British North America
After the witch panic, the colonies did not rest. They multiplied — towns west of Boston, farms on stolen Praying land, stone forts on the Richelieu, trading posts on lakes no European map had named. Between 1693 and 1750 the English branch learned to live as subjects of a crown, not shareholders in a company; the French branch learned that peace treaties with thirty-nine nations could hold sixteen years and still leave the border smoking. One million English souls against sixty thousand French by mid-century — yet Canada covered more ground than the thirteen colonies, and every river between them was a future battlefield.
The Powers line took root where Nashoba had been. 16 December 1696, Walter Powers III married Rebecca Barrett at Littleton — granddaughter of Chelmsford Barretts, daughter of Joseph and Martha Gould — and kept an inn on the northerly part of town near Brown Hill and Spectacle Pond. When elder brother William died, Walter inherited their father Walter Jr.'s Concord house; by 1704 he was caring for sixty-five-year-old Walter Jr. and sixty-three-year-old Tryall at Nashoba. 22 September 1710, Josiah Powers Sr. was born in a garrison house on Neshoba Hill — seventh and last child of Walter and Rebecca, the name that would reach Vermont and Iowa. William Sterling served Haverhill as tithingman and constable 1693–1696 until a 1697 Abenaki attack on Haverhill sent him disposing mills and lands on Fishing River and rebuilding a shipyard on the Lieutenant River at Lyme, Connecticut. Ephraim Smith married Mary Ramsdell at Topsfield September 1694; their son Ephraim Jr. born Boxford 1698 would marry Hannah Rice at Shrewsbury 1733. Daniel Johnson wed Dorothy Lamb at Framingham December 1697. Nathaniel Farnham born Andover July 1695 to Ralph III and Sarah Sterling; he married Hannah Preston 1719 — Preston, Upham, Green, and Sterling braids tightening.
King William's War exhaled with the Treaty of Ryswick 30 October 1697. William Taylor lost third wife Mary Cheevers in childbirth that July — third wife dead that way — and would marry Sarah Parker Wheeler in 1699. Nova Scotia and New Brunswick peeled from the Province charter the same year Puritans feared royal tolerance. Across the river, Pierre Charles Le Sueur settled a Sioux-Chippewa dispute at Chequamegon Bay 1693, built forts on the Brule-St. Croix portage and an island nine hundred sixty miles above the Illinois junction, returned July 1695 with Ojibwe and Dakota chiefs. He wintered at Fort L'Huillier near Blue Earth, Minnesota, eating bison with twenty men; the ore proved worthless; Sac and Fox warriors killed three and abandoned the fort. Le Sueur sailed for Louisiana on the Pélican, contracted yellow fever at Havana, died 17 July 1704 — namesake of Minnesota rivers and counties. Marie Le Sueur born Québec April 1696; Mathurin Lebeau would marry her at Boucherville 1713.
4 August 1701, Governor Callière and thirteen hundred delegates from thirty-nine First Nations signed the Great Peace at Ville-Marie — sixteen years of trade before the next war; the island settlement took the name Montréal. Guillaume Labelle brought Marie and twenty-three-year-old daughter back to fifty acres on Île Jésus. Jean Migneron married Marie Labelle at Côte-de-Beaupré 1695 where Guillaume worked for the Episcopal Corporation. Charles Carrier married Marie Gesseron at Lauzon June 1699; Louis Neveu born Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue January 1694 to Jean Baptiste Neveu and Catherine Gaudin. Paul Vachon the notary-farmer lost four children, a daughter-in-law, and six grandchildren to smallpox 1702–1703, then died himself 24 June 1703 — Beauport's brick and cattle line thinned. Joseph Bonneau's son Joseph Jr. and two grandchildren died the same epidemic; daughter Marie-Jeanne entered Québec Seminary after her husband died within a year. Ignace Choret the Beauport shoemaker died October 1701 days after twin brother Pierre. By 1700, ten thousand French farmers lived along the lower St. Lawrence; English America held two hundred fifty thousand.