quins and the Mohawks, were marked by periodic and
desperate wars. Virginia and her Southern neighbors suffered as did New
England. In 1622 Opecacano, a brother of Powhatan, the friend of the
Jamestown settlers, launched a general massacre; and in 1644 he
attempted a war of extermination. In 1675 the whole frontier was ablaze.
Nathaniel Bacon vainly attempted to stir the colonial governor to put up
an adequate defense and, failing in that plea, himself headed a revolt
and a successful expedition against the Indians. As the Virginia
outposts advanced into the Kentucky country, the strife with the natives
was transferred to that "dark and bloody ground"; while to the
southeast, a desperate struggle with the Tuscaroras called forth the
combined forces of the two Carolinas and Virginia.

[Illustration: _From an old print._

VIRGINIANS DEFENDING THEMSELVES AGAINST THE INDIANS]

From such horrors New Jersey and Delaware were saved on account of their
geographical location. Pennsylvania, consistently following a policy of
conciliation, was likewise spared until her western vanguard came into
full conflict with the allied French and Indians. Georgia, by clever
negotiations and treaties of alliance, managed to keep on fair terms
with her belligerent Cherokees and Creeks. But neither diplomacy nor
generosity could stay the inevitable conflict as the frontier advanced,
especially after the French soldiers enlisted the Indians in their
imperial enterprises. It was then that desultory fighting became general
warfare.

[Illustration: ENGLISH, FRENCH, AND SPANISH POSSESSIONS IN AMERICA,
1750]

=Early Relations with the French.=--During the first decades of French
exploration and settlement in the St. Lawrence country, the English
colonies, engrossed with their own problems, gave little or no thought
to their distant neighbors. Quebec, founded in 1608, and Montreal, in
1642, were too far away, too small in population, and too slight in
strength to be much of a menace to Boston, Hartford, or New York. It was
the statesmen in France and England, rather than the colonists in
America, who first grasped the significance of the slowly converging
empires in North America. It was the ambition of Louis XIV of France,
rather than the labors of Jesuit missionaries and French rangers, that
sounded the first note of colonial alarm.

Evidence of this lies in the fact that three conflicts between the
English and the French occurred before thei