31.8 America: a.d. 1601 to 1700  (Page 2/16)

Robert Cavelier de La Salle, born at Rouen and educated in a Jesuit seminary, emigrated to Canada early in life and from letters brought to life much later, it is apparent that he started his first exploratory trip south from Canada as early as 1671. In 1675 he visited France and received a grant of the government and property at Fort Frontenac (now Kingston, Ontario), which had been previously established in 1672 under the name of Fort Cataraqui. La Salle rebuilt the fort and in the spring of 1678 was commissioned to undertake the exploration of the Mississippi River. (Ref. 63 ) We shall here more of him in the next section.

The first commercial venture into the Hudson Bay area was in 1668 when Fort Charles was built by Scottish entrepreneurs. Two years later the Hudson Bay Company was chartered with title to nearly 1.5 million square miles of territory. French and Scotch-English fought minor skirmishes in this region over control of the land and its furs for the next 100 years. (Ref. 212 )

The united states

By this time the eastern Woodland Indians were using some 275 plants for medicine, 130 for food, 31 as magic, 27 for smoking, 25 for dyes, 18 in beverages or flavoring and 52 for various other purposes. Most of the tribes of the northern United States and southern Canada belonged to the Algonquian linguistic stock, comprised of the Micmacs, Wabanakis, Etchemis, Montaignais, Natick, Abnaki, Massachuset, Penobscot, Wamponoag and Delawares, in the eastern area. The original name for the Delawares was "Lanape" and there is some evidence that they may have had some contact with the Dutch as early as 1609. Squeezed between the New York state Iroquois League, the Susquehannocks and the more southern Powhatan Confederacy, part of the Lenape moved on west and part stayed to become dependent on and eventually in some degree to fuse with the European settlers. (Ref. 253 ) The early history of the Shawnees is not known with certainty, but they considered the Delewares their "grandfathers". By 1650 they were living in southern Ohio and northern Kentucky where they remained for several years. Then, after quarrels with neighbors, they dispersed somewhat, from the Gulf Coast to the Delaware Valley in western New Jersey. (Ref. 293 )

In what was then the "west", in addition to the Shawnee, were the Potowatami, Menominee, Cree, Ojibwa, Ottawa, Arapaho, Blackfoot and Cheyenne. A most interesting observation, recently validated to some extent by Professor Fell, is that the most western of these tribes have Mongolian physical features and Siberian root vocabularies, while their eastern cousins have markedly European physiognomies and marked grammatical and vocabulary similarities to the Semitic language of the Phoenicians (or North Africans). Even a few Celtic words have penetrated the eastern Algonquian dialects and finally there are some Norse words. Fell feels that the eastern Algonquians themselves are in great part descended from early Mediterranean colonizers and their tribal traditions, which included their ancestors crossing the sea and some of the local archaeological evidence, might be confirmatory. (Ref. 122 ) Few historians would back up Fell in these hypotheses and apparently no blood factor studies have been done that might tend to either deny or confirm such ideas. The Indians of North America used little cylinders cut from blue or violet sea-shells threaded on a string as money called "wampum". Even Europeans used this legitimately until 1670 and some even after that. (Ref. 260 ) In 1649 the Virginia assembly had even set standard values - one yard of wampum (peake or roanoke) equaled two shillings sixpence and one fathom equaled five shillings. If the peake was black it had double the value. (Ref. 267 )