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 [From the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters ] 
 
 /o9 
 
 FIRST FRENCH FOOT-PRINTS BEYOND THE LAKES; 
 
 Oh, WHAT BROUGHT THE FRENCH SO EARLY 
 
 INTO THE NORTHWEST? 
 
 / 
 
 By JAMES D. BUTLEK, LL. D. 
 
 l\ 
 
 Copper mines iu the north, and burial-barrows everywhere, be- 
 speak prehistoric races in Wisconsin. But 'vii> modern Wisconsin 
 there was little agricultural settlement before 1836, which we may 
 accordingly reckon its American birth year. 
 
 Between these two developments, however, there was a third, a 
 sort of midway station between the mound -builder or the Indian 
 and the Anglo-Saxon — namely, the French period. This portion 
 of our annals seems worthy of more attention than it has yet 
 received. 
 
 The French were early on Lake Huron, and even in Wiscon- 
 sin. They were there before the cavaliers in Virginia, the Dutch 
 at Albany, and the Puritans of Boston had pushed inland much 
 more than a day's journey. The Mississippi was mapped before 
 the Ohio. Champlain sailed on Lake Huron in 1615, only seven 
 years after the settlement of Quebec. A monk had arrived there 
 a month or two before Champlain. 
 
 On early maps the contrast between French knowledge and 
 English ignorance is at once plain to the eye. On the map drawn 
 by Champlain, in 1632, we see the Lakes which we call Ontario, 
 Huron, Superior and Michigan, while no one of them, nor indeed 
 any river St Lawrence, is discoverable on Peter Heylin's atlas, 
 the one best known in London twenty years afterward. On the 
 blank, where those inland seas should have figured, we read the 
 words America Mexicana, as if Mexico had extended to Hudson's 
 Bay. 
 
 But while the English on tb Atlantic coast were ignorant of 
 western geography, and before the French in Canada numbered 
 ten thousand, Joliet and Marquette, in 1673, traversed Wisconsin 
 from lake to river. They were long supposed to be among the 
 earliest explorers of Wisconsin. In 1853, however, the Catholic 
 
 iB 
 

 historian, J. G. Shea, pointed out in a volume of Jesuit Eelaiiom 
 the following words, written from Quebec to France, in 1640, by 
 Father Le Jeune : " M. Nicollet, who has penetrated into the 
 most distant regions, has assured me that if he had pushed on 
 three days longer down a great river which issues from the second 
 lake of the Hurons (evidently meaning Lake Michigan), he would 
 have found the sea." 
 
 The word Mississippi, meaning "great water," was ambiguous, 
 and, though really denoting a river, might well be mistaken for a 
 sea, especially by an adventurer who knew the sea to be in that 
 direction, and who believed it by no means remote. 
 
 On the strength of this Jesuit testimony, Parkman remarks : 
 " As early as 1639, Nicollet ascended the Green Bay of Lake 
 Michigan and crossed to the waters of the Mississippi." This was 
 within nine years after the founding of Boston, which claims to be 
 of all northern cities the most ancient. 
 
 But in the lowest deep a lower deep still opens. According to 
 the latest researches of Benjamin Suite, Nicollet was in Wiscon- 
 sin four or five years earlier than 1639. He started west from 
 Canada in 1634, and returned the year following. The best 
 Canadian investigators assure us that he never traveled west 
 again, but, marrying and becoming interpreter at Three Eivers, 
 below Montreal, he remained there or thereabouts thenceforward 
 till his death. All agree that Nicollet visited Wisconsin. If it 
 is proved that he was not here in 1639 or afterward, he must have 
 been here before. There is some reason for holding that Nicollet 
 had penetrated into Wisconsin at a date still earlier than 1634. 
 
 Chicago is not known to have been visited by any European 
 before 1673. In the autumn of that year Marquette, returning 
 from his voyage down the Mississippi, was conducted from the 
 Illinois river by Indians to that spot as affording the shortest port- 
 age to Lake Michigan. The next year that missionary, on a coast- 
 ing tour along the lake, after a voyage of forty-one days from 
 Green Bay, reached Chicago, — which was then uninhabited. As 
 sickness disabled him from going further, bis Indian oarsman 
 built him a hut, and two French traders who already had a post a 
 few leagues inland, ministered to him till the next spring, when 
 
he so far recovered as to proceed to St Joseph. Another Jesuit 
 was also met at Chicago by four score warriors of the Illinois 
 tribe in 1676. 
 
 Three years afterward, in 1679, La Salle found no inhabitants 
 there. On his map made the next year he described it as a port- 
 age of only a thousand paces, yet thought it in no way suited 
 for communication between the lake and Illinois river, as the latter 
 at low water was for forty leagues not navigable. Within two 
 year."? after that, however, in 1681, he preferred this route for his 
 own passage. On the sixteenth of December starting from Chi- 
 cago iRith canoes on sleds, he arrived at the mouth of the Mis- 
 sissippi in one hundred and seven days, — that is <)n the sixth of 
 the following April. 
 
 The Chicago portage was traversed by Tonty, La Salle's most 
 trusted and trust- worthy lieutenant, June, 1683, and by Durantye in 
 1685. La Salle's brother detained there in 1688 by a storm, 
 made maple sugar, and in one hundred and ten days after leaving 
 its harbor, had made his way to Montreal. 
 
 After eleven years more, St. Cosme found a house of the 
 Jesuits there established, at which, as at a sort of post office, 
 Father Gravier obtained in 1700, letters from Paris. From that 
 point La Salle had written a letter to La Barre, Governor of 
 Canada, in 1683, and in the map by Franquelin, royal hydro- 
 grapher at Quebec, dated 1684, eighty houses, — meaning wig- 
 wams, are set down on the site of Chicago. It was then viewed 
 as a northern out post of La Salle's central castle — the Rock of 
 St. Louis, — that marvellous natural fortress which the French 
 explorer found ready to his hand, — " his wish exactly to his 
 heart's desire," now called Starved Rock^ near the confluence of the 
 Big Vermilion with the Illinois river, a few miles west of Ottawa. 
 
 All the way down from this era of La Salle the French as 
 rovers, traders, settlers, soldiers and missionaries in our North- 
 west, are traceable generation after generation. The chain is as 
 unbroken as that of apostolical succession has ever been fancied. 
 
 How shall we account for the phenomenon I have now sketched^ 
 that the French penetrated so far inland so early and so persist- 
 ently ? My answer to this question is implied in the words Fun, 
 Faith, Fur, False Fancies, Finesse and Feudalism. 
 
Nicollet, it is admitted, was west of Lake Michigan before La 
 Salle was born. What brought him thas early into the heart of 
 the cootineDt ? 
 
 My answer is that he came for sport ; yes, just for the fun of 
 the thing — or the romance and exhilaration of adventure. 
 
 Where is the community in which it is not proverbial to this 
 day that worlds of fun lie in camping? What amount of civili- 
 zation can kill off love for a feast of tabernacles, or relish for 
 camp-meetings ? What boy reads Robinson Crusoe without a 
 passion to run away ? Hunting, fishing, boating, discovering new 
 .'lakes and streams, new varieties of woodland and opening, attack- 
 ing or eluding antagonists — whether men or beasts — fire, frost, 
 :flood, famine; "foemen worthy of their steely" for what man 
 that is young, strong and brave, must not these excitements have 
 charms? When will the English give up their Alpine club ? In 
 France no man was more of a sportsman than the King, Louis 
 XIV, and in his era especially, French country gentlemen spent 
 most of their time hunting and fishing. Accordingly for the French 
 those pursuits had dignified associations. The first French party 
 that ever wintered on the shore of Lake Brie thus wrote home, 
 more than two centuries ago : " We were in a terrestrial paradisa 
 Fish and beaver abounded. We saw more than a hundred roe- 
 bucks in a single band, and half as many fawns. Bear's meat 
 was more savory than any pork in France. We dried or buc- 
 caned the meat of the nine largest. The grapes were as large and 
 sweet as any at home. We even made wine. No lack of prunes, 
 .chestnuts and lotus fruit all the autumn. None of us were home- 
 :sick for Montreal." Far west was the happy hunting ground of 
 Indian fable. There too the French found it in fact. 
 
 The late Judge Baird of Grreen Bay used to describe as the hap- 
 piest three weeks of his life, the time when, taking his family and 
 friends, with a crew of Indian oarsmen, he voyaged in a bark 
 canoe from our great lake to our great river, along the track of 
 Joliet and Marquette. Every day the ladies gathered flowers as 
 fair as Proserpine plucked in the field of Enna, while the men 
 were never without success as fishers and hunters. They camped, 
 usually early in the afternoon, wherever inclination was attracted 
 by natural beauty or romantic appearance. After feasting on 
 
venison, fish and wild-fowl, they slept beside plashing waters till 
 roused by morning birds. At every turn in the rivers, new scen- 
 ery opened upon them. Overhanging groves, oak openings, 
 prairies, rapids, Baraboo bluffs, outcrops of rock, ravines, mouths 
 of branches, each was a pleasant surprise. That merry month of 
 May, 1830, recalled to the voyager, in the long lapse from youth 
 to age, no other like itself. How many would give half their 
 lives for such a wild-wood memory ! 
 
 In the light of such an experience, it is easy to see how Nicol- 
 let was drawn on and on into the unknown west. No wonder 
 that, only ten years after Quebec was occupied, we find him, in 
 1618, wintering half-way from that new-born post to Lake Huron, 
 in the Isle of Allumette. He had no longing for the security of 
 dwellers beneath the guns of Quebec. Amid his perils he de- 
 spised them, as Caudle-lectured husbands despise those couples 
 who vegetate together for years without a cross word, but in such 
 a stupid style that they never know they are born. 
 
 Nicollet was a representative of a large element among French 
 Canadians. In 1609, at one of Champlain's first interviews with 
 Indians from the remote interior, a young man of his company 
 had boldly volunteered to join them on their homeward journey, 
 and to winter among them. He remembered Pierre Grambie, a 
 page of Laudonniere in Florida, who being allowed to go freely 
 among the Indians, had become prime favorite with the chief of 
 the island of Edelano, married his daughter, and in his absence 
 reigned in his stead. Champlain's retainer was among the first of 
 a class — up to everything, down to everything — who " followed 
 the Indians in their roamings, grew familiar with their language, 
 allied themselves with their women, became oracles in the camp 
 and leaders on the war-path." 
 
 Their fun was as fast and furious as Tam O'Shanter's : 
 
 " Kings may be great, but they were glorious, 
 O'er all the ills of life victorious." 
 
 For them civilization was no longer either cold or hot — but sa 
 lukewarm that they spewed it out of their mouths. Something 
 of their feeling burned in their best historian, Francis Parkman,. 
 
-who exchanged Boston for the Black Hills before one miner had 
 pushed into their fastnesses. His strongest youthful passion was 
 to share in unaltered Indian life, and his loudest cry was : "Sav- 
 agery, with all thy lacks I love thee still !" 
 
 Preference for Indian life has grown up even in Faw^ee captives, 
 -and, what is most surprising, in females. 
 
 A well-known instance was the daughter of Williams — the 
 Massachusetts minister — who refused to be redeemed from cap- 
 tivity in a Canadian tribe. Some will suggest that having been 
 brought up in a parsonage of 'grim and vinegar aspect, she 
 thought nothing could be more repulsive than a Puritan strait- 
 jacket. But many similar instances occurred during Bouquet's 
 expedition west of the Ohio, which was undertaken in order to 
 rescue whites from Indian bondage. Several women, and those 
 •not of ministerial families at all, when compelled to return to 
 white settlements, soon made their escape to the woods, prefer- 
 ring wigwams to their native homes. No thrice-driven bed of 
 down was so soft to them as a couch which, as their phrase was, 
 had never been made up since the creation. Many captive meriy 
 when given up to Bouquet, and bound fast to prevent their es- 
 cape, sat sullen and scowling that they were forced back into 
 society. 
 
 In civilized society there was no sweet savor of romance for 
 
 "A wild and wanton herd, 
 Or race of youthful and unhandled colts." 
 
 No wonder, then, adventurers into the great west, who would 
 rather be scalped at Mackinaw than live in Montreal, became a 
 permanent class. No wonder when La Salle, first of white men, 
 had burst into the heart of Illinois, six of his soldiers deserted, 
 and that as many more of his little band had ran away in the far 
 north. One of these last absconders was encountered by Henne- 
 pin in the wilds of Minnesota. Another in that region was a run- 
 away from Hennepin himself. Nothing less than throwing them- 
 selves overboard from all social restraints could give scope for 
 that superabundant vitality which philosophers hold is pre- 
 eminently a French characteristic. ' 
 
The roving class was all the larger, because settled colonists 
 were vassals, both ia soul and body. In Canada, individuals 
 existed for the government, not the government for individuals. 
 
 Cooped up in the dull exile of petty forts, their prayer was 
 that of the country mouse when entrapped in a city mansion — 
 
 " O give me but a hollow tree, 
 A crust of bread aad liberty." 
 
 La Hontan — a young ofl&cer fresh from France — thus wrote 
 home from Montreal : " A part of the winter I was hunting with 
 the Algonquins, the rest of it I spent here very disagreeably. 
 One can neither go on a pleasure party, nor play cards, nor visit 
 the ladies, without the cure preaching about it; and masqueraders 
 he excommunicates." 
 
 Other writers add that no dances were allowed in which both 
 sexes took part. 
 
 Allowing dances to one sex only was about as satisfactory to 
 gay and festive youth as a father confessor's permitting a fair 
 penitent to rouge onl}'' one side of her face ; or letting out an 
 American lady to walk the Parisian boulevards only on condi- 
 tion that she never goes alone, never wears colors, and never looks 
 into a shop window. Anti-dancing laws — it is needless to add, — 
 were doubly vexatious to a Frenchman, since his feet when he's 
 sleeping seem dreaming a dance. 
 
 Fathers who neglected to marry sons till they were twenty, or 
 daughters till they were sixteen, were fined. Bachelors were 
 barred out from the Indian trade, and even branded with marks 
 of infamy. 
 
 In Quebec chronicles for 1671 we read that Paul Dupuy, having 
 said that when the English cut off the head of Charles I. they did 
 a good thing, the council declared him guilty of words tending to 
 sedition, and condemned him to be led in his shirt, with a rope 
 about his neck and a torch in his hand, from prison to the castle, 
 there to ask pardon of the king ; to be branded on the cheek, set 
 in stocks, laid in irons, etc. 
 
