At that time, the valley of the St. Lawrence was occupied by about fifty thousand French settlers, imbued with bitter hostility towards the settlers in New England and New York. Already the vast design of LaSalle to acquire for the King of France the whole interior of the Continent seemed to have been accomplished. While as yet the English were struggling to secure a foothold upon the Atlantic seaboard, the French had explored the Mississippi and its tributaries to its mouth, and the whole vast region drained by them, between the Alleghanies and the Rockies, had been taken possession of by the French under the name of Louisiana, and a chain of military and trading posts from New Orleans to the St. Lawrence, admirably chosen for the purpose, had been established to hold it, and another chain was already planned to extend southward along the west side of the Alleghanies, to forever keep out the English. The French had been for fifty years hounding on the numerous tribes of Canada and northern New England to attack and exterminate the settlers of New England. The conquest of Canada by the English was therefore an object of the greatest political importance, and necessary for the peace and safety of the colonies, and their future growth, and it continued to engross the efforts and exhaust the means of the colonists, until their purpose was finally accomplished in 1763. The people who settled here were entirely familiar with the hardships, dangers and horrors of Indian warfare to which they were liable in taking up their abode on this frontier. The horrible incidents which attended the massacre of the inhabitants of Schenectady, in 1690, seventeen years before, during the previous war, and of the inhabitants of Deerfield, Mass., and other places in 1704, during the war still raging, were household words throughout Connecticut, and had left an abiding imprint in the minds of the people on the border. Though the Indians, right about them here, seem to have been few in number and comparatively harmless, they knew from their own and their fathers' experience, that their position was one of extreme danger, and that at all times their scanty and hardwon possessions and their lives were liable to instant destruction, from unheralded irruptions by the more distant Indian tribes of the North and Northwest, urged on by their French instigators and allies. For the experience of the last seventy years, from the time of the Pequot War, and during the subsequent troubles with the tribes in southwestern Connecticut, and on Long Island, and during King Philip's War, had fully taught them the craft, treachery and pitiless cruelty of the savages, as well as their capacity for extensive combination among widely separated tribes.