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* N. Y. Council Minutes, MSS., XIII, 350.
CHAPTER IV.
THE BEGINNING OF THE STRUGGLE FOR SUPREMACY.
The discoveries by the Portuguese in the four- teenth and by the Spaniards in the fifteenth century made some additions necessary to the international law, as it then existed. According to a maxim of the civil law (which said, " que nullius sunt, in bonis dan- tur occupanti "*), the law of premier seisin was now introduced and adopted, which gave title to new coun- tries to the nation which discovered them, provided " that no Christian prince or nation had already taken possession of it." England, however, seems to have never adopted this principle; for to them discovery without occupancy meant possession. Hakluyt says in his "Principal Navigations" (III, 155, London, 1600): "The first discovery of these coasts, never heard of before (of North-America), was well begun by Jean Cabot and Sebastian, his son, who were the first finders out of all that great tract of land stretch- ing from the Cape of Florida unto those islands, which we now call the Newfoundland, or which they brought and annexed to the crown of England in 1497." And not long before the American Revolu-
* What belongs to nobody, is to be given as property to him who possesses (occupies) it.
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tion Edmund Burke said in his " Account of the European Settlements in America :" "We derive our rights in America from the discovery of Sebas- tian Cabot,* who first made the northern continent in 1497. The fact is sufficiently certain to establish a right to our settlements in America."
At the time when Hakluyt wrote the words, quoted above, and later, when the English came to establish colonies on this continent, nothing was known of the vast territory, stretching westward from the Atlantic ocean. It has been told in a previous chapter, how the country back "of these coasts, never heard of before " and then partly held by the English, was dis- covered by a Frenchman. His, LaSalle's, further discoveries and journey to the Gulf of Mexico con- cern us here only so far, as that on the 9th day of April, 1682, long before an Englishman had heard of his discovery, he took possession, in the name of Louis XIV of France, of " all the seas, harbors, ports, bays, adjacent straits and all the nations, peoples, provinces, cities, towns, villages, mines, minerals, fisheries, streams," within the extent of Louisiana from the mouth of the great river St. Louis, other- wise called Ohio,t and including the Olighin (Alle- ghany), Sipou and Chuckagoua (our present Ohio). " On that day," says Parkman in " Discovery of the Great West," France received on parchment a stu- pendous possession. The fertile plains of Texas, the
* He ought to have said John Cabot.
+ This was the Iroquois name for the Mississippi.
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vast basin of the Mississippi, from its frozen northern springs to the sultry borders of the gulf, from the woody ridges of the Alleghanies to the bare peaks of the Rocky mountains, all was declared French domin- ion." Part of this vast territory, the northern coun- ties of the present State of Ohio, along the south shore of Lake Erie, had long before, in 1669, been taken possession of for France by the two Sulpitian brothers, Dollier de Casson and Gallinay, mentioned in a former chapter.
The discovery of the hitherto unknown country and the formal act of declaring it part and parcel of the French dominions, ought, according to English cus- tom of the day, to have been sufficient, to hold it in- violable in times of peace. It is likely that the French, suspicious of their English neighbors, tried to follow the example set by the Spaniards and Portuguese in the preceding century, of concealing their discovery of new countries, whence an abundant supply of furs and even valuable metals, as copper, could be ob- tained, but their attempts to do so proved futile within a decade.
Frontenac, the Governor of Canada, had at an early day recognized the importance of a fortified settle- ment at the foot of Lake Ontario, as first suggested by his predecessor, de Courcelles. He intended by it to prevent the Iroquois from carrying to Albany the peltries, for which they went to the Ottawas, and thus to oblige them to seek a market at Montreal, which, he thought, was only just, as they hunted on
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French territory. Thoroughly convinced of the ne- cessity of such a step Count Frontenac went to the place where the fort* was to be built. "On approach- ing the first opening of the lake, the Count wished to proceed with more order and in line of battle. He accordingly arranged the whole fleet as follows:
Four squadrons, as vanguard, in front and in one line, two batteaus.