 At the same period Louis Gaboury. charged with eating meat 
 in Lent, was sentenced to be tied tnree hours to a stake, and then 
 
8 
 
 on his knees to ask pardon at the door of the chapel. Swearers, 
 for the sixth offense, had the upper lip cat with a hot iron, and if 
 thej still uttered oaths, had the tongue cut out altogether Two 
 men were shot at Quebec for selling brandy to Indians. 
 
 Not a few French immigrants had been tramps in the old world, 
 and transportation to the new world gave them no new nature. 
 The Bohemian element was in them as an instinct, and was as 
 sure to cotne out by natural selection as ducklings hatched by a 
 hen are to take to water. The Saint Lawrence flowed in one di- 
 rection ; the sinful loafers steered in quite another. 
 
 Other Canadians had been convicts and so would naturally re- 
 gard all walls as stifling imprisonment. They were not a pious 
 race, but one prayer they never forgot, namely: ''From red-tape 
 and ritualism, good Lord, deliver us !" 
 
 An order of Indian Knights sprung up — young men who 
 thought nothing so fine as to go tricked out like Indians, and 
 nothing so attractive as Indian life ; doing nothing, caring for 
 nothing, following every inclination, and getting out of the way 
 of all correction. This club may have been a natural reaction 
 from a society of matrons and maidens established to promote 
 gossip pure and simple. Meetings were held every Thursday at 
 which each member was bound by a gospel oath to confess — not 
 his own sins, but other people's — that is. all she knew, alike good 
 and bad, regarding her acquaintance. 
 
 There i.-^ a physical reason why those who have learned to live 
 in the open air cannot live in houses. Sleeping under roofs they 
 exchange oxygen for miasma. 
 
 The Circassian mountain chief, S hamyl, when a Russian pris- 
 oner, was luxuriously housed, but at the end of a week told his 
 keepers he must commit suicide unless they would allow him to 
 lodge above the roof instead of under it. So, too, our Texan hero, 
 Sam Houston, when, after open air campaigns, he entered the 
 hall of congress, compared himself to a mouse under an air 
 pump. 
 
 "Yes, there is sweetness in the prairie air, 
 And life that bloated ease can never hope to share." 
 
During several years of frontier life, I have constantly fallen in 
 witli frontier men, who hover in the wilderness beyond the ut- 
 most verge of settlement. Villages, or at least ranchmen, follow 
 them but only, as Paddy prays the blessing of the Lord may fol- 
 low his enemies all the days of their lives — that is, so as never to 
 overtake them at all. Change of base and new departures are as 
 familiar to them as to any politician. The only grain they ever 
 sow is wild oats. 
 
 The French found more fun in woodcraft than the English 
 could. The one could thrive where the other would starve. It 
 is an old saying that a French cook will make more out of the 
 shadow of a chicken than an English one can of its substance. 
 When a French army, near Salamanca, was cut off from supplies 
 for a week by Wellington, he thought it a miracle that they did 
 not surrender. The truth was that they had subsisted all the 
 while on acorns. For more than a week Nicollet's only food was 
 bark, seasoned with bits of the moss which the Canadians named 
 rochtrlpe. But he was not starved otit. The Roman empire 
 spread widely east and west, but never very far north. The fact 
 is strange. To account for it, some say that Roman noses were 
 too long, and so were nipppd off by Jack Frost. The French are 
 a snub-nosed race and so could better brave blizzards. 
 
 There is a strange elation when we discover with how many so- 
 called necessaries we (an dispense, and while having nothing, yet 
 possess all things which we absolutely need. Detecting new 
 capabilities, whether of daring doing or enduring, we seem to 
 become new beings and of a higher order. We discover new 
 Americas within ourselves. 
 
 According to the Greek sage, he is nearest the Gods who has 
 fewest wants. In proportion, then, as we become self-sufficing, 
 we approximate to the Gods. Not without exultation did the 
 adventurer learn to make all things of bark — not only baskets, 
 dishes, boats and beds, but houses and food. Every tree^ when 
 he perceived its bark to be rougher and thicker on the north side, — 
 became for him a compass-plant. In his whole manner of life 
 " the forester gained," says Parkman, " a self-sustaining energy, 
 as well as powers of action and perception before unthought of, — 
 
10 
 
 a subtlety of sense more akin to the instinct of brutes than to hu- 
 man reason. He could approach like a fox, attack like a lion, 
 vanish like a bird." 
 
 The Homeric and earliest ideal of an adventurer, single-handed, 
 into unknown regions, was Ulysses. It is true he goes grumbling 
 all through the Odyssey, — but for all that he is happier to the 
 very core than he could be with Circe or Calypso in any castle of 
 Indolence. He thrives under evil, and at every new stage of his 
 wanderings has new greatness thrust upon him. More than this : 
 According to Dante, who met him in the Inferno, he soon tired 
 of the Ithacan home he had sought so earnestly, and quitted it 
 for enterprises more distant and perilous than ever. 
 
 Many of the early French pushed westward in pilgrimages 
 longer and more varied than that of the most wide-wandering 
 Greek. Their motto was : 
 
 " No pent-up citadel contracts our powers. 
 But the whole boundless continent is ours." 
 
 They pushed into the heart of the continent faster and farther, 
 thanks to matchless highways, — I mean rivers and lakes, — styled 
 by their wisest contemporary, Pascal, " roads which march and 
 carry us whithersoever we wish to go." Thanks also to bark ca- 
 noes, they flew as on the wings of eagles into the recesses of the 
 west. When wishing to traverse Indian routes they had sense 
 enough to avail themselves of Indian hoats^ doing in Rome as Ro- 
 mans do. For nine dollars worth of goods the voyageurs bought 
 a bark twenty feet by two that would last six years. It would 
 carry four men and more than their weight in baggage, yet was 
 not too heavy for one man to carry across the portage between 
 river and river, or round rapids which no boat could climb. Hen- 
 nepin's bark weighed only fifty pounds. At night or in rains it 
 was a better shelter than a tent. Thus the boatman was as inde- 
 pendent as a soldier would be who could carry on his shoulders 
 not only his horse and baggage, but also his barracks. Previous 
 to the year 1673, no boat of wood had ever ascended above Mon- 
 treal. The bark canoe of Judge Baird, of which I have spoken, 
 was on a larger scale — about thirty feet long and five broad. It 
 <5arried thirteen people and all their needments with ease. 
 
11 
 
 Year after year La Salle risked life and lost fortune laboring 
 to build a forty ton vessel for descending the Mississippi. After 
 heart-breaking failures he trusted himself to a native canoe, and 
 thanks to this new departure, easily gained the goal of his ambi- 
 tion. Had he found the great river hedged up by Niagaras — as 
 was reported by natives — his progress would not have been 
 stopped. He could have carried his boat till his boat could carry 
 him. 
 
 A man who riding for the first time in a cab and asked where 
 he was going answered, " To Glory ! " spoke out the exultation 
 which thrilled every French adventurer with his face set toward 
 the western unknown, his hands skilled in paddling a bark canoe 
 and himself encumbered with no more baggage than the ship- 
 wrecked rascal who said he had lost everything except his 
 character. 
 
 Throughout the orient the name of doctor is a sesame open. 
 When Moslems overhear a traveler addressed as doctor they unbar 
 for him even their harems, no matter how often he tells them that 
 it is only in law or divinity or farriery, that he is a doctor. 
 
 Among savages everywhere every civilized man passes in spite 
 of himself for a physician. Relying on this reputation the early 
 French ventured into the infinite west. Nor was their quackery 
 less successful than that of an English monarch touching for the 
 king's evil when 
 
 " Strangely visited people 
 All swollen and ulcerous, pitiful to the eye, 
 The mere despair of surgery, he cures." 
 
 "When Hennepin was a captive among the Sioux, whose blood 
 had belore been drawn only by the sucking mouths of medicine 
 men, he bled their asthmatics, he treated other patients with a 
 confection of hyacinth (a sort of squills) and desperate cases with 
 orvietum, a theriac compounded of three score and four drugs. 
 The more ingiedieni:^ the more certain, as men thought, the cure, 
 as the more bullets in a volley the more surely some of them will 
 hit. A decade earlier, Perrot having dosed a surfeited glutton 
 with the same theriac, had succeeded as well as the druggist, who, 
 when vox populi was prescribed, gave nux vomica. The next 
 
12 
 
 night Perrot was waked bj chiefs who came for more theriac. 
 His supply was so small that he only allowed them to hold their 
 noses over the vial. The odor, however, proved a panacea. They 
 beat their breasts and declared that it had made them immortal. 
 For this sanitary smell they insisted on paying Perrot ten beaver- 
 skins. They believed, what no doctor has been able to beat into 
 Christian patients, that no medicine could do any good if it was 
 not paid for. 
 
 These patients were Miamis. Tlie Sauks, on the other hand, 
 thought no medicine efficacious unless it was bestowed without 
 money and without price. One of their tribe who had been badly 
 scalded, declared himself cured the moment he was presented 
 with a gratuitous plug of tobacco. 
 
 Relish for the romantic was a considerable element even in mis- 
 sionary zeal. Thus Hennepin admits that a passion for travel and 
 a burning desire to visit strange lands had no small part in his 
 own inclination for missions. 
 
 Again, many early bush-rangers belonged to that class who 
 would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven. La Salle fell in 
 with one tribe in mourning for wthe death of a chief, and he said : 
 "Dry your tears ! I will raise him from the dead. Whatever he 
 was to wife, children or tribe, that I will be, feeding them and 
 fighting for them. He is dead no longer." Thereupon he was 
 hailed as chief. 
 
 Still others dashed among distant cannibals, in hopes, like Brig- 
 ham Young among Mormons, to become Gods on earth. It paid 
 for all privations to hear cringing Calibans cry out : •' We pray 
 thee be our God ! We'll fish for thee ; we'll kiss thy foot." 
 
 Saint Castine, who had nothing saintly but the name, roaming 
 with Indians not far from the seaport in Maine which keeps ^his 
 name in memory, gained such a supremacy that his aboriginal as- 
 sociates deemed him the prince of the power of the air. 
 
 In 1683, Perrot having built a fort near the outlet of Lake 
 Pepin, paid a visit to the Sioux up the great river. He was 
 placed by them on their car of state, which was a buffalo robe. 
 He was thus lifted on high by a score of warriors, not like Sancho 
 Panza tossed in a blanket, but borne as reverentially as the Pope 
 
13 
 
 on hig sedia gestqtoria, or portable throne, into the house of council. 
 There, holding a bowl of brandy which the Indians thought to 
 be water, he set it on fire. He thus made them believe that he 
 oould at will burn up their lakes and rivers. A score of years 
 before, — certainly as early as 1665, — he had become a potentate 
 among Pottawatomies near Green Bay. Perrot was worshipped 
 with clouds of incense from a hundred calumets, because he 
 brought iron, — especially in the shape of guns and tomahawks. 
 The further west he went the more unheard of his iron and pow- 
 der, and the more they proved him a God. 
 
 One mode of reverence was to break off branches of trees and 
 sweep the path his feet were about to tread. But the divine honors 
 paid to Perrot were not always delightful. The lowas, whom he 
 pronounces the greatest weepers in the world, wept most effusively 
 at his coming. Their welcome, he tells us, was bathing his face 
 with their tears — "the effusions of their eyes, and alas! of their 
 mouths and noses too ! " 
 
 Other French adventurers threw up rockets, and thus record the 
 sensation : " When the Indians saw the fireworks in the air and 
 the stars fall from heaven, the women and children began to fly, 
 and the most courageous of the men to cry for mercy and implore 
 us very earnestly to stop the play of that wonderful medicine. 
 Had there been any accidental explosion of chemicals so that 
 one of the braves was blown up, he would have deemed it all a 
 part of the show, and as soon as he caught breath would have 
 exclaimed : ' What next ? What in the world will these magi- 
 cians do next?' " 
 
 The simplest French conveniences were sublime in aboriginal 
 eyes. Tbe Mascoutins, when Perrot appeared among them, knew 
 no mode of producing fire except by rubbing two sticks together. 
 Such friction was ineffectual whenever the sticks were iat all wet, 
 and they were often too damp to kindle — an Irishman would 
 say — till one had made a fire and dried them. Naturally, Per- 
 rot's tinder-box was venerated as an angel from heaven. No 
 wonder that a hundred dozen of these Promethean fire-bringers 
 are set. down in the outfit of La Salle. One of an antique pat- 
 tern, lately discovered in an Illinois cave, was shown me in 
 
14 
 
 Ottawa. Possibly it is one of the twelve hundred imported by 
 La Salle. Had lucifera been known to the French, starting 
 camp-fires in a twinkling, they must have converted every Indian 
 into a fire- worshipper and conquered the continent. 
 
 The Indians wished that their children should grow up bald, 
 aside from scalp locks. Their style of hair-catting had been to 
 burn childish scalps with red hot stones. Hennepin's razor, 
 though none of the keenest, was clearly a better depilatory, and 
 so was hailed as a miracle of mercy. 
 
 Nicollet met in council four thousand Wisconsin warriors, who 
 feasted on six score of beaver. He appeared before them in a 
 many-colored robe of state, adorned with flowers and birds. 
 Approaching with a pistol in each hand, he fired both at once. 
 The natives hence named him "thunder-bearer." Such a spec- 
 tacular display was in keeping with the policy which marked the 
 old French regime in two worlds, and which for centuries proved 
 equally sovereign in both. The apotheosis of Nicollet would 
 have been complete if he could have carried a Colt revolver — 
 the thunderbolt of Jove in the thimble of Minerva, omnipotent 
 as ever, yet so small that Cupid would steal it, as no longer too 
 heavy for him to lift or too hot for him to handle. 
 
 Of all Europeans the French only gained the affections of 
 natives. From the beginning they fraternized with them as the 
 British never could. 
 
 They never sold Indian captives for slaves on southern planta- 
 tions as the English did. Through hatred of New Englanders 
 fifty families of Indians there flying west became retainers of La 
 Salle, and some of them were his most trusty oarsmen and braves 
 in discovering the Mississippi. Four score years, said La Salle, 
 have we had Indian allies. Never has one of them proved false 
 to France. We can safely trust them with arms. From first to 
 last the Illinois tribes were faithful to the French. When the 
 French, after their loss of Illinois, went west of the Mississippi 
 in 1763, the Indians followed them. Each tribe loved the French 
 with an affection so ardent as to be jealous, and strove to keep 
 them all to itself, resenting their dealing with any other tribe as a 
 sort of adulterous infidelity. For a score of years Nicholas 
 
15 
 
 Perrot won golden opinions among the Outagamies. After his de- 
 parture they declared in council with the governor of Canada, 
 that their fathers having gone they had no more any breath, or 
 soul. 
 
