Franklin’s recapitulation of the argument in favor of the English claim is in Sparks’ Franklin, iv. 324; but Sparks (Ibid., iv. 335) allows it is not substantiated by proofs, and enlarges upon the same view in his Washington, ii. 13.
[1224] Colden’s official account of this conference and treaty was printed in Philadelphia the same year by Benjamin Franklin: A Treaty held at the Town of Lancaster in Pennsylvania by the Honourable the lieutenant governor of the Province, and the Commissioners for the provinces of Virginia and Maryland, with the Indians of the Six Nations in June, 1744. There is a copy in Harvard College library [5325.38]. Quaritch priced a copy in 1885 at £6. 10s. Cf. Barlow’s Rough List, no. 879; Brinley, iii. no. 5,488; Carter-Brown, iii. 785, with also (no. 784) an edition printed at Williamsburg the same year. There was a reprint at London in 1745. It was included in later editions of Colden’s Five Nations. Cf. J. I. Mombert’s Authentic Hist. of Lancaster County, 1869, app. p.51. The journal of William Marshe, in attendance on the commissioners, is printed in the Mass. Hist. Collections, vii. 171. Cf. Wm. Black’s journal in Penna. Mag of Hist., vols. i. and ii. Black was the secretary of the commission, and his editor is R. A. Brock, of Richmond. Stone, in his Life of Sir Wm. Johnson, i. 91, gives a long account of the meeting. See the letter of Conrad Weiser in Proud’s Pennsylvania, ii. 316, wherein he gives his experience (1714-1746) in observing the characteristics of the Indians. Weiser was an interpreter and agent of Pennsylvania, and a large number of his letters to the authorities during his career are in the Penna. Archives, vols. i., ii., and iii. The Brinley Catal., iii. p. 105, shows various printed treaties with the Ohio Indians of about this time. Those that were printed in Pennsylvania are enumerated in Hildeburn’s Century of Printing, nos. 852, 870, 907, etc.; and those printed by Franklin, as most of them were, are noted in the Catal. of Works relating to Benjamin Franklin in the Boston Public Library, p. 39.
[1225] Mass. Hist. Coll., vi. 134.
[1226] Thomson, Bibliog. of Ohio, no. 1,099; Carter-Brown, iii. 1,092. The French posts north of the Ohio in 1755, according to the Present State of North America, published that year in London, were Le Bœuf and Venango (on French Creek), Duquesne, Sandusky, Miamis, St. Joseph’s (near Lake Michigan), Pontchartrain (Detroit), Michilmackinac, Fox River (Green Bay), Crèvecœur and Fort St. Louis (on the Illinois), Vincennes, Cahokia, Kaskaskia, and at the mouths of the Wabash, Ohio, and Missouri. A portion of Gov. Pownall’s map, showing the location of the Indian villages and portages of the Ohio region, is given in fac-simile in Penna. Archives, 2d ser., ii. Cf. map in London Mag., June, 1754; Kitchin’s map of Virginia in Ibid., Nov., 1761; and his map of the French settlements in Ibid., Dec., 1747.
James Maury (1756) contrasts the enterprise of the French in acquiring knowledge of the Ohio Valley with the backwardness of the English. Maury’s Huguenot Family, 394.
Smith (New York, ii. 172), referring to the period of the alarm of French encroachments on the Ohio, speaks of its valley as a region “of which, to our shame, we had no knowledge except by the books and maps of the French missionaries and geographers.”
A tract called The wisdom and policy of the French, ... with observations on disputes between the English and French colonists in America (London, 1755) examines the designs of the French in their alliance with the Indians.
[1227] Beauharnois’ despatches about Oswego begin in 1728 (N. Y. Col. Docs., ix. 1,010). That same year Walpole addressed a paper on the two posts to the French government, and with it is found in the French archives a plan of Oswego, “fait à Montreal 17 Juillet, 1727, signé De Lery.” The correspondence of Gov. Burnet and Beauharnois is in Ibid., ix. p. 999. The plan just named is also in the Doc. Hist. N. Y., vol. i., in connection with papers respecting the founding of the post. Smith (New York, 1814, p. 273) holds that the French purpose to demolish the works at Oswego in 1729 caused a reinforcement of the garrison, which deterred them from the attempt. Smith says of the original fort there that its situation had little regard to anything beside the pleasantness of the prospect. Burnet, the New York governor, exerted himself to destroy the trade between Albany and Montreal, and the report of a committee which he transmitted to the home government is printed in Smith’s New York (Albany, 1814 ed., p. 246); but in 1729 the machinations of those interested in the trade procured the repeal of the restraining act. (Ibid., 274; cf. Smith, vol. ii. (1830) p. 97.) At a late day (1741) there is an abstract of despatches to the French minister respecting Oswego in the Penna. Archives (2d ser., vi. 51), and a paper on the state of the French and English on Ontario in 1743 is in N. Y. Col. Docs., vi. 227.
[1228] N. Y. Col. Docs., ix. 386.
[1229] O. H. Marshall on the Niagara frontier, in the Buffalo Hist. Soc. Publications, vol. ii. Smith (New York, 1814, p. 268) says that “Charlevoix himself acknowledges that Niagara was a part of the territory of the Five Nations; yet the pious Jesuit applauds the French settlement there, which was so manifest an infraction of the treaty of Utrecht.”