After these came Comte de Frontenac at the head of all the canoes of his guards, of his staff and of the volunteers attached to his person; having on his right the squadron from Trois Rivières and on his left those of the Hurons and Algonquins."+
Although this somewhat theatrical mise en scène was witnessed by only few members of the Indian tribes for whose benefit it was intended, it had the desired effect upon the Five Nations, whom Fronte- nac had summoned to meet him at Catarakoui, for the Indians declared themselves satisfied and glad, to have an establishment for trade so near their homes. Astute as the children of the forest were, they failed to see the ulterior purposes which Fort Frontenac was to serve. Four days after Fron- tenac had begun negotiations with the Indians, the fort was almost ready for its new tenants. A year later, when Joliet had returned from his tour of dis- covery, which had led him to the Mississippi, the Governor could write to his superiors in France :
* Now Kingston, Canada.
+N. Y. Col. Hist., IX, 102.
-
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"Sieur Joliet, whom Monsieur Talon* advised me, to dispatch for the discovery of the South sea, re- turned three months ago and found some very fine countries and a navigation so easy through the beautiful rivers, that a person can go from Lake On- tario and Fort Frontenac in a bark to the Gulf of Mexico, there being only one carrying place, half a league in length, where Lake Ontario communicates with Lake Erie. A settlement could be made at this post. He believes that water commu- nication could be found leading to the Vermillion and California Seas, by means of the river that flows from the West."
Thus was outlined the French policy of the subse- quent period, which tended to link together their pos- sessions in Louisiana and on the St. Lawrence by a chain of forts on the Ohio. The injunction of Louis XIV, given to Frontenac in 1676,+ not to turn his intention to new discoveries without necessity and a very great advantage, as it was better to occupy less territory and to people it thoroughly, than to have feeble colonies of large territorial extents and easily destroyed, as well as the same king's order, to keep peace with the English, delayed for some time a col- lision between the two rival nations.
If the English had at first remained in ignorance of the newly-opened fur market in the west, they were soon to be informed of it by Frenchmen.
* Intendant of Canada.
+ N. Y. Col. Hist., IX, 126.
In Colonial Days. 65
Notwithstanding the orders and laws, made by the new Intendant, Duchesneau, in 1679, Canadian coureurs des bois obtained peltries from the Indians and then carried them to the English market. Of course, this had to be done stealthily and, therefore, the supply could not be a very great one. Afraid that the English traders might be prevented access to the as yet unknown, but nevertheless promising territory, and that consequently her trade, always the first consideration in the English mind, might suffer, England suddenly saw fit to ignore the maxim of international law, established by herself, that " dis- covery establishes title " and although not yet in- tending to occupy the territory, covered by a French paper title, they boldly invaded it for the purposes of trade with the Far Nations, and soon a report came to the ears of the French Governor, de Denon- ville, that the English intended to have a post on Lake Ontario. To counteract the bad effect such an English establishment would have on Canada and French influences in America he proposed a fort, like Frontenac, on Lake Erie and some vessels on the lake, which would make the journey to Missili- mackinack an easier one and enable the French to take the Illinois in hand .* To do this, however, it was necessary to subdue the Iroquois.
Before the French Governor could obtain the King's sanction for carrying out his plans, his Eng- lish neighbors in New York took steps to extend
* N. Y. Col. Hist., IX, 282.
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their commercial enterprises. Governor Dongan began to issue licenses in the summer of 1686 for trading, hunting and making discoveries to the south- west .* Two of these parties, under Captain Rose- boom of Albany and Patrick MacGregory, went to trade under such licenses with the Ottawawas on Lake Huron, where Jesuit missionaries from France had established themselves as early as 1634.+ We do not know which route these intrepid traders took to reach their market, but may safely suppose that they skirted the Ohio shore of Lake Erie, to avoid en- countering French parties on the so-called Ottawa route along the Canada shore. Their precaution was, however, frustrated and near their destination they fell into the hands of the French. In defending this invasion of territory, belonging to or claimed by a nation with whom his own master was then at peace, Governor Dongan claimed, that it was as free for the English to trade with the Far Nations, as to the French.₺ His assertion that "the situation of those parts bespeaks the King of England to have a better right to them, than the French, they lying to the south of us, just on the back of other parts of our dominions and a very great way from your terri- tories,"- discloses a lamentable ignorance of geo- graphical knowledge among the English. This was the first move in the game of chess, for which the
-
* N. Y. Col. MSS., XXXIII, 282 et seq.
