The things we do!

Ange
returned to his old post, restored order, and remained there until another
British officer could reach the fort. The habitants were accustomed "to
obey, without question, the orders of their superiors.... (They) yielded a
passive obedience to the new rulers.... They remained the owners, the
tillers of the soil." [Footnote: Roosevelt, "Winning of the West," 1:38,
Alleghany edition.] And one of the last acts of the Continental Congress
and the first of the new Congress, under the Constitution, was to provide
for an enumeration of these French settlers and for the allotment to them
of lands in this valley where they had been the sole owners.
Many of the French habitants were not of pure blood. The French seldom
took women with them into the wilderness. They were traders, trappers, and
soldiers. They married Indian wives, untrammelled, as President Roosevelt
says, "by the queer pride which makes a man of English stock unwilling to
make a red-skinned woman his wife, though anxious enough to make her his
concubine.


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