Leave us at
least for this winter, or at least till we go hunting, the smith and some
one who can help us. We promise thee that in the spring the English will
retire." [Footnote: Margry, 6:683.]
And so the expedition passed on from river to river, from tribe to tribe,
planting plates and making appeals to the savages, down the Ohio to the
Miami, up the Miami, stopping at the village of a chief known as La
Demoiselle, thence by portage to the French settlement on the Maumee, and
so back to Lake Erie. Then came the fort builders in their wake, and so
the "Spartoi," the soldiers, almost literally sprang from the earth of the
sowing of the plates.
At one place (the place where the Loups prayed for a smith) they found a
young Englishman with a few dozen workmen building a stockade, but they
sent him back beyond the mountains over which he had come and built upon
its site Fort Duquesne--the defense of the mountain gate to the great
valley--here with a few hundred men on the edge of a hostile wilderness to
make beginning of that mighty struggle which was to end, as we know, on
the river by which Cartier and Champlain had made their way into the
continent.
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