 The French captivated the Indians and the Indians captivated 
 them. For them, then, there was a fullness of fun — yes paradise 
 where John Bull would have felt himself in such a purgatory that 
 he could not fare worse by going farther. 
 
 One Englishman who had been forced to make trial of savage 
 life, when asked how he liked it, answered : " The more I see In- 
 dians, the better I love dogs." But amid the same horrors a 
 Frenchman enjoyed himself so well that he declares he was ready 
 to burn his cook books ! What could Frenchman do more ? 
 
 In no long time most northwestern tribes were tinctured with 
 French blood. Perrot treats of French among fugitive Sauteurs 
 on the south shore of Lake Superior as early as 1661. The 
 first permanent settler in Wisconsin, Charles Langlade, was 
 a French half-breed. So was was the first squatter at Madison — 
 (long before the Peck family), St. Cyr, the only saint we could 
 ever boast. In 1816, when the United States forces took posses- 
 sion of Wisconsin, the natives being assembled for treaties, said: 
 " Pray do not disturb our French brothers. 
 
 Adventurers among western aborigines in time became far- 
 traders or interpreters and factors for such traders, as well as mis- 
 sionaries or other officials both military and civil. But their 
 Jirst impulse to plunge into the depth of the wilderness, and to 
 abide there, was because they liked it. To their imaginations 
 forest-life was as charming as the grand tour of Europe a genera- 
 tion ago to ours, or as is girdling the terraqueous globe at the 
 present day, or as roughing it on the Yellowstone to G-eneral 
 Sherman, or on the great divide to Lord Dufferin, or rounding 
 the world on horseback to Sir Greorge Simpson, or Beltrami's sol- 
 itary scamper to the sources of the Mississippi, or the three years 
 cruise of the Challenger to Lord Campbell, whose Log Letters 
 skimming off the cream of all climes and finding no drop sour, 
 cry out in every line, " what Fun ! " It was much more than 
 all this, and can only be compared to the wild dedication of him- 
 
16 
 
 self to unpathed waters, undreamed shores and sands and miser- 
 ies enough by Stanley, in quest of Livingston, or the sources of 
 the Nile and Congo. 
 
 Seekers of pleasure in the pathless woods followed Nicollet 
 into Wisconsin, as well as elsewhere in the Mississippi Valley. 
 Their race endured, and it still endures. Some survivals of it 
 were met with in the first decade of our century far up the Mis- 
 souri, by Lewis and Clark, and by Pike at the sources of the 
 Mississippi. Within the last ten years, the British Major Batler, 
 with whom I traveled down the Eed River of the North in 1872, 
 encountered them on his pilgrimages throughout the great lone 
 land and the wild north land to the shores of the Pacific. 
 
 Enamoured of wild sports, the French more than two centuries 
 ago rushed from Lower Canada into the borders of the Upper 
 Lakes. They came the sooner thanks to unrivaled facilities for 
 boating, hunting and fishing, — to an appetite for open air which 
 grows by what it feeds on, — to their feeling at home in wigwams, 
 to their passion to break loose from law martial and monkish, and 
 to enjoy unbounded license, as well as to the pre eminence which 
 knowledge gave them among barbarians. To the love of fun, 
 then, and the full feast of it fresh as the woods and waters that 
 inspired it, — with which he could fill himself in western wilds, 
 we in Wisconsin owe the explorations of Nicollet and others of 
 like temper, and so our most ancient historic land marks. One 
 of the first French foundations here was laid in fun. Fun then 
 was /imdamental. 
 
 But if fun led the way to exploring the far West, faith also 
 was there, and not least in Wisconsin, a French foundation. 
 
 Faith followed hard after fun, and sometimes outstripped it. 
 The friar, Le Caron, was on Lake Huron before Nicollet had pene- 
 trated half way there. Nicollet lingered in the Isle of Allumette, 
 several hundred miles short of Lake Huron, till 1620. But, 
 five years earlier, mass had been already said on that lake by the 
 Franciscan with sandaled feet and girt with his knotted cord. 
 The monk's passage had been paid by the governor, but he worked 
 his own passage and that bare- footed, since shoes would injure the 
 bark canoe. He thus wrote to his superior : " It would be hard 
 
17 
 
 to tell you how tired I was with paddling all day among the In- 
 dians, wading the rapids a hundred times and more, through mud 
 and over sharp stones that cut my feet, carrying the canoe and 
 luggage through the woods to avoid cataracts, and half starved 
 the while, for we had nothing to eat but porridge, of water and 
 pounded maize, of which they gave me a very small allowance." 
 Through the winter of 1615 in a hermitage a thousand miles west 
 of Quebec which was itself an ultima Thule, — this friar was mak- 
 ing catechisms or struggling with the difficulties of the Huron 
 tongue, or expounding the faith in broken Indian, and by way of 
 object lesson showing "four great likenesses of the Madonna sus- 
 pended on a cord." 
 
 As early as 1614, when the French first ascended the Ottawa, 
 they planted crosses of white cedar on its shores and islands. In 
 1625 the Jesuit Brebeuf began a three years' sojourn on Huron 
 waters. Onward from 1631 a permanent mission was maintained 
 there for fifteen years until the Hurons were scattered to the four 
 winds. Missionaries followed them in their dispersion. In sum- 
 mer plying the paddle all day or toiling through pathless thickets, 
 bending under a canoe or portable chapel heavy as a peddler's 
 pack, veritable colporters, while famine, snow storms, cold, treach- 
 erous ice of the lake, smoke and filth were the luxuries of their 
 winter wanderings, "We underrate the arduousness of mission 
 journeys until we consider how greatly storms, cold and famine 
 retarded them. Allouer's voyage from Mackinaw to Green Bay 
 consumed thirty-one days. Marquette was ten days more on his 
 passage from Green Bay to Chicago. 
 
 Yet, in 1612, Madame de la Peltrie, — a tender and delicate 
 woman, — reared in Parisian refinements, was seized at Quebec 
 with a longing to visit the Hurons, and to preach in person at that 
 most arduous station. In 1611, the year before one house was 
 built in Montreal, Fathers Jogues and Raymbault were distribut- 
 ing rosaries at tBe mouth of Lake Superior. Previous to 1640 
 they had become acquainted with Wisconsin Winnebagoes. The 
 earliest Iroquois baptism was in 1669, but thirty years before, 
 scores of Hurons had been baptized hundreds of leagues further 
 west. 
 
 2b 
 
18 
 
 The first clear trace of a priest in Wisconsin was in 1660. In 
 that year Father Menard, paddling along the south shore of Lake 
 Superior for many a weary week, near its western extremity, 
 reached La Pointe — one of the most northern peninsulas in the 
 region which is now Wisconsin. 
 
 "He evangelized the natives who flocked together there." 
 Such are the words of the old chronicler. The meaning is, not 
 that the Jesuit dispensed the whole gospel to the Indians, nor yet 
 all that he could give, but only so much of it, such a homoeo- 
 pathic dose — as they would receive. 
 
 Early travelers into the Orient when they there met certain 
 albinos thought them the posterity of blacks converted by St. 
 Thomas and whitened by baptism. It seemed doubtful, how- 
 ever, whether such a skin-bleaching was a real improvement. In 
 like manner, may it be questioned whether the western mission- 
 aries who had chosen St. Thomas for their patron were any more 
 successful than he. 
 
 However we may speculate on this matter, we must feel that 
 Menard's motives were the best. Sometimes he had no altar but 
 his paddles supported by croiched sticks and covered with his 
 sail. Moreover, he dared not celebrate mass in the presence of 
 those he had there baptized, because it was beyond his power to 
 convince them that that sacrament was not a juggling trick to se- 
 cure for the priest slaves in the life beyond life. Father Allouez 
 was less scrupulous. He boasts as of some great thing that he 
 had taught one Wisconsin tribe to make the sign of the cross 
 and to daub its figure on their shields. When one of these con- 
 verts had married three sisters at once and was censured for it by 
 La Salle, his defense was : " I was made a Christian against my 
 will by Father Allouez." In 1672 this father was welcomed by 
 Mascoutins whose head-center seems to have been not far from 
 Portage City. 
 
 With Father Menard, in 1660, were three lay-iielpers, whom he 
 next year dispatched southward into Wisconsin to certain Hurons 
 who had sought an asylum at the mouth of Green Bay. Having 
 labored nine years for those Hurons in their old home, he soon 
 followed his fugitive converts, but perished in the wilderness of the 
 
19 
 
 Black river. It is believed that he was murdered by the Sioux, 
 for among them his breviary and robe were discovered years 
 afterward. That stream, now called Bois BruU^ forms the bound- 
 ary between Wisconsin and Michigan, and it is not known on 
 which side of it Menard lost his life. Both states may, therefore, 
 with equal plausibility, glory in him as their own protomartyr. 
 Wading through the sodden snow, under the bare and dripping 
 forests, drenched with rains, braving every variety of unknown 
 horror, faint, yet pursuing to the last, well may we, people of both 
 states, count him worthy of double honor! Doubtless his last re- 
 gret was that he had not a whole life to lay down for the salvation 
 of each state. 
 
 Four years after, in 1665, Father AUouez succeeded Menard at 
 La Pointe, and carried on his work. Very likely, as in the early 
 days of Montreal, his only altar lamp was a vial full of fire flies. 
 When he returned to Quebec for reenforcements, he remained 
 there only two nights before starting back again with volunteer 
 co-workers. La Pointe was then a four months' voyage from 
 Quebec. He was saying mass at Grreen Bay to six hundred In- 
 dians and eight French traders in 1669, and the next year exhib- 
 ited a picture of the last judgment, at Neenah, on Lake Winne- 
 bago. A silver monstrance, the case in which the sacramental 
 wafer is held up for veneration, presented to the chapel of Allouez 
 by the French governor, Nicolas Perrot, and bearing the date of 
 1686, was dug up, in 1802, at De Pere near the head of Green 
 Bay, and is now treasured in the ambry of the cathedral there. 
 In 1671, a chart (34x38 centimeterd) was drawn, entitled iya/ctf 
 Tracy or Superior, with the dependencies of the Mission of the 
 Holy Spirit [that is La Pointe']. It is still extant in Parisian ar- 
 chives, at the depot of marine charts. Two years later in the 
 Jesuit relation of 1673, a map of their missions on the Lake of 
 the Illinois [that is Michigan] was published. 
 
 In the same year the first white men, one of them a missionary, 
 of whose journey a contemporary record remains, crossedjWis- 
 consin from east to west. These adventurers were Joliet and 
 Marquette — a noble brace of brothers. Equals in enthusiasm, 
 the faith of Marquette, the Jesuit, rivaled the rage for discovery 
 
20 
 
 in Joliet, the officer. These explorers were cultivated men, and 
 experienced observers. For five years Marquette had been a 
 western pioneer, partly in Wisconsin, and Joliet, while voyaging 
 on Lake Superior some time before, had also probably trod Wis- 
 consin soil. From Indian reports they had drawn a map of 
 the region they purposed to penetrate, and kept it at hand as they 
 rowed up Fox river, threaded the marshy maze at the grand 
 divide and carrying place ^ — ■ now Portage City — and among herds 
 of elk and deer, floated down the Wisconsin to the great river. 
 Reaching this grand goal on the seventeenth of June, they glided 
 with the current of the Mississippi for a month, and probably to 
 the latitude of Memphis, which, according to their belief, was no 
 more than two degrees north of the Mexican Gulf. 
 
 On the return voyage Joliet wintered at Green Bay, where he 
 had found many good Christians the spring before. The next 
 season, when he was about to land at Montreal, his boat capsized 
 and he was only rescued himself after being four hours in the 
 water. His journal was lost — a sad loss for Wisconsin, which 
 was thus bereaved of the wayside notes of the earliest traveler 
 throughout its whole breadth — a record which who would will- 
 ingly let drown ? 
 
 After all who knows but Joliet's loss may have turned out for 
 our gain? and will still? Who shall count the investigators 
 that, mourning for Joliet's misfortune, have thus, or shall, become 
 doubly zealous to gather up and commit to the custody of our 
 Historical Society — or of the art preservative of all arts — 
 every fragment of our annals, letting nothing — no fraction — be 
 lost? 
 
 Throughout the last third of the seventeenth century and in 
 all generations since, priests of the Catholic faith may be traced 
 in or near Wisconsin. There Allouez labored for a quarter of a 
 century onward from 1665. In 1677 Frontenac speaks of the 
 Green Bay mission as no new thing. All tribes near that Bay 
 are mentioned in the missionary report for 1658. In 1680 and 
 for seven years thereafter, Enjalran was stationed there. He had 
 been preceded there by Fathers Andre and Albanel, and within a 
 decade was followed by Nouvel, and three others whose names 
 
21 
 
 are preserved. As early as 1671 their headquarters were Macki- 
 naw, but they were constantly making excursions and establishing 
 out-stations in the parts beyond. In 1721 Father Chardon had 
 already labored among the Sacs about Green Bay till he had 
 given them up as beyond hope, and was studying Winnebago in 
 order to preach to the tribe of that name. Other missionaries are 
 mentioned at later periods, and the town of De Pere, meaning 
 Fathers^ is said to derive its name from the fact that two Jesuits 
 suffered martyrdom there in 1765. In the interior of Wisconsin 
 there were also stations among the Kickapoos and Menomonies. 
 Downward from the expedition of Joliet and Marquette, Wis- 
 consin was the favorite thoroughfare of missionaries as well as 
 others bound for the southwest. Such way-farers shunned the 
 east shore of Lake Michigan as infested by the Iroquois. If tbey 
 could buy permission of the Foxes they glided down the Wis- 
 consin river as the shortest and easiest route. Those who failed 
 to win Indian favor paddled along the Wisconsin shore of Lake 
 Michigan. 
 
 It is a natural question, " What brought the Catholic fathers to 
 the farthest west at so early a day, while Protestant missionaries, 
 though abroad in New England before one European dwelt in 
 Montreal, had not penetrated half-way to the Hudson river?" 
 
 It might have been predicted from the out-set by a philosoph- 
 ical historian, that French missionaries would out-do all others 
 among our aborigines. They had already showed themselves 
 pre-eminent elsewhere. The French originated the crusades, and 
 from first to last they were the chief crusaders. It was natural 
 for them, changing tactics with the times, to be as zealous against 
 the infidels of the Occident as they had approved themselves 
 against those of the orient, and as persistent with litany and mass 
 as they had been with lance and mace. The presence and per- 
 sistence of Jesuits on our upper lakes and beyond them, more 
 than two centuries ago, is accounted for by one single word — 
 yes, by one syllable, namely Faith — their peculiar faith. 
 
