The first settlement in Wisconsin took place in 1744-46 under Charles de Langlade.[1236]
The Five Years’ War (1744-48) so far as it affected the respective positions of the combatants in the two great valleys was without result. The declaration of war was in March, 1744, on both sides.[1237]
In 1744 the Governor of Canada sent an embassy to the Six Nations, assuring them that the French would soon beat the English.[1238]
In 1744 Clinton proposed the erection of a fort near Crown Point, and of another near Irondequot “to secure the fidelity of the Senecas, the strongest and most wavering of all the six confederated tribes.”[1239]
The scalping parties of the French are tracked in the N. Y. Col. Docs., x. 32, etc., with the expedition against Fort Clinton in 1747 (p. 78) and a retaliating incursion upon Montreal Island by the English (p. 81).
In 1745 both sides tried by conferences to secure the Six Nations. In July, August, and September. Beauharnois met them.[1240] Delegates from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania convened under the New York jurisdiction at Albany, in October, 1745, and did what they could by treaty to disabuse the Indian mind of an apprehension which the French are charged with having raised, that the English had proposed to them to dispossess the Iroquois of their lands.[1241]
Upon the abortive Crown Point expedition of 1746,[1242] as well as the other military events of the war, we have Memoirs of the Principal Transactions of the last War between the English and French in North America, London, 1757 (102 pp.).[1243] It is attributed sometimes to Shirley, who had a chief hand in instigating the preparations of the expedition. This will be seen in the letters of Shirley and Warren, in the R. I. Col. Rec., v. 183, etc.; and in Penna. Archives, i. 689, 711, as in an Account of the French settlements in North America ... and the two last unsuccessful expeditions against Canada and the present on foot. By a gentleman. Boston, 1746.[1244]
A letter of Col. John Stoddard, May 13, 1747, to Governor Shirley, showing how the Six Nations had been enlisted in the proposed expedition to Canada, and deprecating its abandonment, is in Penna. Archives, i. 740; as well as a letter of Shirley, June 1, 1747 (p. 746).
A letter of Governor Shirley (June 29, 1747) respecting a congress of the colonies to be held in New York in September is in Penna. Archives, i. 754; and a letter of Conrad Weiser, doubting any success in enlisting the Six Nations in the English favor, is in Ibid., p. 161.