But, though they kept their distance, they advanced their power. The colonists in New England had been uneasy because of their unwelcome neighborhood from the first. Once and again there had been actual collisions and a petty warfare. But until William of Orange made England a party to the great war of the Protestant powers against Louis XIV. few men had seen what the struggle between French and English held in store for America. The English colonies had grown back not a little way from the sea, steadily pushed farther and farther into the thick-set forests which lay upon the broad valleys and rising slopes of the interior by mere increase of people and drift of enterprise. Before the seventeenth century was out adventurous English traders had crossed the Alleghenies, had launched their canoes upon the waters of the Ohio, and were fixing their huts here and there within the vast wilderness as men do who mean to stay. Colonel Dongan, the Duke’s governor in New York (1683), like many another officer whose duties made him alert to watch the humors and keep the friendship of the Iroquois, the masters of the northern border, had been quick to see how “inconvenient to the English” it was to have French settlements “running all along from our lakes by the back of Virginia and Carolina to the Bay of Mexico.” There was keen rivalry in trade, and had been these many years, between the men of the English and Dutch colonies and the men of the French for the profitable trade in furs which had its heart at the north; and it was already possible for those who knew the forest commerce to reason right shrewdly of the future, knowing, as they did, that the English gave better goods and dealt more fairly for the furs than the French, and that many of the very Frenchmen who ranged the forests in search of gain themselves preferred to send what they had to Albany for sale. But, except for a few lonely villages in far-away Maine, there was nowhere any close contact between French and English in America. Few, except traders and thoughtful governors and border villagers, who feared the tribes whom the French incited to attack and massacre, knew what France did or was planning.