conciliation, was likewise spared until her western vanguard came into
full conflict with the allied French and Indians. Georgia, by clever
negotiations and treaties of alliance, managed to keep on fair terms
with her belligerent Cherokees and Creeks. But neither diplomacy nor
generosity could stay the inevitable conflict as the frontier advanced,
especially after the French soldiers enlisted the Indians in their
imperial enterprises. It was then that desultory fighting became general
warfare.

[Illustration: ENGLISH, FRENCH, AND SPANISH POSSESSIONS IN AMERICA,
1750]

=Early Relations with the French.=--During the first decades of French
exploration and settlement in the St. Lawrence country, the English
colonies, engrossed with their own problems, gave little or no thought
to their distant neighbors. Quebec, founded in 1608, and Montreal, in
1642, were too far away, too small in population, and too slight in
strength to be much of a menace to Boston, Hartford, or New York. It was
the statesmen in France and England, rather than the colonists in
America, who first grasped the significance of the slowly converging
empires in North America. It was the ambition of Louis XIV of France,
rather than the labors of Jesuit missionaries and French rangers, that
sounded the first note of colonial alarm.

Evidence of this lies in the fact that three conflicts between the
English and the French occurred before their advancing frontiers met on
the Pennsylvania border. King William's War (1689-1697), Queen Anne's
War (1701-1713), and King George's War (1744-1748) owed their origins
and their endings mainly to the intrigues and rivalries of European
powers, although they all involved the American colonies in struggles