Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 7).djvu/66

 nécamps, who accompanied Céloron, wrote: "The road is passably good. The wood through which it is cut resembles our forests in France."

Céloron went his way, having given great prominence to the Chautauqua portage, indirectly suggesting that it was the most convenient pass from Lake Erie into the disputed Ohio Valley. It remained for another to mark a more practicable course.

Céloron's report to his governor was thoroughly alarming, and a French force under M. Marin was sent from Montreal in 1752 to fortify the route to the Ohio River and to erect forts to hold that river itself.

After looking over the formidable Chautauqua route, Marin moved along the shore of Lake Erie to "Presque Isle" (Erie, Pennsylvania), where the French had made a settlement as early as 1735. Marin chose to make this twenty-mile portage from Presque Isle to "Rivière aux Bœufs" the armed route of French aggression into the Ohio Valley, in preference to the shorter but more tedious and more uncertain Chau-