England and Holland, while the accession of
William of Orange to the throne of the Stuarts, by pledging England to
twenty years of war against the House of Bourbon, revealed the startling
fact that it was New France rather than New Spain which threatened the
security of British America. English settlements had not yet passed the
Alleghany foothills before French missionaries and explorers had
penetrated by the chain of lakes to the heart of the continent. Jean
Nicolet as early as 1640, Radisson and Grosseilliers in 1660, were
canoeing down the Wisconsin River toward the Mississippi; and in 1671,
the year before Count Frontenac landed at Quebec to begin the
regeneration of Canada, Saint-Lusson, with impressive ceremony in the
presence of fourteen native tribes at Sault Ste. Marie, took possession
of the great Northwest in the name of the Grand Monarch.

It was no mere spirit of adventure, or dream of limitless empire, that
dispersed the French settlements over so wide an area. As Virginia was
founded on tobacco, so was Canada on furs; and unless the Indians on
the northern lakes could be induced to bring their furs down the St.
Lawrence, Quebec might add luster to the crown of Louis, but it could
not greatly increase the commercial strength of France. A firm alliance
with the northern tribes was therefore the first object. It was for this
that military posts were established on the waterways of the interior.
And every stockaded fort was at once a trading camp and a mission house:
merchants lured the Indian with brandy and firearms; civil officials and
men at arms impressed him with the authority of the great king; Jesuit
priests, strangely compounding true devotion and unscrupulous intrigue,
learned the native languages, and with the magic of the crucifix and the
_Te Deum_ converted the spirit-fearing savages into loyal children of
the Bishop of Rome. Canada, with its center at Quebec, and its outposts
at Michilimackinac and Sault Ste. Marie, was little more than "a musket,
a rosary, and a pack of beaver skins": not so much a colony, indeed, as
a mesh of interlacing interests cunningly designed to convert fur into
gold. And so long as the tribes of the northern lakes annually brought
their rich freightage of mink and beaver to Fort Frontenac or Montreal,
to be exchanged there for arms and brandy, beads, hatchets, bracelets,
and gay-colored fabrics, gold was not lacking--for the pockets of clever
merchant and corrupt offi