rapids La Chine, believing that the river led "to China"—a country of which the farthest western nations, the fierce Chippewas and Dacotahs, even, had never heard!
As the eighteenth century grew older, the Iroquois became too busy with affairs of war and diplomacy and trade to come each year to their western hunting-grounds and guard them with the ancient jealousy. Situated as they were between the French and English settlements they found a neutral rôle difficult to maintain and they became fitfully allied now with the Albany, now with the Quebec governments, as each struggled to gain possession of the great fur trade which was controlled by the Six Nations who claimed to control the Ottawa, St. Lawrence, and all the New York rivers.
But this hunting-ground was too delightful a land to remain long unoccupied. Had Providence willed that these forests in and west of the Appalachian mountain system should have continued to be unoccupied until the white man came to possess it, many of the darkest pages of American history would never have been written. But the reverse of this happened. Not only
