Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/303

Rh When the colonists of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay, after 1620, began to go on their fishing and trucking expeditions to the coast of Maine and Acadia, they too surreptitiously sold arms to the Indians and entered into precarious covenants with them. Though the French had been at deadly feud with the Mohawks, the allies of the Dutch, they claimed the protectorate of the territory of the Eastern Indians, and alliance with them. Here, then, — between the French on the one part, and the Dutch and English on the other, — began a series of collisions in rivalry and hostility for territorial and colonial power, and rights to exclusive traffic with the natives, which, prolonged for a full century and a half, closed in 1763 by the English conquest of Canada. Several distinct periods in that sweep of time are historically designated by special names, as defining a particular war, — as, for instance, Queen Anne's War. But these were only concentrations and culminations of a never wholly intermitted hostility. Even when one or another monarch, or minister of a foreign crown, proposed that the quarrels between their subjects at home should not be transferred to these forests, the pacific privilege was not accepted. Leaving for further notice these complications between Europeans at the North, we must glance at the enterprises of the French on other parts of the continent.

Nearly a century and a half after the region had been ravaged by De Soto, the French appeared in Alabama, to open a new series of European lessons in conquest and cruelty with what remained there of the Indian race. Marquette had floated down the Mississippi to the mouth of the Arkansas in 1673, and La Salle had descended to the mouth of the river in 1682, taking possession in the name of the French king, and returning to Canada. But on his sea voyage for the purpose, three years afterwards, that noble and intrepid adventurer, baffled in his attempt to find the mouth of the river in the Gulf, disembarked