+ Le Jeune, Relation de ce qui s'est passé en la Nouvelle France en l'année 1635.
¿ N. Y. Col. Hist., III, 469.
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In Colonial Days.
valley of the Ohio furnished one side of the board. The epistolary discussion of the affaire MacGre- gory drew out some further sentiments from Gover- nor Dongan, which throw interesting side lights upon the question. "I believe," he says in 1688,* "it as lawful for me to send to the Ottawawas, as for the Governor of Canada, but think it very unjust in Monsieur de Denonville to build a fort at Onyagaro or to make war upon the Five Nations, who have long been subjects of the King of England. If the sheep's fleece be the thing in dispute, pray let the King of England have some part of it." That he objected to see the friends and allies of the English, the Five Nations, disturbed by war, was natural, but at the same time he could not overlook the benefit which the " sheep's fleece," the trade with the Five Nations and others, would bring to his master's pocket. Trade, profitable trade above all, by fair or by foul means, was evidently the motto of the English of that day.
On what did the English base their rights to trade on so-called French territory? Simply on the treaties of friendship, the "covenant-chain," made with the Five Nations, which secured to the European intruders immunity from Indian invasions, but had nothing to say about English traders going beyond the territory under the jurisdiction of the Five Nations and of their friends or their enemies. Inter- national law and comity were of only secondary im- portance, when trade was in question.
* N. Y. Col. Hist., III, 528.
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We need not wonder, therefore, that the French Governors attempted to protect not only the trade of their people, but also the sheep, whom they shore .* They kept spies at Albany, who informed them of all hunting parties, going to trade with the Far Nations and when convenient, French parties were sent after them to arrest the Englishmen of the party and if possible induce the French coureurs des bois, in English pay, to return to Canada.+
Governor Dongan had learned about 1684, as we have seen above, that there was considerable terri- tory west of the country known to the English colo- nists, perhaps in consequence of a message sent to him by Governor de la Barre of Canada, for he writes about that time: "I send a map by Mr. Spragg,¿ whereby your Lops may see the several Governmts, etc., how they lye where the Beaver hunt- ing is & where it will be necessary to erect our Country Forts for the securing of Beaver Trade & keeping the Indians in community with us. Alsoe it points where there's a great River discovered by one Lasal, a Frenchman from Canada, who .... brought two or three vessels with people to settle there, which (if true) will prove very inconvenient to us (the River running all along from our Lakes by the Back of Virginia and Carolina to the Bay of Mexico."§
* N. Y. Col. Hist., IV, 501.
+ Ib., 715 et seq.
# Secretary of the Province. It is to be regretted, that the map is no longer in existence or its whereabouts known.
§ N. Y. Col. Doc., III, 396.
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In Colonial Days.
To assert the English right to the new discoveries, made by a Frenchman, he sent the arms of the King. of England to be set up near Niagara and asked per. mission to erect a fort there, although he knew, that the French claimed the country "as far as Mexico, for which they have no other argument, than that they have had possession this twenty years by their fathers living so long among the Indians." But trade required the maintaining of a correspondence with the Far Nations and, therefore, the French claims could not be considered, even though justified by international law.
In the meantime the French again took possession of the settlement at Niagara, which had first been established by LaSalle in 1668, and been burnt by the Senecas twelve years later. They built a fort there in 1687 and manned it, according to an Indian report, with 400 men and great guns, while Governor Dongan pushed his usurpation of French territory so far, as to send men to make themselves masters in their King's name of the post at Michilimackinack. The Five Nations were not well pleased to see the French, the first disastrous meeting with whom un- der Champlain in 1609 they never forgot, settle on their territory, and were glad to hear Governor Don- gan propose an English fort at Cajonhage on the Great Lake," but he was overruled by the Indian Commissioners, who favored Oswego, at the mouth of the Onondaga river.
* Supposed to be Salmon river, Oswego Co., N. Y.