 The views I now present of Jesuit missions are of course those 
 of a non-Catholic. They must be or they could not be my own, 
 and no one would wish me either to dissimulate my own opinions 
 
22 
 
 or to simulate those of others. My information, however, all 
 comes from Catholic witnesses. No others existed then and there. 
 
 My account of the French missionaries must be the more one- 
 sided because my present purpose will not let me expatiate upon 
 their tact patience and heroic endurance amid all vexations, cul- 
 minating in martyrdom. In temptations which we cannot bear 
 to read of, their virtues found a lit emblem in that light from 
 heaven which they came to bring, — sunbeams which, descending 
 to the lowest depths of earth, and however reflected and refracted 
 in abodes of pollution, remain unsullied and continue sunbeams 
 still. 
 
 The Jesuits are the Pope's standing army (Loyola's own name 
 for them was a battalion), and the title of their head is general. 
 At the beck of superiors subordinates plunged into the vast un- 
 known of our continent with the unquestioning alacrity of regular 
 
 troops. 
 
 Not theirs to question why, 
 Not theirs to make reply; 
 Theirs but to do, or die. 
 
 They knew no west or east, no north or south. 
 
 But in addition to his vow of obedience, each missionary was 
 impelled by a faith which inspired him with tenfold more zeal 
 and intrepidity. That faith was this : that he bestowed a clear 
 title to heaven on all whom he baptized, unless they lived to com- 
 mit mortal sins afterward. Hence when one had sprinkled a 
 couple of dying children he writes in his diary : " Two little 
 Indians changed to-day into two angels, by one drop of water. 
 O, my rapture as I saw them expire two hours after baptism." 
 No matter though the sprinkling was effected by pious fraud, 
 when Jesuits unable otherwise to approach sick infants, pretended 
 to administer a medicine of sweetened water, but spilled some 
 drops of it on their heated brows, while whispering sacramental 
 words with motionless lips. The little ones were sent to paradise 
 by these waters none the less surely because secretly. Seeing 
 that death quickly followed baptism, Indians soon inferred that it 
 was occasioned by those priestly drops. They were hence prone 
 to scalp a Father if they detected him administering the sacred 
 rite. 
 
23 
 
 We hear with a shock of burning prisoners alive. Bat the 
 fathers had little to saj against the custom. On the other hand, 
 such an execution seemed to them a means of conversion akin to 
 a Spanish at^fo (^«/e, ai^d equally efficacious. One of the mission- 
 aries wrote home as follows.: 
 
 " An Iroquois was to be burned some way off. What consolation 
 is it to set forth in the hottest summer to deliver this victim from 
 hell. The father approaches, and instructs him even in the midst 
 of his torments. Forthwith the faith finds a place in his heart. 
 He adores as the author of his life Him whose name he had 
 never heard till the hour of his own death. He receives baptism, 
 and in his place of torture cries: "I am about to die but I go to 
 dwell in heaven." How history repeats itself ! In 1877 the last 
 words of Henry Norfolk on the scaffold in Annapolis were : " I 
 am here to hang for the murder of my wife, but I thank God I 
 am going to glory !" 
 
 Again, the record is : On the day of the visitation of the Holy 
 Yirgin, the chief Aontarisati was taken prisoner by our Indians, 
 instructed by our fathers, baptized, burnt, and ascended to heaven, 
 all on the same day. I doubt not that he thanked the Virgin for 
 his misfortune and the blessing that followed, Happy thought! 
 
 Another missionai-y writes : " We have very rarely indeed seen 
 the burning of an Iroquois without feeling sure that he was on 
 the path to Paradise, and we never knew one of them to be on 
 that path without seeing him burnt." Happy thought. 
 
 The conclusion of the whole matter then is : " The only way to 
 save Indians is to burn them," or as they now say in Texas: 
 " Scalp them first, and then preach to them." 
 
 Powerful motives then hurried the Jesuits wherever an infant 
 was death-struck, or a captive in torture. 
 
 Various secular influences speeded the missionaries on their 
 western way. 
 
 i 
 
 First, the spirit of religion was reinforced by that passion for ro- 
 mantic adventure which we have just been surveying. Then, 
 according to Father Biard, the French king, the most dissolute of 
 men, initiated the Jesuit project. Preachers who were over- 
 zealous he liked to ship off, and so transfer their soul-stinging ser- 
 
24: 
 
 mons to the other aide of the Atlantic. He thus parried thrusts 
 which might have hit his conscience more eflfectuallj, and yet 
 more covertly, than the German duke can whose cathedral pew is 
 hedged about with sliding windows, so that, when he pleases, he 
 can shut out unpalatable doctrines. Again, the French mon- 
 arch was as liberal in land-grants to Canadian priests as our con- 
 gress has been to railroads. 
 
 Many of his courtiers too, whose idea of Lent was a month 
 when they hired their servants to fast for them, paid roundly for 
 sending so much gospel to the heathen as to leave very little of 
 it for themselves. Others too who would not give a sou of their 
 own money importuned their neighbors till they forced them to 
 contribute, as the fox while sparing his own fur tore skin off the 
 bear's back to make a plaster for the sick lion. Such beggary 
 they thought was a means of grace. 
 
 While in lower Canada the Jesuits were to some extent subject 
 to the secular arm, and occasionally were forced to beg the gov- 
 ernor's pardon. The powers that were said to them : " Show us 
 the way to heaven, but we will show you yours on the earth." 
 When a Jesuit in a Quebec pulpit declared the King had ex- 
 ceeded his powers by licensing the trade in brandy in spite of the 
 bishop's interdict, the governor, Frontenac, threatened to put him 
 in a place where he would learn to hold his peace. 
 
 The same magistrate sent another priest — brother of the author 
 of Telemachus — to France for trial owing to some disrespect, and 
 wrote to the king : " The ecclesiastics want to join to their spirit- 
 ual authority an absolute power over things temporal. They aim 
 to establish an inquisition worse than that of Spain." 
 
 Amid this conflict of authorities the government was glad to 
 transport the missionaries, and they were equally glad to be trans- 
 ported deep into the wilderness; for there all power in heaven and 
 on earth, temporal and spiritual alike, and each doubling the 
 other, was theirs, theirs alone, without rival. Every whisper 
 against them was admitted to be " injurious to the glory of God." 
 They held it better to reign monarchs of all they surveyed among 
 Menomonies than to hold divided empire in Montreal. 
 
 When once the Jesuits were planted in the far west they suf- 
 
25 
 
 fered no more from'governmental jealousies. On the other hand 
 trade-policy and military power leaned on missions as their main 
 support. Missions were to explore the Mississippi, missions were 
 to win over savage hordes at once to the faith and to France. At 
 a momentous crisis, in 1685, the Jesuit, Bngelran, at Mackinaw 
 adroitly kept the lake tribes from defection. The Marquis Du 
 Quesne used to say that Father Picquet was worth ten regiments. 
 One tribe was taught by the Fathers that Christ was a Frenchman 
 murdered by the English, and that the way to gain his favor was 
 to revenge his death. No wonder a chief called out, " O, that I 
 and my braves had caught those English crucifiers. We would 
 have taken off all their scalps." 
 
 In those times, when the question arose which we are still vainly 
 essaying to answer, " How was America peopled ? how came the 
 Aborigines here ? " it was a common saying of theologians that 
 the devil had led the Indians hither that they might be out of the 
 way of the gospel. Accordingly, whoever penetrated into the 
 utmost corner of the West was sure that he beyond all others 
 was storming the'donjon keep of Satan. 
 
 This Jesuit storming party, full of hope and misnamed forlorn,, 
 roved at will without passports, while others, if they lacked such 
 credentials, were put to death. 
 
 Their first acquaintance with mosquitoes is thus recorded : " The 
 woods were full of a species of flies similar to the gnats which in 
 France are called cousins (that is, I suppose, ' poor relations '). 
 They are so importunate that one always has a multitude around 
 him watching for a chance to light on his face or on some part of 
 his body where the covering is so thin that their stings can easily 
 pierce it. As soon as they light they draw out blood and substi- 
 tute for it venom, which excites a strange uneasiness and a tumor 
 of two or three hours' duration." When they first saw a fire- fly 
 they must have thought like Paddy that a mosquito had taken a 
 lantern in order to find his victims in the dark. 
 
 In sending their underlings into the heart of New France, 
 Jesuit superiors were assured they could there repeat those 
 miracles of conversion and reconstruction which their order had 
 lately wrought in South America. 
 
26 
 
 In Paraguay they had built up a model state. The natives be- 
 came tolerant of their culture and compliant to their bidding in 
 every particular. They rose and sought their beds, were married 
 and given in marriage, weaned their children, removed from place 
 to place, raised stock or grain, fixed prices, and used their gains 
 at the dictation of spiritual guides. They were docile, but unde- 
 veloped, or developed only in some single prescribed direction. 
 They were literally sheep, submissive when fleeced and even 
 flayed and slaughtered at the pleasure of their shepherds. But 
 their development was arrested. At their best they never became 
 men, but remained children of larger growth, or rather became 
 weaker in mind as they grew stronger in muscle. The purpose 
 was to build up a second Paraguay in North America. An ex- 
 periment, tried in Lower Canada, had failed. Its want of success 
 was attributed to the roving habits of the tribes and the impossi- 
 bility of persuading them to renounce nomadic life. It was tried 
 again, with more sanguine hopes, on Lake Huron, for the tribes 
 there were fixed through the year in one abode. When the Hurons 
 had been overpowered by foes and driven into Wisconsin, the 
 experiment was repeated there. 
 
 The westward exodus of Hurons into Wisconsin began as early 
 as 1650. Onward from that time the French became known there, 
 and that most favorably, as a race superhuman in arms, in arts 
 and in benevolence. Such must have been the report concerning 
 them which fell from the lips of fugitive converts. It roused the 
 braves on the farthest shores of the farthest lakes to set sail in 
 quest of the admirable strangers. 
 
 Missionaries were the more encouraged to venture far west ; 
 thanks to invitations from the aborigines. 2Vs early as 1611, the 
 first fleet of Hurons that descended the St. Lawrence to meet 
 Champlain said to him, " Come to our country, teach us the true 
 faith." Iq 1633 it is chronicled that Hurons vied with each other 
 for the honor of carrying missionaries home with them in their 
 boats of bark. The volume of Jesuit Relations for 1640, states 
 that fathers, invited by Algonquins on Lake Superior, were on 
 the point of pushing forward even to that most western sea. 
 
 In 1679 an Outagarai chief, espying friars among La Salle's com- 
 
27 
 
 pany near Chicago, cried out : " We love those gray robes. They 
 go barefoot as we do ; they care nothing for beaver ; they have no 
 arms to kill us; they fondle our infants ; they have given up every- 
 thing to abide with us. So we learn from our people who have 
 been to carry fur to French villages." 
 
 Stations far inland and dissevered from their base on the sea- 
 board, were also preferred as being undisturbed by the influx and 
 influence of non-missionary and anti-missionary whites, — godless 
 sailers who swarmed on the rock of Quebec, — and above all from 
 the heretical psalmody of Huguenots which could not there be 
 silenced. 
 
 Aside from the moral advantages of a mission in the heart of 
 the land, the fathers and their employes, whether paid or volun- 
 teering without pay, were most numerous and useful when remote 
 from other whites, because they were able to push trade in fur, 
 free from competitors. The lay brothers together with brandy 
 sold scapularies or belts of the Virgin which were of such sovereign 
 virtue that nobody who wore one at his death could possibly sink 
 to perdition. The missionaries, according to Grovernor Frontenac, 
 wished to keep out of sight the trade which they always carried on 
 In the woods. They also claimed that their profits never exceeded 
 five hundred per cent. Parkman wrote his Jesuits more than a 
 decade ago. He was then doubtful whether those missionaries 
 engaged in fur trading, ^utthe letters of Frontenac, often writ- 
 ten in cipher for secrecy (lately discovered by P. Margry and pub- 
 lished by our congress), leave us no doubt on this point. In 1674 
 he wrote Colbert that when he ursjed the Black Robes to labor near 
 white settlements, they answered that their coming into America 
 was to indoctrinate savages — or rather to draw in beaver. He 
 accuses them of dealing in peltries. In 1682 La Salle wrote that 
 the Green Bay Jesuits held the real key of the castor country, 
 while their blacksmith brother and his two helpers converted 
 more iron into fur than all the fathers could turn pagans into 
 proselytes. 
 
 A further narrative by La Salle regarding Jesuit tactics, reads 
 as follows: "A savage named Kiskirinaro, that is to say, Wild Ox, 
 of the Mascoutin tribe, a considerable war chief among his people. 
 
28 
 
 says that in a little river to whicli he wished to lead me, he had 
 picked up a quantity of white metal, a portion of which he brought 
 to Father Allouez, a Jesuit, and that brother Giles, a goldsmith 
 who resides at Green Bay (" the bay of the Puans "), having 
 wrought it, made the sun-shaped article [soleil] in which they put 
 the holy bread. He meant the ostensory which this same brother 
 has there made. He says that Father Allouez gave him a good 
 deal of merchandise by way of recompense, and told him to keep 
 the matter secret because [the metal] was a manitou — this is to 
 say a great spirit who was not yet developed." 
 
 Nor were the most distant fathers altogether at the mercy of 
 savages. A seminary for Huron boys at Quebec was projected in 
 the outset, and was begun in 1636, two years before the building 
 of Harvard College. One reason for founding this educational in- 
 stitution was that the Indian children in this Do-tbe-Boys Hall, 
 would be hostages for the safety of missionaries, however distant 
 in the interior. 
 
 It is a merciful ordination of Providence that the tragic sug- 
 gests the comic, and all miseries have a ludicrous side. 
 
 The crew of Captain Nares in quest of the North Pole would 
 have died of hypo in a darkness which outlasted a hundred times 
 the space that measures day and night to us, had they not dipped 
 deep in comic theatricals. Nor in the worse than Arctic gloom 
 around them would the Jesuits have fared better, had not their 
 eyes now and then rested on a silver lining of their sable cloud. 
 Burdens, otherwise too heavy, they threw off by sportive notes 
 in their diaries. Thus they must have felt a grim pleasure in 
 writing down skunks as infants of the devil. Father Allouez 
 relates that while publishing the gospel in the midst of Wiscon- 
 sin he found himself in a sort of monkey France. Certain of the 
 sequestered natives having carried beaver to Montreal had there 
 beheld military pomp. Wishing to pay the missionary fitting 
 honors, they stuck feathers in their hair, and organized the naked 
 braves into a militia company who gravely mimicked every 
 evolution of the governor's guard. The Jesuit discoursed to 
 them ot heaven and hell, but the unseasonable parody of French 
 parade did not cease for an instant. The Black Robe could not 
 
29 
 
 keep his countenance, but his guard of honor did keep theirs. 
 Every savage executed every punctilio of his part with more than 
 Spanish gravity. 
 
