Washington's Road (Nemacolin's path) the First Chapter of the Old French War

by Archer Butler Hulbert

CHAPTER III

THE ARMS OF THE KING OF FRANCE

In the year fifteen hundred and forty, Jacques Cartier raised a white cross crowned with the fleur-de-lis of France upon an improvised altar of crossed canoe paddles at Quebec, bearing the inscription “Franciscus Primus, Dei gratia, Francorum Rex Regnat,” and formally took possession of a new continent. Two centuries later, in the dawn of early morning, British soldiers wrested from the betrayed Montcalm the mist-enshrouded height where that emblazoned cross had stood, and New France fell—“amid the proudest monuments of its own glory, and on the very spot of its origin.”

All the American Indians soon found, as the Iroquois had, that nothing would do but these newly come Frenchmen must run about over all the country. Each river must be ascended, the portages traversed, and lakes crossed. Every hint of further rivers and lakes resulted forthwith in a thousand questions, if not in the immediate formation of an exploring expedition.

And yet there was method in the madness of this running about. In the first place log forts were founded at various points, and when the world came to know even a fraction as much as the French did about the West, it found that these forts were situated at the most strategic points on the continent. For instance, there was Fort Frontenac near the narrowing of Lake Ontario into the St. Lawrence. This fort commanded that river. Then there was Fort Niagara, which commanded the route to Lake Erie. There was Fort Detroit which commanded all access from Lake Erie to lakes Huron, Michigan, and Superior. There were forts La Bœuf, Venango, and Duquesne to hold the Ohio, Fort Sandusky to hold the Sandusky river, Fort Miami at the head of the rapids on the Miami-of-the-Lakes, to hold that river, and the portage to the Wabash, and Vincennes and Kaskaskia and other posts in the Illinois country.

The Indians did not object to these forts because they found that they were really no forts at all, but rather depots and warehouses for the great fur trade, where their heavy stacks of otter and sable and beaver skins could be exchanged for such splendid colored ribbons and tinkling bells, and powder, lead, and whiskey. Each fort became a trading post where the Indians gathered frequently for entertainments—of various character.

Fancy if you can the emparadizing dreams which must have filled the head of many a governor of New France, as he surveyed with heaving breast the vast domains of the Mississippi valley, comprising four million square miles of delectable land, and pictured the mighty empire it would some day sustain—outrivaling the dreams of a Grand Monarque. Fancy, if you can, the great hopes of the builder of Quebec who could see the infant city holding in fee all the great system of lakes beside whose sea-outlet it stood—the Gibraltar of the new continent. Fancy the assemblies of notables which met when a returned Jesuit or forgotten coureur-de-bois came hurrying down the Ottawa in his canoe and reported the finding of a mighty river, yet unchronicled, filled with beaver and otter; a new, bright gem for the Bourbon crown!

And so, we may suppose, such assemblies referred mockingly to the stolid Englishmen living along the Atlantic seaboard to the south. How the French must have scorned England’s conception of America. Long after the French had passed from Quebec to the Lakes and down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, the English had a boat built at home which could be taken apart on the upper waters of the James river, carried across the mountains on wagons, to be put together on the shores of the Pacific Sea. How the French must have laughed when they heard of this; can you not see them drinking hilariously to the portable boat stranded in the Alleghany forests three thousand miles from its destination?

And so it was that the wily emissaries of the Bourbon throne incorporated the fast filling hunting-ground of the Iroquois, with New France. It was an easily acquired country since they brought nothing into it that was not wanted, and took nothing away—but furs! Though of these they were particular respecting the number and the quality, and especially that traders from the English settlements over the mountains should not come and get them.

But it turned out that the English not only came, but even claimed for themselves the Ohio country which lay beyond the Alleghany mountains! If Cabot and Drake discovered the continent, did they not discover its interior as truly as its seaboard? Moreover, the English had by treaty acquired certain rights from the Iroquois which held good, they maintained, wherever the Iroquois had carried their irresistible conquests from Labrador to the everglades of Florida. And who could then say that this did not hold good beyond the Alleghanies, where the Iroquois for so long had been the acknowledged masters?