A few years later a sort of flank movement was made on Oswego, as well as on New England, by the French pushing up Lake Champlain, and establishing themselves in the neighborhood of Crown Point (1731), where they shortly after built Fort St. Frederick. The movement alarmed New England more than it did New York.

The French persisted in seeking conferences with the Six Nations, -as they had been called since the Tuscaroras joined them about 1713, — and in 1734 succeeded in obtaining a meeting with the Onondagas. They ventured in 1737 to ask the Senecas to let them establish a post at Irondequot, farther west on Lake Ontario than Oswego. The Iroquois would not permit, however, either side to possess that harbor. For some years Oswego was the burden of the French despatches, and the English seemed to take every possible occasion for new conferences with the fickle Indians.

The most important of these treaties was made at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1744, when an indefinite extent of territory beyond the mountains was ceded to the English in the form of a confirmation of earlier implied grants. A fresh war followed. The New Englanders took Louisbourg,1 but New York seemed supine, and let French marauding parties. from Crown Point fall upon and destroy the fort at Saratoga without being aroused.2 Oswego was in danger, but still the New York assembly preferred to quarrel with the governor; and tardily at best it undertook to restore the post at Saratoga, while the Albanians were suspected of trading clandestinely through the Caughnawagas with the French in Canada. Both sides continued in their efforts to propitiate the Iroquois, while a parade of arming was made for an intended advance on Crown Point and Montreal. Governor Shirley, from Boston, had urged it, since a demonstration which had been intended by way of the St. Lawrence had to be given up, because the promised fleet did not arrive from England. To keep the land levies in spirits, Shirley had written to Albany that he would send them to join in an expedition by the Lakes, and had even despatched a 13-inch mortar by water to New York. Before the time came, however, the rumors of D'Anville's fleet frightened the New Englanders, and they thought they had need of their troops at home. It was some time before Governor Clinton knew of this at Albany, and preparations went on. Efforts to enlist the Iroquois in the enterprise halted, for the inaction of the past year had had its effect upon them, and it needed all the influence of William Johnson, who now first appears as Indian commissioner, to induce them to send a sufficient delegation to a conference at Albany. The

1 Chapter vii.

2 This fort had been built in 1739, and called Fort St. Frederick. G. W. Schuyler (Colonial N. Y., ii. pp. 113, 114) uses the account of the adjutant of the French force, probably found in Canada at the conquest. The fort stood on the west side of the Hudson, south of Schuylerville,

while Fort Clinton, built in 1746, was on the
east side. (Ibid., ii. pp. 126, 254.) A plan of
this later fort (1757) is noted in the King's Maps
(Brit. Museum), ii. 300. See no. 17 of Set of
Plans, etc., London, 1763.

8 American Mag. (Boston), Nov., 1746.
4 Chapter ii. p. 147.

business still further dragged; the withdrawal of New England became in the end known, and by September 16 Clinton had determined to abandon the project, and the French governor had good occasion to twit old Hendrick, the Mohawk chief, when he ventured with more purpose than prudence to Montreal in November.1

Early the next summer (June, 1747) the French had some experience of a foray upon their own borders, when a party of English and Indians raided upon the island of Montreal, — a little burst of activity conspicuous amid the paralysis that the quarrels of Clinton and De Lancey had engendered.

Shirley had formed the plan of a winter attack upon Crown Point, intending to send forces up the Connecticut, and from Oswego towards Frontenac, by way of distracting the enemy's councils; but the New York assembly refused to respond.

The next year (1748) the French, acting through Father Picquet, made renewed efforts to enlist Iroquois converts, while Galissonière was urging the home government to send over colonists to occupy the Ohio Valley. A number of Virginians, on the other hand, formed themselves into the

1 N. E. Hist. Geneal. Reg., 1866, p. 237. 2 This sketch of a footguard, with grenade and match, is taken from Grant's British Battles, ii. 60. Cf. Mag. of Amer. Hist., i. 462; and the uniform of the forty-third regiment of foot (raised in America), represented from a

drawing in the British Museum, in The Century, xxix. 891.

3 After a water-color sketch in the Mass. Archives: Documents collected in France, viii. p. 129. The coat is red, faced with blue; the

breeches are blue.

Ohio Company, and began to send explorers into the disputed valley. In order to anticipate the English, the French governor had already despatched Céloron de Bienville to take formal possession by burying lead plates, with inscriptions, at the mouths of the streams.1

For the present, there was truce. The treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, entered upon in May, and signed in October (1748), had given each side time to manœuvre for an advantage. Picquet established a new barrier against the English at La Presentation, where Ogdensburg now is; 2 and in 1749 Fort Rouillé was built at the present Toronto.3

The Virginians, meanwhile, began to push their traders farther and farther beyond the mountains. The Pennsylvanians also sent thither a shrewd barterer and wily agent in George Croghan, and the French emissaries whom he encountered found themselves outwitted.4 The Ohio Company kept out Christopher Gist on his explorations. Thus it was that the poor Ohio Indians were distracted. The ominous plates of Céloron meant to them the loss of their territory; and they appealed to the Iroquois, who in turn looked to the government of New York. That province, however, was apathetic, while Picquet and Jean Cœur, another Romish priest, who believed in rousing the Indian blood, urged the tribes to maraud across the disputed territory and to attack the Catawbas. William Johnson, on the one side, and Joncaire, on the other, were busy with their conferences, each trying to checkmate the other (1750); while the English legislative assemblies haggled about the money it cost and the expense of the forts. The Iroquois did not fail to observe this; nor did it escape them that the French were building vessels on Ontario and strengthening the Niagara fort (1751).

While Charles Townshend was urging the English home government (1752) to seize the Ohio region forcibly, the French were attacking the English traders and overcoming the allied Indians, on the Miamis. Virginia, by a treaty with the Indians at Logstown, June 13, 1752, got permission to erect a fort at the forks of the Ohio; but the undertaking was delayed.

In the spring of 1753 Duquesne, the governor of Canada, sent an expedition to possess by occupation the Ohio Valley, and the party ap

5

1 See ante, p. 9.

2 See ante, p. 3.

8 Canadian Antiquarian, vii. 97.

He was accompanied by Andrew Montour, a conspicuous frontiersman of this time. Cf. Parkman's Montcalm and Wolfe, i. 54; Schweinitz's Zeisberger, 112; Thomas Cresap's letter in Palmer's Calendar, Va. State Papers, 245; and on his family the Penna. Mag. of Hist., iii. 79, iv: 218.

In 1750 John Pattin, a Philadelphia trader, was taken captive among the Indians of the Ohio Valley, and his own narrative of his cap

tivity, with a table of distances in that country, is preserved in the cabinet of the Mass. Historical Society, together with a letter respecting Pattin from William Clarke, of Boston, dated March, 1754, addressed to Benjamin Franklin, in which Clarke refers to a recent mission of Pattin, prompted by Gov. Harrison, of Pennsylvania, into that region, "to gain as thorough a knowledge as may be of the late and present transactions of the French upon the back of the English settlements."

5 The English got word of this movement in May. N. Y. Col. Docs., vi. 779.