 When an Indian had been so scalded as to lose the skin of his 
 face, a Jesuit writes : "It would have been very well if he had 
 lost his old heart with his old hide." 
 
 Another Huron, finding no missionary assurance that there was 
 tobacco in heaven, declared he would never go there. The re- 
 flection chronicled by the Father is : " Unhappy infidel ! all his 
 time spent in smoke and his eternity in fire." 
 
 Eobes and ritual inspired a divine awe. This was sometimes 
 betrayed in odd ways. No Black Robe's risibles could remain 
 unmoved when he overheard converts who feared to address a 
 missionary, but asked the most solemn questions of his dog. 
 
 Again, certain Christian Indians having caught a warrior of a 
 heathen tribe, named Wolf, the Jesuits let them burn him, having 
 first instructed and baptized him. Then with a pun on his name 
 they recorded it as a marvel indeed, that a Wolf was at one 
 stroke changed into a lamb ; and through the baptism of fire 
 entered at once into that fold which he came to ravage. 
 
 Priestly humor was sometimes unconscious. Thus Hennepin re- 
 marks that no sooner had he declared a fraction of the heroic 
 virtues of " the most high, puissant, most invincible " (Almighty? 
 no ! but) King of France, to savages" than they at once " received 
 the gospel and revered the cross." 
 
 Again when he had set forth certain mysteries the Indians told 
 him some of their fables. But these, he told them, were false. 
 Their answer was, we believed your lies ; had you been as polite 
 as we were, you would have believed ours." Again, the question 
 whether the quid of a tobacco chewer, taken in the morning 
 before mass, broke his fast, was discussed pro and con by casuists. 
 To them it seemed a question altogether serious, however ludi- 
 crous on all sides it appears to us. 
 
 Again, when they noticed that a certain hear dies s'^nes.i was a 
 special favorite with natives, they sent to France for pictures of 
 Christ painted without a beard. 
 
 After some analogous scrutiny of Indian tastes they wrote in 
 
30 
 
 their next order for paintings, " one view of celestial rapture is 
 enough, but you cannot send too many scenes of infernal torments." 
 
 Again, " if three four or five devils were painted torturing a 
 soul with different punishments, one applying fire, another ser- 
 pents, another tearing him with pincers, another holding bim fast 
 with a chain, this would have a good effect, especially if every- 
 thing were made distinct, and misery, rage and desperation ap- 
 peared plainly in the victim's face." 
 
 Within fifteen years after Jesuits began work in earnest among 
 Hurons, that tribe was either annihilated or expelled by the Iro- 
 quois. But for that catastrophe the faith of the Jesuit might 
 have been to this day more dominant in Upper Canada than it is 
 in Lower. 
 
 Some tincture of it has survived everything in all Indian dis- 
 persions. One of the first English adventurers to Maine was 
 greeted by the natives with a pantomime of bows and flourishes 
 which in his judgment could have been learned of nobody but a 
 Frenchman. The aborigines in general were inoculated with 
 French faith and French fashions so that they took about as much 
 of one as of the other, — and not much of either. Disciples who 
 ran wild in the woods retained some prayers and chants learned 
 by rote. The divine vision which roused Pontiac and his com- 
 patriots to war, was a woman arrayed in white. Had they not 
 been taught concerning the Virgin Mary, it could hardly have 
 taken this form. In 1877, a white man who had been caught by 
 a Rocky Mountain tribe chained to his wagon- wheel and half 
 burnt, when he made the sign of the cross was snatched out of 
 the fire. The hunting camps of tribes in Manitoba are to-day 
 called Missions. 
 
 Missionaries, then, burning to propagate their faith, more than 
 two centuries ago penetrated into our Northwest, some, of them 
 into Wisconsin. They there discovered tribes having fixed abodes, 
 over whom their knowledge and tact gave them power, so that 
 they molded them as clay in the hand of a potter, where their 
 influence was unchecked by white intruders, and where they could 
 so trade as to make their enterprise self-supporting. 
 
 The third stepping-stone of the French into the northwest, and 
 thus into Wisconsin, was fur. 
 
31 
 
 The fur trade would have drawn thera thither, even if fun and 
 faith had not paved their way. Indeed, that trade began to at- 
 tract them to American shores before either fun or faith had 
 worked at all in that direction. 
 
 After all, fislc was the JirsL magnet which drew Frenchmen 
 across the Atlantic. According to a manuscript in the library at 
 Versailles, when Cabot (before Columbus had landed on conti- 
 nental America) discovered Newfoundland, he heard the word 
 haccalaos there in use for "cod-fish." But " baccalaos" is the Bre- 
 ton-French word for that fish. It is possible then that Bretons, 
 next to the ISTorse, were the true discoverers of America — pre- 
 Columbian and pre-Oabotiaa. 
 
 However this may be, fish, indispensable for fasts and not un- 
 welcome at feasts, were sought by Bretons off Newfoundland, a 
 centur7 before Quebec was founded. In 1578, there were one 
 hundred and fifty French vessels there. 
 
 But peltries, already scarce in Europe, filled the land in that 
 quarter no less than fish the sea, and were hunted as early. Before 
 the close of the sixteenth century, forty convicts, left on a Nova 
 Scotia island, had accumulated a quantity of valuable furs. 
 
 But, what is far more surprising, Menendez relates that fifty- 
 five years before the landing from the May Flower — in 1565 — 
 buffalo skins had been brought by Indians down the Potomac, 
 and thence along shore in canoes to the French about the St. 
 Lawrence at the rate of three thousand a year. 
 
 But not content with coast traffic, and with a view to escape the 
 rivalry and hostility of Dutch and English, as well as in quest of 
 fresh fur fields, traders pushed inland. Before the year 1600 they 
 had a post at Tadoussac, at the mouth of the Saguenay, and in 
 1603 established themselves at Quebec. 
 
 To this emporium Indian flotillas, year by year larger and 
 larger, and from districts more and more remote, resorted. They 
 came laden with furs, and drawn thither by what they counted 
 miracles of beauty and ingenuity, which, bartered on the coast 
 by the first comers, had glided up the St. Lawrence and all 
 its tributaries, and even to the great lakes, where beaver were 
 most and best. 
 
32 
 
 They were further attracted by the presents and invitations of 
 Champlain, who, in 1615, within seven years after the first tree 
 was felled at Quebec, had held councils on Lake Huron, and 
 bidden the natives to bring down their furs. Western Indians were 
 still more stimulated to traffic by adventurers, who, as we have 
 seen, had in 1609 begun to be domesticated among the aborigines 
 and to share their hunts. "Wrapped in furs, striding on snow 
 shoes with bodies half bent, through the gray forests and frozen 
 pine swamps, among black trunks and dark ravines, these young 
 Frenchmen, though they meant not so, were commercial travelers, 
 and they fulfilled their mission as shrewdly as those who now 
 sally from Chicago. Those Chicago emissaries are dextrous deal- 
 ers, yet very possibly might learn some new tricks of trade could 
 they recover the lost arts of their forerunners whose palace cars 
 were bark canoes, and their commercial hotels wigwams. Drum- 
 mers from the lake metropolis now encounter men of their own 
 stamp from St. Louis. So did the early French agents conflict 
 even in Illinois and Michigan with those who had been dispatched 
 from the Hudson. la order to get beyond New York competitors, 
 the French hurried still further luest than they otherwise would 
 have ventured. 
 
 Again, these roving and fraternizing Frenchmen did not long 
 go among the aborigines empty-handed, or even selling by sam- 
 ples. They took with them into the heart of the land those 
 goods — light and cheap — for which the Indian demand was the 
 greatest. 
 
 At sight of an iron hatchet, says Perrot, Wisconsin tribes 
 raised their eyes blessing heaven for sending them a race able to 
 furnish so powerful a deliverer from all their woes. Every bar 
 of iron was in their eyes a divinity. But hrandy was from first 
 to last the one thing needful in a trader's outfit. It was indeed 
 contraband according to the dignitaries of both church and state. 
 Yet then as now it had free course on some underground railroad. 
 It was more easily carried because, before exposed for sale, it was 
 ivatered as profusely as the stock of our railroads. Each gallon 
 of proof liquor swelled to six. The lowest price for brandy was 
 a chopine for a beaver skin. How much a French chopine 
 
33 
 
 amounted to you cannot easily learn from books. French and 
 English measures were incommensurable. But what I long sought 
 in vain, I have learned from the casual remark of an ancient fur- 
 trader, that a chopine was so small a quantity as. would not make 
 an Indian drunk more than once. An' Indian is quite unlike an 
 Irishman. Bat in one thing they agree. Neither is consciously 
 guilty of a bull when he says: "Give me the superflaities of life 
 and I will give up the necessaries. Traders too scrupulous to sell 
 liquor to an Indian, would still exact a beaver of him for a single 
 four pound loaf ot bread. 
 
 French c )mmercial men bore a charmed life. The fiercest sav- 
 ages spared both them and their goods, lest no more of that desira- 
 ble clas^ should come among their tribes. They had too much 
 wit to ki 1 the geese who were their only hope of golden eggs. 
 La Salle's testimony is: (M. 2,281.) "The savages take better 
 care of us French than of their own children. From us only can 
 they get guns and good.-=." Hennepin relates that he would have 
 been scalped by his Indian captors had they not judged that his 
 death would hinder others of his countrymen from bringing them 
 iron. 
 
 French traders soon brought with them more merchandise than 
 they could transport overland. They were thus led to establish 
 trading pos^s on navigab'e streams and at carrying-places. We 
 naturally think such commercial stations would be set up first 
 along the St. Lawrence and Lake Ontario^ those natural highways 
 to and from the west. They were not. Those waters were wa-tched 
 by the Lvquois ; fiercest in fight of all Indians, foes of France, 
 allies of Holland and England. Accordingly the thoroughfare 
 of western Indians to Quebec and of French traders to the upper 
 lakes, was by the Ottawa^ a river which, lying farther north, was 
 comparatively safe from Iroquois ambuscades, which were with 
 reason more dreaded than cold, famine, storm and cataract. 
 
 Hence it came to pass that the French while they still knew 
 nothing of Lake Erie and Niagara, were familiar with Lake 
 Superior. Two of their traders had penetrated into that inland 
 sea in 1658. 
 
 Even after the French were at peace with the Indians on the 
 3b 
 
34 
 
 soutli of the St. Lawrence and Lake Ontario, they were no match 
 on those waters for Datch acd English rivals in fur tradino^. The 
 latter could aftord to pay four times as much ior furs as the French 
 could. Nine pence was the export duty on a beaver at New 
 York ; in Qaebec it was six times as much. In New York far- 
 trade was free. At Qaebec seven hundred crowns were charged 
 for permission to send a single boat up ihe Ottawa. Good reason 
 then had the French to seek furs so far northwest that they could 
 escape European competitors. 
 
 The result was that they had reached Like Huron in 1615, and 
 soon hurried on to Michigan, while they had no port on the 
 nearer lake, Ontario, till two generations afterward in 1673, when 
 they threw up Fort Frontenac at its outlet, where Kingston now 
 stands. Its builder, Frontenac, intended it merely as a base of 
 operations for fur trade so far west that he would be independent 
 of the governor of Montreal. Seven years af:erward in 1679, 
 La Salle, having launched the first sloop ever built on Lake Erie, 
 voyaged in her through St. Clair, Huron and Michigan to the 
 mouth of Green Bay. 
 
 His vessel vv^as there freighted with rich furs, bat as she was 
 lost on her first passsage eastward, La Salle's experiment did not 
 recommend the lower lakes. On the contrary it tended to make 
 the upper, or Ottawa route, more popular than ever. 
 
 The doors into Wisconsin were two, — Li Pointe and Green 
 Bay, and these two were about equal favorites. The first mis- 
 sionary arrived at La Pointe in 1660. Fur traders came icith him. 
 Nine years after, in 1669, when Father Allouez reached Green 
 Bay to found a mission, fur traders were on the ground, and had 
 become so domineering in that end of the world, that the mis- 
 sionary was brought by the Indians from Lake Superior as a 
 protector. 
 
 Nicholas Perrot, who in 1683 built a fort near the mouth of the 
 Chippewa river, though on the west bank of the Mississippi, had 
 entered Green Bay eighteen or twenty years earlier. He wrote 
 a volume, — not for publication — but for the information of the 
 Canadian government. In this work which was first printed less 
 than twenty years ago, in 1864, he describes a score of journeys in 
 
35 
 
 all parts of Wisconsin, all of them having something to do with 
 fur. How fully even in his lifetime the region between Lake 
 Michigan and the great river had become known to ihe French, is 
 plain from the early geographical names being largely French. 
 
 Le Sueur, who passed up the Mississippi in the year 1700, men- 
 tions between the Wisconsin and the St. Croix, six rivers with 
 French names, all apparently of long standing. These nvers 
 were Aux Canots. Oachee, Aux Ailes, Des Riisins, Pasquilenette 
 and Bon Secours. In other parts of Wisconsin not a few French 
 names run back as far as these on its western border. 
 
 In l()o4: Father Le Mercier at the outlet of Lake Superiiir 
 wrote that about Green Bay, nine days' journey distant, there 
 were Algonquin?, and that if thirty French were sent there they 
 would not only gain many snuls to God but would receive pecu- 
 niary profit, because the finest peltries came from those quarters. 
 The next year fifty canoes of ihe-e Indians visited Quebec, and 
 thirty Frenchmen returned with them. Among Ottawas between 
 Green Bay and Lake Superior French traders are mentioned in 
 1659. In 1665 Perrot was buying beaver of Outagamies in or 
 near the Wisconsin county in the name of which they still live, 
 and in the following year the second flotilla of Pottawatomies bad 
 reached Montreal. 
 
 French fur-factors penetrated the further into western fastnesses, 
 because by this means they practically enjoyed free- trade. Mak- 
 ing bark canoes far inland they evaded the crushing imposts on 
 all canoes allowed to pass up. While mother-states were all at 
 war, they plied friendly commerce with Dutch and English mid- 
 dle-men as well as their Indian confederates. Thus their beaver 
 were either exported through New York, dodging the French tax, 
 or they were bartered there for blankets cheaper and better than 
 were to be had in Canada. 
 
