“ Lawrence, including the narrow margin that could be seen from the prow of the barque as it sailed along its shore from Tadoussac to the Lachine Rapids, had been explored. A vast continent stretched away in the distance, shrouded in dark forests, diversified with deep rivers and broad lakes, concerning which nothing whatever was known, except that which might be gathered from the shadowy representations of the wild men roaming in its solitudes. ”

“ With five voyageurs and two birch-bark canoes, Joliet and Marquette, by the 7th of June, had reached a settlement of Kikapous, Miamis, and Mascoutens, in the valley of the Fox River, and three leagues beyond they found a short portage by which they reached the Wisconsin River, and following its tortuous course amid sandbars and islands dense with bushes, on the 17th of June they entered the broad great river called the Mississippi, walled in by picturesque bluffs, with lofty limestone escarpment, whose irregular outline looked like a succession of the ruined castles and towers of the Rhine. ”

“ Another American plant has had an important influence on the history of American commerce, though it did not aid in the settlement of the country,—tobacco. That singular gift of the New World to the Old quickly gave the basis of a great export to the colonies of Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina; it alone enabled the agriculture of the Southern colonies to outgrow in wealth those which were planted in more northern soil. To this crop, which demands much manual labor of an unskilled kind, and rewards it well, we owe the rapid development of African slavery. ”

“ In the west, the Cordilleras are a formidable bar to those who seek to enter the continent from the Pacific. None but a modern civilization would ever have forced its barriers of mountains and of deserts. An ancient civilization, if it had penetrated America from the west, would have recoiled from the labor of traversing this mountain system, that combines the difficulties of the Alps and the Sahara. If European emigration had found such a mountain system on the eastern face of the continent, the history of America would have been very different. ”

“ Acadia had been the home of civilized men for nearly a hundred years; but there was almost nothing to show as the fruits of this long occupation of a virgin soil. It had produced no men of marked character, and its history was little more than the record of feuds between petty chiefs, and of feeble resistance to the attacks of more powerful neighbors. Madame la Tour alone exhibits the courage and energy naturally to be looked for under the circumstances in which three generations of settlers were placed. ”

“ Brown-Séquard, assures me that the American body, be it that of man or beast, is more enduring of wounds than the European; that to make a given impression upon the body of a creature in America it is necessary to inflict severer wounds than it would be to produce the same effect on a creature of the same species in Europe. His opportunities for forming an opinion on this subject have been singularly great, so that the assertion seems to me very important. That the fecundity of the population is not on the whole diminishing, is sufficiently shown by the statistics of the country. ”

“ Scarcely any other continent offers such easy ingress as does this continent to those who come to it from the Atlantic side. The valleys of the St. Lawrence, the Hudson, the Mississippi, in a fashion also of the Susquehanna and the James, break through or pass around the low-coast mountains, and afford free ways into the whole of the interior that is attractive to European peoples. No part of the Alleghanian system presents any insuperable obstacles to those who seek to penetrate the inner lands. The whole of its surface is fit for human uses; there are neither deserts of sand nor of snow. ”

“ There are many lesser peculiarities connected with the soils of North America that have had considerable influence upon the history of the people; the most essential fact is, however, that the climatic conditions of this continent are such that all the important European products, except the olive, will flourish over a wide part of its surface. So that the peoples who come to it from any part of Europe find a climate not essentially different from their own, where the plants and animals on which their civilization rested would flourish as well as in their own home. ”

“ One hundred and fifty of the five hundred soldiers who had been sent out to Canada by King Louis had perished of scurvy while crossing the sea. The colony was in great disorder; the Iroquois roamed at their pleasure, destroyed when and whom they pleased, and vented their anger with all the cruelty and ferocity of their savage nature on such tribes as favored the French. The Indian allies of the French who had been abandoned by La Barre had little respect left for the nation whose chief representative had so badly served them. ”

“ The fur-trade of Canada produced a class of men hardy, agile, fearless, and in habits approximating to the savage. [446] Inured to toil, the voyageurs arose in the morning, “when it was yet dark,” and pushing their birch-bark canoes into the water, swiftly glided away, “like the shade of a cloud on the prairie,” and often did not break fast until the sun had been for hours above [165] the horizon. ”

“ The Iroquois Mission.—War with the Iroquois had been almost uninterrupted since the settlement of Canada. Champlain found the Canadian tribes of every origin arrayed against the fierce confederation which in their symbolic language “formed a cabin.” The founder of Canada had gone to the very heart of the Iroquois country, and at the head of his swarthy allies had given them battle on the shores of Lake Champlain and on the borders of Lake Oneida. But the war had brought the French colony to the brink of ruin, and swept its allies from the face of the earth. ”

