Indians; fur traders, whose lure the red man could not resist,
and settlers occupying the lands beyond the mountains, so it was
said, would do the business. In 1749, five hundred thousand acres
of land had been granted to the Ohio Company "in the King's
interest" and "to cultivate a friendship with the nations of
Indians inhabiting those parts"; and as late as 1754 the Board of
Trade was still encouraging the rapid settling of the West,
"inasmuch as nothing can more effectively tend to defeat the
dangerous designs of the French."

On the eve of the last French war it may well have seemed to the
Board of Trade that this policy was being attended with
gratifying results. In the year 1749, La Galissomere, the acting
Governor of Canada, commissioned Celoron de Blainville to take
possession of the Ohio Valley, which he did in form, descending
the river to the Maumee, and so to Lake Erie and home again,
having at convenient points proclaimed the sovereignty of Louis
XV over that country, and having laid down, as evidence of the
accomplished fact, certain lead plates bearing awe-inspiring
inscriptions, some of which have been discovered and are
preserved to this day. It was none the less a dangerous junket.
Everywhere Blainville found the Indians of hostile mind;
everywhere, in every village almost, he found English traders
plying their traffic and "cultivating a friendship with the
Indians"; so that upon his return in 1750, in spite of the lead
plates so securely buried, he must needs write in his journal:
"All I can say is that the nations of those countries are ill
disposed towards the French and devoted to the English."

During the first years of the war all this devotion was