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Dutch, like the French, found the fur trade with the Indians profitable. There was scarcely any limit to the number of pelts to be bought for a trifling amount from the natives. Simple-minded people, the Indians were satisfied to exchange the most valuable furs for gaudy scarfs or brightly colored beads.

To encourage settlement, the Dutch trading company offered any one who would take a little colony of fifty families to the new world at his own expense, sixteen miles along the bank of a river or eight miles along both banks, the tract to reach inland almost any distance. They were given rights corresponding in some respects to those exercised by feudal lords and were called Patroons. Even with such inducements the Dutch did not come thither in very large numbers. They early came into conflict with the Swedes in Delaware and were driven out of that colony. Their settlements at Fort Orange, Albany and New Amsterdam, New York, were very prosperous. However, Charles II granted all this region to his brother, the Duke of York, who came over to take possession of it. The Dutch were too wedded to their commerce to launch upon war. War destroys trade and their interest was to build it up; consequently, in 1664 the Dutch governor surrendered the colony to the English.

The dawn of the eighteenth century found thirteen English colonies stretching along the Atlantic coast. The French were strong to the north, and there was still a struggle to be waged for the Mississippi basin. However, in that struggle the English were destined to win. Spain, foremost in early discovery, had no part in the settlement of the East. Florida, to be sure, remained a Spanish province, but it was not strong enough to make itself felt.

From this time forward, save for the rivalry with France, interest in America was to center for years in the welfare of those colonies that reached from Massachusetts to Georgia. Considered geographically, they were distinguished as the New England, Middle and Southern Colonies.

Classified

according to their government, some were charter, some royal, some proprietary. The colonies of Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island were governed by charters which had been granted by English sovereigns and which designated cer

tain provisions concerning the administration of each. Local affairs were left largely in the hands of the colonists. The royal colonies were provinces governed directly by the king; New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, Virginia, North and South Carolina and Georgia being of this kind. Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland were proprietary colonies and were under the immediate control of the proprietors who had received these tracts as grants from the king. The township system, as has been noted, prevailed in the north; in the south the county system, and in the Middle colonies a combination of the two grew up.

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Copyright by Underwood and Underwood, N. Y.

A BUSY STREET AT THE NIJNI NOVGOROD FAIR.

CHAPTER III.

THE BEGINNINGS OF A NATION.

During the latter part of the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth centuries, England and France were at war with one another. Rivalries in trade and for imperial possessions were the real points of difficulty between them, although other reasons were set forth upon the various outbreaks of hostilities. This strife between the two countries invariably spread into the colonies and in America these wars became known as King William's, Queen Anne's or King George's war, according to the particular sovereign who chanced to be on the English throne at the time.

The French allied themselves with the Indians more firmly and more uniformly than did the English. For this reason war between the English colonies and the French in America meant Indian raids and massacres. The towns on the frontiers always suffered most. The Indians were semi-barbarous and, while they had been docile and kind in their attitude toward the first white explorers, the utter greed and injustice displayed by these men aroused feelings of deepest distrust and hatred on the part of the Red men. When outbreaks of war gave them confidence to fight at all, they shot out from behind trees, burned dwellings, scalped women and children and in every particular followed the same methods by which they had always fought each other.

For these reasons the recitals of Indian raids are invariably similar. Harrowing deeds, fiendish delight in causing suffering, lack of sympathy for the helpless, characterized the attacks made upon the little English hamlets along the eastern coast during these years and the ones made later upon settlers who pressed farther west, making them more fearful than ever of the natives and more determined to drive them back, away from their settlements. We today are sufficiently removed to view the matter fairly and to realize how mistaken has been the policy pursued toward the American Indians. For that reason the government today is doing

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