Horace Walpole, speaking of the French and English ways of seating themselves in America, said: "They enslaved, or assisted the wretched nations to butcher one another, instructed them in the use of firearms, brandy, and the New Testament, and at last, by scattered extension of forts and colonies, they have met to quarrel for the boundaries of empires, of which they can neither use nor occupy a twentieth part of the included territory." "But," he sneers elsewhere, "_we_ do not massacre; we are such good Christians as only to cheat." But, while the French moved down the lakes and the Allegheny, and the English came across the mountains, what of the _poor_ Indian for whose _rich_ lands both were so anxious? An old Delaware sachem did not miss the mark widely when he asked the question: "The French claim all the lands on one side of the Ohio, and the English on the other: now, where does the Indian's land lie?" Truly, "between their father the French and their brothers the English, they were in a fair way of being lovingly shared out of the whole country." In 1744, the English paid four hundred pounds to the representatives of the Six Nations for assuming to cede to them the land between the Alleghany Mountains. But, as we have seen, the Six Nations had practically given up their Alleghany hunting-grounds to the other nations who had swarmed in, the Delawares (known to the French as the _Loups_, "wolves"), and the Shawanese. So, in a loose way, the confederacy of the Six Nations was friendly to the English, while the actual inhabitants of the land which the Six Nations had "sold" were hostile to the English and usually friendly to the French. Besides these (the Delaware and Shawanese nations), many fugitives from the Six Nations, especially Senecas, were found aiding the French as the momentous struggle drew on. CHAPTER IV THE VIRGINIAN GOVERNOR'S ENVOY A thousand vague rumors came over the mountains to Governor Dinwiddie of Virginia in 1753, of French aggressions on the upper Ohio, the more alarming because vague and uncertain. Orders were now at hand from London, authorizing the erection of a fort on the Ohio to hold that river for England and conciliate the Indians to English rule. But the governor was too much in the dark as to the operations of the French to warrant any decisive step, and he immediately looked about him for a person whom he could trust to find out what was really happening in the Ohio valley.