For the moment those mountains stand upon the horizon as the symbol of the
only part of North America east of the Rockies which the French pioneers
did not possess before others by the trails of their feet or the paths of
their boats. Verrazano of Dieppe had sailed along the Atlantic shore
front, but so, perhaps, had Cabot. Ribaut had been "put to the knife" in
Florida, but it was the knife of a Spaniard whose compatriots had been
there before Ribaut. Etienne Brule had wandered all the way from Canada
into Pennsylvania along the sources and upper waters of the Atlantic
streams, but the colonists of other nations were sitting huddled at the
mouths of the streams. And Father Jogues had endured the torturing portage
from the shores of Lake George to the Mohawk, but the Dutch were by that
time there to succor him from the Iroquois. Only with their eyes had the
French beheld first of Europe the America of the eastern waters, whose
inhabitants, when they came to put on uniform and fight for its
independence, called themselves "Continentals," as if their little hem of
the garment were the continent.
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