 As a rule the French governor and intendant were at swords' 
 points with each other. Each would charge the other with a 
 heinous offense — carrying furs to the English province. The 
 truth is that each of them was determined to be the onl// sinner 
 in that line. Each thus resembled the usurer who was delighted 
 with a sermon against usury, paid iov prinling it and said to the 
 
36 
 
 preacher, " Make more 'such discourses ! Stop everybody from 
 taking high interest — except me. Then lean monopolize the 
 whole busin^-s." As his rec >mpen'e for risks and outlays in 
 westprn di'jcovery, La Sille asked nothing but the exclusive right 
 to sell the skins of buffalo'-s. 
 
 Royal mon(\polies of fur trading, lavished in Paris on conit 
 favorites or on cor|)o?'ations as the Hundred Associates, crippled 
 thut traffic near the coast. But they drove the bulk of that busi- 
 m ss into the heart of ihe continent, where it fell into the hands 
 uf traders so distint, shrew>l an I self-suffi iing that it could not 
 be crippled. Oyer a region vaster than any European kingdom, 
 the hush-rangers ca-ried on the fur-trade af(er their own pleasure, 
 and laughed at royal restrictions on their dealings. 
 
 In IfJSl Hennepin, at Mackinaw, met with forty two Canadians 
 who hid ct)m3 thither to tra le in furs, defiant of the orders of 
 their viceroy. Tnese foresters were not without a sort of con- 
 science, for they all begged the Jesuit to give them the cord of St. 
 Francis, which was believed to make their salvation sure if they 
 died wearing it as a girdle, and they all gained their request. 
 Hennepiii wis ilieti journeying eastward ifom Green B ly. where 
 he had been entertained by the same o'ass of contraban 1 trafficlcers. 
 There simihir adventurers — Li Salle informs us — had a perma- 
 nent post in 1677, and that bay had even been visited by a brace 
 of voyagprs more than twenty years before, in 1654. Before La- 
 Salle began his exploration's in 1679, his CTiployes were familiar 
 with far western tribe-5. One of them, Accault, had spent two 
 winters and a summer in Wisconsin. Before 1680, Duluth, with 
 a score of followers, was trading as far inland as the city which 
 now bears his name. He proclaimed that he feared no authority 
 and would force the government to grant hi.Tn amnesty. (M. 2, 251.) 
 The sloop which La Salle in 1679 had dispatched to Niagara 
 before he started from Green Bay for Illinois, according to his 
 conviction was scuttled by her crew, who plundered her and 
 struck into the northwestern wilderne?s, meaning to join hands 
 with Daluth. (M. 2, 327.) Years afterward La Salle heard of a 
 French captive on the upper Mississippi whom he identified as his 
 pilot, and learned that hand-grenades, which could only have come 
 
37 
 
 from the miss'mg vessel, had been taken by savages from that 
 captive. 
 
 In order to buy cheaper of Indian trappers, wandering fur 
 hunters would report pedilence as prevailing in Montreal, and thus 
 frighten savages from paddling down the river. Such fur factors 
 were outlawed on the upper lakes, and they could not dam up 
 their outlets, but they intercepted many a flotilla anxiously ex- 
 pected from above in Montreal. Thus masters of the situation, 
 they resembled those cunning Athenians who Aristophanes tells 
 us were suspended in a sort of balloon, stopping incense as it rose 
 from Jove's altars, and letting ^no savor of it reach 01yra[)ian 
 nostrils, but keeping all for themselves. 
 
 On a long march every thing not totally indispensable is dropped. 
 Hence the far western dealer carried no scales or steel yards. But 
 he was himself a better weighing machine, for himself at least, 
 than any witty invention of Fairbanks with all Howe's improve- 
 ments superadded. So the saying was about Du'uth: " Duluth, 
 an honest man, bought all by weight, and made the ignorant 
 savages believe that his right foot exactly weighel a pound. By 
 this for many years he bought their furs, and died in quiet like 
 an honest dealer." 
 
 In selling to Indians, however, the pound was no doubt quite a 
 different weight. In the journal of a missionary at the outlet o! 
 Lake Superior I find th tt in 1670 a beaver was there valued at 
 either four ounces of powder, or one fathom of tobacco, or the 
 same length of blue serge or six knives. 
 
 Wood-ranging fur men seemed an evanescent race. Neverthe- 
 less they outlasted French empire in America. In latter times 
 when English and Yankee fur companies were o'gmized in 
 Montreal and New York they were unable to dispense with the 
 French operatives, "to the manner born." Generation after gen- 
 eration they retained them as practical men fittest for all works 
 relating to fur. In all governmental departments the higher 
 functiimaries, when first elected (and too often to the very end of 
 their career), need to be taught ofiicial routine. H^nce officials 
 of lower grade who have learned to run the machine, are retained 
 without regard to political revolutions. These factotums are sig- 
 
nifieantly called "dry-nurses." Such dry-nurses for English and 
 American fur kings were discovered in French underlings. 
 
 Fun and faith both gave a new impulse to the fur trade. With 
 it they formed a three fold cord which drew the French from end 
 to end of the Mississippi, as well as to the farthest fountains of the 
 St. Liwrence, and even further. La Salle deserves deathless fame, 
 and will have it, because he was first to follow the Mississippi 
 down to the gulf. But his grand object was to secure an outlet 
 for fur that was not half the year frozen up, and the other half 
 infested by English rivals, Iroquois ambushes, and worse than all, 
 Canadian farmers of the royal revenue. Duluth, whose name we 
 have seen revived and bestowed on a r'nushroom metropolis, "the 
 zenith city of the unsalted sea," two centuries ago bad penetrated 
 beyond the farthest corner of our innermost and uppermost lake. 
 His mission was to intrigue and foil the English on Hudson Bay. 
 Ere long a French fort rose on the Saskatchawan, two thousand 
 mile-", as men traveled, from the seaboard. This station came up 
 under the auspices of the French Company of the Northwest, in- 
 corporated in 1676, in antagonism to the Hudson Bay Company, 
 which came into existence six years earlier. It long bore sov- 
 ereign sway over a wide savage domain. 
 
 The natives preferred the manufactures of the English, but the 
 manners of the French, L'ke all savages, they were swayed by 
 impulse more than by interest. They would give more for one 
 plug of tobacco brought to their wigwams than they could buy 
 twenty for in Albany or Hudson Bay. Hence they traded with 
 the French, and became their tools. One result was that in 1681, 
 and again three years after, Nicolas Perrot, the supreme fur 
 trader and Indian negotiator of his time, persuaded five hundred 
 Indians from Wisconsin and near it to paddle their canoes all the 
 way to Niagara in order to fight for the French. 
 
 In 1724, Bourgmont was already exploring the Upper Missouri. 
 But on this line of Western research Yerendrye outstripped all 
 others. Pushing on s'ep by step for ten years, he discovered the 
 Rocky Mountains in 1743 on New Year's day, sixty-one years 
 before our L^wis and Clirke. The point of his discovery was 
 just above where the Yellowstone joins the Missouri. That re- 
 
30 
 
 gion was so fall of fur that the governor's share in the profits of 
 a trading company soon amounted to 300,000 francs. 
 
 Those who, from mere love of fun, explored unknown woods 
 and waters, learned strange tongues and ceased to be strangers 
 among strange tribes, and unawares acquired all the requisites for 
 successful commerce in beaver. Missions also, though founded 
 in faith, by faith and for faith, furnished as gool a ba?e for the 
 enterprises of furriers as if they had owed their origin to the 
 spirit of mercantile speculation. 
 
 There is no danger of overrating the pervasiveness of French 
 fur dealings in the Northwest centuries ago. We may well be- 
 lieve no cove, no navigable stream was unplowed by their boats 
 of bark; no tribe, no council unvisited. 
 
 The demand fjr fur in France was stimulated by royal decrees. 
 In 1670 one of them prohibited the manufacture of demi-castors, 
 a sort of hats that were only half made of beaver. Saon after- 
 ward a prohibitory duty was laid in France on all furs not from 
 French colonies. 
 
 Statistics are stupefying, and there is some wit in the quip, " A 
 fig for your c?a/e5.''" After all a few figures are necessary if we 
 would understand how speedily and how grandly the trade in 
 skins was developed, or how long and how widely fur was king 
 as truly as cjtton or corn has become so in our times. 
 
 In IGLO, ten years before the landing of the forefathers at 
 Plymouth, the boats of fur traders were at the outlet of Lake 
 Champlain. Three years after forty canoes came down to Mon- 
 treal bringing fur. In 1690 their number was 165; three years 
 after, it rose to two hundred. For a decade before 1649, the 
 Huron beaver harvest was valued at half a million francs a year. 
 Fifty francs would then feel a man for a twelvemonth, and one 
 hundred and fifty would pay a soldier. In IQl-k, the skins im- 
 ported into Il)chelle were 31 1,315. The governor of Montreal, 
 whose salary wa-5 a thousand crowns, soon cleared fifty thousand 
 by illicit lur dea'irjg. 
 
 As early as 1670 there is mention of a fur fleet embarking at 
 Green Bay for Montr<-al. Even before this, as we have seen, ad- 
 venturers to Wisconsin waters and its interior, paid the charges 
 
40 
 
 of exploration bj an incidental trade in far. Just afterward, the 
 first Indians whom Marquette met on the Mi-sissippi, were wear- 
 ing French cloth. During the winter of 1674-5, when thiit mission- 
 ary lay pick at Chicago, two traders were already encamped in the 
 vicinity. 
 
 For more than a hundred yenrs, the Northwestern beaver trade 
 flowed on with a colossal and all-pervading stream. In 1791, the 
 skins collected there for Montreal merchans amounted lo more 
 than ha f a million (565,000). A few years after John Jacob 
 Astor, "sagaci<jus of his quarry from afar," eng^g'd in this traffic 
 ■with hundreds of boats, thousands of men and millions of capital. 
 
 Green B;iy was his point of departure, as Mackinaw had been 
 that of the French for many generations. But his employes 
 pushed through the continent to the western ocean. Most of his 
 fortune came from fur, and it would have been twice as large, but 
 for the war of 1812. Bat even A-Jtor's fur agents of all classes 
 were largely descendants of French voyageurs who had taken up 
 their abode in the Northwest ages before. 
 
 Falsehood and false fancies were also among the forces which 
 first hurried the French far west. 
 
 It is through no longing for alliterative initials that I add false 
 fancies and fnlsehood as a fourth force to fun, faith and fur. At 
 that ppriod all travelers, if not Munchausens themselves, believed 
 Munchausen stories, and when people are willing to be deceived, 
 they are deceived. Demand for lies never lacks supply. 
 
 One Frenchman in Florida, when he saw a squaw so wrinkled 
 that there was no room for one furrow more, believed the report 
 that she had outlived five generations. Another, near Newfound- 
 land, landed on an isle of demons not without wings, horns and 
 tails. A third, when certain Canadian chiefs told him of a race 
 who had but one leg and lived without food, took them to France 
 for repeating their story to the king. These were sons of men 
 who h id been ere iulous to Venetian merchants, who, selling spices 
 for their weight in gold, advertised them as no product of the 
 vulgar earth, but plucked from branches thrown down h'om the 
 battlements of E ien by compassionate cherubim. The age of 
 failh was not yet over. As recently as the last jear of the seven- 
 
41 
 
 teenth century a company formed in France to work a mine of 
 green earth reported to exist at the sources of the Mississippi, 
 sent a party of thirty miners up that river. Their voyage up 
 stream last d ten month?. 
 
 Among the earliest volunteers from the retainers of Champlain 
 to ascend the Ottawa with savages, who had descended from a 
 country no white man had ever trod, was Vignan, in IGIO. On 
 his return next season, he declared that he had pusln d on to a 
 salt ?ea, seen the wreck of an English ship, and heird of Cathay 
 and Zipango, — so China and Japan were then called — as not far 
 away. 
 
 The spark fell in gunpowder. Champlain heard not only what 
 he wi.>^hed to believe, but what all men of his time an 1 a century 
 after ht;ld for certain, that a short Northwest pa«s;ige to the East 
 Indies existed, and would at once double the wealth of any nation 
 which could appropriate it by right of discovery. His own fleet 
 had been equipped in IdOS, not merely to colonize Acadia, but 
 " to penetrate inland even to the Occidental sta and arrive some 
 day at China." 
 
 He believed that in 1609 a vessel, clearing from Acapulco, — a 
 Mexican p Tt on the Pacific, lost its reckonmg in a storm, but 
 after two months found i'self in Ireland, — and that the King of 
 Spain had ordered the journal of the pilot to be burned so as to 
 keep foreigners from knowing the course followed, but which 
 was supp sed to be north of Cacada. The map of Vtrrazano, 
 then still an authority, in addition to the Isthmus of Panama 
 showed another no less narrow near the latitude of New York 
 with the Pacific beyond it on the West. 
 
 More than three score years afterward, La Salle sought that 
 East Indian route by way of the Mississippi. Ilis estate just above 
 Montreal was, and is still, cdled or nick-named, I/i Chine, that is 
 China, because he started from there bound for the E:npire of 
 Celestials. Years after he had stood at the mouth of the Missis- 
 sippi, he spoke of that river as separated from the China sea only 
 by the breadth of the province; of Culiacan, and was confident of 
 meeiing not far fi'om the mouth of the Missouri, with rivers 
 which flowed into the ocean he sought. 
 
42 
 
 England shared in tlie delusion that the Pacific was near the 
 Atlantic. Hence a barge was sent over to John Smith in Vir- 
 ginia with orders to row it up the Potomac, carry it over the 
 mountains, and launch it on some stream that flowed into the 
 South sea, which was afterward made the western boundary of 
 Connecticut 
 
 The truth is that French and English alike had a short cut to 
 China on the brain. No sooner then had Ghamplaia heard the 
 story of Vignan than he hastened up the Ottawa with a crew of 
 enthusiast?. Thirty five carrying-places and an infinity of hard- 
 ships seemed nothing to him. When half way to Like Huron — 
 at the Isle of AUumette, — he detected the imposition which Vig- 
 nan had practiced upon him. Champlain was more magnanimous 
 than certain p'o-pectors lately led into the Black Hills by a guide 
 who promised them diggings that would yield thirty cents a pan, 
 and finiHng him a liar straightway strung him up on the nearest 
 tree. Champlain was more disappointed than the prospectors — 
 yet he forgave the innpostor. 
 
 The next year, 1615, taking a fresh start, he i-eached the head 
 of the Ottawa, crossed to Lake Huron, — held councils with divers 
 nations on that inland s^a, hearing of still other seas beyond — 
 and saying to one and all: "Bring furs down to Quebec and 
 show me the way to China." Plainly he thought one request as 
 easy to grant as the other. 
 
