These various western forts, except Fort Chartres and Fort Niagara, which were afterwards rebuilt, the one in stone and the other in earth, were stockades of no strength against cannon. Slight as they were, their establishment was costly; and as the King, to whom Canada was a yearly loss, grudged every franc spent upon it, means were contrived to make them self-supporting. Each of them was a station of the fur-trade, and the position of most of them had been determined 58 more or less with a view to that traffic. Hence they had no slight commercial value. In some of them the Crown itself carried on trade through agents who usually secured a lion’s share of the profits. Others were farmed out to merchants at a fixed sum. In others, again, the commanding officer was permitted to trade on condition of maintaining the post, paying the soldiers, and supporting a missionary; while in one case, at least, he was subjected to similar obligations, though not permitted to trade himself, but only to sell trading licenses to merchants. These methods of keeping up forts and garrisons were of course open to prodigious abuses, and roused endless jealousies and rivalries. France had now occupied the valley of the Mississippi, and joined with loose and uncertain links her two colonies of Canada and Louisiana. But the strength of her hold on these regions of unkempt savagery bore no proportion to the vastness of her claims or the growing power of the rivals who were soon to contest them.[57] [43] “De manière qu’on puisse arrêter les Anglois, qui depuis longtems tachent de s’emparer de l’Amérique françoise, dont ils conoissent l’importance et dont ils feroient un meillieur usage que celuy qui les françois en font.” [44] On the river Jordan, so named by Vasquez de Ayllon, see “Pioneers of France in the New World,” 11, 39, _note_. It was probably the broad river of South Carolina. [45] _Second Mémoire concernant les Limites des Colonies présenté en 1720 par Bobé, prêtre de la Congrégation de la Mission_ (Archives Nationales). [46] _Demandes de la France_, 1723 (Archives des Affaires Étrangères). [47] _Colonel Heathcote to Governor Hunter, 8 July, 1715. Ibid, to Townshend, 12 July, 1715._ [48] _Journal of Schuyler and Livingston, 1720._ [49] _Vaudreuil au Conseil de Marine, 24 Octobre, 1717._ [50] _Vaudreuil et Bégon au Conseil de Marine, 26 Octobre, 1719._ [51] “I am ashamed to confess that he built the fort at his private expense, and that a balance of above £56 remains due to his estate to this very day.”--Smith, _History of New York_, 267 (ed. 1814). [52] _Mémoire de Dupuy, 1728._ Dupuy was intendant of Canada. The King approved the conduct of Beauharnois in not using force. _Dépêche du Roy, 14 Mai, 1728._