Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/844

784 aloft, sang the war-song- and danced before his guests. These joined him, and the peace which had been threatened was restored amid the signs of abundant profits. The old Onontio, the Indian name for the Governor of Canada, had come again. He was their stern and just father, so regarded by these savages that alone of all white men he could dance and sing the war-song before the Indians without impairment of the respect of the natives, who ordinarily looked with suspicion upon those who departed from the customs of their own people.

All the while two English expeditions were preparing, one against Montreal, and the one against Quebec under Phips. The land expedition against Montreal under the Connecticut Winthrop failed by reason of Indian treachery, internal discord, and the breaking out of smallpox. The expedition against Quebec failed because the mediocre Phips was overmatched by the genius of Frontenac. Still peace did not come, and the French in Canada were not left undisturbed. For years the Iroquois continued to assail outlying settlements and to murder wandering Frenchmen. War went on with the cruelties, the sufferings, and the hardships peculiar to the time and to the combatants. The French made bloody raids upon New England settlements. The hostility between New York and Canada became more and more intense as English Governors more and more stimulated Iroquois hostilities against the French. In the end, however, Frontenac broke the power of the Five Nations, while Iberville snatched the rich treasures of Hudson's Bay from the English. Frontenac's policy was to give to France the West and the Mississippi. He sought his object through his alliance with the Western Indians, by encouraging and sustaining the explorers, the soldiers, and the traders. Against him were the English working with the Iroquois, who, with an astute diplomacy worthy of the more cultured peoples of the time, played Englishman against Frenchman and Frenchman against Englishman, in the main to the advantage of the Dutch and English fur-dealers. Against him also were his enemies at home, the priestly and political people who did not accept his policy. The Jesuits were opposed to him on moral grounds. The Intendants, Duchesneau in his first administration and Champigny in his second, opposed him for reasons of trade, of politics, of religion or morals,—for they were devoutly attached to the Church and to its rulers in Canada,—and because, too, they wermen of small minds, jealous of the irascible, passionate, strong-headed count. He offended the priest by insisting upon the dominance of the civil power, and upon giving permission to wild and possibly dissolute youth to carry their cunning and their wiles into the woods to the injury of the Indian man, whom they supplied with brandy, and of the Indian woman whom they debauched. He offended the trader by establishing posts on the frontier where furs were bought, the Indians being there intercepted on their way to Montreal, where the "legitimate" traders expected to make all the profit which was to be gained from the business—the only business which can be said to have been carried on in Canada. Frontenac's policy was not well sustained at home, especially after Colbert placed the colonial business of the kingdom in the hands of his son, Seignelay. The King's mind was prejudiced against him by influences that were always at court, and Louis was too dull to see that Frenchmen scattered through the woods of a new country, dwelling among American Indians, could not be governed by the same methods that were successful restraints when applied to compact communities in the provinces of France.

During the war with the English, the Indians of the West and the Abenakis of the East remained true to France. Frontenac had inspired them with awe, or had attracted them by a personality which charmed at the court of Versailles or at a council-fire in the forest. At last, in 1697, Louis signed the Peace of Ryswick, and, in doing so, surrendered much which his American colony had gained, among the gains being those made by Iberville on the shores of Hudson's Bay, where French victories were too fresh to have been known in Europe when the treaty of peace was signed. The treaty put an end, for the moment, to the war between the French and the