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Nothing was done. The French abandoned their fort at Niagara after a year's occupancy, a disastrous war against the Iroquois having shown them, that this advanced post could not altogether protect their trade to the far west. King William's war drew the attention of the English from the subject, and nothing was heard of it until about 1699, Robert Livingston, Secretary of the New York Commis- sioners for Indian Affairs, submitted some observa- tions on the decay of the Albany trade, in which he was personally interested, to the then Governor of New York, Lord Bellomont. He gives as reason for this decay the impoverished state of the inhabit- ants, brought about by the late war and the French intrigues among the Far Indians, by which they are kept constantly on the warpath against the Five Nations of New York. As a remedy and tonic for the drooping trade he advises, that New York should endeavor to negotiate a peace between these warring tribes, which would enable Englishmen to trade again to the west and increase his Majesty's revenues. This could be done, he suggests, by sending a party of 200 white men, natives of the Colonies and as such good woodsmen, with 300 to 400 Iroquois to make a fort at Wawayachtenock (now Detroit) and " so pro- ceed to the respective Far Nations, who will undoubt- edly receive them, although the French are there among them and have a pretended sort of possession by a laying a Jesuit and some few men in a small fort ; for wherever a Frenchman has once set his foot, he
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In Colonial Days.
claims a right and title to the country." After the peace had been made between the Iroquois and the Dowaganhaes, Twightwees, Ottawas and other Far Indians, all these tribes will resort to Albany to dis- pose of their furs, and the trade there will be in- creased tenfold, while now the French deprive the English of it by their frivolous pretenses of subduing those Far Nations and converting them to the Chris- tian faith .* Livingston, the son of a minister of the gospel, ought to have known the biblical parable of the beam in his own eye and the mote in that of his neighbor, for he proposes to do, what he reprimands the French for having done ; the English claimed the whole continent, not because their seamen had first trodden upon its soil, but because they had first seen it.
Lord Bellomont approved of building a fort in the Onondaga country. He foresaw, that the French designed first to annihilate the Iroquois, which could easily be done under the dilatory policy of the Brit- ish government, and then with the help of the west- ern Indians to drive all the English into the ocean,t and the next year, 1700, he suggested a fort at the mouth of the Onondaga river, thus adopting the formerly expressed plan of the more experienced In- dian commissioners. This fort at Oswego would se- cure the rivers, by which the French had obtained access to the Seneca country in 1687, while it would
* N. Y. Col. Hist., IV, 500.
+ Ib., 505.
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enable the Dowaganhaes and other western tribes, at war with the Five Nations, to come and trade with the English in spite of their Iroquois enemies .* Again nothing was done. Jealous of the increasing power of the Bourbons, King William III declared war against Spain and France, both countries under kings of the Bourbon family. His death shortly after the declaration of war did not bring peace, and Queen Anne's war, as it was called after his succes- sor, lasted for eleven years, to 1713. The waves of the bloody contest did not reach the shores of Lakes Ontario and Erie, but all suggested enterprises in that direction were laid aside, and the English colon- ists of the last century, as well as their descendants, can congratulate themselves, that the allies at war against France found so much employment for Louis XIV, that he could send neither men nor money to prosecute his plans in America.
The Treaty of Utrecht, which ended this war in 1713, by its fifteenth article meant to settle the dis- puted questions concerning the boundaries between the French and the English in the west. It said : "The subjects of France, inhabiting Canada, shall hereafter give no hindrance or molestation to the Five Nations or Cantons of Indians subject to the dominion of Great Britain, nor to the other natives of America, who are friends to the same. In like manner the subjects of Great Britain shall behave themselves peaceably to the Americans, who are sub-
* N. Y. Col. Hist., IV, 717.
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In Colonial Days.
jects or friends to France, and on both sides they shall enjoy full liberty on account of trade, as also the natives of those countries shall with the same" liberty resort as they please to the British or French colonies for promoting trade on the one or the other, without any molestation or hindrance either on the part of the British subjects or the French, but it is to be exactly and distinctly settled by commissaries, who are and who ought to be accounted the subjects and friends of Britain and of France."
