Page:History of the Ojibway Nation.djvu/205

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ENDING OF THE FRENCH SUPREMACY.
195

almost every battle which was fought during these bloody wars, on the side of the French, against the English. A party of the tribe from their central village of La Pointe on Lake Superior, even proceeded nigh two thousand miles to Quebec, under their celebrated war chief Ma-mong-e-se-da, and fought in the ranks of Montcalm on the plains of Abraham, when this ill-fated general and the heroic Wolfe received their death wounds. According to the late noted British interpreter John Baptiste Cadotte, the name by which the Ojibways now know the British, Shaug-un-aush, was derived from the circumstance of their sudden and almost unaccountable appearance, on that memorable morning on the heights of Abraham. It is a little changed from the original word Saug-aush-e which signifies "to appear from the clouds."

With the deepest regret and sorrow, the Ojibways in common with other Algic tribes, at last viewed the final delivery of the Northwestern French forts into the hands of the conquering British. With aching hearts they bade a last farewell to the kind hearted French local commanders, whom they had learned to term "Father," and the jovial hearted "Coureur du Bois" and open-handed "Marchand voyageur," many of whom took their final departure from the Indian country on its cession to Great Britain. The bonds, however, which had been so long riveting between the French and Ojibways were not so easily to be broken.

The main body of the French traders and common voyageurs who had so long remained amongst them, had many of them become united to the Indian race by the ties of marriage; they possessed large families of half-blood children whom the Indians cherished as their own, and in many instances actually opposed their being taken from their midst. These Frenchmen, as a body, possessed an unbounded influence over the tribes amongst whom they