the white men. In all their long centuries in America they had
learned nothing of the use of iron. Their sharpest tool had been
made of chipped obsidian or of hammered copper. Their most potent
weapons had been the stone hatchet or age and the bow and arrow.
It thus happened that, when steel and gunpowder reached America,
the natives soon came to despise their primitive implements. More
and more they craved the supplies from Europe which multiplied in
a hundred ways their strength in the conflict with nature and
with man. To the Indian tribes trade with the French or English
soon became a vital necessity. From the far northwest for a
thousand miles to the bleak shores of Hudson Bay, from the banks
of the Mississippi to the banks of the St. Lawrence and the
Hudson, they came each year on laborious journeys, paddling their
canoes and carrying them over portages, to barter furs for the
things which they must have and which the white man alone could
supply.

The Iroquois, the ablest and most resolute of the native tribes,
held the lands bordering on Lake Ontario which commanded the
approaches from both the Hudson and the St. Lawrence by the Great
Lakes to the spacious regions of the West. The five tribes known
as the Iroquois had shown marked political talent by forming
themselves into a confederacy. From the time of Champlain, the
founder of Quebec, there had been trouble between the French and
the Iroquois. In spite of this bad beginning, the French had
later done their best to make friends with the powerful
confederacy. They had sent to them devoted missionaries, many of
whom met the martyr's reward of torture and massacre. But the
opposing influence of the English, with whom the Iroquois chiefly
traded, proved too strong.