It is remarkable enough that this war, which was to settle so much, began from a spark struck in the West. The explanation of this is found in the fact that a great expanse of forest separated the English settlements on the Atlantic seaboard and the great line of French settlements, three thousand leagues in length, which stretched from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico. The nearest points of contact were in Virginia and Pennsylvania, for here the rivalry of French and English traders had been most intense.
Virginians found it a very acceptable part to play--this trying the test case with France to decide who was the real master of the land over the mountains. In 1749, a company of Virginian gentlemen received from the King of England a royal charter granting them possession of two hundred thousand acres of the Black Forest between the Monongahela and Kanawha rivers.
The astonishment and anger of the French on the St. Lawrence knew no bounds. Immediately the French governor Galissonière set on foot plans which would result in the withdrawal of the English colonists.
Looking back through the years, it may seem very strange that the governors of New France never anticipated a clash with England on the Ohio and prepared for it, but it appears, that, of all the West, _Lake Erie and the Ohio river were the least known to the French_. This can be understood by following the romantic story of French exploration:
On a wild October day, Cartier, who raised the altar at Quebec and claimed the new continent, stood on Mt. Royal, looking wistfully westward. Behind him lay the old world throbbing with an intuition of a northwest passage to China and India. Before him shimmered in the sun two water-ways. As we know them now, the southern was the St. Lawrence, the western the Ottawa.
It was a strange providence which compelled Cartier to set the tide of French trade and exploration over the Ottawa rather than up the St. Lawrence. By this France lost, we are told, the Hudson valley--the key to the eastern half of the continent--but gained the Great Lakes. This tide of trappers, merchants, Jesuits, and adventurers went up the western river, across into Georgian Bay, through the lakes, down the Allegheny, Wabash, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Mississippi. Some few braved the dangers of traveling in the domains of the Iroquois and went up the St. Lawrence to Lake Ontario, then across to Lake Simcoe and Georgian Bay. The important result was that Lake Erie was the last of all the Great Lakes to be discovered and the country south of it was the last to be explored and claimed by the French. Lakes Ontario and Huron were discovered in 1615, Lake Superior in 1629, Lake Michigan in 1634. Lake Erie was not discovered until 1669--half a century after the two lakes which it joins; and then for a hundred years it was a mystery. Champlain drew it on his map as a widened river; other maps of the day make it a brook, river, strait, or lake, as their authors fancied. One drew it as a river, and, in perplexity over its outlet, ran it into the Susquehanna and down into Chesapeake Bay. And as late as 1750, in the map of Céloron, is written along the southern shore of Lake Erie, "This shore is almost unknown."