The things we do!

"
But again I would ask you to think of St. Lusson not as proclaiming merely
the sovereignty of Louis XIV or of France, but as heralding the new
civilization, for if we are to appreciate the real significance of that
pageant and of France's mission, we must associate with that day's
ceremony, not merely the subsequent wanderings of a few men of French
birth or ancestry in all those "countries, rivers, lakes and streams,"
"bounded on the one side by the seas of the north and west and on the
other by the South Sea," but all that life to which they led the
adventurous, perilous way.
The Iroquois and disease had thinned the Indian populations of the
northeast, but here was a new and a friendly menace to that stone-age
barbarism whose dusky subjects found their way back to their haunts by the
stars, lighted their fires by their flint, and gluttonously feasted in
plenty, or stoically fasted in famine.
For the French it was a challenge to "those countries, lakes and islands
bounded by the seas.


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