The Indian population of the Ohio and its northern tributaries was relatively considerable.  The upper or eastern half of the valley was occupied by mingled hordes of Delawares, Shawanoes, Wyandots, and Iroquois, or Indians of the Five Nations, who had migrated thither from their ancestral abodes within the present limits of the State of New York, and who were called Mingoes by the English traders.  Along with them were a few wandering Abenakis, Nipissings, and Ottawas.  Farther west, on the waters of the Miami, the Wabash, and other neighboring streams, was the seat of a confederacy formed of the various bands of the Miamis and their kindred or affiliated tribes.  Still farther west, towards the Mississippi, were the remnants of the Illinois.

France had done but little to make good her claims to this grand domain.  East of the Miami she had no military post whatever.  Westward, on the Maumee, there was a small wooden fort, another on the St. Joseph, and two on the Wabash.  On the meadows of the Mississippi, in the Illinois country, stood Fort Chartres,—­a much stronger work, and one of the chief links of the chain that connected Quebec with New Orleans.  Its four stone bastions were impregnable to musketry; and, here in the depths of the wilderness, there was no fear that cannon would be brought against it.  It was the centre and citadel of a curious little forest settlement, the only vestige of civilization through all this region.  At Kaskaskia, extended along the borders of the stream, were seventy or eighty French houses; thirty or forty at Cahokia, opposite the site of St. Louis; and a few more at the intervening hamlets of St. Philippe and Prairie a la Roche,—­a picturesque but thriftless population, mixed with Indians, totally ignorant, busied partly with the fur-trade, and partly with the raising of corn for the market of New Orleans.  They communicated with it by means of a sort of row galley, of eighteen or twenty oars, which made the voyage twice a year, and usually spent ten weeks on the return up the river.[3]

[Footnote 3:  Gordon, Journal, 1766, appended to Pownall, Topographical Description.  In the Depot des Cartes de la Marine at Paris, C. 4,040, are two curious maps of the Illinois colony, made a little after the middle of the century.  In 1753 the Marquis Duquesne denounced the colonists as debauched and lazy.]

The Pope and the Bourbons had claimed this wilderness for seventy years, and had done scarcely more for it than the Indians, its natural owners.  Of the western tribes, even of those living at the French posts, the Hurons or Wyandots alone were Christian.[4] The devoted zeal of the early missionaries and the politic efforts of their successors had failed alike.  The savages of the Ohio and the Mississippi, instead of being tied to France by the mild bonds of the faith, were now in a state which the French called defection or revolt; that is, they received and welcomed the English traders.