Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 3).djvu/86

82 traders but it must have been comparatively rare. Few men of his race had such a lasting and honorable hold upon the Indian as Sir William Johnson and we cannot be wrong in attributing much of his power (of such momentous value to England through so many years) to the spirit of comradeship and familiarity which underlay his studied deportment.

"Are you ignorant," said the French governor Duquesne to a deputation of Indians, "of the difference between the king of France and the English? Look at the forts which the king had built; you will find that under their very walls, the beasts of the forests are hunted and slain; that they are, in fact, fixed in places most frequented by you merely to gratify more conveniently your necessities. The English, on the contrary, no sooner occupy a post, than the woods fall before their hand—the earth is subjected to cultivation—the game disappears—and your people are speedily reduced to combat with starvation." M. Garneau, the French historian, frankly acknowledges that the marquis here accurately described the chief differ-