made inevitable by the passage of Joliet and Marquette down the Great River to the Arkansas, in 1673, and of La Salle to the Gulf of Mexico, in 1681. It was the establishment of military posts throughout this vast valley that eventually brought on a life-struggle between the English and the French. The English pretension was an alleged territorial right derived from charters formulated for the most part when the world was ignorant of the limits they conveyed. These charter extensions were propped by claims bought from the Iroquois, only less substantial, which prompted England to push her pioneers toward the setting sun and athwart the French course. A large part of the history of the Mississippi valley during the eighteenth century is the record of a conflict of races which these opposing claims engendered.

The prize contended for was a noble one. In Europe the The Alps and in Asia the Himalayas shake off as from

Mississippi   central buttresses the streams of human life to a verge

basin.   

of ocean waters. A continental condition that the Old World had not known was now found in this magnificent interior basin, over which the frontiers of a great republic were yet to be rapidly pushed from one mountain wall to and beyond the other. It is a territory in its central water-shed of more than a million square miles, and with its tributary areas of no less than two and a half millions. It is, perhaps, as fertile a space for its size as the globe shows, and capable of supporting two hundred millions of people. It has a breadth of tillable valley remarkably free from impassable mountains, and modern engineering can easily overcome all physical obstacles in the way of a united people holding it. 
   THE GREAT RIVER.

5

It is threaded by a central water-way that begins amid an average temperature of 40  , and meets the sea with the mercury at 72  . This lordly current passes through belts of corn, cotton, sugar, and oranges. It is shaded successively by the willow and the sycamore, by the locust, persimmon, and ash, and at last by the bay-tree, the magnolia, and palmetto. With forty or fifty considerable tributaries and a hundred thousand affluent streams in all, the great current carries off to the Gulf a marvelous precipitation. These water-ways offer sixteen thousand miles of navigable waters, and it has been said that its great body of tributaries is more generally serviceable for transport service than that of any other river, except perhaps the Amazon. Vessels of good size are thought to be able to traverse at least ten thousand miles of channel for most of the year. The voyager stemming the current from the Gulf must pole his bateau nearly a thousand miles to the Ohio. At the Falls of St. Anthony     the first serious obstruction     he finds himself about seven hundred feet above the sea, and this elevation is more than doubled when he reaches the source of all in Itasca Lake, more than twenty-five hundred miles from the deltas in the Gidf. If he follow the Missouri from its junction with the main stream, he can reach the Rocky Mountains, near four thousand miles from the sea, and the sinuosities of his course will double the length of his passage.

Descending, as was ordinarily done in these early days of the French occupation, from the portages about Lake Michigan, the canoeist found a declination of nearly six hundred feet in twenty-five hundred miles. In the floods of the early summer it took him about a month to make the descent, and hardly less than three months at any time to mount against the stream. A season of freshets would have raised the surface of the Gulf a foot and a quarter but for some oceanic compensations.

Moreover, there was something commensurately grand in the surging of this vast current through the years Tim surging athwart an average width of forty or fifty miles of current-alluvial bottom, on its way to find the level of the sea. Fran-quelin, in 1684, gave the Taensas lake as immediately opening into the Great River. Iberville, in 1700, found it a league to the west, and Thomassy, in 1859, put it several miles still farther from the main stream-   Again, Cahokia was' founded 
   6

THE MISSISSIPPI BASIN.

in 1699, but it was not long before the shifting current left its habitations far inland. Charlevoix, in 1721, speaking of the region about the mouth of the lied River, found evident proof that "the Mississippi casts itself here from the east,"     a condition to be considered, he thought, in making settlements thereabouts. To counteract these and other hydrographical vagaries along the great current and its largest affluent, the government of the United States is now expending five million dollars a year.

