of Spain and France upon Charlestown, S. C., then
claimed by Spain as a part of Florida, had been repulsed by the vigor
and martial skill of the Colonial authorities.

At that time, the valley of the St. Lawrence was occupied by about fifty
thousand French settlers, imbued with bitter hostility towards the
settlers in New England and New York. Already the vast design of LaSalle
to acquire for the King of France the whole interior of the Continent
seemed to have been accomplished. While as yet the English were
struggling to secure a foothold upon the Atlantic seaboard, the French
had explored the Mississippi and its tributaries to its mouth, and the
whole vast region drained by them, between the Alleghanies and the
Rockies, had been taken possession of by the French under the name of
Louisiana, and a chain of military and trading posts from New Orleans to
the St. Lawrence, admirably chosen for the purpose, had been established
to hold it, and another chain was already planned to extend southward
along the west side of the Alleghanies, to forever keep out the English.
The French had been for fifty years hounding on the numerous tribes of
Canada and northern New England to attack and exterminate the settlers
of New England. The conquest of Canada by the English was therefore an
object of the greatest political importance, and necessary for the peace
and safety of the colonies, and their future growth, and it continued to
engross the efforts and exhaust the means of the colonists, until their
purpose was finally accomplished in 1763.

The people who settled here were entirely familiar with the hardships,
dangers and horrors of Indian warfare to which they were liable in
taking up their abode on this frontier. The horrible incidents which
attended the massacre of the inhabitants of Schenectady, in 1690,
seventeen years before, during the previous war, and of the inhabitants
of Deerfield, Mass., and other places in 1704, during the war still
raging, were household words throughout Connecticut, and had left an
abiding imprint in the minds of the people on the border. Though the
Indians, right about them here, seem to have been few in number and
comparatively harmless, they knew from their own and their fathers'
experience, that their position was one of extreme danger, and that at
all times their scanty and hardwon possessions and their lives were
liable to instant destruction, from unheralded irruptions by the more
distant I