Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/240

220 voyage here, obtained the consent of a cacique for constructing his fort at La Navidad for the party left by him as a colony. The Spaniards always acted complacently on their own church theory, that, as heathen territory belonged to Christians, no title-deeds were necessary to transfer its ownership.

The French, according to the purpose and method of their errand and occupancy here, seem never to have thought of the propriety of asking leave or of acquiring a title from the natives. In their steady progress of exploration and establishing trading-stations and missions along the Northern lakes and by the courses of the Western rivers, they assumed that the natives and themselves were to share in mutual advantages, and might take for granted that the new comers would be welcome. They were not bent upon establishing cleared farms and townships, like the English. They never objected, as did the English, to the unrestrained presence of the natives circulating among them, and keeping up a free intercourse. It seems never to have occurred to them to ask for the transfer to them, by covenants, of bounded tracts of land. The French took up their first permanent residence in the territory of the Algonquins and Hurons, making themselves agreeable to the natives at first by profitable trade, and soon afterwards necessary as allies against their ruthless enemies the Iroquois. These Iroquois, who were in amicable relations with the Dutch, were deadly enemies of the French, because the latter were in alliance with the Hurons. The powerful Iroquois were themselves invaders, and held by conquest the splendid region at the centre and the west of New York. They drove out the previous occupants. The strife between them and the Adirondacks of Canada continued more than half a century after the early voyages of the French in 1535.

We may make the largest allowance for the fact that the whites, in many places all over the country and in all the