ed, but which really
belonged to the Hodenosaunee, had become one of two keys to the North
American lock, the other being its larger and scarcely less beautiful
sister, Champlain. They and their chains of rivers had been for
centuries the great carry between what had become the French and English
colonies, and whoever became the ruler of these two lakes would become
the ruler of the continent.

It was granted to Robert with his extraordinary imaginative gifts to
look far into the future. He had seen the magnificence of the north
country, its world of forest and fertile land, its network of rivers and
lakes, a region which he believed to be without an equal anywhere on
earth, and he knew that an immense and vigorous population was bound to
spring up there. He had his visions and dreams, and perhaps his youth
made him dream all the more, and more magnificently than older men whose
lives had been narrowed by the hard facts of the present. It was in
these brilliant, glowing dreams of his that New York might some day be
as large as London, with a commerce as large, and that Boston and
Philadelphia and other places for which the sites were not yet cleared,
would be a match for the great cities of the Old World.

And yet but few men in the colonies were dreaming such dreams, which
became facts in a period amazingly short, as the history of the world
runs. Perhaps the dream was in the wise and prophetic brain of Franklin
or in the great imagination of Jefferson, but there is little to prove
that more than a few were dreaming that way. To everybody, almost, the
people on the east coast of North America were merely the rival outposts
of France and England.

But the army that was starting for the green shores of Andiatarocte bore
with it the fate of mighty nations, and its march, hidden and obscure,
compared with that of many a great army in Europe, was destined to have
a vast influence upon the world.

It was a strange composite force. There were the militiamen from New
England, tall, thin, hardy and shrewd, accustomed to lives of absolute
independence, full of confidence and eager to go against the enemy. Many
of the New Yorkers were of the same type, but the troops of that
province also included the Germans and the Dutch, most of the Germans
still unable to speak the English language. There was the little
Philadelphia troop under Colden, trained now, the wild rangers from the
border, and the fierce Mohawks led by King Hendr