A School History of the United States. John Bach McMaster
him in an ambush or shoot him with an arrow from behind a tree. He was never so happy as when, at the dead of night, he roused his sleeping victims with an unearthly yell and massacred them by the light of their burning home.
%63. The French and the Indians.%—The ways in which French and English colonists acted towards the Indian are highly characteristic, and account for much in our history.
From the day when Champlain, in 1609, joined his Huron-Algonquin neighbors and went with them on the warpath against the Iroquois, the French held to the policy of making friends with the Indians. No pains were spared to win them to the cause of France. They were flattered, petted, treated with ceremonial respect, and became the companions, as the women often became the wives, of the Frenchmen. Much was expected of this mingling of races. It was supposed that the Indian would be won over to civilization and Christianity. But the Frenchmen were won over to the Indians, and adopted Indian ways of life. They lived in wigwams, wore Indian dress, decorated their long hair with eagle feathers, and made their faces hideous with vermilion, ocher, and soot.
%64. Coureurs de Bois.%—There soon grew up in this way a class of half-civilized vagrants, who ranged the woods in true Indian style, and gained a living by guiding the canoes of fur traders along the rivers and lakes of the interior. Stimulated by the profits of the fur trade, these men pushed their traffic to the most distant tribes, spreading French guns, French hatchets, beads, cloth, tobacco and brandy, and French influence over the whole Northwest. Where the trader and the coureur de bois went, the priest and the soldier followed, and soon mission houses and forts were established at all the chief passes and places suited to control the Indian trade.
%65. The English and the Indians.%—How, meantime, did the English act toward the Indians? In the first place, nothing led them to form close relationship with the tribes. The fur trade—the source of Canadian prosperity—and the zeal of priests eager for the conversion of the heathen, which sent the traders, the coureurs de bois, and the priests from tribe to tribe and from the Atlantic halfway to the Pacific, did not appeal to the English colonists. Farming and commerce were the sources of their wealth. Their priests and missionaries were content to labor with the Indians near at hand.
In the second place, the policy of the French towards the Indians, while founded on trade, was directed by one central government. The policy of the English was directed by each colony, and was of as many kinds as there were colonies. No English frontier exhibited such a mingling of white men and red as was common wherever the French went. Among the English there were fur traders, but no coureurs de bois. Scorn on the one side and hatred on the other generally marked the intercourse between the English and the Indians. One bright exception must indeed be made. Penn was a broad-minded lover of his kind, a man of most enlightened views on government and human rights; and in the colony planted by him there was made a serious effort to treat the Indian as an equal. But the day came when men not of his faith dealt with the Indians in true English fashion.
Remembering this difference of treatment, we shall the better understand how it happened that the French could sprinkle the West with little posts far from Quebec and surrounded by the fiercest of tribes, while the English could only with difficulty defend their frontier.[1]
[Footnote 1: A fine account of the Indians, and the French and English ways of treating them, is given in Parkman's Conspiracy of Pontiac, Vol. I., pp. 16–25, 41–45, 46–56, 64–80.]
%66. Early Indian Wars.%—Again and again this frontier was attacked. In 1636 the Pequots, who dwelt along the Thames River in Connecticut, made war on the settlers in the Connecticut River valley towns. Men were waylaid and scalped, or taken prisoners and burned at the stake. Determined to put an end to this, ninety men from the Connecticut towns, with twenty from Massachusetts and some Mohegan Indians, in 1637 marched against the marauders. They found the Pequots within a circular stockade near the present town of Stonington, where of 400 warriors all save five were killed.
%67. King Philip's War.%—During nearly forty years not a tribe in all New England dared rise against the white men. But in 1675 trouble began again. The settlers were steadily crowding the Indians off their lands. No lands were taken without payment, yet the sales were far from being voluntary. A new generation of Indians, too, had grown up, and, heedless of the lesson taught their fathers, the Narragansetts, Nipmucks, and Wampanoags, led by King Philip and Canonchet, rose upon the English. A dreadful war followed. When it ended, in 1678, the three tribes were annihilated. Hardly any Indians save the friendly Mohawks were left in New England. But of ninety English towns, forty had been the scene of fire and slaughter, and twelve had been destroyed utterly.
%68. The Iroquois.%—Elsewhere on the frontier a happier relation existed with the Indians. The Iroquois of central New York were the fiercest and most warlike Indians of the Atlantic coast. But the fight with Champlain, in 1609, by turning them into implacable enemies of the French, had rendered them all the more tolerant of the Dutch and the English, while their complete conquest and subjugation of the Delawares, or Lenni Lenape, prepared the way for the easy settlement of New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
%69. Penn and the Lenni Lenape.%—These Indians were Algonquian, and lived along the Delaware River and its tributaries. But early in the seventeenth century they had been reduced to vassalage by the Five Nations, had been forbidden to carry arms, and had been forced to take the name of Women.[1]
[Footnote 1: Read Parkman's Conspiracy of Pontiac, Vol. I., pp. 30–32, 80–82.]
When the Dutch and Swedes began their settlements on the South River, and when Penn, in 1683, made a treaty with the Delawares, the settlers had to deal with peaceful Indians. No horrid wars mark the early history of Pennsylvania.
%70. The Powhatans in Virginia.%—Much the same may be said of the Virginia tribes. They were far from friendly, and had they been as fierce and warlike as the northern tribes, neither the skill of John Smith, nor the marriage of Pocahontas (the daughter of Powhatan) with John Rolfe, nor fear of the English muskets, would have saved Jamestown.
[Illustration: Powhatan Indians at work[1]]
[Footnote 1: From a model.]
On the other hand, the destruction of the tribes in New England and the feud between the French and the Iroquois saved New England. For the time had now come for the opening of the long struggle between the French and the English for the ownership of the continent.
SUMMARY
1. The inhabitants of the New World at the time of its discovery, by mistake called Indians, were barbarians, lived in rude, frail houses, and used weapons and implements inferior to those of the whites.
2. The Indian tribes of eastern North America are mostly divided into three great groups: Muskhogean, Iroquoian, and Algonquian.
3. In general, the French made the Indians their friends, while the English drove them westward and treated them as an inferior race.
[Illustration: THE BRITISH COLONIES AND EUROPEAN POSSESSIONS 1733]
CHAPTER VIII
THE STRUGGLE FOR NEW FRANCE AND LOUISIANA
%71. Louisiana, or the Mississippi Basin.%—The landing of La Salle on the coast of Texas, and the building of Fort St. Louis of Texas, gave the French a claim to the coast as far southward as a point halfway between the fort and the nearest Spanish settlement, in Mexico. At that point was the Rio Grande, a good natural boundary. On the French maps, therefore, Louisiana extended from the Rocky Mountains and the Rio Grande on the west, to the Alleghany Mountains on the east, and from the Gulf of Mexico on the south, to New France on the north. This confined the English colonies to a narrow strip between the Alleghany Mountains and the Atlantic Ocean. As the colonies were growing in population, and as the charters of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Virginia, and Carolina gave them great stretches of territory in the Mississippi valley, it was inevitable