isters in New England. Throughout the whole of the seventeenth century the priests kept side by side with the explorer and the trader in the march to the west. The accounts of their triumphs and martyrdoms were annually sent home to the superior of their order in France. These reports, known in literature as the "Jesuit Relations," were published anew in 1900, edited by a noted American historian, making a formidable library of seventy-two volumes, with French and English pages opposite, and they form one of the most valuable sources for the study of the French regime in North America. They treat only slightly of our section of the Ohio Country. Bonnecamps' journal, soon to be noted in this history [Chapter XII], is given in full in Volume LXIX.4 The English colonies on the seaboard were utterly indifferent to the early explorations of the French in the west. They were occupied with their own problems of developing agriculture, building up commerce, and more or less engaged in disputes with King and proprietors regarding the precious rights of self-government. They were indeed slow to realize the menace of the French power gradually surrounding them with a long chain of forts and military posts, extending from the St. Lawrence to the mouth of the Mississippi; in other words, walling in the English with the Appalachian ranges. For, though the charters of several of the colonies extended their western boundaries to the Pacific, the Allegheny Mountains in Pennsylvania, three hundred miles only from the sea, actually formed the western boundary which the English colonists were over a century in reaching, and a half century in crossing with permanent settlements. This is truer of Virginia than Pennsylvania, for Pennsylvania was later colonized than Virginia. When the Virginians were still defending their peninsula against the Indians and for years after Penn established his Quaker colony on the Delaware, what the French fur traders, missionaries and explorers were doing at the head of the Great Lakes or along the Mississippi seemed too remote for notice.

There had been some exceptions to the general indifference of the English colonies to the progress of the French, but they were about French territory in the Hudson Bay region and in Acadia, the oldest permanent French settlement in America, antedating Jamestown eight years and Plymouth Rock sixteen years. However, the expeditions against Acadia and the fighting around Hudson Bay prior to 1710 were of slight importance for the possession of the North American continent compared with the mighty struggle for the region between the Upper Hudson and the St. Lawrence and the vast area between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi. The efforts of the French to push their frontier to Lake Champlain and the Hudson are likewise of slight importance in our history of Western Pennsylvania and the West except that similar efforts were made and were successful right on ground now in the heart of the city of Pittsburgh, and the events that led to the Seven Years War in Europe-the French and Indian War in America-were those that took place hereabouts.

4 Consult also in this connection Muzzey: "An American History," pp. 84-87.

It is a well acknowledged fact of history that as long as the Stuarts occupied the English throne their colonial governors received little support against the machinations of the French in America. The royal brothers, Charles II. and James II., of England, were cousins of Louis XIV. of France, and as they had received millions of pounds from Louis to combat their own parliaments they could not consistently oppose Louis' governors in New France. With the expulsion of the Stuarts and the accession of William of Orange in 1689 there came a great change. William was a deadly enemy of Louis from the days of 1672 when Louis made his shameful attack on the Netherlands. Then, too, religion entered, for William was the leading Protestant prince of Europe and the champion of the reformers whom Louis was straining violently to overthrow. England rallied to William's support, spurred by the fear of the absolute power of France unless Louis could be curbed. Then began the mighty struggle between the two countries for the colonial and commercial supremacy of the world-"A Century of Warfare," to use Parkman's phrase, and in the various wars the American colonists performed their part valiantly and suffered greatly. In the eventful years between 1689 and 1815 England and France had been at war seven times-in all of sixty years duration and covering lands and oceans from the forests of Western Pennsylvania to the jungles of India and from the Caribbean Sea to the Nile.

There were three wars which in their termination by the respective treaties affected the trans-Allegheny region rather than by actual hostilities. These were King William's War, 1689-1697; Queen Anne's War, 1702-1713; and King George's War, 1744-1748; all parts of general European conflicts. Other names in history designate these wars as the War of the Grand Alliance; the War of the Spanish Succession, and the War of the Austrian succession, terminated respectively by the treaties of Ryswick in 1697, Utrecht, 1713, and the inglorious one at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748. All these treaties are mentioned in our histories and in the correspondence between the French authorities in Canada, and the governors of Pennsylvania and Virginia, particularly. They are recorded also on Celoron's plates, as will be shown.

