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The Mentor, No. 35, The Story of America in Pictures: The Contest for
North America




THE MENTOR

“A Wise and Faithful Guide and Friend”

    Vol. 1             No. 35




THE STORY OF AMERICA IN PICTURES

THE CONTEST FOR NORTH AMERICA

    LA SALLE

    CAPTURE OF LOUISBURG

    DEERFIELD MASSACRE

    CAPTURE OF QUEBEC

    BRADDOCK’S DEFEAT

    PONTIAC WAR

[Illustration]

_By ALBERT BUSHNELL HART Professor of Government, Harvard University_


The whole round world is now open. Gone is the pleasure of finding new
lands, sighting strange mountains, floating down mysterious rivers,
and meeting unknown races of men. After Mt. Everest is climbed by some
daring mountaineer, and after an airship lands on the highest peak of
Mt. McKinley, what will be left for the seeker of novelty? Where can
you now find a river or mountain range or tribe certified never before
to have been seen by white men?

That rich pleasure was enjoyed in the fullest measure by the explorers
in North America; in fact, they enjoyed it so much that they kept it
alive for four centuries. For a good two hundred and fifty years the
English at intervals battered their way into Hudson Bay, and Davis
Strait, and the Arctic deserts, trying to smash a route through the
ice, around to the north of Asia and Europe. Nearly three centuries
passed after De Soto reached the lower Mississippi before Lieutenant
Pike found its source in its native lair. As late as 1880 no man, white
or red, knew the passes across the Canadian Rockies; and to this day
only three boat parties have ever gone through the length of the canyon
of the Colorado.

[Illustration: ROBERT CAVELIER DE LA SALLE

_Born 1643; died 1687._]

In the work of opening up North America the French surpassed the
English: if no bolder, they were more adventurous. From the lower St.
Lawrence they held a direct route into the interior, which flanked the
two great obstacles to western exploration; namely, the Six Nations of
the Iroquois and the Alleghany Mountains. It is hard to say which was
the firmer wall against English discovery.


FRENCH ADVENTURE

[Illustration: LA SALLE’S SHIP, THE GRIFFIN

_From an old print._]

If we were only French, we could weep at the splendid story of French
discovery, as compared with the final collapse of the French empire on
the continent of North America. The French were the first to find the
St. Lawrence; first to see each one of the Great Lakes; first to spread
exaggerated ideas about Niagara Falls--where, according to Mark Twain,
the hack fares in his time were so much higher than the falls that the
visitor did not perceive the latter. They were first to be awestruck at
the site of the future city of Chicago; first to reach the Mississippi;
first to be stopped by the Falls of St. Anthony, which unfortunately
were not at that time subject to conservation; first to navigate the
Mississippi; first to see the Rocky Mountains; first to cross from Lake
Superior to Hudson Bay. What a fate, to be the star actors in so many
first performances, and then not to appear at all in the last act!
What a destiny for the earliest explorers of our country!

One reason why the French secured early control of the interior
was that they had an astonishing gift of living on the country.
When Stanley crosses the Dark Continent, or Amundsen penetrates the
White Continent, he carries great quantities of stores with him; but
Champlain, and Marquette, and La Salle went light. The Frenchmen
paddled their canoes along with their Indian friends, lived on game and
Indian corn, found much to engage and interest them, and were always
ready for a joyous fight. Frenchmen know how to draw the pleasures of
life out of unpromising surroundings.


FOUNDING OF QUEBEC

The French made their first permanent settlement at Quebec in 1608;
but the English had then been in Jamestown a year. From the first the
continent was too small to hold two such boisterous, expanding, and
conflict-loving people. Captain Argall in 1613 opened the ball by
capturing the little Jesuit settlement at Flying Mountain on Mount
Desert. From that time, for just a hundred and fifty years, the two
nations were sparring with each other.

[Illustration: Copyright, 1897, by Little, Brown & Co. Reproduced by
permission.

LA SALLE PRESENTING A PETITION TO KING LOUIS XIV]

For many years this warfare was hedged in, because mountains, woods,
and savages filled up a broad belt of territory between the English
coast settlements and the St. Lawrence. But in war, as in the chivalric
game of football, when you cannot break through the center, you play
round the ends. Hence in every one of the six regular wars, besides
various local squabbles, there was always fighting between French and
English in Nova Scotia, or the Islands of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, or
along that river. In 1613 the English captured Port Royal on the Bay of
Fundy, and again in 1690 and 1710,--it became almost a habit,--in 1670
they broke into Hudson Bay; in 1745 and 1758 they mastered Louisburg;
and in 1759 took Quebec.


LA SALLE

The most gallant figure in this century and a half is the chevalier
Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle, who had all the pluck and endurance
of his Norman ancestors. He was educated by the Jesuits; but preferred
the life of a seignior on the frontier of Canada. There he heard tales
of a river starting somewhere near the Great Lakes and following so
long a course that he guessed it must be the Colorado. From that time
he became a still hunter for the Mississippi River. He built the
Griffin, the first vessel ever seen on Lake Erie. Apparently he found
the Ohio, and decided that that was not the advertised stream; and
before he could get to the Mississippi it had been discovered by the
priest Marquette and the Indian trader Joliet, while Father Hennepin
went up the great stream to the falls.

[Illustration: NIAGARA FALLS

_As pictured by Father Louis Hennepin, probably the first white man
to see this wonderful waterfall. From a plate made from the original
Utrecht edition of 1697._]

La Salle had larger plans than to see new countries and float on
strange rivers: he wanted to occupy that region for his sovereign and
friend, Louis XIV, Le Grand Monarque. Early in 1682 he reached what
the recorder of that expedition calls “the divine river, called by the
Indians Checagou.” With him was that picturesque figure Tonti, “the man
with the iron hand”--and his artificial member was no tougher and more
enduring than his iron heart.

February 6, 1682, the expedition reached what they called “the River
Colbert,” and six leagues lower they passed the mouth of the Missouri.
There they registered the first protest against the St. Louis water
supply; for that stream, they said, “is full as large as the River
Colbert, into which it empties, troubling it so that from the mouth
the water is hardly drinkable.” The Indians entertained him with the
fiction that by going up the Missouri ten or twelve days he would come
to a mountain, beyond which was the sea with many ships.

La Salle was the man who put the French into the Mississippi Valley,
and thus gave them possession of the two finest regions in North
America,--the whole watershed of the St. Lawrence, including the Great
Lakes, and the whole watershed of the Mississippi. How many different
craft have followed after his canoes,--a keel boat containing Aaron
Burr and his misfortunes; a flat boat, with Abraham Lincoln stretching
his long arms over the steering oar; the Belle of St. Louis racing the
Belle of Memphis, cramming sugar and hams into the furnace, and, just
as she pulled abreast of her rival, blowing up in most spectacular
style; and Porter’s gunboats, driving past Vicksburg and exchanging
broadsides with the batteries on the heights! Little did La Salle know
that he was opening up a highway for a nation not yet born!


ENGLISH CLAIMS

[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.


FRONTIER WARFARE

[Illustration: SOLDIERS’ MONUMENT, DEERFIELD

_This monument stands on the common in Deerfield, on the site of the
church of 1704._]

All this fighting was not according to the nice, formal,
observe-the-laws-of-war methods, such as are now followed between
civilized nations: it was more like a campaign in the Balkans, or the
amenities of the Zulus in Africa. Europeans were not particularly
gentle in their warfare. The early colonies were planted when the
Thirty Years’ War was raging in Germany, a war in which the unoffending
peas