Such things, however, serious as they were, did not check the steady growth of the colonies. It was not yet questions of self-government or of the preservation of their peace that dominated their affairs; and only those who observed how far-away frontiers were being advanced and two great nations being brought together for a reckoning face to face saw what was the next, the very near, crisis in store for the English in America. Through all that time of peace a notable drama was in fact preparing. Slowly, but very surely, English and French were drawing nearer and nearer within the continent,—not only in the north, but throughout all the length of the great Mississippi. Step by step the French had descended the river from their posts on the lakes; and while peace reigned they had established posts at its mouth and begun to make their way northward from the Gulf. So long ago as 1699 they had built a stockade at Biloxi; in 1700 they had taken possession of Mobile Bay; by 1716 they had established posts at Toulouse (Alabama) and at Natchez. In 1718 they began to build at New Orleans. In 1719 they captured and destroyed the Spanish post at Pensacola. By 1722 there were five thousand Frenchmen by the lower stretches of the great river; and their trading boats were learning all the shallows and currents of the mighty waterway from end to end. Meantime, in the north, they advanced their power to Lake Champlain, and began the construction of a fort at Crown Point (1721). That same year, 1721, French and English built ominously near each other on Lake Ontario, the English at Oswego, the French at Niagara among the Senecas. In 1716, the very year Governor Spotswood rode through the western forests of Virginia to a summit of the Blue Ridge, the French had found a short way to the Ohio by following the Miami and the Wabash down their widening streams. It was while they thus edged their way towards the eastern mountains and drew their routes closer and closer to their rivals on the coast that that adventurous, indomitable people, the Scots-Irish, came pouring of a sudden into the English colonies, and very promptly made it their business to pass the mountains and take possession of the lands which lay beyond them, as if they would deliberately go to meet the French by the Ohio. [Illustration: OSWEGO IN 1750]