And so the lakes and the western rivers and the Mississippi itself saw the French; and French posts sprang up upon their shores to mark the sovereignty of the King of France. Frenchmen easily enough learned the ways of the wilderness and became the familiars of the Indians in their camps and wigwams; and they showed themselves of every kind,—some rough and lawless rovers, only too glad to throw off the restraints of the orderly life to which they had been bred and live as they pleased in the deep, secluded forests, trading without license, seeking adventure, finding a way for the civilization which was to follow them, but themselves anxious to escape it; others regular traders, who kept their hold upon the settlements behind them and submitted when they were obliged to official exactions at Montreal; some intrepid priests, who preached salvation and the dominion of France among the dusky tribes, and lived or died with a like fortitude and devotion, never willingly quitting their sacred task or letting go their hold upon the hearts of the savage men they had come to enlighten and subdue; some hardy captains with little companies of drilled men-at-arms from the fields of France:—at the front indomitable explorers, far in the rear timid farmers clearing spaces in the silent woodland for their scanty crops, and little towns slowly growing within their walls where the river broadened to the sea. This stealthy power which crept so steadily southward and westward at the back of the English settlements upon the coast was held at arm’s-length throughout that quiet age of beginnings, not by the English, but by a power within the forests, the power of the great confederated Iroquois tribes, who made good their mastery between the Hudson and the lakes: the Senecas, Cayugas, Onondagas, Oneidas, and Mohawks. They were stronger, fiercer, more constant and indomitable, more capable every way, than the tribes amidst whom the French moved; and Champlain had unwittingly made them the enemies of the French forever. Long, long ago, in the year 1609, which white men had forgotten, he had done what the Iroquois never forgot or forgave. He had come with their sworn foes, the Algonquins, to the shores of that lake by the sources of the Hudson which the palefaces ever afterwards called by his name, and had there used the dread fire-arms of the white men, of which they had never heard before, to work the utter ruin of the Mohawks in battle. They were always and everywhere ready after that fatal day to be any man’s ally, whether Dutch or English, against the hated French; and the French found it necessary to keep at the back of the broad forests which stretched from the eastern Lakes to the Hudson and the Delaware, the wide empire of these dusky foes, astute, implacable. They skirted the domains of the Iroquois when they were prudent, and passed inland by the lakes and the valley of the Mississippi.