]
The treaty had done nothing to settle the vexed question of boundaries
between France and her rival. It had but staved off the inevitable
conflict. Meanwhile, the English traders were crossing the mountains
from Pennsylvania and Virginia, poaching on the domain which France
claimed as hers, ruining the French fur-trade, seducing the Indian
allies of Canada, and stirring them up against her. Worse still, English
land speculators were beginning to follow. Something must be done, and
that promptly, to drive back the intruders, and vindicate French rights
in the valley of the Ohio. To this end the Governor sent Celoron de
Bienville thither in the summer of 1749.
He was a chevalier de St. Louis and a captain in the colony troops.
Under him went fourteen officers and cadets, twenty soldiers, a hundred
and eighty Canadians, and a band of Indians, all in twenty-three
birch-bark canoes. They left La Chine on the fifteenth of June, and
pushed up the rapids of the St. Lawrence, losing a man and damaging
several canoes on the way. Ten days brought them to the mouth of the
Oswegatchie, where Ogdensburg now stands. Here they found a Sulpitian
priest, Abbe Piquet, busy at building a fort, and lodging for the
present under a shed of bark like an Indian. This enterprising father,
ostensibly a missionary, was in reality a zealous political agent, bent
on winning over the red allies of the English, retrieving French
prestige, and restoring French trade.
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