It was pitched in a small natural clearing on the Mohawk river, a little before its junction with the Hudson, at the mouth of which New York is situated. Not the New York of to-day, with its regular streets and avenues, its towering buildings, well-named "sky-scrapers," its gigantic hotels, its tenement dwellings and its mansions where millionaires hide from the inquisitive eyes of the people; but the New York of the year 1756, with many Dutch among the inhabitants, who still clung to the city which had once been theirs, but at that time belonged to the English. New York with its smaller and, compared with modern days, unpretentious dwellings above which the only thing that towered was the steeple of the church. South and west of the camp where Steve and his comrades rested was Albany, an up-country Dutch settlement, which boasted many wealthy and aristocratic Dutch, and offered always a means whereby the hunters and trappers of English descent could barter the pelts which they had collected during the previous winter. It was whispered, too, that here, in this quiet Albany, tenanted by Puritan Dutch, French _voyageurs_, and _coureurs de bois_, the backwoodsmen and trappers of that portion of Northern America then owned by France, and now known as Canada, were able to sell the loot obtained from the numerous English settlements which they and their Indian helpers had attacked and captured. For there was war between the colonial French and the colonial English, and for some little time now the two nations had been engaged in a cruel frontier struggle. In Europe, however, France and England were outwardly at peace, so far as those in America knew, though the spring of the year above mentioned saw England's patience at last destroyed, and a formal declaration of war made. Still, these backwoodsmen had no notion of that, nor had the numerous French _voyageurs_ and soldiers who had come across Lake Erie and had marched down into the valley of the Ohio. That was the disputed ground, where the bold English pioneers had settled their log huts and taken up holdings, believing themselves to be on British soil. And now hordes of French, accompanied by their priests and by thousands of Indians, were pushing south and west, were expelling the British colonists, and too often were exterminating them.