%70. The Powhatans in Virginia.%--Much the same may be said of the Virginia tribes. They were far from friendly, and had they been as fierce and warlike as the northern tribes, neither the skill of John Smith, nor the marriage of Pocahontas (the daughter of Powhatan) with John Rolfe, nor fear of the English muskets, would have saved Jamestown. [Illustration: Powhatan Indians at work[1]] [Footnote 1: From a model.] On the other hand, the destruction of the tribes in New England and the feud between the French and the Iroquois saved New England. For the time had now come for the opening of the long struggle between the French and the English for the ownership of the continent. SUMMARY 1. The inhabitants of the New World at the time of its discovery, by mistake called Indians, were barbarians, lived in rude, frail houses, and used weapons and implements inferior to those of the whites. 2. The Indian tribes of eastern North America are mostly divided into three great groups: Muskhogean, Iroquoian, and Algonquian. 3. In general, the French made the Indians their friends, while the English drove them westward and treated them as an inferior race. [Illustration: THE BRITISH COLONIES AND EUROPEAN POSSESSIONS 1733] CHAPTER VIII THE STRUGGLE FOR NEW FRANCE AND LOUISIANA %71. Louisiana, or the Mississippi Basin.%--The landing of La Salle on the coast of Texas, and the building of Fort St. Louis of Texas, gave the French a claim to the coast as far southward as a point halfway between the fort and the nearest Spanish settlement, in Mexico. At that point was the Rio Grande, a good natural boundary. On the French maps, therefore, Louisiana extended from the Rocky Mountains and the Rio Grande on the west, to the Alleghany Mountains on the east, and from the Gulf of Mexico on the south, to New France on the north. This confined the English colonies to a narrow strip between the Alleghany Mountains and the Atlantic Ocean. As the colonies were growing in population, and as the charters of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Virginia, and Carolina gave them great stretches of territory in the Mississippi valley, it was inevitable that, sooner or later, a bitter contest for possession of the country should take place between the French and the English in America. The contest began in 1689, and ended in 1763, and may easily be divided into two periods: 1. That from 1689 to 1748, when the struggle was for Acadia and New France. 2. That from 1754 to 1763, when the struggle was not only for New France, but for Louisiana also.