“ As Verrazano had good anchorage for his ship, he sent his boat in. This, after going a half league, found that the entrance widened into a magnificent lake of three leagues circuit, upon which at least thirty of the natives’ boats were passing from shore to shore. These people received the strangers kindly, and showed them the best place to bring their boat to the land. A sudden squall from the sea frightened the French, and they returned in haste to the ship without exploring further this pleasant harbor,—which seems to have been that of New York. ”

“ Their record is a chapter of American history full of personal devotedness, energy, courage, and perseverance; none can withhold the homage of respect to men like Jogues, Brebeuf, Garnier, Buteux, Gravier, Allouez, and Marquette. Men of intelligence and education, they gave up all that civilized life can offer to share the precarious life of wandering savages, and were the first to reveal the character of the interior of the country, its soil and products, the life and ideas of the natives, and the system of American languages. ”

“ Le Moyne, in similar peril on the Mohawk, wrote a farewell letter, which he committed to the Dutch authorities; but the sachems of the tribe suddenly sent him to Montreal in the care of a party, so that in March, 1657, the Jesuit missionaries had all withdrawn from the territory of the Five Nations, after their short but laborious effort to open the eyes of the people to the truths of religion.
The Iroquois then dropped the mask, and war parties swept through the French colony, filling it with fire and blood. Yet the influence of the missionaries had not been in vain. ”

“ Fort Frontenac’s garrison was also sadly diminished, and the distress throughout the country, from famine and disease, was very great. To add to the Governor’s troubles, the fur-trade had languished. Bands of Iroquois menaced the unfortunate settlers. The fields were untilled; danger lurked in every bush, and destitution, gaunt and grim, abounded everywhere. Peace must be had at any price, if the colony would live, and Denonville resolved to make it. ”

“ Throughout their efforts in North America, the French showed a capacity for understanding the large questions of political geography, a genius for exploration, and a talent for making use of its results, or guiding their way to dominion, that is in singular contrast with the blundering processes of their English rivals. ”

“ Accustomed from boyhood to the scenes and excitements of frontier life, quick-witted, with some education, a leading spirit among coureurs des bois, and looked upon with respect by the Indians, he was an intelligent explorer of the interior of the continent. In the spring of 1670, when twenty-six years of age, Perrot left Green Bay with a flotilla of canoes filled with peltries and paddled by Indians. By way of Lake Nipissing he reached the Ottawa River, and descended to Montreal, and in July he visited Quebec. ”

“ To close this brief account of the physical conditions of the first European settlements in North America, we may say, that the English colonies were peculiarly fortunate in those physical conditions upon which they fell. There is no area in either of the Americas, or for that matter in the world outside of Europe, where it would have been possible to plant English colonies that would have been found so suitable for the purpose: climate, soil, contact with the sea, and a chance of dominion over the whole continent were given them by fortune. ”

“ The historians who charge the Dutch with pusillanimity and cowardice in their dealings with the Indians forget that to their policy we owe to-day the existence of the United States.
The country between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mississippi River, the Great Lakes and the Savannah River, was at the time of the arrival of the Dutch practically ruled by a confederacy of Indian tribes,—the Five Nations,—who, settled along the Mohawk and Upper Hudson rivers and in western New York, commanded the key to the continent. ”

“ During the night and morning of the 4th and 5th of August, 1689, some fourteen or fifteen hundred Iroquois landed at Lachine. A tempest was raging at the time, and taking advantage of the storm and the darkness, they crept noiselessly up to the houses of the sleeping settlers, and, yelling their piercing war-whoop, fell upon their defenceless and surprised victims. The houses were fired, and the massacre of the inmates which followed was swift and frightful. Few escaped; men, women, and children were indiscriminately slain in cold blood. ”

“ When the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras said that man was born to contemplate the heavens, the sun, and the moon, he might have added also the earth and its formation in all its details, and enjoined on his disciples the necessity of representing the result of such contemplations by maps and charts. We require a map fully to understand the geography and chorography of a country; hence a study of the maps made by contemporaneous makers becomes the duty of the writer of New Netherland history. ”

“ It is an interesting fact that while America has given but one domesticated animal to Europe, in the turkey, it has furnished a number of the most important vegetables, among them maize, tobacco, and the potato. The absence of strong domesticable animals in America doubtless affected the development of civilization among its indigenous people. The buffalo is apparently not domesticable. The horse, which seems to have been developed on North American soil, and to have spread thence to Europe and Asia, seems to have disappeared in America before the coming of man to its shores. ”

“ Although the Western prairies have the temporary advantage that they are more readily brought under cultivation than wooded regions, the forests of a land contribute so largely to man’s well-being, that without them he can hardly maintain the structure of his civilization. The distribution of American forests is peculiar. All the Appalachian mountain system and the shore region between that system and the sea, as well as the Gulf border as far west as the Mississippi, were originally covered by the finest forest that has existed in the historical period, outside of the tropics. ”