Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/300

280 transit of the seas, alternating between the court of France—where he defended, or drew friends to, his colony—and the depths of sombre wildernesses, patient under all buffetings and privations. More than any other white man he awed and won the confidence and love of the natives. He could command, threaten, and sway them; and, though with scowls and murmurs they might hesitate, they generally yielded to his mastery. He held in equal poise in his aims two great objects not inconsistent each with the other, but mutually helpful as he viewed them,—the commercial interests of New France, and the conversion to the Church of its debased, imbruted, and benighted natives. Beside these was the lure of finding a water-way to China and the East. Mr. Parkman well says of this grand visionary: “Of the pioneers of the North American forests, his name stands foremost on the list. It was he who struck the deepest and boldest strokes into the heart of their pristine barbarism.” Whether from the first he had matured a plan, that which guided him to the end of his career is strongly defined by Mr. Parkman as follows. It was “to influence Indian counsels, to hold the balance of power between adverse tribes, to envelop in the network of French power and diplomacy the remotest hordes of the wilderness.” At some commanding position on the line of water-transit from the vast interior to the sea, he would plant a fort that should secure the mastery for all trade and intercourse.

But here at the North, as on the Southern bounds of our present domain, the Europeans found the native tribes in deadly strife together. As soon as they were able to apprehend the facts and the traditions of these tribes,—still existing in strength, or in exhausted and subjugated remnants,—they learned that the strife, with its varying fortunes, ferocious and pitiless, had been going on for undated time. The French could but take part in it. It was not