a fortress which from
that time has remained the chief naval and military stronghold of Great
Britain in North America. At Louisbourg some two hundred miles farther
east on the coast, France could reestablish her military strength, but
now Louisbourg had a rival and each was resolved to yield nothing to the
other. The founding of Halifax was in truth the symbol of the renewal of
the struggle for a continent.

CHAPTER V. The Great West

In days before the railway had made possible a bulky commerce by
overland routes, rivers furnished the chief means of access to inland
regions. The fame of the Ganges, the Euphrates, the Nile, and the Danube
shows the part which great rivers have played in history. Of North
America's four greatest river systems, the two in the far north have
become known in times so recent that their place in history is not
yet determined. One of them, the Mackenzie, a mighty stream some two
thousand miles long, flows into the Arctic Ocean through what remains
chiefly a wilderness. The waters of the other, the Saskatchewan,
discharge into Hudson Bay more than a thousand miles from their source,
flowing through rich prairie land which is still but scantily peopled.
On the Saskatchewan, as on the remaining two systems, the St. Lawrence
and the Mississippi, the French were the pioneers. Though today the
regions drained by these four rivers are dominated by the rival race,
the story which we now follow is one of romantic enterprise in which the
honors are with France.

More perhaps by accident than by design had the French been the first
to settle on the St. Lawrence. Fishing vessels had hovered round the
entrance to the Gulf of St. Lawrence for years before, in 1535, the
French sailor, Jacques Cartier, advanced up the river as far as the foot
of the torrential rapids where now stands the city of Montreal.
Cartier was seeking a route to the Far East. He half believed that this
impressive waterway drained the plains of China and that around the next
bend he might find the busy life of an oriental city. The time came
when it was known that a great sea lay between America and Asia and the
mystery of the pathway to this sea long fascinated the pioneers of
the St. Lawrence. Canada was a colony, a trading-post, a mission,
the favorite field of Jesuit activity, but it was also the land which
offered by way of the St. Lawrence a route leading illimitably westward
to the Far East.

One other route rivaled th