 The name of the first Wisconsin tribe with whijh the French 
 became acquainted, and that before 1610, namely, Winnehagoes, 
 was under^^tood by them to signify SaUwaler men, and western 
 saltwater they associated only with the Pacific. Nicolet, the first 
 white man on the Wisconsin (?), having voyaged down that river 
 within some five and thirty leagues of the Mississipp', believed 
 himself within three days march of the great sea of the west. 
 
 The Indians were always notorious for repining whatever they 
 perceived that whites desired to hear. They thus ho.ixed them 
 all alike. Spaniards they tickled wiih stories of gold, New Eng- 
 land Puiitans by legends concerning the Great Spiiit, and so they 
 amused the Fiench, who came with a passion for China, with ac- 
 counts of a Celestial empire. 
 
4S 
 
 At that era various nations were rivals in searching for new 
 routes to China, — the English through Hudson Bay, the Dutch 
 north of Lap'and, and the French by way of the Great Lakes. 
 They had all been denied access to the Eist Indies either by the 
 Cape of Good Hope or of Horn, — which Spain and Portugal re- 
 spectively blockaded, treating as privateers all who tried to pass. 
 But their hopes were sanguine of finding another road thither, as 
 the Italians when at the fall of Constantinople cut off from their 
 medifeval thoroughfare eastward from the Levant, had set their 
 faces westward and discovered America. The spirit of the age, 
 " the grandeur of which," Froude pronounces " among the most 
 sublime phenomena which the earth has witnessed," felt that only 
 a corner of the veil had been lifted. All past findings just gave 
 enough to wake the taste for more. 
 
 Chaniplain was the more thoroughly persuaded that the Pacific 
 was near Lake Huron because he had himself beheld Pacific 
 surges at Panama, the longitude of which is not so far west as 
 that lake by a dozen degrees. His sight strengthened his faith, 
 which was never weak. Quartz pebbles picked up on the river 
 bank at Q lebec he thought diamonds, and gave the rock above 
 the name it bears to this day — Cape Diamond. 
 
 On Joliei's return from d own the Mississippi, Frontenac's first 
 feeling was regret that that river had not borne the explorer to 
 the Pacific and to Jipan. His next emotion was hope that the 
 Missouri — still anonymous, but called by Joliet a northwest 
 branch entering the Mississippi in latitude 38 degrees — could be 
 ascended to a lake with an outlet into the Vermilion Sea — his 
 name for the Gulf of California. Seven years later, in 1680, 
 Duluth, near the head waters of the Mississippi, heard of Henne- 
 pin as a captive among the Sioux. He sought him out, procured 
 his release and escorted him to Green Bay. But for this call to a 
 mission of mercy, " my design was," says he, " to push on to the 
 sea on the northwest, believed to be the Vermiliou Sea, from 
 which a war party had come among the Sioux. Some of its salt 
 they gave to three Frenchmen that I had sent out as a scout, and 
 they brought it to me. According to their report it was no more 
 than twenty days' march to a great lake the water of which was 
 
44 
 
 not fit to drink, and which I had no doubt I could reach without 
 difficulty." 
 
 But all varieties of Frenchmen in America — the fur-hunter, 
 the votary of fun and frolic and the apostle of faith — whatever 
 their primary impulses, each man wa^ inspired to dive further 
 into the west, by a lurking but fixed idea that he was himself the 
 predestinated Columbus of the grand discovery — that portal 
 through which men should bring the glory and honor of the 
 nations to and from farthest India — that world's highway which 
 lay hid from princes and plebeians till in the fullness of time 
 California opened wide her Golden Gate on golden hinges turninsr. 
 
 Only tho^e of us who rarneniber when California burst on the 
 world like a sun-burst, or lightning shining from the west unto 
 the east, as El Dorado no longer fabulous, can understand the 
 fever and frenzy which burned in every man who set his foot 
 toward the western unknown; his assurance that he was to be the 
 revelator, not of an ignis fatuus or desert Nile fountain, but, of 
 greater marvels than are dreamed of in all the Arab'an Nights — 
 a fairyland where urchins play at cherry-pio with diamonds, 
 where country wenches thread rubies instead of rowan berries for 
 necklaces, where the pantiles are pure gold and the paving stones 
 virgin silver. For such merchandise who, though n-) pilot., would 
 not adventure to the farthest shore washed by the farthest sea? 
 
 "The blood more ftirs to rouse a lion than to s'art a hare." 
 Accordingly the illusions, that sheening far celestial seemed to be, 
 of the China-seeker, the missionary and ihe funlover, yes, of the 
 fur-dealer, roused them to efforts and crowned them with suc- 
 cesses they could never have made had they seen things as ihey 
 really were. 
 
 Celestial visions flitting always a little ahead of western wan- 
 derers were an analogue of Sydney Smith's pitent Tantalus. 
 This was a bag of oats hung on the pole of his carriage. It 
 rattled before the noses of his horses, but was about a foot beyond 
 their reach. In both cases, also, the stimulating influence was 
 very similar. 
 
 Another French foundation was laid in the far west by politi- 
 cal finesse and feudalism,. 
 
45 
 
 The apostles of faith were also political intriguers. They 
 knew that nothing but the supremacy of France could afford a 
 basis for permanence in their missions. Accordingly, of them- 
 selves they worked for French domination as for self-preservation, 
 and they wtre often formally appointed ambassadors. 
 
 Moreover, they sometimes established a sort of theocratic feu- 
 dalism, or oriental patriarchate, in which they were themselves 
 lords paramount. 
 
 According to Parkman, "it behooved them to require obedi- 
 ence from those whom they imagined God had confided to their 
 guidance. Their consciences then acted in perfect accordance 
 with the love of power innate in the human breast. 
 
 "These allied forces mingle with a perplexing subtlety. Pride 
 disgui-ed even from itself walks in the likeness of love and 
 duty, and a thousand times on the pages of history we find hell 
 beguiling the virtues of heaven to do its work. The instinct of 
 domination is a weed that gro's's rank in the shadow of the 
 temple." (Jesuits, p. 159.) 
 
 Always and everywhere Jesuits have been charged with usurp- 
 ing political sway. In 1667, the Canadian Intendant, Talon, ad- 
 dressed a remonstrance to Colbert, the French premier, complain- 
 ing that the Jesuits "grasped at temporalities, encroaching even 
 on that police which concerned magistrates alone." This com- 
 plaint related to intermeddlin:' on the St. Liwrence. But on the 
 Upper Lakes and beyond them, there could not be too much 
 Jesuit domination to please French statesmen. 
 
 But another class of political agents were very early abroad in 
 the west. Nicolet, whom I have mentioned as in Wisconsin in 
 1634, and probably the first white man ever there, had been dis- 
 patched to Green Bay as a peace maker between the tribes of that 
 vicinity and the Hurons. 
 
 Soon after the year 1650 the Iroquois had vanquished all the 
 tribes east of Lake Michigan. They expelled them from their 
 old homes, and drove most of them beyond that lake, some of 
 them even beyond the Mississippi. In this flight theOttawas de- 
 scending the Wisconsin, and pushing up the Mississippi some 
 dozen leagues, entered the Little Iowa and sought an asylum on 
 
46 
 
 its upper waters. For those tribes who lingered in Wisconsin 
 there was no hope of fighting the Iroquois firearms without fire- 
 arnas, and no hope of fire-arms except from the French. The 
 governors of New France, to whom the Iroquois were sworn ene- 
 mies, — at once saw the policy of lifting up these fugitives, unit- 
 ing them in amity to each other, and to the tribes where they had 
 fled for refuge, supplying them with kettles, tobacco, but above 
 all with guns and powder, — in a word by every me ins stealing 
 their hearts. For this end they disp itched into Wi-onsin and 
 further a sp3ciei of envoys of whi;h Nicolas Perrot was a good 
 representative. 
 
 This Indian commissioner had been prepare 1 for his functions 
 by much western experience. lie was first in Jesuit employ as a 
 lay-brother, and then becxme an adventurer in quest of fin and 
 fur where no white man's foot had trod. No doubt he was in 
 make half Indian, and when present at a war dano would lead 
 it, like Frontena3 at thrje score and ten, wh)op'ng like the rest, 
 or rather outwhooping them all. The Indians nimed him " Pop- 
 corn," perhips because when heated he seemed to them to grow 
 ten times bigger, like the dwarf who declared that though his 
 avoirdupo s in the scile was ordinarily only one hundred and 
 twenty pounds, whehevi r he got mad he wrighed a ton. 
 
 His o(ricial career in Wisconsin began at latest in 1665. After 
 making friendship with the Pottawatomies at Green Bay, he 
 pushed up Fox River and into a lake of which it is an outlet. 
 There he held a council with the Oatagamies, After this fashion 
 he went on for five years, — at home with tribe after tribe — at 
 home in th3 customs and diale3ts of all the enormous ang'e be- 
 tween the upper Mississippi and the upper lakes. He brought 
 many nations into a confederation with each other and against the 
 Iroquois. H s farne, like Solomon's, brought visitors into Green 
 Bay from the uttermost parts of the earth, — some who sooke of 
 trading with Mexican Spaniards and others who de-cribed white 
 men fir north in a hoase which walked on the water — meaning 
 the English- on Hudson bay. (2 178 La Potherie.) How he was 
 borne aloft on a buffalo robe, reverenced for fashioning iron as 
 squaws did dough in a kneading trough, and feared as holding in 
 his hands thunder and lightning, we have ?ecD heady. 
 
47 
 
 In 1671 he was interpreter for a dozen nations whose delegates 
 largely through his persuasions then gathered at Mackinaw and 
 acknowledged the sovereignly of Fraic?. Ili-i influence over 
 them was seen in 16S1, and again three years after, when, as I 
 have before stated, he induced five hundred warriors from Wis- 
 consin, and iK3ar it, to paddie their canoes many a hundred miles 
 in order as allie-i of the French to fisjht agiins', the Ifoquois. 
 Aocor']ing to Indian ideas his greatest exploit was delivering 
 from torture find death a captive whom the savages had resolved 
 to burn. No common miracle was it to make Indians forego the 
 ecstasy of beholding and gloating on an enemy in agony. The 
 French then aimed to make the we<?tern chiefs do homage to their 
 king as a suzerain, ami fight shou'der to shoulder in hi^ battles. 
 
 But many adventurers from France also sought to become 
 themselves a sort of feudal barons. -To this end they secured 
 patents of nobility wiih land-grants, termed seigniories. Some of 
 these bordered on the S^ Lawrence and LakeChamplain. But these 
 eastern estates ]u?t gave enough to wake the taste for more. At 
 the outlet of Lake Ontario La Salle possessed a domain stretch- 
 ing five leagues along the shore, besides others almost boundless 
 on Lake Michigan, and whatever in other unknown regions he 
 could conquer. As Ci)l. Colt invented a patent revolver, so La 
 Salle expected to hold as a patent-right; the realm he had re- 
 vealed. He was sanguine that his principality would be more at- 
 tractive to immigrants than Canada. It was prairie which needed 
 no clearing, — it was m^ra fertile, of milder climite and more 
 varied proiiuct-, manv of them — as salt, grapes and hemp — lin 
 known in Canada. Not a few similar land-claims ba^ed on gov- 
 ernmental grants were set up by French occupants when the 
 United States assumed jurisdiction over Wisconsin. The Norman 
 race which centuries before had feudalized all Europe, now meant 
 to master the Mississippi Valley. French wanderers were not 
 unfrequently elected chiefs of tribes. Perrot was so honored 
 among nine different nations. French officers al.-o came with a 
 retinue of their own countrymen, whom they ruled by martial 
 law, being sometimes judge, jury and executioners all at once. 
 This one-man power, where no law was known but his will, was 
 
48 
 
 the secret of many a success. It inspired a salutary fear where 
 the common law of England and even the civil law of continental 
 Europe wouM only have provoked contempt. 
 
 At Frontenac La Salle wrought wonders. The n itives were 
 compliant to his will like clay in the hands of a potter. At his 
 bidding they seitled near his fort, cleared land, tilled it, worked 
 on the fortifications and on houses, sent their children to school. 
 According to Parknian, "seignior by royal grant of waterfront 
 for five leagues, — feudal lord of the forests around, — commander 
 of a garrison raised and paid by himself,— founder of the mis- 
 sion, — patron of the church, — he reigned the autocrat of his 
 lonely empire." Nor was he altogether destitute of feudal trap- 
 pings, — for, according to his chuplain, Hennepin, on state occa- 
 sions he wore a scarlet mantle laced with gold. 
 
 On the Illinois river his sucr-ess was still more marvelous. The 
 colony he there extemporized was reckoned in 16S4 to contain 
 4,000 Indian warriors or 'iOOOO souls, like the peasantry of the 
 raiddle-ages, clustered around his rock fi)rt, "Starved Kock," 
 perched high as an eagle's nest. The region around be bad be- 
 gun to parcel out among his f )llowers. 
 
 Fee'ing equal to the grandest enterprises, he had longed for 
 liberty to beard the Spaniard in Northern Mexico. Having been 
 granted that liberty, had he not been betrayed on his way back 
 to the Mississippi, he would have made S'arved Rock the strat- 
 egic base of active operations against Mexicans. All the region 
 between that p ist, styled St. L mis, and the South Se^, was sub- 
 jected to him by his French coinmission. 
 
 Judging by such an experiment, and before the failures in this 
 direction which followed bard after, it was not unreasonable to 
 hope for founding feudal baronies far west' with French retainers 
 as henchmen of each dignitary, and a crowd of aboriginal vassals 
 beneath all the whites; but supporting all by fur and farming in 
 lime of peace, and not less by filling the ranks in time of war. 
 There still exists an early map of New France with a fort in 
 every seigniory. 
 
 Enterprising Erenchmen, who aspired to the independence of a 
 media3val nobleman, must needs go west in order -to find what 
 
49 
 
 thej sought. No populous native tribes still survived east of 
 Lake Huron. The French were hemmed in by the English and 
 Iroquois on the south, while short days and long winters repelled 
 them from the north. On the other hand, everything allured 
 them westward — natural highways, mild climate, fertile soil, 
 prairies that needed no clearing, buffaloes fancied ready to yield 
 wool and draw the plow, friendly Indians, and — more than all — 
 elbow room, safe from Canadian dictators. The founders of Mon- 
 treal had been brow-beaten in Quebec. The vice-governor at 
 Montreal was not very subordinate to the royal functionary at 
 Quebec, but more so than the officials upon Ontario and further 
 were to his own jurisdiction. They were their own masters. 
 
 In addition to this, French intrigues in the far we5t were multi- 
 plied and intensified by pecuniary interest. Nothing but politi- 
 cal supremacy in that distant realm could assure prosperity in that 
 fur-trade where lay their sole hope of money-making. 
 
