The Valley Of The Ohio
Almost at the moment in 1749 when British ships were lying at anchor in Halifax harbor and sending to shore hundreds of boatloads of dazed and expectant settlers for the new colony, there had set out from Montreal, in the interests of France, an expedition with designs so far-reaching that we wonder still at the stupendous issues involved in efforts which seem so petty.
The purpose of France was now to make good her claim to the whole vast West.It was a picturesque company which pushed its canoes from the shore at Lachine on the 15th of June, six days before the British squadron reached Halifax.There was a procession of twenty-three great birchbark canoes well filled, for in them were more than two hundred men, at least ten in each canoe, together with the necessary impedimenta for a long journey.There were twenty soldiers in uniform, a hundred and eighty Canadians skilled in paddling and in carrying canoes and freight over the portages, a band of Indians, and fourteen officers with Celoron de Blainville at their head.
The acting Governor of Canada at this time was a dwarf in physique, but a giant in intellect, the brilliant naval officer, the Marquis de la Galissoniere, destined later to inflict upon the English in the Mediterranean the naval defeat which caused the execution of Admiral Byng as a coward.This remarkable man--planning, like his predecessor Frontenac, on a scale suited to world politics--saw that the peace of 1748 settled nothing, that in the balance now was the whole future of North America, and that victory would be to the alert and the strong.He chose Celoron, the most capable of the hardy young Canadian noblesse whom he had at hand, a man accustomed to the life of the forest, and sent with him this large party to assert against the English the right of France to the valley of the Ohio.The English were now to be shut out definitely from advancing westward and to be confined to the strip of territory lying between the Atlantic coast and the Alleghany Mountains, a little more than that strip fifty miles wide talked about in Quebec as the maximum concession of France, but still not very much according to the ideas of the English, and even this not secure if France should ever grow strong enough to crowd them out.
At no time do we find more vivid the contrast in type between the two nations.Before a concrete fact the British take action.When they gave up Louisbourg they built Halifax.Their traders had pressed into the Ohio country, not directed under any grandiose idea of empire, but simply as individuals, to trade and reap for themselves what profit they could.When they were checked and menaced by the French, they saw that something must be done.How they did it we shall see presently.It was the weakness of the English colonies that they could not unite to work out a great plan.If Virginia took steps to advance westward, Pennsylvania was jealous lest lands which she desired should go to a rival colony.France, on the other hand, had complete unity of design.
Celoron spoke in the name of the King of France and he spoke in terms uncompromising enough."The Ohio," said the King of France through his agent, "belongs to me." It is a French river.The lands bordering upon it are "my lands." The English intruders are foreign robbers and not one of them is to be left in the western country: "I wilt not endure the English on my land." The Indians, dwelling in that region, are "my children."Scattered over the vast region about the Great Lakes were a good many French.At the lower end of Lake Ontario stood Fort Frontenac, a menace to the colony of New York, as the dwellers in the British post of Oswego on the opposite shore of the lake well knew.We have already seen that the French held a fort at Niagara guarding the route leading farther west to Lake Erie and to regions beyond Lake Erie, by way of the Ohio or the upper lakes, to the Mississippi.Near the mouth of the Mississippi, New Orleans was now becoming a considerable town with a governor independent of the governor at Quebec.Along the Mississippi at strategic points stretching northward beyond the mouth of the Missouri were a few French settlements, ragged enough and with a shiftless population of fur traders and farmers, but adequate to assert France's possession of that mighty highway.The weak point in France's position was in her connection of the Mississippi with the St.Lawrence by way of the Ohio.This was the place of danger, for here English rivalry was strongest, and it was to cure this weakness that Celoron was now sent forth.
Celoron moved toilsomely over the portage which led past the great cataract of Niagara and launched his canoes on Lake Erie.
>From its south shore, during seven days of heart-breaking labor, the party dragged the canoes and supplies through dense forest and over steep hills until they reached Chautauqua Lake, the waters of which flow into the Allegheny River and by it to the Ohio.For many weary days they went with the current, stopping at Indian villages, treating with the savages, who were sometimes awed and sometimes menacing.They warned the Indians to have no dealings with the scheming English who would "infallibly prove to be robbers," and asserted as boldly as Celoron dared the lordship of the King of France and his love for his forest children.
Celoron realized that he was on an historic mission.At several points on the Ohio, with great ceremony, he buried leaden plates, as La Verendrye had done a few years earlier in the far West, bearing an inscription declaring that, in the name of the King of France, he took possession of the country.On trees over these memorials of lead he nailed the arms of France, stamped on sheets of tin.Since that day at least three of the plates have been found.