For over a century after the European contact this great The river had waited for recognition.   It sometimes rose

discoverers. gfty   ee   jn jts        an(j ye   fais immense'butflow in

the Gulf had failed of adequate notice. Pineda, in 1579, did not comprehend it. Twenty years later, De Soto had crossed the river at the Chickasaw bluffs without a suspicion of an immense drainage, of which the consequent cartography took no note.

It was not till 1673 that Marquette and Joliet found the "great water" of the Indian report, so long familiar, to flow neither into the Gulf of California nor into the Sea of Virginia, but to run south to the wide semi-tropical Gulf. The future of the Great River was now assured. The luckless La Salle had fallen by the assassin's bullet while endeavoring to make it the imposing southern entrance to the interior of the continent.

Nature had, indeed, made the entrance from the Gulf more than the portal of a single basin.   The south winds

The trough 1   . .

of the       which are swept in from its tropical waters, unitmc;

continent. . 1 .   r .

with other currents drawn thither from the regions bordering on the Pacific, course northward together to be precipitated at the sources of the Mississippi, Saskatchewan, and Mackenzie rivers. Thence passing up those boreal valleys, reinforced by the Chinooks from the North Pacific, they make the soil fairly tillable almost to the Arctic circle, and agriculture profitable as far north as the 62   of latitude. There is another natural cause of the cultivable power of these high latitudes in the depression of the average altitude of the land, as shown in the eight thousand feet of elevation where the Union Pacific Railroad runs, and the four thousand on the line

Note. The opposite map is from the Carte de la Louisiane, par le Sieur D'Anville, dresste en max, 1732; publiee en 1752. It shows the country of the Natchez and Tonicas, and the position at that time of the Lac des Tainsas. 
    
   8 THE MISSISSIPPI BASIN.

of the Canadian Pacific. It has been computed that the depression of altitude from Wyoming to the Mackenzie River would counteract climatically a northing of thirteen degrees. Furthermore, the greater length of sunlight everywhere characteristic of high latitudes conduces at least to the rapidity of botanic development.

All these causes put spring on the Peace River ahead of that season on the Minnesota, and the ice in the river at Fort Snell-ing near St. Paul is said to break up simultaneously with that at Fort Vermilion in Athabasca. Thus it was in these early clays that the buffalo ranged among the copsewood and on the prairie extending from the lower Mississippi to Athabasca.

So the great longitudinal trough of North America, with scarce a perceptible divide in some places where the Mississippi and Red River of the North head together, stretches in graduated aspects from the Mexican Gulf nearly to the Great Slave Lake. In this way the enormous interior trough is not confined to the Mississippi, but is increased by something like two millions of square miles of land along the Mackenzie, Saskatchewan, and Red rivers, which with the Mississippi form an almost continuous course of fertilizing water.

It was obviously now the mission of France to make this watery portal by the Mexican Gulf for the valley of the Mississippi what French explorers had already, a century and a half before, made the St. Lawrence Gulf for the lower basin of the Great Lakes.

The French had two rivals to be feared in fulfilling this mis-Rivais of sion,     the Spanish and the English. Spanishimd The Spaniards had not profited as they might have done by the incursions across this lower country made by Narvaez and De Soto; but they had founded St. Augustine, on the Atlantic coast, in 1565, twenty y*ars and more before the fatal stroke to Spanish prosperity fell in the destruction of the Great Armada. Spain was at that time unquestionably dominant everywhere in this northern continent, and she had not yet begun to fear that the English would in time dispossess her of the New Mexican mines, or that the French in the Illinois would get from the Comanches horses bred from Spanish ponies.   She had little to dread from Raleigh's colony at Roa- 
    
   10

THE MISSISSIPPI BASIN.

noke, or from the scattered fishing stations of the French about Newfoundland. But when Philip II. died, the time had come for Spain's threatening rivals to contest her claim to American soil.