The death of Frontenac in 1697 had brought only a lull in the savage raids upon New England and New York. The war known as Queen Anne's, breaking out in 1701 in Europe, with hostilities the next year in America, was brought to a close by the treaty of Utrecht. It was a humiliating defeat for Louis XIV. and made England the foremost maritime power of the world. France then surrendered to England Acadia, Newfoundland and the Hudson Bay territory. Many statesmen in the English colonies in America strongly urged that the English demand the whole of the St. Lawrence Valley and free their colonies once for all from the danger of French and Indians from the north and west. But the Mother Country was content to get title to what was granted; territory that had been in dispute for a century; and also to secure he undisputed control of the Iroquois Confederacy. So the French held on to the great river of Canada and the Great Lakes for another half century. In their expulsion, the history of Pittsburgh begins, for the

spark was lighted here and the blaze spread to all inhabited North America and raged for seven years across the sea.

The peace of Utrecht was only a truce as far as the English colonies in America were concerned, for it 'decided nothing as to the possession of the vast territory west of the Alleghenies. However, the truce lasted, owing to the death of Louis XIV in 1715, and because two peacefully disposed ministers came into power-Walpole in England, and the Cardinal Fleuri in France. Indian raids promoted by the French occurred at times on the frontiers in America until the middle of the eighteenth century and betokened trouble, but no hostilities occurred until King George's War burst upon the colonies in 1744, a real French war, ingloriously ended by the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748.

But the English colonists were becoming more and more disturbed by the menace of the French occupation of the vast Western Country beyond the Alleghenies. There was danger to all the frontiers, much as there had been to Nw England and New York previously. British sailors were warned away from the mouth of the Mississippi, and the Spaniards incited the Southern Indians against the English. Everywhere there was entreaty to the Mother Country to come to the aid of the colonists.

The French were active. They held forts at Crown Point and Niagara; had armed vessels on Lake Champlain; occupied Detroit for the control of Lake Erie and the portages of the Ohio Country, and increased their posts along the Mississippi and pushed forward the settlement of Louisiana. Both sides were waiting for the overt act of war, which striking the spark, each realized an incipient blaze would burst into a mighty flame. It came in 1754, when the French and English at the same moment were attempting to gain possession of the Ohio Valley, and that first act was in what is now Pittsburgh-right at our "Point," the ever famous "Forks of the Ohio." The French, with the English penned in by the mountains, could control the water routes to the Mississippi which the English greatly desired.

Celoron de Bienville to this end played his part and he must be accorded a chapter in our strange history. This will follow.

Muzzey, a recent English historian, has been mentioned and quoted at some length. Describing conditions in French Colonial Canada compared with the English Colonies, observes:

The two powers brought thus face to face to contend for the mastery of America, differed from each other in every respect. The one was Roman Catholic in religion, absolute in government, a people of magnificent but impracticable colonial enterprises; the other a Protestant, self-governing people, strongly attached to their homes, steadily developing compact communities. There was not a printing press or a public school in Canada, and plow and harrow were rarer than canoe and musket. The 80,000 inhabitants of New France were overwhelmingly outnumbered by the 1,300,000 British colonist. But two facts compensated the French for their inferiority in numbers; first, by their fortified positions along the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes and at the head of the Ohio Valley, they compelled the English, if they wished to pass the Alleghenies, to fight on French ground; secondly, the unified absolute government of New France enabled her to move all her forces quickly under a single command, whereas the English colonies, acting, as Governor Shirley of Massachusetts complains, "like discordant semi-republics," either insisted on dictating the disposition and command of the troops

which they furnished, or long refused, like New Jersey and the colonies south of Virginia, to furnish any troops at all. To make matters worse, the generals sent over from England, with few exceptions, despised the colonial troops and snubbed their officers.

