The principal point to notice in the dreary record of {196} murder and pillage is the attitude of the Canadian Government and their superiors in France. Letters were intercepted, proving beyond dispute that the Indians were acting under the direct encouragement of the French authorities. In time of peace and nominal friendship the old struggle was ever going on. North America was a chessboard. On the French side the Indians were in front, pawns in the game. Behind them was the King temporarily in check, bishops or their representatives, half-breed knights of tortuous movement, and the castles of Louisbourg and Quebec. [Sidenote: _Oswego._] [Sidenote: _Fort Rouillé or Toronto._] The mouth of the Niagara river had long been held in intermittent fashion by the French, and by 1720, in spite of jealous opposition on the part of the Five Nation Indians, a permanent fort was built there. The English in their turn, in the year 1727, established and garrisoned a trading fort at Oswego, on the southern shore of Lake Ontario,[3] Burnet, the Governor of New York, finding the necessary funds, as the colonial Legislature would not vote the money. The establishment of this station was a serious blow to French trade, nullifying to a large extent the advantage of holding Niagara. In vain the Canadians tried to incite the Five Nations to destroy it; and in vain, in 1749, they planted a rival post, Fort Rouillé, at Toronto,[4] on the other side of the lake, to command the direct route to Lake Huron by Lake Simcoe. To Oswego the Indians brought their furs, and the traffic enriched the Iroquois and their English neighbours in New York. [Footnote 3: See the letter from Governor Burnet to the Board of Trade, dated New York, May 9, 1727: 'I have this spring sent up workmen to build a stone house of strength at a place called Oswego, at the mouth of the Onnondage river, where our principal trade with the far Nations is carried on. I have obtained the consent of the Six Nations to build it.' Papers relating to Oswego in O'Callaghan's _Documentary History of New York_, vol. i, p. 447.] [Footnote 4: The name of Toronto appears before the founding of this fort. On the old maps, i.e. on Delisle's map of Canada, published in 1703, Lake Simcoe appears as Lake Toronto.] [Sidenote: _Crown Point._]