[Illustration: GENERAL PEPPERELL AT LOUISBURG
_General Pepperell was commander of the English forces which on June
16, 1745, captured the town of Louisburg._]
Where were the English all this time? Did their Indian friends tell
them nothing about great rivers full of crocodiles, and crook-backed,
woolly oxen, and mountains of gold? After 1664 they held the whole
coast from the St. Croix River to the Savannah River; but it took them
a long time simply to reach the edge of the Mississippi Valley. Two
adventurous men, Thomas Batts, and the German, John Lederer, wormed
their way through the confused mountains of western Virginia, and
Batts reached the New River about 1671,--“a pleasing but dreadful
sight to see, mountains and hills piled one upon another.” They took
possession of “all the territories thereunto belonging” for his Majesty
Charles II. Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania all had
charters reaching west of the mountains; but they knew better than to
try to pick up territory from under the lodge poles of the ferocious
Iroquois. The English seemed to lack the discoverer’s spirit, which
can be satisfied only, as the colored preacher puts it, “by unscrewing
the inscrutable.” John Endicott thought he was as heroic as Marco
Polo, when he went up the Merrimac River to Lake Winnepesaukee, and
there cut his initials on a rock; and Governor Alexander Spotswood of
Virginia felt very proud of himself when in 1716 he conducted a party
of gentlemen on horseback across the mountains into the valley of the
Shenandoah, which was still a long way from the Mississippi Basin.
[Illustration: DOOR OF OLD HOUSE, DEERFIELD
_Showing the holes chopped in the door by the Indians, through which
they shot Mrs. Weldon, a victim of the raid._]
The French riveted their claim on the Mississippi by sending out a
colony in 1699, which soon after founded the town of New Orleans, on
the high bluff fourteen feet above the sea level of the nearby Lake
Pontchartrain. They made many settlements; such as Detroit, and St.
Joseph, and Green Bay, Vincennes, Kaskaskia, and Natchez. They set up
trading posts among the Indians; they buried lead plates along the
banks of the Ohio River, bearing the arms of the king,--they had a
clear claim to the two enormous river valleys.
[Illustration: OLD HOUSE IN DEERFIELD
_This old house escaped the conflagration in 1704._]
What was a clear claim? The Indians thought they had a clear claim,
and warlike tribes like the Iroquois and the Creeks fought for that
conviction. The English claimed the Mississippi Valley because they
wanted it, and took advantage of the four international wars of
the eighteenth century to make that claim good by further right of
conquest. After the second war, by the treaty of Utrecht, in 1713, the
first territory was clipped off from the French possessions; Acadia
(Nova Scotia) passed to the English, and with it they acquired whatever
the French claims had been to Newfoundland and Hudson Bay. At the end
of the third war, in 1748, they were holding Louisburg; but gave it
back. Then in 1754 came the great struggle of the French and Indian
War, in which the English attacked the French on the upper Ohio, on
Lake Ontario, at Louisburg, and finally at Quebec, all with triumphant
success. The Canadian French were outnumbered five or six times to one
in America, and their home government had its hands full with European
and naval wars, and could not help them.