The route farther south by Lake Ontario and Lake Erie was more difficult.The Iroquois menaced Niagara and long refused to let France have a footing there to protect her pathway to Lake Erie and the Ohio Valley.It was not until 1720, a period comparatively late, that the French managed to have a fort at the mouth of the Niagara.On the Detroit River, the next strategic point on the way westward, they were established earlier.Just after Frontenac died in 1698, La Mothe Cadillac urged that there should be built on this river a fort and town which might be made the center of all the trading interests west of Lake Erie.End the folly, he urged, of going still farther afield among the Indians and teaching them the French language and French modes of thought.Leave the Indians to live their own type of life, to hunt and to fish.They need European trade and they have valuable furs to exchange.Encourage them to come to the French at Detroit and see that they go nowhere else by not allowing any other posts in the western country.Cadillac was himself a keen if secret participant in the profits of the fur trade and hoped to be placed in command at Detroit and there to become independent of control from Quebec.Detroit was founded in 1701; and though for a long time it did not thrive, the fact that on the site has grown up one of the great industrial cities of modern times shows that Cadillac had read aright the meaning of the geography of North America.
When France was secure at Niagara and at Detroit, two problems still remained unsolved.One was that of occupying the valley of the Ohio, the waters of which flow westward almost from the south shore of Lake Erie until they empty into the vaster flood of the Mississippi.Here there was a lion in the path, for the English claimed this region as naturally the hinterland of the colonies of Virginia and Pennsylvania.What happened on the Ohio we shall see in a later chapter.The other great problem, to be followed here, was to explore the regions which lay beyond the Mississippi.These spread into a remote unknown, unexplored by the white man, and might ultimately lead to the Western Sea.We might have supposed that France's farther adventure into the West would have been from the Mississippi up its great tributary the Missouri, which flows eastward from the eternal snows of the Rocky Mountains.Always, however, the uncertain temper of the many Indian tribes in this region made the advance difficult.The tribes inhabiting the west bank of the Mississippi were especially restless and savage.The Sioux, in particular, made life perilous for the French at their posts near the mouth of the Missouri.
It thus happened that the white man first reached the remoter West by way of regions farther north.It became easy enough to coast along the north and the south shore of Lake Superior, easy enough to find rivers which fed the great system of the St.
Lawrence or of the Mississippi.These, however, would not solve the mystery.A river flowing westward was still to be sought.
Thus, both in pursuit of the fur trade and in quest of the Western Sea, the French advanced westward from Lake Superior.
Where now stands the city of Fort William there flows into Lake Superior the little stream called still by its Indian name of Kaministiquia.There the French had long maintained a trading-post from which they made adventurous journeys northward and westward.
The rugged regions still farther north had already been explored, at least in outline.There lay the great inland sea known as Hudson Bay.French and English had long disputed for its mastery.
By 1670 the English had found trade to Hudson Bay so promising that they then created the Hudson's Bay Company, which remains one of the great trading corporations of the world.With the English on Hudson Bay, New France was between English on the north and English on the south and did not like it.On Hudson Bay the English showed the same characteristics which they had shown in New England.They were not stirred by vivid imaginings of what might be found westward beyond the low-lying coast of the great inland sea.They came for trade, planted themselves at the mouths of the chief rivers, unpacked their goods, and waited for the natives to come to barter with them.For many years the natives came, since they must have the knives, hatchets, and firearms of Europe.To share this profitable trade the French, now going overland to the north from Quebec, now sailing into Hudson Bay by the Straits, attacked the English; and on those dreary waters, long before the Great West was known, there had been many a naval battle, many a hand-to-hand fight for forts and their rich prize of furs.
The chief French hero in this struggle was that son of Charles Le Moyne of Montreal, Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville, who ended his days in the task of founding the French colony of Louisiana.He was perhaps the most notable of all the adventurous leaders whom New France produced.He was first on Hudson Bay in the late summer of 1686, in a party of about a hundred men, led by the Chevalier de Troyes, who had marched overland from Quebec through the wilderness.The English on the Bay, with a charter from King Charles II, the friend of the French, and in a time of profound peace under his successor, thought themselves secure.They now had, however, a rude awakening.In the dead of night the Frenchmen fell upon Fort Hayes, captured its dazed garrison, and looted the place.The same fate befell all the other English posts on the Bay.Iberville gained a rich store of furs as his share of the plunder and returned with it to Quebec in 1687, just at the time when La Salle, that other pioneer of France, was struck down in the distant south by a murderer's hand.
