In this way men with families were encouraged to make France strong in her western outposts. Within a year one hundred persons responded, and an official census shows a population at Detroit of nearly five hundred persons, of whom thirty-three were women over fifteen, and ninety-five girls under that age. This represents no mere floating population of traders and adventurers. The property returns of the inhabitants show them to have been an agricultural people who made the most of the rich land on which they lived. In the census they reported one hundred and sixty horses in place of the one of forty years before, and six hundred and eighty-two cattle. The fertility of the strait of Detroit seemed to inspire even the roving Canadian, usually so restless and adventurous, with a desire to plant and develop a home. CHAPTER IX NIAGARA AND THE LOSS OF CANADA The importance of Niagara in trade and warfare was early recognized by both the French and the English as well as by the Iroquois. La Salle and Denonville, in their desire to monopolize the Indian trade, had built fortified storehouses on the shore of the river, but both had been destroyed by the Iroquois. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the English began to make serious inroads on the fur trade of the interior, and the French became more anxious than ever to secure a permanent foothold at Niagara. For twenty-five years French and English orators harangued at Indian councils, begging for permission to build forts or trading houses at that point; governors wrote home for the necessary funds to purchase the Indians’ consent; and rival traders watched every camp on the river with suspicion. At length French diplomacy won the day. In 1720, Joncaire, with the help of Charles Le Moyne, Chevalier de Longueuil, gained from the Indians a reluctant consent to the building of a bark house at Niagara. He made the most of this permission, and on the site of Lewiston built a large house, forty feet wide and thirty long, which could accommodate fifty traders. This he surrounded with a high fence or palisade and named the Magazin Royal. In their turn the English built a similar, though smaller, house at Oswego (1722), from which the Indians could go by portage by the Oswego River to Lake Oneida, and, gaining the Mohawk, could paddle their fur-laden canoes to Albany.