France on her part was not prepared to dispute the rights of Spain west of the Rio Grande del Norte, for the Spaniards asserted that Antoine du Miroir, who had led their explorations from Mexico, had never passed east of that river. Accordingly, from that stream along the coast of the modern Texas and as far east as Pensacola (where Spain had recently settled a colony, in 1696) France claimed that her rights rested upon her discovery of the Mississippi by Joliet, and upon La Salle's coursing along the adjacent coasts.

Inland, however, the Spaniards had already gained some knowledge of this Texan region. In 1575, Francisco de Urdi-nola had reconnoitred the upper reaches of its rivers, and a hundred years later (1675) an expedition under Fernando del Bisque had again penetrated the country. There seem, indeed, to have been wandering Spanish missionaries at certain points in the country at a later day. What is now San Antonio had formerly been a Spanish military post, and was considered a regular station of their frontier in 1690, and a number of settlers had been gathered there under its protection.

The current of the Red River offered to the Spaniards another Red River aPProacn on tne western flank of the Mississippi; but it would lead them to a low country, without mines, and this characteristic of the lower valley of the Mississippi had long kept that gold-seeking people out, and was likely to continue to do so.

The most dangerous rivals of the French were in the east,     English the English dwelling north of the Floridean peninsula, colonies. separated by bounds claimed in 1663 by the English to be the 31   of north latitude, but never settled till the obliteration of 1763. Living under their sea-to-sea charters, these English were nevertheless walled in on the Atlantic slope by the Appalachian range. Though in some regions much conglomerated of stock, they were in the main dominated by unmistakable English principles which the French little understood. This difference of character always kept the two people mutually unattractive.   There was a fundament of English policy 
   THE ENGLISH COLONIES.

11

which at first blush seemed to place the English on a better footing with the aborigines, but events hardly showed a constant advantage in it. This was the policy of claiming only sovereignty over the natives' land, and requiring the purchase of the fee before occupancy. The French and the Spaniards, on the other hand, claimed both sovereignty over and the fee in all heathen lands which they occupied.

The English, moreover, were a trading people in a sense that the French were not. They founded their communities on family life, which bound them to the soil, so that they abided whereon they entered. The practice of the fur trade, the sole support of the French, was opposed to such kind of domesticity. The English, too, had proved themselves a seafaring folk beyond what their rivals on the St. Lawrence were. They had flourished on the ocean in spite of a survival of mediaevalisni in the narrow policy of imperial navigation acts. By this failure of the mother English to recognize a public policy advancing inevitably, the colonies were hardened to ways which eventually deprived England of them.

The Dutch, during their rule on Manhattan, had organized an Indian trade in peltries, and the English, who succeeded in their pursuit of the same trade, outbid the French in their own policy. Their rivals in this were touched in their sorest spot. From the beginning this emulation engendered and kept up a sort of guerrilla warfare between the traders of both races. In 1685 Governor Dongan of New York had invited the " Otta-wawas, a people on the back of Maryland, Virginia, and Carolina, to come and trade at Albany," and the next year the French ^captured some Albany traders who had gone to these Indians " on a lake."

The British colonists were drawing apart from the feudal and manorial systems' of the Old World, as the French were

J Their

not.   In New England, the early adoption of the Mo- political

-,   -i    -i -i      r ii* . i mi character.

saic code had banished primogeniture and entail. Ihe Quakers in Philadelphia had already sounded the knell of slavery, and Samuel Sewall, in Boston, was soon to inveigh against it in his Selling of Joseph. The future union of the States was noticeably prefigured in the plans of confederation which William Penn, Lord Cidpepper, and others were considering. The people were everywhere divided into " patriots " and " prerogative men." 
   12

THE MISSISSIPPI BASIN.

The class lists of Harvard, soon to be followed by those of Yale, ranked students by social position, so that a strong infusion of Old-World sentiments in family distinctions was still prevailing, but on political questions it was easily remarked that growing convictions were sundering the colonies from the mother country. It was significant of the geographical divergencies of these sentiments, that in the sequel the southern gentleman was oftenest to stand for a new future, and th