ves taken in raids all
along the thin and straggling frontier; farmers and artisans, peasants
and soldiers, women raped from the farms of the Richelieu _censitaires_,
and wood-rangers now grown savage as their captors and loth to leave the
wild life into which they had so naturally grown. It was the first
reflex of the wave, and even now the bits of flotsam and jetsam of wild
life were fain to cling to the Western shore whither they had been
carried by the advancing flood. This was the meeting of the ebb with the
sea that sent it forward, the meeting of civilized and savage; and
strange enough was the nature of those confluent tides. Whether the red
men were yielding to civilization, or the whites all turning
savage--this question might well have arisen to an observer of this
tremendous spectacle. The wigwams of the different tribes and clans and
families were grouped apart, scattered along all the narrow shore back
of the great hill, and over the Convent gardens; and among these
stalked the native French, clad in coarse cloth of blue, with gaudy belt
and buckskins, and cap of fur and moccasins of hide, mingling
fraternally with their tufted and bepainted visitors, as well as with
those rangers, both envied and hated, the savage _coureurs de bois_ of
the far Northern fur trade; men bearded, silent, stern, clad in
breech-clout and leggings like any savage, as silent, as stoical, as
hardy on the trail as on the narrow thwart of the canoe.

Savage feastings, riotings and drunkenness, and long debaucheries came
with the Great Peace, when once the word had gone out that the fur trade
was to be resumed. Henceforth there was to be peace. The French were no
longer to raid the little cabins along the Kennebec and the Penobscot.
The river Richelieu was to be no longer a red war trail. The English
were no longer to offer arms and blankets for the beaver, belonging by
right of prior discovery to those who offered French brandy and French
beads. The Iroquois were no longer to pursue a timid foe across the
great prairies of the valley of the Messasebe. The Ojibways were not to
ambush the scattered parties of the Iroquois. The unambitious colonists
of New England and New York were to be left to till their stony farms in
quiet. Meantime, the fur trade, wasteful, licentious, unprofitable, was
to extend onward and outward in all the marches of the West. From one
end of the Great River of the West to the other the insignia of France
and o