And thus we find the possessions of France slowly being peopled, till in the year when Steve and his friends reached the Alleghanies, the colonists numbered some 60,000 souls, exclusive of some ten thousand living in Acadie, once French but now English, though the _habitant_ who had filled that smiling land was French by birth and intensely French in thought and sympathy. We find Cape Breton, an island just north of Nova Scotia, a possession of France, with the formidable fortress of Louisbourg situated upon it, and its ramparts bristling with cannon. Hunters and _coureurs de bois_ had sailed across the lakes, and knew every foot of their shores, while soldiers and agents of France had built forts and trading posts in numerous places, had erected stockades at certain points on the Mississippi, and were slowly progressing in a scheme which promised soon to allow the men descending this mighty Mississippi to join hands with men of their blood at New Orleans, settled some time ago by the French. Look again at the map for a moment, and see what such a line of forts meant. It cut the northern continent into two unequal parts, leaving France the major portion lying to the west, as well as that wide tract between the Mississippi and the Alleghanies. It was this portion, commencing with the valley of the Ohio, which they determined to occupy, despite the fact that our hunters and pioneers had penetrated its forests years before, and it was this same valley in which their own Indians were now camping, having harried and massacred far and wide, and set fire to all the settlements not only in the valley, but as far as and beyond the Alleghany range.