After the construction of the barques had been begun, the consent of the five Iroquois nations was secured. Longueuil promised them that it would be to them "a House of Peace" down to the third generation and farther. To Gaspard Chaussegros de Lery, engineer, was committed the building of the structure. He determined to make it fireproof. "Instead of wooden partitions I have built heavy walls, and paved all the floors with flat stone," he wrote in a report sent to France. The loft was paved with flat stones "on a floor full of good oak joists, upon which cannon may be placed above the structure." The trade with the Indians at the completed stone house on the Niagara increased. So did the activities of the English. Governor Burnet of New York craftily persuaded the Onondaga Indians that their interests had been endangered by the building of the French fort, since it penned them up from their chief hunting-place, and was therefore contrary to the Treaty of Utrecht; they agreed with him that the Iroquois had no right to the territory, which was really the property of the Senecas, and they asked the Governor to appeal to King George to protect them in their right. Therefore the suggestion was made that they "submit and give up all their hunting country to the King," and sign a deed for it. Accordingly Seneca, Cayuga, and Onondaga sachems deeded to the English a sixty-mile strip along the south shore of Lake Ontario, which included the Niagara frontier, the Niagara River being the western boundary. "From this time on the 'stone house' was on British soil; but it was yet to take the new owner a generation to dispossess the obnoxious tenant," Frank H. Severance writes in "An Old Frontier of France." The story of the next thirty years is a story of plots and counter-plots, of expeditions threatened and actual, of disappointing campaigns, of imprisonment and cruelty and death. More than once Indians promised the English that the house at Niagara should be razed. Spies reported that the defences at the castle were in bad shape; "'tis certain that, should the English once attack it, 'tis theirs," one report ran. "I am informed that the fort is so dilapidated that 'tis impossible to put a pin in it without causing it to crumble; stanchions have been obliged to be set up against it to support it." Another report disclosed that if the cannon were fired the walls would crumble. But the French were not ready to give up. They felt that Fort Niagara was the key to the Ohio Valley, which they wished to control. They strengthened the defences of the fort. The defeat of Braddock at Fort Du Quesne and the strange decision of General Shirley to stop at Oswego instead of continuing with his force to Niagara, gave the French a new lease of life.