surprised, and Rasles slain. He met his death with the sublime
cheerfulness and courage which were the badge of his order. French
influence in northeastern Massachusetts was at an end, and John Lovewell,
before he lost his life by an ambush of Saco Indians at Battle Brook, had
made it necessary for the Indians to sue for peace. Commerce took the
place of religion as a subjugating force, and an era of prosperity began
for the northeastern settlements.

There was no settled boundary between northern New York and the French
regions. Each party used diplomatic devices to gain advantage. Both built
trading stations on doubtful territory, which developed into forts. Burnet
of New York founded Oswego in 1727, and gained a strip of land from the
Iroquois; France built a fort on Lake Champlain in 1731. Six years before
that, they had established, by the agency of the sagacious trader
Joncaire, a not less important fort at Niagara. Upon the whole, the French
gained the better of their rivals in these negotiations.

Louisiana, as the French possessions, or claims, south of Canada were
called, was meanwhile bidding fair to cover most of the continent west of
the Alleghanies and north of the indeterminate Spanish region which
overspread the present Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California and Mexico.
No boundary lines could be run in those enormous western expanses; and it
made little practical difference whether a given claim lay a thousand
miles this way or that. But on the east it was another matter. The French
pursued their settled policy of conciliating the Indians wherever they
hoped to establish themselves; but though this was well, it was not
enough. Narrow though the English strip of territory was, the inhabitants
greatly outnumbered the French, and were correspondingly more wealthy.
Spotswood of Virginia, in 1710, was for pushing out beyond the mountains,
and Logan of Pennsylvania also called Walpole's attention to the troubles