The king had stigmatized La Barre's treaty with the Iroquois
as disgraceful, and expressed indignation at his abandonment of the
Illinois allies. All this was now to be changed; but it was easier to
give the order at Versailles than to execute it in Canada.
Denonville's difficulties were great; and his means of overcoming them
were small. What he most needed was more troops and more money. The
Senecas, insolent and defiant, were still attacking the Illinois; the
tribes of the north-west were angry, contemptuous, and disaffected;
the English of New York were urging claims to the whole country south
of the Great Lakes, and to a controlling share in all the western fur
trade; while the English of Hudson's Bay were competing for the
traffic of the northern tribes, and the English of New England were
seizing upon the fisheries of Acadia, and now and then making
piratical descents upon its coast. The great question lay between New
York and Canada. Which of these two should gain mastery in the west?
Denonville, like Frontenac, was a man of the army and the court. As a
soldier, he had the experience of thirty years of service; and he was
in high repute, not only for piety, but for probity and honor. He was
devoted to the Jesuits, an ardent servant of the king, a lover of
authority, filled with the instinct of subordination and order, and,
in short, a type of the ideas, religious, political, and social, then
dominant in France.
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