Thus it was, slowly, naturally, and with the certainty of doom itself, there drew on the terrible war which decided whether the destiny of the new continent should be placed in the hands of a Teutonic or a Gaelic civilization—whether Providence should hold the descendants of the founders of Jamestown or of Quebec responsible for its mighty part in the history of human affairs. This war has received the vague name of the “French and Indian” war. By this is meant the war England and her colonists in America fought against the French and Indians.
It is remarkable enough that this war, which was to settle so much, began from a spark struck in the West. The explanation of this is found in the fact that a great expanse of forest separated the English settlements on the Atlantic seaboard and the great line of French settlements, three thousand leagues in length, which stretched from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico. The nearest points of contact were in Virginia and Pennsylvania, for here the rivalry of French and English traders had been most intense.
Virginians found it a very acceptable part to play—this trying the test case with France to decide who was the real master of the land over the mountains. In 1749, a company of Virginian gentlemen received from the King of England a royal charter granting them possession of two hundred thousand acres of the Black Forest between the Monongahela and Kanawha rivers.
The astonishment and anger of the French on the St. Lawrence knew no bounds. Immediately the French governor Galissonière set on foot plans which would result in the withdrawal of the English colonists.
Looking back through the years, it may seem very strange that the governors of New France never anticipated a clash with England on the Ohio and prepared for it, but it appears, that, of all the West, Lake Erie and the Ohio river were the least known to the French. This can be understood by following the romantic story of French exploration:
On a wild October day, Cartier, who raised the altar at Quebec and claimed the new continent, stood on Mt. Royal, looking wistfully westward. Behind him lay the old world throbbing with an intuition of a northwest passage to China and India. Before him shimmered in the sun two water-ways. As we know them now, the southern was the St. Lawrence, the western the Ottawa.
It was a strange providence which compelled Cartier to set the tide of French trade and exploration over the Ottawa rather than up the St. Lawrence. By this France lost, we are told, the Hudson valley—the key to the eastern half of the continent—but gained the Great Lakes. This tide of trappers, merchants, Jesuits, and adventurers went up the western river, across into Georgian Bay, through the lakes, down the Allegheny, Wabash, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Mississippi. Some few braved the dangers of traveling in the domains of the Iroquois and went up the St. Lawrence to Lake Ontario, then across to Lake Simcoe and Georgian Bay. The important result was that Lake Erie was the last of all the Great Lakes to be discovered and the country south of it was the last to be explored and claimed by the French. Lakes Ontario and Huron were discovered in 1615, Lake Superior in 1629, Lake Michigan in 1634. Lake Erie was not discovered until 1669—half a century after the two lakes which it joins; and then for a hundred years it was a mystery. Champlain drew it on his map as a widened river; other maps of the day make it a brook, river, strait, or lake, as their authors fancied. One drew it as a river, and, in perplexity over its outlet, ran it into the Susquehanna and down into Chesapeake Bay. And as late as 1750, in the map of Céloron, is written along the southern shore of Lake Erie, “This shore is almost unknown.”
It is a custom peculiar to the French to declare possession of a land by burying leaden plates, upon which their professions of sovereignty are incised, at the mouths of its rivers. This has been an immemorial custom, and has been done in recent times in the Pacific sea. La Salle buried a leaden plate at the mouth of the Mississippi in 1682, claiming possession of that river and all streams emptying into it and all lands drained by them. But, now, more plates were needed. And so Céloron de Bienville, a gallant Chevalier of St. Louis, departed from Quebec in the fall of the same year with a detachment of eight subaltern officers, six cadets, an armorer, twenty soldiers, one hundred and eighty Canadians, thirty friendly Iroquois, and twenty-five Abnakis, with a load of leaden plates to be buried at the mouths of all the rivers in the Central West. Two plates were buried in what we now call the Allegheny river and one at the mouths of Wheeling creek, the Muskingum, Great Kanawha, and Miami rivers. At the burial of each plate a given formality was observed. The detachment was drawn up in battle array. The leader cried in a loud voice “Vive le Roi,” and proclaimed that possession was taken in the name of the king. In each instance, the Arms of the King, stamped upon a sheet of tin, were affixed to the nearest tree, and a Procès Verbal was drawn up and signed by the officers. Each plate bore the following inscription:
“In the year 1749, of the reign of Louis XV., King of France, We, Céloron, commander of a detachment sent by Monsieur the Marquis de la Galissonière, Governor General of New France, to reëstablish tranquillity in some Indian villages of these cantons, have buried [here a space was left for the date and place of burial] this plate of lead near the river Ohio otherwise Belle Rivière, as a monument of the renewal of possession we have taken of the said river Ohio, and of all those which empty into it, and of all lands on both sides as far as the sources of said rivers, as enjoyed by the Kings of France preceding, and as they have there maintained themselves by arms and treaties, especially those of Ryswick, Utrecht, and Aix-la-Chapelle.”
Ah! but leaden bullets were more needed in the West than leaden plates! This Céloron found out before he had gone a dozen leagues. Suspicious savages dug up his first plate and hurried with it to the English at Albany. Is it strange that the Indians soon came to the conclusion that there was ever some fatal connection between the art of writing and their home-lands? At Logstown, near the present city of Pittsburg, he found some detested English traders, and a strong anti-French influence. He drove off the intruders with a sharp letter to their governor, but here his Iroquois and Abenaki Indians deserted him, and, on their way north, tore from the trees those sheets which contained yet more of that horrid writing. Céloron hurried homeward by the shortest route—up the Miami river and down the Maumee and through the lakes—and rendered his alarming report. It was decided immediately to fortify Céloron’s route. The enterprising successor of Galissonière—Governor Duquesne—sent a detachment from Quebec with orders to proceed to Lake Erie and begin the building of a line of forts down the Ohio frontier, from Lake Erie to the Ohio river. This party, under the command of M. Marin, landed near the present site of Erie, Pennsylvania, and raised a fort.