Lawrence and strong enough to impress the Indians whose country
she had invaded. At first she had reached the interior by way of
the Ottawa River and Lake Huron, and in that northern country her
position was secure enough through her posts on the upper lakes.
The route farther south by Lake Ontario and Lake Erie was more
difficult. The Iroquois menaced Niagara and long refused to let
France have a footing there to protect her pathway to Lake Erie
and the Ohio Valley. It was not until 1720, a period
comparatively late, that the French managed to have a fort at the
mouth of the Niagara. On the Detroit River, the next strategic
point on the way westward, they were established earlier. Just
after Frontenac died in 1698, La Mothe Cadillac urged that there
should be built on this river a fort and town which might be made
the center of all the trading interests west of Lake Erie. End
the folly, he urged, of going still farther afield among the
Indians and teaching them the French language and French modes of
thought. Leave the Indians to live their own type of life, to
hunt and to fish. They need European trade and they have valuable
furs to exchange. Encourage them to come to the French at Detroit
and see that they go nowhere else by not allowing any other posts
in the western country. Cadillac was himself a keen if secret
participant in the profits of the fur trade and hoped to be
placed in command at Detroit and there to become independent of
control from Quebec. Detroit was founded in 1701; and though for
a long time it did not thrive, the fact that on the site has
grown up one of the great industrial cities of modern times shows
that Cadillac had read aright the meaning of the geography of
North America.

When France was secure at Niagara and at Detroit, two problems