 As soon as they had secured sway in any tribe they first said, 
 "Bring all your fur to our factors!" This point gained, their 
 second demand was, " Make your neighbors do likewise, peace- 
 ably if you can, but forcibly if you must." Thus it came to pass 
 that many a brave was butchered to procure beaver for French 
 whose policy was that of ^Esop's monkey : 
 
 " That cunning old pug everybody remembers, 
 Who, when he saw chestnuts a roasting in embers, 
 To spare his own bacon, took pussy's two foots, 
 And out of the ashes he hustled his nuts." 
 
 Considerations such as these show how powerfully the finesse 
 of political schemers and the ambitions of feudalism roused the 
 French to penetrate into the utmost corner of the west. 
 
 The English also, as adventurers, traders, or both, tried to push 
 into the farthest western wilds. But the French outstripped them, 
 arrested their factors and explorers and treated them as outlaws. 
 The motto of the French was : 
 
 " It shall go hard, 
 
 But we will delve one yard below their mineg 
 
 And blow them at the moon." 
 4b 
 
50 
 
 The French foundations in the Northwest proved failures. 
 When French officers gazed at the charge of the six hundred at 
 Balaklava, they cried out: "This is admirable, but it is not 
 war," So French foundations in the Northwest were wonderful 
 beyond all wonder, but they did not constitute a state, one whole 
 body fitly framed together, which vital in every part cannot but 
 by annihilating, die. 
 
 The first foundation was Fun. Fun taken in homeopathic 
 doses is good, butit is by no means substantial food for a lifetime 
 much less for a nation's life. At all events it either finds or makes 
 frivolous those to whom it is all inall, — labor and not merely lux- 
 ury, — business as well as lecreation. If all the year were playing 
 holidays, to sport would be as tedious as to work. Savage life, how- 
 ever fascinating at a distance as to the novelist Cooper, or the sen- 
 timentalist Rousseau, loses romance when viewed close at hand 
 as by Paikman domiciliated among Dakotahs — indeed by the 
 sober second thought of any one capable of appreciating civiliza- 
 tion and aspiring to progress. 
 
 The result was that French fun-lovers, either like Nicolet re- 
 turned from their sportive sallies to dwell among thtir own peo- 
 ple as well as educative and elevating institutions, or on the other 
 hand, they sunk to the low level of the aborigines around them, 
 perhaps degraded them still lower by the vices of civilization. 
 The backwoods maxim proved true; that it is the hardest 
 thing in the world to make a white man out of an Indian, while 
 it is very easy to make an Indian out of a white man. 
 
 The apostles of faith also failed in the far west. Their want of 
 success was due in part to the extermination by war and plague 
 of tribes among whom they ministered, in part to inability to re- 
 claim other tribes from nomadic habits, and in part to the nature 
 of their teachings. Their exhibition of Christianity was rather 
 spectacular than intellectual, more emotional than practical. 
 Among their maxims I find these: " li is God's will that who- 
 ever is born a subjVct should not reason but obey." " Teaching 
 girls to read is robbing them of time." They taught singing but 
 not reading. No newspaper appeared in New France till after 
 the British conquest. At an Indian college which had flourished 
 
51 
 
 for a generation Frontenac, relates that no student could speak 
 French. In sp te of all pains pupils proved Calibans on whom 
 nurture would never stick. Of one that was taken to France at 
 a tender age, baptized, and learned French well, I read that when 
 brought back to Canada as an interpreter, he became as rude a 
 barbari in as any one and held fast, his barbarism to the end. 
 
 If the Jesuits had had free course on our Upper Likes, the result 
 would have been nations submissive but not self-suflQcing, peace- 
 able but unable to defend themselves — having the personnel of 
 men but the puerility of children. They had an ordinance to 
 hasten the jV/^s/ca^ weaning of Indian children — but their 
 mental weaning they would never permit, 
 
 Fiontenac's report to the home government was : " The Jesuits 
 will not civilize the Indians because they wish to keep them in 
 perpetual wardship. Their missions are hence mockeries." They 
 censured La Salle because at his fort he had some fifty Indian 
 children taught to read and write. 
 
 Compared with the sturdy Puritan, the self-reliant Yankee, the 
 products of Jesuit training would seem those legendary monkeys 
 who were intended to be men, but whose creation being begun on 
 Siturday afternoon, was interrupted by the coming on of the Sab- 
 bath, so that they were sent into this breathing world scarce half 
 made up. Their development remains arrested still. Well is it 
 said : " A man to be a man must feel that he holds his fate in his 
 own hands." 
 
 However Jesuits might have succeeded, in blowing up a bub- 
 ble, bright and polished as glass and iridescent with rainbow hues, 
 it must have burst at the first rude shock from without, as did the 
 insubstantial pigeant which they conjured up in Paraguay. 
 
 A heretic would say that their system had not truth enough in 
 it to make a lasting He. Hence it was, " The perfume and sup- 
 pliance of a minute." 
 
 The far-trader rejoiced in a longer success than either the votary 
 of fun or the apostle of faith. But Iris occupation too was gone 
 at length. Far-bearing animals vanished even sooner than the 
 forests that. sheltered them. 
 
 Fish began to be taken in Canadian waters before the first furs 
 
52 
 
 were trapped on Canadian shores. The fish continue now as mul- 
 titudinous as ever, while the fur is no more found. Five and a 
 half millions have we recently paid for the right to fish in Cana- 
 dian waters. 
 
 Crops springing out of the bosom of the earth are exhaustless 
 like a living spring. Beasts wandering over its surface, or living 
 in its dens, pass away, like desert streams in summer, and what 
 is worse, are never renewed as those streams are. 
 
 Beaver Dam as the name of a city in Wisconsin may always 
 endure, but the cunning handiwork of the beaver, chief favorite 
 among fur-bearers, is to day scarcely discoverable in all the 
 State. The beaver's gone beyond redemption, gone with a gallop- 
 ing consumption. Not all the quacks with all their gumption, will 
 ever mend him. 
 
 The chief Yankee staple was fish ; that of the French was fur. 
 The contrast between the races was palpable. Accordingly the 
 natives named the Yankees Kinshon, which signifies "lash," and 
 the French Onontio, that i?, "Big Mountain." The latter name 
 may have been suggested by Gallic pomposity. But after labors 
 manifold the mountain brought forth a mouse, and the fish 
 swallowed him. 
 
 The victims lured on by falsehood or false fancies in pursuit of 
 a short cut to the farthest East, were no less heart breakingly dis- 
 appointed than the men of fun, fur and faith. 
 
 Their chase in the West of an ever-fleeing East, reminds me of 
 De Soto chasing the phantom of a rejuvenating fountain. Both 
 long roved in a fool's paradise, but at length wasted sinewy vigor, 
 like thirst-parched pilgrims, running after the mirage when the 
 sultry mist frowns o'er the desert with a show of waters mocking 
 men's distress. 
 
 But after all both achieved great discoveries, like alchemists, 
 not of what they sought, but of whatever was to be found. De 
 Soto discovered the lower Mississippi, and French visionaries the 
 upper, its head- waters, the Yellow Stone and the Rocky Moun- 
 tain backbone of the continent. They were the first who ever 
 burst into our inmost shrines. 
 
 But their aims were low. At its best their ideal was not to 
 
53 
 
 found nations circled bj all that exalts and embellishes civilized 
 life. It was merely to discover a thoroughfare to the Pacific and 
 the Indies ready made to their hands. This ideal was never 
 realized, and under the old regime of the French it never could be. 
 
 To make such a pathway, or rather more than rojal highway 
 was a beau ideal reserved for the Anglo-Saxon of our times, and 
 his ideal was straightway actualized, — the firstlings of his heart 
 became the firstlings of his hand. Some of us cannot worship 
 the heroes of our trans-continental roads. Even we, however, 
 ■must admit that but for their iron will we should even now re- 
 joice in no iron ways. 
 
 Indians and French — path-finders like Fremont — were a 
 vapor that appeared for a little time — at most an Indian summer. 
 
 Yankees brushing them away, working mines of lead and lum- 
 ber, and then extracting agricultural wealth yet more perennial 
 and wide-spread, have buih on firmer foundations, and are efSo- 
 rescing in a higher style of culture throughout all departments of 
 life. 
 
 The French who occupied the Northwest either as missionaries 
 among Indians, and those bound by vow to celibacy, or who 
 adopted Indian ways of life, naturally proved a rjce no less 
 •ephemeral than the natives themselves. They vanished all the 
 sooner because they entered that region in small numbers. Indeed 
 French immigrants were nowhere numerous in America. 
 
 But had one single feature of French policy been different, the 
 change in American history would have been great beyond cal- 
 culation. Huguenots, the only class of Frenchmen ready to leave 
 France^ were not permitted to enter New France. Had they been 
 welcome there, legions of them would have penetrated its wilds 
 as far as any fanatical Jesuit or jolly rover. They would have 
 outnumbered the English American?, being driven abroad by 
 worse persecutions at home. They would have furnished mate- 
 rial for such agricultural and manufacturing centers on the Upper 
 Lakes as Lx Salle vainly strove to found in Illinois. 
 
 In the next place, most of those French refugees who enriched 
 Switzerland, Holland, Germany, England, and divers British col- 
 onies, especially those on the Atlantic coast, with new arts or old 
 
54 
 
 ones plied with new skill, would have betaken themselves to 
 Canada. There no strange language nor strange institutions re- 
 pelled them. They never williogly expatriated themselves, and in 
 New France they would have seemed still at home. It has not 
 been enough noticed that New France was at first founded by 
 French Protestants, and that the early 'adventurers thither were of 
 the same faith, as well as that outfitters being Calvinists would 
 not admit Jesuits into their ships. Next, the two religions for a 
 time there held divided empire. When a pries't and a minister 
 there died on the same day, they were laid in the same grave. 
 "Let us see," it was said, " whether they who have always lived 
 at war will now lie ia peace." The first petition of Jesuits that 
 " reformed religionists," so-called, should be forbidden to inhabit 
 Canada dates from 1621. Eejected at that time by the French 
 king it was granted six years afterwards. 
 
 Had such been the French foundations in our Northwest, they 
 might still have stood strong there. The Canadians, while scarcely 
 a tithe of the English, held their own for a century. What if 
 they had surpassed them 'in numbers, as much as they did in 
 unity, military spirit, and friendship for the aborigines? 
 
 In all likelihood France and England would today hold di- 
 vided empire throughout the territory embraced by the United 
 States. The settler.-^, — each race afraid of the other, — would 
 both have clung to their mother countries, and sought protection 
 Tinder their wingt^. During the Napoleonic wars, instead of being 
 developed by the carryiog-trade of Earop?, — by a market there 
 for all our products, and by dedication to the arts of peace, we 
 colonists should have been all the while belligerents, — and that 
 between two fires, pierced by invasions from the west, while our 
 coast was ravaged and our ports bombarded. 
 
 Not a few in this audience are of Huguenot descent. Their 
 ancestors in all colonial wars must have fought against those 
 British provinces for which in fact they fought. 
 
 Even if the colonies, — English and French,— had one or both 
 of them become independent, each race would have forcced the 
 other to maintain a standing army of European proportions, to 
 build a Chinese wall, or line of forts — "the labor of an age in 
 
65 
 
 piled stones," — from the Upper Lakes to the Gulf. Border col- 
 lisions would daily occur. Wars must have been frequent and 
 chronic. 
 
 Again, had the French centuries ago burst into the Northwest 
 by thousands instead of b}'^ scores, they would have planted their 
 mediaeval institutions too deeply to be rooted out. Lords of broad 
 domains would have monopolized the land. Under them would 
 have been vassals uneducated save to drudgery or death dealing, 
 not one in a thousand of them rising above the low level of that 
 inglorious throng in which they were born. The Texan question 
 of a witness, " Do you write your name like a monk, or make 
 your mark like a gentleman?'' would have been common all the 
 way from the tropic to the pole. 
 
 The masses would have remained clannish retainers of heredi- 
 tary chiefs. Each seigniory would have been a section cut out 
 of France with all the pre-revolutionary enormities carried over 
 ocean and continent like the angel-borne holy house of Loretto, 
 and set down in the Mississippi Valley with all its imperfections 
 on its head. 
 
 Even that earthquake revolution which toppled to the earth 
 the feudal fabrics of France, would not have extended into the 
 heart of this continent. It was, in fact, powerless even on the 
 lower St. Lawrence, so far as not reinforced by British thunder. 
 
 On the whole, had Huguenots been tolerated from the first in 
 New France, a million of them would have migrated there, and 
 its population would have been no less numerous or puissant than 
 that of British America. All the European colonies in America 
 would probably still be subject to their parent states. 
 
 At all events they would have so balanced each other, and 
 their mutual relations would have been so antagonistic, that the 
 rise, progress and world-wide influence of those institutions and 
 that form of society which are distinctively American, would 
 have been impossible. America would have been Europeanized. 
 There is no room in the universe for both Christ and Belial. So 
 there was no room in these United States for both freedom and 
 feudalism. 
 
 Well then may we thank God for the intolerance of Louis 
 
56 
 
 XIY, or rather for the passing-pleasing tongue of Madam Mainte- 
 non, which kept that Grand Monarque her unconscious servitor. 
 Though he meant not so, neither did her heart think so, their pol- 
 icy was suicidal. They were pioneers clearing the ground for the 
 undisturbed establishment and expansion of a system — political, 
 religious, educational, social, — which was ordained by GoJ, and 
 utilized by man, for revolutionizing not only America, but France 
 and Europe. May that system of ours pervade the world, endure 
 forever, and prove a survival of the fittest ! 
 
 In our northwest French and Indians have stamped their 
 names forever on many natural -features, — lakes, rivers, moun- 
 tains, and on hamlets which have, or will, beoome cities. But, 
 while names are French and Indian, — as Chicago and St. Louis, — ■ 
 all else, — all distinguishing characteristics bespeak the Anglo- 
 Saxons. They came out from Great Britain in order to build on 
 a broader basis a Britain yet greater, continental and cosmopoli- 
 tan, gathering together in one those whom Babel scattered abroad. 
 Hence it has come to pass, that in the world's wide mouth, we to- 
 day are called, not New French, nor yet New English, nor by the 
 name of any Europeans whatever, but Americans^ now and for- 
 ever Americans. That cognomen is already all our own, and this 
 fact I hail as an omen that the continent also in all its length as 
 well as breadth will be ours ere long ; 
 
 "The unity and married calm of states." 
 
 H 107 89 Hi 
 
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