It was said a moment ago that one of the chief objects for which the governors wanted money was to maintain troops for defence against the French and the Indians. This was a very serious matter indeed. To any one who looked at a map of North America in 1750 it might well have seemed as if the French had secured for themselves the greater part of the continent. The western frontier of the English settlements was generally within two hundred miles of the sea-coast. In New York it was at Johnson Hall, not far from Schenectady; in Pennsylvania it was about at Carlisle; in Virginia it was near Winchester, and the first explorers were just making their way across the Alleghany mountains. Westward of these frontier settlements lay endless stretches of forest inhabited by warlike tribes of red men who, everywhere except in New York, were hostile to the English and friendly to the French. Since the beginning of the seventeenth century French towns and villages had been growing up along the St. Lawrence, and French explorers had been pushing across the Great Lakes and down the valley of the Mississippi river, near the mouth of which the French town of New Orleans had been standing since 1718. It was the French doctrine that discovery and possession of a river gave a claim to all the territory drained by that river. According to this doctrine every acre of American soil from which water flowed into the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi belonged to France. The claims of the French thus came up to the very crest of the Alleghanies, and they made no secret of their intention to shut up the English forever between that chain of mountains and the sea-coast. There were times when their aims were still more aggressive and dangerous, when they looked with longing eyes upon the valley of the Hudson, and would fain have broken through that military centre of the line of English commonwealths and seized the keys of empire over the continent. [Sidenote: The Indian tribes.]