ORIGINAL TERRITORY OF THE UNITED STATES 77 



hostile to their pretensions as the mother country. The colonies 

 of England, which in 1640 were threatened with being pushed 

 into the sea, had become a continuous chain of eager contestants 

 for supremacy, destined to sweep westward and drive the French 

 dominion from the continent forever. 



The French had formed a bold and magnificent design for the 

 possession of the vast interior west of the mountains. 6 Near the 

 close of the seventeenth century a brave and brilliant explorer, 

 La Salle, continuing the career of Cham plain, who had carried 

 the trade and dominion of France westward to Wisconsin, de- 

 scended the valley of the Mississippi, after traversing the Great 

 Lukes, and planted a French settlement in Louisiana. The St 

 Lawrence, the Great Lakes, the Mississippi, these furnished the 

 natural highway for the genius of the great Frenchman in, his 

 progress toward the fulfillment of his splendid dream of empire; 

 but the chief necessity for its realization was men, and these 

 w r ere wanting. At the close of the seventeenth century the 

 French in all the wide region claimed by them numbered only 

 twelve thousand souls, while the English had grown to a hun- 

 dred thousand in New England and New York alone. " The 

 paternal providence of Versailles," says Parkman, " mindful of 

 their needs, sent to the colonists of Louisiana, in 1704, a gift of 

 twenty marriageable girls, described as ' nurtured in virtue and 

 piety and accustomed to work.' " But it required more than a 

 cargo of girls to save New France.- The forces of true coloniza- 

 tion were wanting to the French, whose adventurers were de- 

 scribed by an officer as " beggars sent out to enrich themselves," 

 and who expected the government to feed them while they 

 hunted for pearls and gold mines. 



A weak chain of forts and trading posts, occupied chiefly by 

 priests and friendly Indians, was the only bond that held to- 

 gether the long interval of wilderness between the St Lawrence 

 and the Gulf of Mexico. The governor of New France, La 

 Jonquiere, perceived that the connecting link between these out- 

 posts was the rich valley of the Ohio, and demanded of his King 

 the shipment often thousand French peasants to populate this 

 Intermediate region. But the thought had occurred too late; 

 Louis was indifferent, preoccupied with the pleasures of his 

 court ; the inevitable conflict came at last and New France was 

 erased from the map of North America. 



France resisted nobly in Europe, but left the defense of her 



*8ee map of the territory of the present United states during the French and Indian 



w ;ir-. 