Eight years later the English Lords of Trade and Plantations admitted in a memorial on the American plantations,* that " the French territories extend from the mouth of the River St. Lawrence to the embou- chure of the Mississippi, forming one continued line from north to south on the back of your Majesty's plantations, and although their garrisons in many parts are hitherto but very inconsiderable, yet as they have, by the means of their missionaries, debauched several of the Indian nations to their interest, your Majesty's subjects along the continent have the ut- most danger to apprehend from the new settlement (on the Mississippi), unless timely care be taken to prevent their increase."
At the same time they concede the discovery of the inland communication between Canada and the Gulf of Mexico to French enterprise, but consider it a " very late discovery," fifty years after it had been made, and in the succeeding paragraphs of their memorial they
* N. Y. Col. Doc., V, 620.
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describe the routes taken by the French, as if they had only just heard of them. But had this matter of discovering new countries, they think, been sooner considered, then undoubtedly the English colonists would have been the first to make them, for the British colonies are so much more convenient to the lakes than Canada. One such attempt to discover new territory, that of General Wood of Virginia, in 1671, has already been mentioned ; Governor Spotswood, also of Virginia, sent another equally unsuccessful exploring expedition to the west in 1710,* and started in person with a large retinue in 1716 “ over the great mountains, to satisfy myself whether it
was practicable to come at the lakes. Having on that occasion found an easy passage over that great ridge of mountains, which were before judged impas- sable, I also discovered by the relation of Indians, who frequent those parts, that from the pass, where I was, it is but three days' march to a great Nation of Indians living on a river, which discharges itself in the Lake Erie."+ Which great river Governor Spotswood can mean, we must leave to the inter- preter of English geography in the eighteenth century. Hecalls it the River Mic, three miles from the River Occabacke, going into the Mississippi. Neither of these names appear on any map, and though it may be thought, that Occabacke stands for Ouabache, Governor Spotswood certainly did not get within
* Spotswood Letters, I, 42.
+ Ib., II, 295.
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In Colonial Days.
three days' march of the head-waters of the Ohio. Thus much for Colonial British enterprise in dis- covering new territory. He advises a settlement on - Lake Erie in order to entitle the English to a right of possession, for the French could not dispute such a title which the law of nations gives to the first oc- cupant. It is evident the law of nations had a hard time of it among English statesmen of the last cen- tuty.
Before Governor Spotswood had recommended this simple way of obtaining possession of a new coun- try, the English seem to have adopted this plan, for already in 1715 Father Louis Marie de Ville, mis- sionary among the Peorias, and Sieur de Vincenne, a trader among the western Indians, write, that the English of Carolina have recourse to every expe- dient to attract the southern Indians by means of the Iroquois; and Sieur Bezon, a French official, re- ports, that Father Jacques Marmet, missionary at Kaskaskias, Illinois, tells about the encroachments of the English in the Rivers Ouabache and Mississippi, where they are building three forts .*
A few years after the peace of 1713, the French saw again how necessary for their plans the close friendship of the Iroquois was. This was the only nation of Indians, where they never had been able to obtain, through their courtly manners and cajo- leries, the footing, which first the Dutch, and later the English had had, notwithstanding their somewhat
* N. Y. Col. Hist., IX, 931.
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boorish and bluff bearing. The Iroquois were them- selves too much a people of the rough warrior type to appreciate smoothness of manners and, besides, had other reasons for disliking the French. The lat- ter, nevertheless, managed to procure the Senecas' permission, in 1717, to build a trading-house at Iron- dequat,* on the New York side of Lake Ontario, and a fort, called Fort des Sables, from which places they supplied the New York Indians with powder and lead for their war against the Flatheads (Cherokees) and thereby obtained a large quantity of peltry, in- tended for the English market.
They appear to have soon discovered that the Treaty of Utrecht did not allow them such an usurpation, for the treaty made by New York with the Five Nations, in 1701, placed this locality under English protection, and in 1720, before the treaty of 1726 had confirmed the one of 1701, the Indians acknowledged, at a confer- ence with the Governor of New York, that they had given this place, as well as Trongsarænde (Detroit), Onjagera (Niagara) and all other hunting places, to the Crown of England, to be held for them and their posterity, lest others might encroach upon them. The municipal officers of Albany, N. Y., all more or less directly interested in active Indian trade, saw now an opportunity to revive the trade, which had given to their city such an important place among the com-
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