BRITISH FOOTGUARD, 1745.
This sketch of a footguard, with grenade and match, is taken from Grant’s British Battles, ii. 60. Cf. Mag. of Amer. Hist., i. 462; and the uniform of the forty-third regiment of foot (raised in America), represented from a drawing in the British Museum, in The Century, xxix. 891.
FRENCH SOLDIER, 1745.
After a water-color sketch in the Mass. Archives: Documents collected in France, viii. p. 129. The coat is red, faced with blue; the breeches are blue.
Early the next summer (June, 1747) the French had some experience of a foray upon their own borders, when a party of English and Indians raided upon the island of Montreal,—a little burst of activity conspicuous amid the paralysis that the quarrels of Clinton and De Lancey had engendered. Shirley had formed the plan of a winter attack upon Crown Point, intending to send forces up the Connecticut, and from Oswego towards Frontenac, by way of distracting the enemy’s councils; but the New York assembly refused to respond.
The next year (1748) the French, acting through Father Picquet, made renewed efforts to enlist Iroquois converts, while Galissonière was urging the home government to send over colonists to occupy the Ohio Valley. A number of Virginians, on the other hand, formed themselves into the Ohio Company, and began to send explorers into the disputed valley. In order to anticipate the English, the French governor had already despatched Céloron de Bienville to take formal possession by burying lead plates, with inscriptions, at the mouths of the streams.[1112]
For the present, there was truce. The treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, entered upon in May, and signed in October (1748), had given each side time to manœuvre for an advantage. Picquet established a new barrier against the English at La Presentation, where Ogdensburg now is;[1113] and in 1749 Fort Rouillé was built at the present Toronto.[1114]
The Virginians, meanwhile, began to push their traders farther and farther beyond the mountains. The Pennsylvanians also sent thither a shrewd barterer and wily agent in George Croghan, and the French emissaries whom he encountered found themselves outwitted.[1115] The Ohio Company kept out Christopher Gist on his explorations. Thus it was that the poor Ohio Indians were distracted. The ominous plates of Céloron meant to them the loss of their territory; and they appealed to the Iroquois, who in turn looked to the government of New York. That province, however, was apathetic, while Picquet and Jean Cœur, another Romish priest, who believed in rousing the Indian blood, urged the tribes to maraud across the disputed territory and to attack the Catawbas. William Johnson, on the one side, and Joncaire, on the other, were busy with their conferences, each trying to checkmate the other (1750); while the English legislative assemblies haggled about the money it cost and the expense of the forts. The Iroquois did not fail to observe this; nor did it escape them that the French were building vessels on Ontario and strengthening the Niagara fort (1751).