Farseeing men like Governors Dinwiddie, of Virginia, and Shirley, of Massachusetts, tried to effect some sort of union of the colonies in the face of the eminent danger from the French. The very summer that the first shots were fired (1754), a congress was sitting at Albany for the discussion of better intercolonial relations and the cementing of the Iroquois alliance. At that congress, Benjamin Franklin, the foremost man in the colonies, proposed the scheme of union known as the Albany Plan. A grand council consisting of representatives from each colony was to meet annually, to regulate Indian affairs, maintain a colonial army, control public lands, pass laws affecting the general good of the colonies, and levy taxes for the expense of common undertakings. A president general chosen by the king was to have the executive powers of appointing high officials and of nominating the military commanders. He might also veto the acts of the council. Franklin's wise plan, however, found favor neither with the colonial legislatures nor with the royal governors. To each of them it seemed a sacrifice of their rightful authority; so the colonies were left without a central directing power, to coöperate or not with the king's officers, as selfish interests prompted.5

The events that brought about hostilities between France and England began with the expedition of Celoron formally claiming the country in the name of his sovereign. Dinwiddie, governor of Virginia, was aroused and the futile embassy by Washington to the French forts followed. Then events culminated in war. But first the story of Celoron's expedition demands attention.

5"An American History;" David S. Muzzey, pp. 95-97.

CHAPTER XII.

In the Name of the King.

The governor-general of New France in America in office when the English traders prior to 1750 made inroads on the French traffic to the west of the Alleghenies, was Roland Michel Barrin, Comte de la Galissoniere, sometimes mentioned as marquis. In the "Jesuit Relations" his title is "Comte," count.

Like many other governors at Quebec he was an admiral, a high rank to leave for civil duties in a pioneer country. New France was yet quite new and as noted in Chapter XI, vast in extent. This country France lawfully claimed by the right of discovery-good under the law of nations in those warring times when kings found it necessary to have some basis of agreement both for war and peace.

In 1747 the French had entered upon actual explorations of the regions about the Allegheny and the Ohio. They ascertained the geography of the country and the proximity of the English settlements on the west of the Allegheny Mountains. They took active measures to extend their trade among the Indians then ranging the region, well aware that when this inevitable clash came these would prove most useful auxiliaries or dangerous enemies. Agents of the Ohio Company came along about this time, gaining influence among the Indians and it was obligatory to counteract the English influence by every means possible.

It has been related in Chapter X how the French in 1745 fomented disaffection among the Ohio Indians towards the English through Peter Chartier, a French spy, and how his efforts resulted in the subserviency of the Shawanese to the French cause. In 1748, after the treaty at Aixla-Chapelle, the French ministry began paying close attention to the strength and resources of Canada and Louisiana. Between these far-off lands there is, we know, an almost continuous inland water communication. Hence the design of uniting these extremities and unfolding the means of subduing English power in North America.

De la Galissoniere was born at Rochefort in 1693. He entered the navy in 1710 and served with distinction, becoming a captain in 1738. His term as governor-general of New France lasted from September 19, 1747, to August 24, 1749.

Encyclopedia writers impress the fact that he was energetic and that his administration was marked with severe disputes with the English relative to territorial rights in Nova Scotia and the Ohio region. The latter concerns us, for Galissoniere sent Celoron and his party in 1749, warning off the English traders on the Ohio and depositing his leaden plates and posting his "Proces Verbal."

That same year De la Galissoniere was one of the commissioners for settling the boundaries of Acadia. He was an author and a devoted student of natural science, of great heart and mind. He was low in stature and deformed in person-in truth a hunchback. A more extended notice of this wonderful man will be found in Chapter XVI, "The French Regime in Western Pennsylvania." Galissoniere was not, as far as we