way of the Ottawa River and Lake Huron,
and in that northern country her position was secure enough through her
posts on the upper lakes. The route farther south by Lake Ontario and
Lake Erie was more difficult. The Iroquois menaced Niagara and long
refused to let France have a footing there to protect her pathway
to Lake Erie and the Ohio Valley. It was not until 1720, a period
comparatively late, that the French managed to have a fort at the mouth
of the Niagara. On the Detroit River, the next strategic point on the
way westward, they were established earlier. Just after Frontenac died
in 1698, La Mothe Cadillac urged that there should be built on this
river a fort and town which might be made the center of all the trading
interests west of Lake Erie. End the folly, he urged, of going still
farther afield among the Indians and teaching them the French language
and French modes of thought. Leave the Indians to live their own type
of life, to hunt and to fish. They need European trade and they have
valuable furs to exchange. Encourage them to come to the French at
Detroit and see that they go nowhere else by not allowing any other
posts in the western country. Cadillac was himself a keen if secret
participant in the profits of the fur trade and hoped to be placed
in command at Detroit and there to become independent of control from
Quebec. Detroit was founded in 1701; and though for a long time it did
not thrive, the fact that on the site has grown up one of the great
industrial cities of modern times shows that Cadillac had read aright
the meaning of the geography of North America.

When France was secure at Niagara and at Detroit, two problems still
remained unsolved. One was that of occupying the valley of the Ohio, the
waters of which flow westward almost from the south shore of Lake Erie
until they empty into the vaster flood of the Mississippi. Here there
was a lion in the path, for the English claimed this region as naturally
the hinterland of the colonies of Virginia and Pennsylvania. What
happened on the Ohio we shall see in a later chapter. The other great
problem, to be followed here, was to explore the regions which lay
beyond the Mississippi. These spread into a remote unknown, unexplored
by the white man, and might ultimately lead to the Western Sea. We might
have supposed that France's farther adventure into the West would have
been from the Mississippi up its great tributary the Missouri, which
flows eas